Google I/O and Microsoft Build

So much happened this week in the world of The Verge. Both Google and Microsoft hosted their annual developer conferences and announced a whole bunch of stuff, so Nilay, Paul, Natt, and Dieter gather to break it down and give you the highlights. And this wouldn’t be an episode of The Vergecast without the segment Paul does every week, “Kick flip the kickstand script.” It’s a big one, so listen to the whole episode to get everything you need for this massive week in tech news. 01:28 - 10 Biggest announcements from Google I/O 03:45 - The selfishness of Google Duplex 21:09 - Android P 26:41 - At I/O Google showed its willingness to change and shape our lives 34:33 - JBL’s Android-powered soundbar does a lot of things right 38:43 - Volvo’s native Google integration is the next level for Android Auto 44:06 - Six new Google Assistant voices, including John Legend 47:49 - Nadella’s Microsoft 56:51 - What is edge computing? 1:08:16 - Paul’s weekly segment “Kick flip the kickstand script” 1:10:38 - Net neutrality, mergers, AT&T, and Michael Cohen: what we know so far Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by IBM. By 2050, the world population will reach nearly 10 billion, and food production will need to grow by 70%. What if artificial intelligence could help? Farmers are already using it to help increase crop yields. Watson and the IBM Cloud provide access to weather data and analyze satellite imagery to help them monitor soil moisture levels and reduce water waste. So as the population grows, more food can be put on tables. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at ibm.com/smart.

• 0:29Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast about parenting, babies, you know, the normal stuff that I talk about all the time. No, it's the flagship technology podcast in the world, I think. I'm Neelai. I'm joined, as always, by Paul Miller. Hello, Paul. Hello. Dieter Bohn is here. Hey, Dieter, you're back.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm back. Hi, everybody.

• 0:51Nilay Patel?

  And Nat Garin is joining us.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 0:53Nilay Patel?

  Nat, you and Dieter have had a huge week because it's Google I/O. You've been out in San Francisco at I/O. And then, Dieter, it was also Microsoft Build, and you interviewed Sachin Adala, the CEO of Microsoft. You're just doing all kinds of stuff.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, last week was a crazy week. This week is also a crazy week. I unfortunately didn't go to Build itself, but we can talk about that later. It was kind of a sleepy, sleepy sort of build, I think.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think it running around the same time as I/O helped, but...

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that overlap was rough.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, massive week in news. There's so much going on. We should start with I/O. I do want to say Build is quiet, but Microsoft has been quiet lately in the sense that they're moving away from sort of their consumer-facing Microsoft existence to this very enterprise-focused, "we're going to build, I don't know, cloud services for people." We'll talk about that in a minute. But in a normal world where they had the whole stage themselves, it still would have been quiet. But next to what Google just did at I/O, which might be the biggest, most interesting developer conference we've seen from anyone in years, I don't know. It's tough. But let's start with I/O and unpack that a little bit. They announced a ton of stuff. Dieter and Nat, you want to walk us through it?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  I mean, they announced so much stuff. I don't think... They just put up a blog post today, this is Thursday, of 100 things we announced at Google I/O. And I don't think they padded those numbers at all. It's crazy. So they of course announced everything that's coming to Android P. They had just a ton of, you know, wild AI things, many of which launched right away. So I don't know, Google Maps now is augmented reality and like you can point at stuff and see it. You can just hit Tab in Gmail to autocomplete all your emails. They announced release dates for their smart displays. They, they have six new voices for the Google Assistant.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Plus John Legend.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Plus John Legend.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Very relevant news for me.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  They added more editing to Google Photos. They relaunched Google News as a whole new news app that's going to have stories chosen for you by the algorithm, which sounds quite a lot like the Facebook News feed, but without your friends in it. I'm sure that will never cause problems ever. They added some capability to Google Lens so that it's able to do OCR properly and you can copy and paste from your picture. And then of course they, this thing called Google Duplex, which is a robot voice that sounds so much like a human that it ended up creeping the hell out of everybody everywhere.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  It's like, it's like Bart Simpson mode for Google Assistant. Now your assistant can do prank calls on hair salons.

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  Let's just start with Duplex. It's by far the thing that got, I mean, I want to talk about Android. I want to, there's so much stuff I want to talk about, but we got to start with Duplex. It's the thing that broke out at I O, the beta, it's not even a beta. It's, it's a demo. It's a, it's the prototype demo that launched 10,000 takes, right? Cause it's not shipping. It can only do-

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Actually, I'm going to actually there. I talked to someone, a person in charge on background a little bit and it's not shipping, but they're not going to be testing it just inside like Google's labs with a bunch of people like watching it happen. They do intend this year in like the coming months, quote unquote, to have it work for real consumers out in the real world.

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  But as a product or as a thing that if you happen to know Sundar, he's going to give you a download code?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  That is an excellent question, but they really do think that they can get it out and have it be really useful by real people this year.

• 4:46Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so if you don't know what duplex is, really quick.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:49Nilay Patel?

  Sundar got on stage, you can go listen to the demos online, there's a whole page for him. But Sundar got on stage during the demo and he said, "We've developed the technology for assistant to actually make phone calls on your behalf." And then he demoed it calling a hair salon with ums and ahs and it got through some misunderstandings and it just had a conversation with this person at the hair salon and it made the appointment and hung up and that was that. And it's a robot having a conversation with a person where the person doesn't know that they're talking to a robot. Google has been very clear so far that it only works in limited domains as they're calling them. So I think, what are the three things it can do? It can schedule hair appointment?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Oh, hair appointments, restaurant reservations and store hours. And then for the store hours thing in particular, they're planning on doing this thing where when holidays are coming up, they'll call a bunch of stores that they don't know the holiday hours for and then ask once and then update all of Google's data set with the answer.

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  So that's crazy. So it's a limited, it's insane. It's very cool. I don't think there's anyone who doesn't think, just at its most basic level, this is insanely cool. Then I think in a modern context, when every piece of technology that's ever been developed has been used for evil instantly and we're having this reckoning about what technology should and shouldn't do and how it should be used, the obvious problems with having robots call people on your behalf, that people are identifying them and asking what we're going to do about them before the product has even come to consumers, whether or not Google's going to actually give it to consumers this year, is what you're saying.

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  Has anybody, did you talk to anybody at Google about that? Because having robots call poor, and you wrote a great piece about this, calling service industry workers who are already kind of overworked, like having wealthy people offload human interaction to robots that like people who own stores just have to deal with, that will increase the volume and increases their work. There's really big questions about.

• 6:58Nilay Patel?

  They necessarily are gonna have to record the calls. And it's illegal to record a call in many states unless you have consent. It, I mean, there's just like ethical issues every which way you look. Did you talk about that with anybody, Dieter?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my understanding, although we're, we're, we're double checking this because it was a really quick, quick meeting, is they're not gonna be doing this in every state because not all states have, uh, some states require two-party consent. Some states only require one-party consent, and so therefore they could record the calls without informing. The, there's also this whole like question of how can they get this robot to talk to people such that they'll actually talk to the robot? Because Google does believe that they need to inform the people they're talking to that they're speaking to, you know, an AI instead of to a real person. They, they think they need to do that. But as soon as you hear that you're talking to a robot, what are the chances you're gonna continue to talk to that robot?

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Why did they put ums in it if they're gonna tell people it's a robot?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  It just feels more natural? I don't know.

• 7:54Nilay Patel?

  Dude, for the same reason that when you call Delta, it makes fake typing noises at you in the phone tree.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  There's nothing more insulting than the idea that I will be pacified into waiting for a slow computer than like, like, what is that? I hate that.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  But if you're talking to me and I go, uh, and then I say something, you will unconsciously and naturally make accommodations in what you say back to me based on the tone of my voice and how many ums and ahs I've got. You'll wait a second longer, you'll maybe try and speak more clearly the next time you say it to me, you'll be more forgiving when you need to repeat yourself.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  So it's, it's ums as UX?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically. I think that there's, there's a lot, like, ums and ahs, they don't just make you sound human, they, they actually serve real linguistic communicated, communication functions when you're talking to somebody, and they're trying to build that into the way that this thing talks. Not just to make it sound like a human, but also because they do genuinely like communicate something when you hear them.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz I think like most times you call a phone number and you can hear a robot, and it's like, please say pharmacy for the pharmacy department, please say this for the other department, you like cut it off immediately. But I think the ums and ahs make people a little more patient and realize that like, "Okay, this person's processing an information. They're trying to convey something to me. Let me finish. Let me let them finish their thought."

• 9:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there is, I think it might be from the book MicroSurfs by Douglas Copeland, but there's this famous description of Bill Gates that he doesn't say um when he talks, and it's the most unsettling thing. You just don't know how he feels because he never says um or ah. Now, look, I think all that's fine. I think the idea that computers should interact with humans in a more natural way is good, fine. But the question of should we outsource some of these tasks where on the one end, there's a human being doing the work, and on the other end, there's a robot on behalf of a human being doing the work. It's kind of like what you really want is for your local business to just have like a scheduling API and for

• 9:59Nilay Patel?

  Google Assistant to talk to the API instead of you tell Google Assistant, which then tells Duplex, which then talks to a person, which then uses like their own scheduling software. Like, that's really, there's something squishy in there.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  The optimistic case, and I hate defending Google on this because they could have just addressed this. They could have, they should have known how much this would stand out to everybody as a demo. But the optimistic case, that this is a reasonable step towards that future where it is an API. It's reasonable to expect in the future, robots will talk to robots and solve our scheduling problems for us. Maybe step one is that we start using robots on the consumer end. But, you know, obviously, Google, like Dieter mentioned, is also, you know, doing this in the sense of like, we'll call once for holiday hours and then update everybody with that information, which in that case will reduce the load of phone calls.

• 10:54Nilay Patel?

  Nat, can you talk a little bit about your piece that you wrote about? So actually, funny story. Nat, I'm driving, Nat texts me, Google's robot voice reads out her text to me, and she says, "Hey, I'm just working on this Duplex piece about service workers." And then I had to call her and be like, "What the hell does Duplex have to do with Chrome browser technology? It makes no sense."

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Service workers are-

• 11:17Speaker 02

  And I was like, "What are you talking about?"

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Service workers are an open standard. They've also been implemented in Safari and Firefox. Okay, Dieter?

• 11:24Nilay Patel?

  I know, I know.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Not at all what I'm getting at, no. The whole thesis to what I wrote about is the fact that I just couldn't help walk away from the demo feeling like Google used a bunch of human workers as they're like something to experiment their new technology on without letting them know, which felt really uncomfortable to me. And then the whole idea of outsourcing technology in the way that, you know, like online ordering or like just using the internet to make our lives more convenient has widened the gap between how people who are tech privileged interact with people who are, you know, underpaid workers who are working around the clock to serve you food or deliver your like items

• 12:11Speaker 02

  and all these other gig economy stuff. Yeah, so I guess like the feeling that I got walked away out of Google Duplex is just that this technology at a glance, like, you know, it's clearly very early. But the demo they gave was like, use Duplex when you're too busy because like you're hanging out with your kids and not something that, you know, like they write in their blog post that it's known to help with accessibilities and like language barriers, which is fine, that's great, but they didn't really lead with that in the keynote. It talked about how like you can spend your time with your kids and like have Google Assistant do all your chores and errands for you. But I think that we've seen in the past with services like Seamless where people are using

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Seamless to put in insane special orders to restaurants, so much so that Seamless turned it into an ad campaign, which is super obnoxious and crazy. And yeah, like I just think that the wider technology makes people who are using them, the farther these people get to not speaking to the people who are servicing them, the more we as a society just like have this gap between the rich and the poor. And I don't know, I just worry about that. And yeah, like the solve for that would be so that Google implements this on the business side so that businesses also have a robot that's handling this transaction and just telling the business owners on, you know, here are your reservations for whatever and you don't have to bother with them. Or like the people who are talking to really rude people, customers on the phone, don't

• 13:38Speaker 02

  have to talk to rude customers on the phone. That's all fine, but I don't know, like none of this was brought up in the keynote. Yeah, I don't know. Like I, you know, I used to work as a waitress. It gives me a lot of, like, has taught me a lot about how to be empathetic to the people who are working really hard to do it. And I just feel like...

• 13:56Speaker 02

  It's, I just feel very uncomfortable about the whole idea of like people abusing this type of technology and kind of erasing people who work really hard.

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's a real, it's like such a deep, meaningful concern. And I think it's only buttressed by the idea that probably eventually you have to go get your haircut. Like, they can schedule the haircut for you, but you as a person have to go and ideally you are polite and kind to the people who are working for you in that moment. And you're like, that is the root of at every stage of this transaction, like, you're not scheduling an appointment to have a robot cut your hair, you're scheduling an appointment to have a human being cut your hair. And maybe that first interaction where you're scheduling the appointment is where that relationship begins. Like, I don't think that anyone has ever really thought that through, because we haven't had to.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, again, it's so early that I have no idea what this is going to look like, if it ever comes out. I just wanted to, like, the first people I always think about when it comes to new tech like this are the people who are often very invisible to tech and clearly the people who are cutting your hair and serving your food, not often the people who are using said technologies we saw this week.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that the big question for me is something you brought up, which is, okay, what if the restaurant deploys technology too? And now you have a robot talking to a robot? That might be the most inefficient thing that could possibly happen, right? Like, if I get Google Assistant to navigate the Delta phone tree for me, something has gone horribly wrong. It like

• 15:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I also don't think that this technology could ever scale to the point where, at least not in the next couple of years, where big corporations are now outsourcing their call centers to robots, which is another issue on its own. But I think that like, at launch, it seems like they're targeting small businesses that don't have like an open table booking thing that you have to call them on the phone in the first place, which is why it's like so troubling to me. But yeah, like, I don't know that in the next few years, this would ever scale to the point where like Delta is now going to employ these realistic sounding robots to change your flight or a deal when your flight gets delayed or canceled.

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. I mean, look, rich people have always had assistance, right? I mean, the very rich among us have traditionally not made these phone calls anyway. Now we're making that like more mass market. I think that will, that definitely changes things in a serious way. But what's amazing to me about this is that I don't think anyone is disputing whether or not the technology is powerful or interesting. The entire conversation is how is it deployed? Who is it going to affect? How will it affect those people? Do the negatives clearly outweigh the positives? The one party consent stuff that Dieter brought up in those states, just

• 16:55Nilay Patel?

  to be clear to everyone, just for the computer to process what it's hearing, it necessarily has to make a recording, right? There's no, it's not they're recording it so they can play it back for you later. I don't know who in the world wants to listen to a robot make phone calls later on its behalf. It's literally, they have to, they have to capture the audio into a file so that, you know, a TensorFlow unit somewhere can figure out what the hell's happening and then generate a response. There's no way to do this without capturing and recording that audio and making, making a copy. And if you don't change the laws, then this will never go out to every state. And I have no idea how to write that law. Just none, right?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I've been talking to Sarah Jang about this. She's writing a piece and like, one of the things is there are different laws for like data and storage and data and at rest. And yeah, at what point does this data become, does your voice data become data at rest? It's very complicated. And like, I'm, I am sure that the laws are not as are currently composed, anywhere near being able to understand what to do with the situation.

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, but that's like, oh, man, this is such a rabbit hole. It's like, there's like copyright law, right? So like, early internet law, we had to decide as a country, as a policy, that if I request an image from theverge.com, that the copies are made on every router along the way and in my computer's memory, were not copies that were actionable, right? They're transient copies in memory. That's like, we had to, there were lawsuits about that shit. Like, big, meaningful, I got taught them in law school lawsuits about that stuff. And obviously, it makes no sense to treat those as actionable copies that create liability. That has nothing to do, and we'll have to do that with this stuff,

• 18:48Nilay Patel?

  but that has nothing to do with wiretapping laws, right? Or call recording laws. Those are like a different, it's a whole different thing. So you've, you've got these two entire different bodies of law that are both implicated by this technology that Google is like, well, here it is. Like, everybody figure it out now. And I honestly don't know how to write two-party consent state law. That's like, both parties need to consent to having this call recorded unless one of those parties is a robot. Like, that doesn't make any sense. And like, it's just like bizarre to me, because you can't even get to the consent. You can't have the robot call, in a two-party consent state, you couldn't have Duplex call you and say, hi, I'm a robot. Do you consent to have this call recorded?

• 19:33Nilay Patel?

  Because in order for it to hear and understand your consent, it has to record you.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  You could, you could say, press one. It's not listening until you press one.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it has to say, ah, but that's like nonsense. Like, press one to have your call recorded by this robot.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  On the other hand, legal robocalls exist today, right? Like, I think that is like, the legal stuff is like, ah, but it's not so, like, so fraught that I don't think that it will be a huge problem. I think the bigger question is like the ethics of the thing and the ethics of informing somebody that they're speaking to a robot. And then if so, what's the likelihood that that person will be willing to do so and like actually want to talk to that robot? When they call you, not when you call it.

• 20:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then you combine it with the deepfake stuff where you can like, record a minute of audio of somebody's voice. And now it actually is Obama talking to you to ask for money? Like, woo, crazy. All right, let's talk about Android.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  So that's one down, 99 things to go.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Good job, everybody. I think we're really on pace.

• 20:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man. Halfway through the show, we're finally to Android. So, Dieter, here's-

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, it was almost to the end of the keynote of Google's keynote before they got to Android. It took a while. I was like, sitting there, waiting and waiting and waiting. So, I don't know, Google split up everything into what, into three themes? So, which one do you want to tackle first? Like, they put it into like, general intelligence, AI stuff. They put it into digital well-being, and then they had, you know, the sort of, they called it simplicity, which is silly, but it's like, it's the gestures. It's the gestures.

• 21:09Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about the gestures. I think we've done enough. AI will doom us for one segment of the show.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Okay, I will say one thing about the AI. The idea of app slices is really interesting. Google's been trying to get apps to work outside their, like, inside the app for years, and this seems like the really, the best cut at it in a long time. So, that's cool. So, the gestures are, you, there's a home button. You tap it to go home. You swipe up to go to an overview, which depending on whether or not you have a proper Google phone, will show you a Google search bar and predictive search apps. And then you can slide the home button over to jam through a bunch of recent apps. And the back button sometimes shows up and sometimes isn't there. And to me, the reaction to it immediately after, because it came out right away on beta on a bunch of different phones, and everyone installed it. It was like, oh, this kind of sucks. I think it's jankier on the beta than some of the other builds that are out there.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  And in fact, I don't know this for a fact, but it feels jankier on the beta than I have on my own Pixel than it did when I was using it at Google's campus the week, the week before. But they are mixing metaphors. There's still a tap to go home, but then a swipe to do other stuff. And it's a lot like the iPhone X, except that Google has one more surface than the iPhone does. The iPhone has a home screen, a most recent app screen, a multitasking screen, and a notification tray slash lock screen. They also have, you know, we could keep going to the other screens, but whatever. Google has one more. They have a home screen, plus they have an app drawer. So, that extra thing that they've got to contend with is still there.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  And so, it necessarily means that they have to have, their bottom bar gesture thing has to do at least one more thing. And in Google's case, it has to do two more things because they didn't go all the way towards trying to get rid of the back button. It's still there because too many apps still have a drawer on the left for the swipe.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  Wait, when do you use the back button?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Uh, the back button is there when you have an app that needs a back button. So basically every app lets you go back. And so the back button appears.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Not in the multitasking view.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  But you know, it disappears in the home screen and the multitasking view. It only appears in apps.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Right, okay, okay.

• 23:18Nilay Patel?

  So why are they doing this? That's like what I don't understand. Like, I sort of get why Apple did it with the iPhone, right? Like, they gotta get rid of the button. They wanna be all screen. Like, the hardware drove the software design. Why is Google doing this?

• 23:33Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. Uh, I think, uh, it's a trend. They just wanna be trendy. I think that's one thing. I think that they genuinely don't like the way that multitasking has worked in their quote unquote overview screen before. They really did wanna show multiple things. And not for nothing, but this also gives them, uh, another place to put their Google search bar. When then you do a Google search and then maybe you might accidentally see an ad at some point in your future. So I think there's that. Oh, no, I'm not, I'm not kidding. I think they wanna build to getting rid of the back button. And then they'll be able to build to not needing a bar down there at all. Cause it will all just learn how the gestures work. I think that's like the long-term plan, but to get there, they have to do this half-step. That's my, that's my best, like, most charitable read.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  The, the really like cold-hearted read, not cold-hearted, but like, like clear-eyed read is they just, you know, they saw the iPhone edit. They saw people liked it, so they're trying to do it too.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  This is just a brief tangent. We don't have to go down the whole path of the fact that Chrome OS is getting Linux apps. And I'm very excited. But on Chrome OS, you, the caps lock button is search. So you hit search and now I want to launch the terminal all the time to use, to use Linux. Well, when you search on, on a, on a Pixelbook, it's not like Spotlight. So I type in T E R and, uh, the first result is Hungarian TER, which is English, uh, is, is the word space in English. And then below that, I have the terminal app. Like, the, they're, they're conflating Google search with the things I actually wanna do on my app.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Maybe it works better on Android, especially with these like actions and slices and stuff like that, but.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, over time, they, if you were to keep typing turn, keep selecting terminal, over time, it would become the first result. That's like their first answer, probably. On Android, they, they sort of split stuff out. So if you search for an app, the apps appear at the bottom, which is closer to your thumb. And so you can like type TWI and then tap the Twitter icon. And then above it, at the top are, you know, a bunch of stuff you might search for that starts with TWI. So it's a, it's an interesting thing that they're doing with it. But so there's like, stuff you might, you'll probably want to tap at the bottom instead of at the top, because that's where your thumbs already are next to the keyboard. So that, that is like, instead, you usually think of it like you want to just arrow down and hit enter. But because it's a tapping touch interface, you actually,

• 25:57Speaker 01

  they put the most important stuff at the bottom.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, Paul, the dream is that you will have no files. You will only have what Google surfaces to you on the web. You have no files, no applications. You will just have the cloud. And everything is an endpoint to the cloud. And all the buttons are search buttons.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  No, dude, it's all about the edge.

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  The intelligent edge.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  The intelligent edge.

• 26:18Nilay Patel?

  So, Dieter, so that is the gestures, which is like one big thing. And then, there's actually more Android stuff in Android P, new features, ideas, than any recent Android I can think of. Because there's a gestures, there's a new material design, which is like a wild. And then there's all the, the time well spent stuff. Let's do time well spent, and then let's talk about the design part. What's going on with, with these like, stop using your phone features?

• 26:46Speaker 01

  So, the, the main thing is there's a dashboard, which shows you just a stupid amount of data. It's how long you spent in every single app, every day, for the past week, and what time you, what time you use that app. So, you can, you could just see what you did today. How many notifications you got, how many notifications you got from each app, how long you had each app open, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then you can tap on an app, and then, or slide over, and, you know, pick Facebook, and you can slide over and say, okay, so, on Monday, I used Facebook for a half an hour, but most of that time was at night. And then on Friday, I used Facebook for three hours, most of it was in the morning, because I was goofy. off at work and I really gotta stop doing that and so I'm gonna limit myself to only use Facebook for an hour a day or 20 minutes a day or whatever.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  So you could just like lose yourself in this insane quantified self world of all the time you're spending and all the different apps on your phone. That's one. Two, you can limit the apps so that you can only have a certain number of minutes per day, per app. And when you hit that time limit, it just turns gray and it won't open. And it pops up a little dialogue box saying, sorry, you said you didn't want to use this, so I'm not gonna let you open.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  I thought it just turned gray. It won't let you open?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  It turns gray, but it will let you open it. And when the dialogue box pops up saying you can't open it, there's no button on the dialogue box to say, just kidding, I really do want to open it. You have to go back to the dashboard and change your time limit.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  In order to reopen your app.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  This is like the Amazon like kids free time or whatever their product is called. It's like literally you're teaching your kids how often they can be spending their time on a device. And now we have just made an adult version of it.

• 28:26Nilay Patel?

  I want this, but I want to give the keys to like friends and family.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 28:30Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 28:31Speaker 02

  I will aggressively, no, honestly, I, one thing I would love to do if my friends used Android phones more is to just take their phones away, put that on so that when we go out to dinner, they can stop Instagramming their food and taking stories about the fact that we're hanging out and just like talk to me.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Can I?

• 28:49Nilay Patel?

  Yes. If the phone notices that you're around other phones of people you like, all the phones shut off.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  That would be great. No, that would be awesome. Everyone should just opt into like, this is dinner and then we, everyone says, yes, we're going to dinner and it can be tied to like Google Maps or, you know, the Maps is gonna have that thing where you all agree on some business to, or a restaurant that you guys can all go to together. And then when you all show up, your phone grays out and then you guys are forced to actually have dinner together. That would be great.

• 29:16Nilay Patel?

  And if there's like an emergency and you gotta turn on the phones, you all have to like do a dance, you have to like a gesture that's a dance move.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Like they're gonna have to shake their hands in the air.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Can I, I'm really excited about all this, this wellbeing type stuff. But can I also point out that this is a developer conference? What does Google do at developer conferences? It tells developers, here's new cool ways to, to make apps. You know how Google has all this data about when you're using apps? And how much you're using apps? And what time you're using apps? Guess who else Google likes telling that information to? To developers? Why does it tell that to develop? Like a literal example, Google used on stage at I O was like, hey, you noticed that a user opened your game and then quit after like a short amount of time?

• 30:05Speaker 03

  You can use that to optimize your game difficulty so that people use your game more.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Like Google, Google is turning around and sell, in like not selling, kind of selling all of this data to developers to make their apps stickier.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the crash Linux is now being integrated with Google Analytics. So developers have a single dashboard to see and they'll know which, which people are more likely to spend a couple of dollars on upgrades in two dots nat.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  I would never, never.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  And make, and then they'll be more, they'll be more likely to try and offer you purchase opportunities. And like Paul said, if, if like they see somebody dumping out a level a bunch, they, the next time they open the game, they can make that level easier on them. So they're, they're giving developers a ton of usage data on how people use their apps. And then they're just now starting to give users usage data on how they're using their apps.

• 30:57Nilay Patel?

  Wait, but is that in conflict? Just to play, I mean, I think it is, but to play devil's advocate, is that actually in conflict? Right? You're, you're letting the people who sell the products get more data about how to make their products better, which is not

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:13Nilay Patel?

  necessarily a bad thing. And you're letting the people who consume the products have more data about how they're consuming it so that presumably they're adults in, you know, live a life of moderation and, and, and good judgment.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  I feel like

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  Again, a bit of a stretch, but

• 31:29Speaker 03

  I feel like this is a leveling of the playing field. You, now you get the data that developers have been using to.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  In a negative light, manipulate you to use their apps more.

• 31:40Nilay Patel?

  No, but you're not getting that data.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  The goal, the goal, I guess, is quality over quantity, right? It's like, if you only limit yourself to 30 minutes or whatever, then you're gonna use those 30 minutes wisely on whatever app you're opening. I mean, that's the hope.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  I mean, if you, if I picked up my phone and it said, you have 30 minutes, use it wisely every time I picked up my phone, that would be great. But it, but it's not what it's doing. Like, Paul, you're not getting that data. You're not, when you quit the game, it doesn't say, hey, we noticed that you always quit games just when they get hard. We're telling developers to make the games easier. Right? It's just saying, this is how much time you're spending. It's, it's letting you set your own limits, which is great.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  But it's, it's almost like on the user side, there's this recognition that we're terrible at setting limits for ourselves. And then on the developer side, it's, here's some more information that will help you make this stuff more addictive. That's why I think it's in conflict. I just, you know, the ideal is that everybody is an adult that makes smart decisions. I just think we know that's not true, right?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  At all.

• 32:39Nilay Patel?

  Like that game Slidy on the iPhone, like, I'm like, yeah, you can have three more dollars. Like, here you go. Like, I need more jewels. Like, it's ridiculous.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  On the other hand, Google Play this morning pushed me an extra dollar so that I can spend money on games. And I'm like, no.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Not doing it. Can't, can't get me.

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  A whole dollar.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  I pay for, I pay for nothing. They will not get me. They, they can play ads for me, though. That's fine.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's awful. Yeah, Hulu has started, I started watching the second season of Legion. FX Now does a thing where they're like, if you watch this one interactive ad at the beginning, we'll cut out all the rest of the ads. And we'll just do one ad break per time and there's 10,000 ads. So I'm like, sure, I'll do it. The interactive ad is just a video for a BMW. And at the end, it just says, click here. So that's fine. But then it's like, I'm not interacting with anything. And then it plays the same ad seven more times through the course of the show for salad dressing. Throughout all of this, I was like, I would have spent an hour doing a 360 degree turnaround of your new BMW, if not for this horrible experience that you've made me suffer through. Anyhow, that's ads, whatever. I, I, look, I think this Time Well Spent stuff, Casey wrote a great piece.

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  Tristan Harris is the guy who has been pushing Time Well Spent. He's the one who is smartphone addiction. Like, he's the one who's pushing that narrative. He was on stage at Code. He's all over the New York Times. Casey showed, he published his slide deck that he published at Google when he worked at Google. Years ago, my favorite part, you should go look at it. My favorite part about this is that he mocked up a Verge article that was like, Google has a team now. That's the best. I love it. Um, so go read Casey's piece. It's just interesting. This has been building for quite some time. And now we're in the moment where, hey, maybe we're not so good at regulating our behavior on phones. We need the technology to help us do it is coming into the forefront. Okay. So that's, I think we've covered three out of 100 things.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  I wanna, I wanna talk about one more thing, just to troll you. Are you aware of what this JBL Google Assistant soundbar is?

• 34:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, motherfucker. And you called it an HDMI switcher and not a receiver. I'm so confused. It's a receiver.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  It's like a, it's like both. How is it a receiver?

• 34:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's a receiver. It's got a bunch of inputs. It routes audio, right? It routes video. It's a receiver.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Okay, I guess. Okay, fine. I'll call it, it's a receiver, not an HDMI switcher. To me, it's, it's a glorified HDMI switcher, but whatever.

• 35:02Nilay Patel?

  Um, sure.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  The thing that's interesting about it is it overlays the Google Assistant on top of those other dumb HDMI inputs. So you always have it available. And what's cool about that is that means you can always use it to jump with a deep link directly to, you know, some show in a proper app that you wanna watch.

• 35:20Nilay Patel?

  So do you remember the original Google TV was this? The Xbox One is this thing. They've looped all the way back around. So the original Google TV, you plugged everything into it. You plug your, you know, your cable box into it, it into your TV. It did HDMI pass through. Xbox One does HDMI pass through. This just has more inputs and they would overlay Android TV on top of whatever. Uh, the Xbox One can overlay the Xbox interface over whatever. So I think this is really smart. I think putting the intelligence into the soundbar is, I think you're gonna see every company start to do it. The big question for me is whether they can watch and interact with the TV content, right?

• 36:04Nilay Patel?

  So if you plug your cable box into the JBL soundbar in that end of the TV, are they gonna be able to say, oh, we know you're watching X when you're done with it? Do you want to watch this related YouTube video that unpacks all the Westwood, Westworld theories?

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  That is the, the dream. I just don't know if they're going to get there. And that also, by the way, tons and tons of data privacy issues there because then Google's watching everything that you watch, which no one likes. Right? Or we see that you're playing Xbox and we know you're having a really hard time getting past this level of Far Cry 5. Here are some YouTube playthroughs that will show you this. Like, can they do that? Because if they could do that, A, it's really powerful and interesting, but B, it's also terrifyingly creepy.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the answer is definitely not. This is like a, a pretty like standard issue Android TV set top box that just happens to be crammed into a soundbar.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, I think it's really cool and I, I love the idea of being able to call up assistant wherever you are. You have a Vizio TV that has Alexa, right? Or do you have the, you have one of the older ones?

• 37:11Speaker 01

  I don't know, man. I, I'm so angry at that, that Vizio TV that I've refused to think about it or do anything special with it. I bought a Harmony remote, the, the one with the hub that, you know, is Bluetooth and whatever. And I hate it because it, it thinks the TV is from 1995 and so it like goes through like all these like careful time delayed steps when it would just be faster for me to like pick up the Apple remote, hit a button and have CEC turn everything on. So yeah, I, I'm, I'm full in, I'm all in on HDMI CEC. It's a perfect technology. The only thing that will make my life better is an IR repeater.

• 37:45Nilay Patel?

  No, but like what if you, there are lots of TVs that have assistant, you have a Sony TV with Google that runs Android and has a system, you plug the soundbar into it. What answers you? Unknown, right? Like, you gotta figure like, who's this thing for? I do think this is a lot smarter than sort of the Sonos play. So I think Sonos is, you know, there's an event coming up, the product's been leaked. It sounds like a new playbar. I think that's being made for smart TVs. So if you have like a Samsung smart TV and you have a Sonos rig, you can like plug this into it, you get better sound and it's a Sonos. It doesn't run any of the smart TV smarts on it, right? But this is the smart TV stuff. So this is like, you have a much older TV that doesn't have any smart features or, you know, it's old and it's running them slow.

• 38:29Nilay Patel?

  So you upgrade your soundbar, you get free Android TV. As always, the big question is like, where does the processor live? Do you want it to be modular? Do you want it all to be built in? I'm into this thing, but it's a receiver, not HDMI switcher. I'm just letting you know that right now. The end.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Now, was there anything super cool about the Android Auto thing that you looked at?

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Well, so the news with Android Auto is that last year Volvo said that it would be working with Google to pre-install Android Auto and just make their infotainment system an Android-based system. This year, they have it for demo, and the cool thing about it is that you don't have to have a phone to be able to use it. So whether or not you use an iPhone or an Android, you can use the same Android Auto system in the car, and it'll look like a Volvo skin because they have their own version running on Android P. So the cool thing, yeah, like the fun thing there is that you can have it adjusted to your profile. So when you get in the car, you pick the driver, like you pick your own profile, the seats adjust to your height.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  All your favorite locations are preloaded to the Google Maps on the screen. You can adjust to your favorite stations and all of that stuff, which is really cool. One thing that is kind of odd to me is like there is a Play Store that you can download stuff from, which it's neat, but I don't know the kind of stuff they'll allow on it. They said that it's going to be a bunch of media stuff, so you can listen to podcasts, music, and there's some messaging stuff, and there's RCS, so you can get the chat protocol stuff sent to your phone or your screen. So, yeah, that's all cool and fine, but, yeah, I don't know. It just looks like a giant Android tablet, and I feel like even though it looks really cool, I mean that in a positive way.

• 40:11Nilay Patel?

  How could you mean that in a positive way?

• 40:13Speaker 02

  I mean, because it's not like the Tesla version where it's like a massive iPad Pro with way too much information. Their version is like four menu bars, and it gives you, the top thing is Maps, the second thing is Media, the third thing is Messaging or Phone, and the last thing is like Calendar.

• 40:30Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Fine. There's also the second screen, that's the one behind the wheel, that gives you like a Google Map navigation thing if you have it turned on. Like, I think it's pretty neat. It's not going to be available until next year, the 2020 models, which means that you can't order it until late next year. But, yeah, that's kind of the thing that's new with Android Auto. I don't know, like you hate Android Auto.

• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  I hate it on my car. It's super crashy on the Pixel 2 XL in my Honda Civic. It's just the worst. That's partially because my Honda Civic is running on Android 6.1.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Oh, right. So because it's running on Android P, which apparently Assistant can make appointments for you at some point, Volvo thinks that in the future, the car, because it's running on Android P, will like recognize when the car needs maintenance or some other issue. And then Google Assistant might be like, hey, your car is due for maintenance. Would you like me to make this appointment? And you can just say yes while you're driving and it'll handle that for you. So there's that component and we can go back to the whole ethics problem, whatever. But yeah, like that is a thing that Google and Volvo thinks that you can now do from the car, which I guess is cool and kind of weird and creepy, but cool.

• 41:35Nilay Patel?

  It's Volvo doing it. They will presumably install software at their dealers. So you push the button and it like does that over software, right? It's not, I highly doubt Volvo is going to have their own cars call anyone but a Volvo dealer for certain.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, absolutely. I think that's definitely true. Yeah, but like the demo version that they had for us, it was absolutely like a very half-picked version. Like half the time it wasn't very responsive when I touched it. So like it didn't really get to do that much with it.

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  No, that's just Android Auto.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  Hey, man, like Android Auto works great in my Ford Escape. I'm just saying. It hasn't given me any problems, but uh.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  I just don't know why they won't make an Android Auto app for the iPhone. There's one, you can run Android Auto on an Android phone. Just you push the button and it shows up and it's the display. Like, if someone run that on an iPhone, I'll be happy. Like, I run Google Maps on my iPhone in the car all the time anyway. It seems like a missed opportunity to get everybody who is already using Google Maps in their car and their phone to this other kind of Google experience. Just do that. I don't need this. Anyway, whatever.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Well, how else will you, they sell you new cars if you, if you can get it on your phone.

• 42:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's true. There's like, there's a, there's a, the stat's a couple of years old now, but it, your, your, your point is correct that more people buying cars were looking at CarPlay Android Auto than any other features. The driver of purchase decisions. I don't know if that stat still holds, but it was definitely true a couple of years ago. All that said, what if I want to buy some like, cool old Camaro? Like, I just want to run Android Auto on my phone.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Well, then you bought, you go to Volvo and then you rip their Android tablet out of the center of their car and then attach it somehow to your old fancy car.

• 43:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The, uh, the producer of Cir- the Circuit Breaker show, Creighton, he was telling me that he wanted to buy a LeBaron. And I was telling, like, don't do that. Like, that's a horrible idea. Buy an old Camaro instead. So, so that just sent me down, like, I got nothing to do. The kid sleeps on me for like, hours a day. I'm just looking at Camaro's on.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  It's really, I wasn't looking at a LeBaron's, I promise you that. All right. Four out of 100 Google things. I think we've covered the waterfront. Anything, Dieter, anything else from Ia that really stands out? You want to talk about material design for two minutes? Just what's happening with it?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  No, we've, we've talked about Google for an hour. It's, they, they made it so you can customize material design to your preferences. The end.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  So Google Assistant this week, they announced that they will have now six new voices and it's male, female, different accents. It's kind of like Siri when Siri had a bunch of different, like, new voices. Kind of cool. And then they did the gimmicky thing with John Legend, which is really fun. But apparently none of these voices have names. They're going to be colored, which is weird.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  The plan is to give, instead of, they don't want to give the voice a name because they give the voice a name, then it'll be gendered and they really like that Google Assistant isn't gendered. But if they're going to give it na- if you're going to give it different voices, you gotta give it names. Instead of like, voice one, voice two, voice three, apparently the plan is eventually to give each name a color. So there'll be the orange voice and the blue voice and the yellow voice and

• 44:46Speaker 02

  The red voice.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  The red voice.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  The green?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  The green voice. They're gonna start with Google's primary colors, but eventually they're gonna run out of colors.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  And there are going to run to colors that should not be named for people's voices.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I don't think anyone feels good about having a white, black, or brown voice, or just the ethics around that. It's really uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.

• 45:13Nilay Patel?

  Confident Google, like, of all of the pitfalls that you should avoid, that one seems very obvious.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Although yellow is part of Google's colors.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  So I don't know how they're going to navigate around that one.

• 45:27Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Virtuous also brought to you by HBO's Silicon Valley. As you might know, Kara Swisher from Recode has been on Silicon Valley a number of times. And this season, they're doing kind of a crazy ad thing. Russ Haneman, the venture capitalist character from Silicon Valley, is on Recode Decode as the character Russ Haneman. So listen to Kara interview Russ Haneman. This is going to be wild. Check it out.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  Today's show is brought to you by HBO. And today in the red chair is Russ Haneman. He's one of Silicon Valley's most notorious investors. And he's recently emerged as an aggressive player in the cryptocurrency market. Welcome to the podcast, Russ.

• 46:01Speaker 05

  Thank you, Kara. And you're welcome, by the way.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  For what exactly?

• 46:06Speaker 05

  What do you mean, for what? I basically invented the podcast. For what?

• 46:10Speaker 04

  You invented the podcast?

• 46:11Speaker 05

  I put radio on the internet. That sounds like a fucking podcast to me. Not that I'm making shit off it.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  That actually brings me to my first question. The standard internet funding and sales models have served you pretty well over the years. But now you're jumping feet first into ICOs. Why?

• 46:25Speaker 05

  Kara, this town is filled with assholes getting rich off crypto by doing jack. The Winklevoss twins put in some loose change five years ago. Now they're Bitcoin billionaires. So yeah, I'll buy a ticket for that fucking ride.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  You don't feel like you've already missed getting in on the ground floor?

• 46:38Speaker 05

  If I could change the past, I wouldn't have a kid at home right now snorting up my ADHD meds. I can only focus on the future. H O D L, bitches.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  So I'm hearing you already have taken 36 companies to ICO. How have you fared so far?

• 46:51Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I'll be honest, Kara. It's been down, you know? It's been up. It's been mostly down. You know, 35 of them have, you know, fucking tanked.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  35 out of 36. What happened?

• 47:01Speaker 05

  I mean, this is, this is the game, all right? First, it's the SEC. Then it's one of your founders running away with your cash. Then it's a bunch of fucking hackers deciding that instead of edging in their basements that afternoon, they're going to come after your blockchain. Then one of your CEOs dies like a pussy. Anyway, listen, I'd rather focus on my successes. My success. One of them worked.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  And what was your ROI on the one that worked?

• 47:21Speaker 05

  Radio on Internet?

• 47:23Speaker 04

  No, return on investment.

• 47:24Speaker 05

  Return on investment, yeah, I know. It's 300M, all right? That's a million. And it's on some thumb drive in the middle of a landfill. My boys are on it, though. You ever lose a drive with a ton of crypto on it?

• 47:34Speaker 04

  No, Russ, I haven't.

• 47:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, you have.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  Uh, no. But thanks for coming on the show and good luck with that thumb drive. Watch new episodes of Silicon Valley Sundays at 10:00 PM on HBO.

• 47:49Nilay Patel?

  We were saying at the beginning of the show that Google obviously had this huge event. It kind of overshadowed what's happening at Build. But Build was off this week. Big announcements from Microsoft and that at the scale that Microsoft is not making big announcements. But Dieter, you interviewed Satya Nadella. And we were talking a lot about how this seems like it's it's very much Nadella's Microsoft. It has been, obviously, for several years. And Windows is becoming a much smaller piece of that puzzle. What was your takeaway from talking to him?

• 48:20Speaker 01

  The main thing is that it is Windows is a smaller piece of the puzzle, but that they're going to be trying to work harder to make sure Windows will work with more devices. But they're much more interested in you thinking about how their AI and Azure stuff will work in little IoT devices. So that's the Azure Cloud Edge. If you want Paul to get into explaining what edge computing is.

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  I did, Paul, I loved your piece. I want to hear more about that. But go through it all first, Dieter.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  So, I mean, the news from Build is they're making this thing that will have your phone sort of appear inside Windows. So you can do a bunch of phone stuff directly inside Windows. They are going to have Cortana and Alexa talk to each other a little bit more. And so I want to tell this story about how Windows is the most open operating system, and it's going to try and work with everything. But I can't quite tell that story because Cortana still, you know, it'll talk to Alexa, but it won't talk to Chrome. That's a sure bet. So that's a pain. They're going to have timelines so that you can like pick up and drop off tasks from your phone to your computer. They're also going to be giving a bigger cut to developers, which is cool. I wish everybody would do that. They're going to like mess around with tabs. There's a bunch of other stuff. But the thing that I mostly talked to Nadella about was

• 49:32Speaker 01

  You know, got him to like, basically say, yes, we're the Windows company. We're still, Windows is still a thing, uh, which was nice to hear for that, uh, that he isn't going to shut it down. Uh, but then they're, they're really trying to get, make, tell a different story about what they are. And what they are is like, not relevant to consumers for the most part. Like the Windows stuff still is, but, um, you know, whether or not a drone is able to look for a dent in an oil pipeline is not a story for me. Uh, it's cool that I could pick it off, uh, pick up an off the shelves drone and have it stream video to my laptop. And the laptop can use machine learning to look for the dent in the oil pipeline. Or you could just build Microsoft software directly into a big industrial drone and then it can do it. Like, all that's very cool and all they're, you know, they're doing just fine as a company and they're making a ton of money.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  But they're doing it in a way that is completely different from those other companies. And so I came away from it basically like, I'm not angry at Microsoft anymore. I spent many years being angry at Microsoft, especially about Windows Phone. Just, you, you, you just missed it, guys. You just, you screwed it up. You had all this potential and you just wasted it. And I'm not angry anymore. It's like, yep, there's that gap, uh, between what you wish Microsoft was and what they are. And it's fine. They're just, they're just more like IBM now. It's fine. That's, that's how I feel about Microsoft right now. He also talked a lot about, you know, the ethics of AI and he like, is saying the right things about it. But I, I have more mixed feelings about that having come out of both Microsoft and I O. But that's maybe too long of a story right now.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  He also said privacy is a human right, which I thought was really interesting.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So I know I'm going to get into it. Uh, so he said, we feel a great responsibility for, uh, users, protecting users' privacy. Sundar has also, Sundar Pichai at Google has also said, we feel a great responsibility. And I'm tired of tech CEOs saying that they feel responsibility. Cause you know what? I don't care how you feel. I care what you're actually legitimately responsible for yourself. There's a big difference between feeling responsible and being responsible. And until there are actual consequences to you screwing up your AI and doing something bad to the world, then feeling responsible is just puffery. It just, it's sound, it's a nice thing for you to say, and I believe you that you actually do feel bad if something happens and you are taking some.

• 51:41Nilay Patel?

  Actions to try and prevent it from happening. But unless there's teeth, it's not a real responsibility. Like, if I don't turn in my draft and I, you know, whatever, then like Neelai yells at me and like, there's like actual consequences to me not doing my job. So if you say that you are taking on responsibility, I want to know what that actually means. Because right now, what it mostly means is you're telling me that you feel responsible. And I just don't care.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  I really noticed this, I wrote just sort of a, like a McSweeney's piece about if Google could make a Paul. But what I was thinking about was this idea that I have a way that might be inaccurate, but I have like a narrative in my head, how I describe to people how Apple tries to keep your data private. I have a narrative in my head of how Microsoft or Google are trying to do that. And Google's products especially are very reliant on knowing everything you're doing at all times. Like, they know what restaurants you go to, what you like. They now know everything you ever point your camera at. Everything, opening your camera app is a Google search.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  What is, I don't have a narrative that can say, well, yeah, Google does do that, but here's how they have it completely sandboxed from any, you know, bad actors.

• 52:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then it's harder even still with Microsoft, right? Like, the question for Microsoft, if they're gonna be, and Nadella's conception of Microsoft is, we make tools so that other people can make tools that help you do stuff, right? Which is a great conception of Microsoft. Like, don't get me wrong, that's like a powerful way to think about your company. But if he feels this great responsibility, then what he actually has to do is limit the tools that the other people use so that they can't do bad things.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he wouldn't go that far when I talked to him.

• 53:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a weird place for a toolmaker to be.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I specifically asked, you know, if you're making all this AI available to your developers to build stuff on, do you actually have to limit what they can do? And he was a little bit muddy about it. He's like, well, we want to provide guidelines and we think that people should think about good ethical use of AI in the way that we currently think about good usable use of user interface UI. So that's really smart. I really like that. A lot, but that's a good way to think about it, but that the question is, this comes back to responsibility. If I'm a bad actor and I take Microsoft's AI and I use it to do something awful. Is that my fault as a developer or is it Microsoft's fault for providing me the AI foundation to do that awful thing?

• 54:10Speaker 01

  And if you're gonna say that you feel responsible, you need to actually like that you need to take on the responsibility for that bad actor that used your tools.

• 54:18Nilay Patel?

  Or, well, it's, I mean, this gets real shaky, right?

• 54:21Speaker 01

  I don't know, like are they a gunmaker or are they?

• 54:24Speaker 03

  If a robot shoots a gun.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Right. If a robot shoots a gun, do you blame the person who programmed the robot? The person who provided the programming language for the robot or the person who made the gun?

• 54:35Nilay Patel?

  You blame everyone. That's what I, that's what, you listen to the Verbs Cast and I blame everyone. No, the line about good UI is crazy. And it's crazy for this reason, which is everything looks pretty now, but we are surrounded by dark patterns. Everywhere we look and those dark patterns, like they trick you into buying things in games. They make the levels of the games easier, right? When you're about to quit. They, they, there's fake news, like we are surrounded by people using the elements of good UI. Even, even companies that we like, brands that we like, apps, developers that we like to do not nefarious things,

• 55:18Nilay Patel?

  but to make us pick settings we wouldn't otherwise pick. Or Facebook is like, upload your contacts. You can pick yes or later. Like, right? Like all over the place, there is good UI that's deployed in icky ways.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Right. But I think his point is that we don't need, like, we know what good ethical UI is. We also know what good and bad just from a usability perspective is because there's a ton of research and thinking and experience of having built user interfaces, especially visual user interfaces. With AI, we don't have enough of that research or that experience building stuff for it and on it. And I think his point is that we have to at least get to a place where we actually know what the hell we're talking about. And when it comes to building stuff in AI, and I don't think Nadella thinks that as a. Industry and as a tech community, we're there yet. I do think that saying, well, let's figure that out first and then we'll get the, you know, the, well, then we'll do it. It's like, that's a little bit of a cop out. I think that you have to do both in parallel.

• 56:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think this leads, I, I want Paul to talk about edge computing, but I think this leads into it because one of the realities of this is that the processing power you need to do some of this powerful AI stuff right now is not particularly local. You need to do it on Microsoft Data Center, you know, on Azure, AWS, or Google's cloud, like wherever you're gonna do it. You know, Microsoft sees a bad actor, they can just shut it off. They, we all needed to like, when are these companies gonna start shutting this stuff off? That's a conversation that we've been having, yes or no, but it points to a world where everything is much more managed. And Paul, you're, you had this, you talked about the edge in a piece you wrote this week, but at the end of it, you're like, I'm not even sure I understand how I feel about having managed client devices.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:02Nilay Patel?

  Get into that a little bit.

• 57:03Speaker 03

  Well, I think, I think a good word to unpack is the word security. So, so, so take, so take, take the Xbox.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Take the Latin root.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Take the Latin root for security. Comes from, I have no idea. Okay. So, take the Xbox.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Please.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Take the Xbox. Can you, can you, Neelai, can you run, can you run random.exe files on, on Xbox?

• 57:32Nilay Patel?

  I do not believe I can, no.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  Well, congratulations. You are secure. So like my, one of Microsoft's hot new products, you know, for the cloud and the, one of its very IBM-y new things it's doing is called Azure Sphere, which is kind of a fun, exciting thing in the world because Microsoft has made its own like version of Linux. And it's like a secure stack from the, from the microcontroller to the, the, the, the, the software that developers can use to develop for it, to the cloud services. And they're basing a lot of their security practices on the Xbox. And if you think of what the Xbox is, it's something that is very hard to hack, but it It also is very disempowering for users.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  And it kind of makes sense. You probably don't want to run random.exe files on your toaster. And you don't want your toaster to join a botnet and be hacked. And so edge computing really needs to be managed in order to stay secure. Or possibly, right now, it looks like the solution to securing IoT devices is to manage them very centrally. And that's something that Microsoft's pushing. But the other thing about edge computing, I mean, I broke down like a bunch of different reasons why edge computing is exciting. But one thing that edge computing enables is it's like big data 2.0. Like, right now, companies have big data that they do their machine learning on.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  And they like, you know, do inferences about their customers. And it's a big competitive advantage and they sell it to people and all that sort of stuff. But you're kind of limited by how much data you can get into the cloud. And then how much money you can pay to process. So like, Facebook was able to process 3.5 billion photos from Instagram because Facebook has a lot of money to do that. But one, one thing that edge computing is going to allow is, is, is a company will be able to design a machine learning algorithm. Like, like, take like Lens, for instance. You're running machine learning very rapidly on the phone, identifying objects. But all, all the meaningful data still ends up in the cloud.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  So now Google, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, companies like that, who are embracing these sort of more edge paradigms by offloading some of their big computing work to edge devices. They get to do like even more big data. They, they get to process maybe 100 times more like video footage than they could have ever done.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  So, okay, let me, let me give you some bad metaphors. Is it like, it's like SETI at home, but instead of using my processing power to help find spacelions? It's, I'm using my processing power to help give yet more data to Google and Microsoft such that they can use it against me for advertising later?

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Absolutely. That's a good one.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Okay. Edge computing is the best.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  The thing is, is like, I mean, I'm playing with the Pixelbook right now because it's, you know, they added Linux. It's a very managed device. Same with iOS. You know, you get a lot of upsides from having a company that just runs everything for you. But at some point, one, that company maybe knows more about you than you'd like them to know. And two, you want to install a .exe that you trust that you might not be allowed to. Like, the thing is, is that, back to the word security.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  By the way, Sekura, which is without care, used often, beginning in the 1530s, as without care, dreading no evil.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  Dreading no evil. Well, you know the evil-

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Dreading no evil is good, but without care is complete opposite because all people care about now is security.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  The primary, as far as I can tell, the evil that is really dreaded by these companies is their users.

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:01:29Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I want you to pull that apart.

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  The biggest security vulnerability of your computer is you. You are the person who puts the least thought into-

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  -your computer's secure.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Well, that's why, that's why all these future computing platforms are managed.

• 1:01:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Wait, can I, can I just offer you the, so Paul, I completely agree with you. I thought you meant something else. I thought you meant the like, you're going to run your own software instead of our subscription software. But no, you are absolutely right. Let me just offer you this example. We, Max is here. We have a lot of family coming to visit us. Those people have laptops. They're using the laptops. I'm noticing a lot of tape on laptops. Do you know what I'm not noticing a lot of? On the webcams. You know what I'm not noticing a lot of? Passcodes on phones.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  We have had more family members come through here to just like play with the baby, who have tape over their webcams, but no passcode on their phone. And I, like, it short circuits my brain. I'm like, how are you, how are you thinking the FBI is on your, but you don't, how do, how do I, and Becky's like, just leave it alone. Hold the baby. That is like, you do want a bunch of these client devices managed because the people will screw up and click on the bad link and put malware on their computer. It's just, it's inevitable. The question is, there's another class of user, or there's the kid who's learning how to use a computer.

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  And they, in order to innovate, they also need to be able to like, run their own code outside of a managed system.

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  You need to be able to break things.

• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  To build.

• 1:03:06Nilay Patel?

  And it's un, it's unclear, as we get into more and more of these managed devices, how you will be given the permission to go ahead and break stuff. Right? It's also unclear, if you have a bunch of hardware that relies on a connection and a cloud service to function, because that's where a lot of it's going. What happens when Microsoft decides that, you know what, Xbox Live, like, just, we just lost, we're shutting it off.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:03:31Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, Google does that every week. Like, how are we gonna contend with that? Because we're buying this hardware and it's in our lives. I, I don't know the answer to that at all.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Right. And, and, and I, I just have a visceral internal reaction to ever having to ask a company for permission to, to do things with products that I've bought.

• 1:03:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I'll say like, um, this is ridiculous. Like, we had to buy a baby monitor.

• 1:03:58Nilay Patel?

  There are lots of beautiful, fancy baby monitor startups out there, this is true, and I just refused. Like, we have the simplest, it's a video one, but it's like, it has a crappy piece of, uh, it's like, it's, I wouldn't even call it a tablet. It's just like, a remote RF video monitor. It's the same one Joanna Stern has. She was like, you should just buy that one. It doesn't have wifi, because I don't want to buy some Kickstartered baby monitor and the company fails. And then the cloud service it relies on to send video to my phone disappears, and I've got a $500 piece of junk. And like, every single product like that, I now think, well, okay, I'm buying this expensive piece of hardware.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  If its cloud service goes away, I'm doomed. And as you move, Microsoft's entire future is enabling people to build more and more of those products. Which is good, because we'll get cool stuff, but bad, because the hardware is starting to become completely commodity and replaceable in a way that I think is kind of scary.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  Right. The optimistic vision of the future is Microsoft, uh, solves these problems well enough that like, the company that you bought your baby monitor from, your cloud baby monitor can go out of business, but somehow the- The fabric of intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is is well enough established and defined that you can like move your service over to some something else and you can keep on, you know, gaining that service. But the history is that Xbox Live just goes down and and you can't play.

• 1:05:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, like another example, Amazon owns Ring, the doorbell company. Like, and Google has a doorbell. I cannot imagine telling anyone to buy, recommending anyone buy a video doorbell that isn't from one of those companies. Because the reality is they will probably stay in business, whereas some startup doorbell probably won't. Right? And like, that is a huge competitive advantage. But at the same time, it's like, ah, A, first of all, does anybody need one of these products? The answer is probably no. But B, like, how can anyone start to compete once everything is managed into a cloud? And all we're depending on is longevity of services. Who knows? Who knows the answer

• 1:06:16Nilay Patel?

  to this question? All right. That was dark. Microsoft's great.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  Microsoft's great.

• 1:06:21Nilay Patel?

  They're great. And I think what they're trying to do with Windows, like, they're trying to make it integrate with a phone better. Like, they're doing that app called Your Phone. And they, it's funny, Tom interviewed Joe Belfiore about basically that app. And the first thing they said was, we really wanted to work with iMessage. We haven't talked to Apple yet.

• 1:06:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you poor man.

• 1:06:43Speaker 03

  I just wish, all Microsoft needs to do for me right now is if they just had one person who pretended like Windows was important to them. Like, you have a lot of people who pretend that improving Windows is an important thing for Microsoft. But it seems like as a company, they're treating it as such a small insignificant, eventually dying market.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  It's just, it's just, if, imagine a startup that made Windows. You know, this startup company is like, look how large of a market it is. We're so excited, we're going to deliver tons of interesting features to our core users. Instead, like, Microsoft sees Windows as this thing that like, they can leverage into cloud things and, I don't know. Also, never want to hear the words of Microsoft 365 ever again.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sorry, sorry for your luck, Paul. That's never going to stop. Paul, I'm going to say something to you now, and then we're going to have an ad. But I'm just going to say this to you. This is the year of Linux on the desktop.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  As you know, this episode of Veritas is brought to you by IBM. We live in a world that's creating AI-enabled everything, a world with more IoT devices than people. Today, technology has never been smarter, but smart only matters when you put it to work where it matters. When we put smart to work, we can help save the species, increase crop yields, and make progress, not just for a few of us, but for all of us. So let's get to it. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at IBM.com/smart.

• 1:08:16Nilay Patel?

  Paul, every week.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  Every week.

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  You do a segment.

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  Never lose the tab where I wrote down the name. It's called Kickflip: The Kickstand Script.

• 1:08:31Nilay Patel?

  All right, talk to me.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  Nintendo has solved the worst problem with this.

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  No, they haven't.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  The two worst problems with the Nintendo Switch in one $20 product. It's a little, it's a little doc. You put your Switch in, it has a kickstand, because the Switch has a garbage kickstand. It also allows you to charge your Switch while it's sitting on a table, which is the other problem, because the USB-C port is on the bottom. So everybody's happy now, and the world is great.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Twenty dollars?

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  Is the dock wired, I'm guessing?

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it literally just like a USB C pass through with a kickstand.

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  So it's not like you can really take it to your rooftop party and play with your friends like in the promo video because you have to plug it in.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  It does at least fold up pretty small, so that's something.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  I mean, I think you could put it in this dock and not have the dock plugged in anything and it'd still work, I'm assuming.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  I see. Yeah, that also makes sense.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  God, I'm gonna buy this thing and just leave it attached to my Switch non-stop, aren't I?

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  Yep. Yes, you are.

• 1:09:44Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that when they were designing the Switch, they like thought about this? They're like, "In year three, we'll put out the exact same Switch with a better kickstand, and everyone will upgrade."

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, they absolutely did.

• 1:09:56Nilay Patel?

  Nintendo's not that evil. That's like a, that's a...

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Have you seen their product release cycle for the DS? Yes, they are. It absolutely are.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  I don't think they mean to be, though.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Hmm, I don't know, man. I've seen, I've seen what they've been doing with that 3DS and the 2DS and all that, and like, they are ice cold about that stuff.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  This is true. This is a company that just put out mini versions of its 30-year-old consoles.

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  The 3DS, the 3DS cycle reminds me of like somebody like, like, uh, naming like a Word document like "Final V2." You know?

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  Alright, we're out of time here. I just want to real quick, talk about a little bit of policy stuff. It's been a heavy episode on actual tech products, but this is true. We talk about net neutrality on the show all the time. Obviously, the FCC had a vote. They rolled back the Obama-era net neutrality rules, but the Senate has forced a vote on restoring those rules through a little-known procedure called Congressional Review. You can read about that all on the site. That is, so there's gonna be a vote in the Senate. Now, obviously, to get it all the way done, there has to be a vote in the House, and Trump has to sign the bill. Those things seem less likely, but we're at least going to get to a point where I think what the Democrats in the Senate want to do is force every sitting member of Congress

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  to vote yes or no on net neutrality, which I think is going to be very revealing and provide a lot of, I don't know, grist for this upcoming midterm cycle. So be aware of that. It's coming. Net neutrality has officially rolled back on the 11th. On Ju- I'm sorry, on June 11th, not May 11th, June 11th.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40Nilay Patel?

  So there's a lot of net neutrality stuff spiraling in this world. Again, there's no, like, policy debate to be had right at this point. If you've been listening to the Vergecast, we've had the net neutrality policy debate, I don't know, for a decade.

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  Can I just say one thing about this?

• 1:11:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  I obviously am the pro the new rules, don't like the old rules, but I love that Congress has realized it has oversight over regulatory. This is a very exciting development to me, even if I lose on the specific policy.

• 1:12:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Look, I think it's very instructive that we, as a country, are now saying, like, hey, our government should, like, do stuff.

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 1:12:23Nilay Patel?

  Like, we're, we expect the government that we elected to, like-

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  Specifically, the elected people should do stuff.

• 1:12:28Nilay Patel?

  Check and balance each other. Yeah. Yeah. Checks and balance. Have you guys heard of those? Try it out. Like, that's happening. So that's good. I, you know, I would be very surprised if this actually works as a gambit. I don't think that's anyone's point. I think the point is to make elected officials vote up or down and have that be part of the midterms. I think, we've talked about this before, net neutrality is a surprising, uh, engine for, like, young voter turnout. Like, people are really into it. I take credit for that, I think. Just my work and, no, I'm totally kidding. People are into it. Like, the internet's important to people. And I think this is like a really, this will be an interesting moment.

• 1:13:08Nilay Patel?

  So that's coming very soon. You're gonna see sites like Etsy, Reddit, Pornhub, others all, like, going red to tell people, like, go talk to your representatives about this stuff. So we'll see what happens there. Then, sort of next to it, Sarah Jeong wrote a great timeline of, if you're following any of the Trump administration news, you know that Michael Cohen has emerged as this cartoon of a hapless person. Yes. He's in the middle of everything. He's Trump's lawyer, he's taken money, he's not apparently a great lawyer, he's doing all this stuff, but AT&T paid him some money, right when Trump took over his office, they claim it's for consulting. Obviously, AT&T, they just wrapped up the antitrust trial about whether or not they

• 1:13:53Nilay Patel?

  should be able to buy Time Warner. Obviously, net neutrality is rolled back. There is an incredible, just read Sarah's timeline, it points to nothing in one sense, and it points to everything in another sense, which is $600,000, I think, probably for most everyone who isn't a CEO of a major, multi-billion dollar company, is like a lot of money. But for AT&T, doling out $600,000 to Michael Cohen, just to like, have it done in case they needed it, did not seem to be a thing that they thought of. Novartis paid, you know, something like over a million dollars to Michael Cohen for, you know, in case we need consulting on pharmaceutical regulations. And their statement about it was, "We had one unproductive meeting.

• 1:14:36Nilay Patel?

  I would like to offer anyone who listens to the Vergecast one unproductive meeting with me for a million dollars. Anytime you want, happy to do it." But swirling in the background of net neutrality of the AT&T-Time Warner merger is whatever is going on with Michael Cohen. It's super interesting in the sense that Trump news is just sort of default interesting. It hasn't amounted to anything. So just read Sarah's timeline of this stuff, because it's gonna keep coming up over and over and over again. I don't think Michael Cohen got AT&T any favors, right? Like, the Trump administration decided to block the Time Warner merger, and they went to trial about it, so. Like I said, there's, there's nothing explicit there. That's basically Sarah's point. But on a larger level, the amount of money and corporate influence that's flying back and

• 1:15:21Nilay Patel?

  forth is everything.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like there's, there's no smoking gun. There's just like a giant, like, I don't know, unused cannon, just like getting rolled around and everybody, nobody hears it, but there it is.

• 1:15:32Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's just, I mean, it's the, the, the idea that this is how it works, I think, just makes everybody squeamish, right? And like, this isn't how you want it to, you don't want AT&T to be like, yeah, we've got $600,000 in a slush fund. Like, we'll kick it to this guy and hopefully that'll work, right? Like, it's icky in its way. Anyhow, because there are, by the way, there are no consumer groups that have that much money to just like throw at the problem, right? Only the, the corporations do. And like, you want that balance in there. But never fear, because The Verge will continue publishing forever. And we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll fight for the users.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  More like Tron.

• 1:16:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're like Tron. We've gone way over. Nat, thank you for joining us this week. Yeah, for sure. And I think that's it. We'll be back next week. There's other stuff to listen to. Why'd You Push That Button, Season Two is going. This week's episode, Ashley and Caitlin talked to a bunch of people about push notifications. So of all the stuff we were talking about, about time well spent and using your phone better is interesting to you. Ashley and Caitlin talked to John Herman at The Times, who wrote a whole piece about the red dots on your phone. They talked to the guy at The New York Times who actually writes and sends their breaking news push alerts, which is just incredible. And they talked to the CEO of a company called Swerve, which is a company that manages push notification

• 1:16:46Nilay Patel?

  targeting to users, which is not something I knew that was a business of this scale. So Listen, Watch, Push That Button, this week's episode's great, the whole season's great. They're carrying on. And I also want to tell you, listen to Pollyon's Quality Control, which is their review podcast. They're talking endlessly about video games, and this week in particular, Infinity War, which I haven't seen yet, so don't tell me anything about it, but I'm sure they did a good job. You can also listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. Vergecast fans, Josh DePaulsky was the guest on Recode Media this week, so listen to that. It was actually a pretty fun interview. Josh remains Josh, maximum Josh on that episode, so it's really good. And you can follow us everywhere. We're at Verge. Paul is at FuturePaul. Dieter's Backlon. I'm Reckless. Nat, you are NatKaren on Twitter? Yes, I am.

• 1:17:30Nilay Patel?

  We'll see you next week. That's it for the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Paul, promo code.

• 1:17:51Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Vergecast was brought to you by IBM. Technology today has never been smarter, but smart only matters when you put it to good use. Together, we can build a smarter future for all of us. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at ibm.com/smart.