Macbook Pro review, Lenovo smart display review, and the Data Transfer Project

After a week of speculation on whether the new MacBook Pro was throttling performance under heat, Apple released a software fix to address the problem. Dieter’s review for the laptop (post software fix) published on Wednesday so Nilay, Paul, and Dieter discuss what happened with the product and how it performs. Dieter also reviewed the new Lenovo Smart Display, so there's a chunk of the show dedicated to that device, which exceeded expectations. And we’ve got another week of Elon Musk. Transportation reporter Andrew Hawkins gives us an update in what has been happening in the world of Tesla, SpaceX, and the various endeavors of the unpredictable billionaire. We’re going strong with our weekly interviews, and this week we have Brian Willard from Google to discuss the Data Transfer Project — Google’s initiative designed to transfer data from one service to another without downloading and re-uploading. We also can’t forget the segment Paul does every week called “What is it like to be a dolphin?” so keep listening for that. But you know, we’ve got a whole lot more in between that — so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 02:30 - Apple MacBook Pro review (2018, 15-inch): the heat is on 22:01 - This week in Elon Musk with Andrew Hawkins 26:53 - Lenovo Smart Display review 35:44 - Data Transfer Project with Brian Willard of Google 59:46 - Paul’s weekly segment “What is it like to be a dolphin?” 1:02:30 - Amazon’s Alexa Cast makes it simpler to play music from your phone on Echo speakers 1:10:00 - Facebook growth slows in aftermath of privacy scandals 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 The Vergecast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Hiring used to be hard. We had multiple job sites, stacks of resumes, a confusing review process. But today, hiring can be easy and you only have to go to one place to get it done, ziprecruiter.com/verge. ZipRecruiter sends your job to over 100 of the web's leading job boards, but they don't stop there with their powerful matching technology. ZipRecruiter scans thousands of resumes to find people with the right experience and invites them to apply to your job as applications come in. ZipRecruiter is so effective that 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site within the first day. Right now, Vergecast listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address. Guess what it is? It's ziprecruiter.com/verge.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 0:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's me.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  That's you, Joe.

• 0:46Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to Vergecast. I was ready for like a cymbal crash or something.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  I left my cymbal at home today. I'm sorry.

• 0:52Nilay Patel?

  I'm your buddy, Nilay. Paul is here.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:55Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, what is your relationship to the audience this week, my friend?

• 1:00Speaker 02

  I'm your good buddy this week.

• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good. Dieter's on a roll. A very quiet week in news. We got a, we got a good show, though. We got to talk about the MacBooks. Dieter reviewed them.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Yes, I did. Well, one of them.

• 1:12Nilay Patel?

  An emotional journey for all of us. Dieter also reviewed a new, the new Google Assistant displays, Lenovo smart speaker. That's going to be cool. A bunch of Facebook news, which Dieter is awkwardly going to ignore because it's my work at Facebook. But like, Facebook experience today, today, as we're recording, largest stock drop ever. Like, just huge. Billions of dollars wiped off. The biggest, you've got a story on The Verge. I'll read the headline to you. One of the biggest in American history. And, this is neat. I'm excited about this interview that we did. Last week, Google announced a new data portability initiative, which sounds very boring. But basically, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, all teaming up so that with one click of a button, you can move your data between all the sites. So you got your photos in Google Photos. You're like, screw it, I hate it,

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  I want to go to Facebook. One button, they go to Facebook. It's designed to increase competition, give you control of your data. I talked to one of the guys behind the project, a Google, a Google engineer named Brian Willard. So we're going to do that in the middle of the show. Super interesting stuff. Like, we always talk about competition and lock-in.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Exciting.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  This is Google driving forward an industry initiative to make it easier to move your stuff around without having to download it all from the cloud and re-upload it somewhere else. And there's some, there's some stuff in there that's complicated. So we interviewed Brian Willard and Minnie Shaw. But let us begin, Dieter, an emotional tale. A man and his MacBook, and whether or not the processor operates or not.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. And it ended up like, we made a video that like reflected the emotional journey, and we maybe put too many of our emotions in that video.

• 2:47Nilay Patel?

  There are a lot of emotions.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  A little chaotic. So, you know what? The review's not even the most important part. What I think of what happened is not even the biggest deal here. The biggest deal here is Dave Lee, the YouTuber Dave Lee, created a test that revealed a massive software bug. I don't know, massive, maybe minor, simple, something. It revealed a software bug that then Apple finally repeated to verify, repeated his exact workflow to export video. And then they had to issue a software update that completely changed the way that the computer handles thermals. I think it completely changed it because it changed our tests. So that like, in the space of a week, they released a laptop and then released a software

• 3:30Speaker 02

  update that changed the way that it handles heat, so that you're, it could actually run at the speeds that it's supposed to run.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  So let's start at the beginning. So everyone gets the MacBooks for review. You got one for review. You know, we went to the party with the hotshot teenagers. Everyone felt bad about their careers.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:49Nilay Patel?

  Laptops were given to us. We start doing the tests. The tests look good. Other people that we, we-

• 3:55Speaker 02

  They looked fine. They didn't look great, but continue.

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  Dave Lee posts this video, and all credit to him, he found the bug. And he says, hey, when I run Premiere, it was Premiere, right?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a particular kind of export in Premiere. And how particular it was and how edge casey it was is very much open for debate.

• 4:15Nilay Patel?

  Sure. So I'm running this export in Premiere, and I'm noticing the processor clocks way down. And this is my favorite part of his video. If I stick the computer in a freezer and do the export on the computer, it doesn't. So the problem is obviously heat management. Then, Dieter, just correct me if I'm wrong, then the Reddit sleuthing began, and everyone tried to figure out what was going on. Everyone's running benchmarks. Other people that we know and talk to, Jonathan Morrison runs like 500 tests on a live stream. Like, he went for it. He like tests, can't find the bug. Other people can't reproduce the bug. Other people can reproduce the bug. What happened then, Dieter?

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Well, so there was, there's been many theories about what precisely this bug was. And the one that seemed most likely, there was a, there was a guy on Reddit who started, I think it was a voltage regulator module, started messing with that. Like, that might have actually been the source of the heat problem. Anyway, his fix seemed to work better. So anyway, Apple released a software update and they also released a statement. And following extensive performance testing under numerous workloads, we've identified there is a, quote, "missing digital key."

• 5:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  "In the firmware that impacts the thermal management system and could drive clock speeds down under heavy thermal loads in the new MacBook Pro. Blah, blah, blah. We apologize to any customer who's experienced less than optimal performance." So here's the thing. I don't know what a missing digital key is.

• 5:41Nilay Patel?

  No one does!

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Okay, here's my-

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Do not know.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Here's my completely uninformed theory.

• 5:46Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Intel specifically accelerates certain video encoding and Apple forgot to pay the license. They didn't enter their key.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's like, that's the best theory I've heard. I mean, we fell down a hole of like, I was like reading Intel white papers in the middle of the night.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  I don't know anything about how to do that. So that was confusing.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  It's possible that in the past 24 hours, someone has actually figured out what it means, but the problem is that VRM thing I mentioned earlier, they explicitly said, "Nope, that's not it." Dave Lee's got that in his updated benchmarking video. Every time, I'm like, "What does that mean? Does it mean this? No, it doesn't mean that. Well, what does it mean? Digital key?" He's like, "Ah!" So I do not know. I haven't looked in the past 24 hours, but the precise outlines of what they've done seem to be along the lines of what has been discovered, but it's not like precisely that. But it is apparently a simple fix and it does in fact work. In our testing, we ran a bunch of benchmarks and then we ran them again after the software update. We are not seeing the performance

• 6:52Speaker 02

  increase we would like to see on Adobe, but Adobe Premiere Pro CC on the Mac is- You know, but we have seen remarkable performance on Final Cut X, which is not what I expected at all, all of which is to say that benchmarking is a dark art and tiny changes in your setup can have huge changes down the line. If you watch some of the benchmarking videos, you'll see that if you, depending on the initial state of your video, if it's a 4K, what kind of 4K, depending on what you render it to, depending on what bitrate you want that final file to be, you know, you just can just go down the line and you're going to get radically different tests all around. So when Apple says it's, you know, 70% faster, I mean, that's on one particular test. It is, in our experience, anywhere

• 7:36Speaker 02

  from, we saw like, just 10% to almost not much of a percent at all, all the way up to 50% on some of our tests.

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  Let's go back to Digital Key. I'd like to just live in that moment. Apple, okay. How did they make this mistake? They won't, they're not, they're not going to tell us. But it's like very-

• 7:56Speaker 02

  It seems remarkable.

• 7:57Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like, they must have run tests. And if, all they're saying is, we didn't run this one edge case, then the performance they shipped it with across this other variety of tests must have been acceptable to them, which is great. But then they turned the key.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:10Nilay Patel?

  They did something.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Well, they found the key, but they were busy.

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  They located the key.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  They typed the key in.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  And now the computer is way more performant on certain tests, right? How do they not know that? Like, this is their primary skill set, is shipping computers, right? Like, how do they not see the results they were getting out of this hardware and realize-

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Well, they only do it every, like, four years.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  He's like, "I'm always forgetting I key." It's not true, because they haven't done the key in a long time. That's the part that I don't, that I think is troublesome. And Dieter, your review, both the video and the written review, they're centered on the notion of trust, right? Like, the previous MacBook had a trust problem around the keyboard, which, you know, you can believe Apple that it was a small problem or not, but that became the narrative of the thing, that you probably can't trust this keyboard. There's a trust issue around the entire concept of the touchbar. Is this a good idea? Do I trust Apple to take me down this road, where I'm typing on glass instead of just pushing the escape button?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  One positive in this, if you want like, a real silver linings of this, this is a problem Apple can fix, because Apple is-

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  Responsible for the whole stack, the whole software stack.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yes, it's a problem Apple can fix, but the question is, they fixed the software, cool. And they maybe did that in collaboration with Intel, I don't know. Maybe it's Intel's problem and whatever, but Apple controls more of it than usual. So like it was Apple's problem to fix the, you don't, when the, when the, when the meal is bad, you don't blame the butcher, you blame the chef, you know? When the steak is bad.

• 9:52Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, when the steak is bad at the restaurant, you don't blame the butcher, you blame the chef. If it's rotten meat, you don't get mad at the meat seller. It's the chef whose job it is to create the meal that you eat.

• 10:05Nilay Patel?

  Cause they're the gatekeeper.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  And they should stop you from having to experience that rotten meat. So Apple's the chef.

• 10:10Nilay Patel?

  The digital key master.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Oh, man, I had so many key master gatekeeper puns with this missing digital key.

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  So here, the, the, let's just be in this metaphor together as a family. Here, the, the. Blame the chef. The steak is the core I9 chip. Right. The six core, core I9 chip. And under certain eating patterns, overcooked it. And if you. If you put it in a freezer, it tastes great. Just to be clear, and Apple is the chef and the chef forgot to season the core I9 with digital keys.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  Am I tracking along here, Dieter? Yeah. But I, I don't think, this is obviously not Intel's fault, right? Like the hardware is fine, they just ship, they just give them chips.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  It's Intel's fault insofar as the only chip that Intel has to sell to Apple is a big, fat, hot, six core chip.

• 11:05Nilay Patel?

  That is not Intel's fault, that's just what they make.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  That's what they make, it's, and it's in, you could theoretically imagine an alternate future where Intel had shipped a 10 nanometer chip and then this MacBook was designed for it and everything would be fine.

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  But then, but then they forget the key and everyone's getting lower performance and it's still Apple's fault.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Should Apple have redesigned this computer for better thermals? Made it thicker, done something else, spent a bunch of money to re-engineer the thing?

• 11:30Nilay Patel?

  Let me defend that, I disagree, like, that's a good argument.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  I don't know the answer to that question, I think the answer to the question is probably no.

• 11:36Nilay Patel?

  They shipped a misconfigured computer, right? So now the computer works as designed inside the case that is able to handle the heat. The computer was misconfigured. I don't think the question is, should they have designed a case that would have accounted for their misconfiguration? That seems backward.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, no, they should never, not that, but like, assume, now that it's configured correctly, do you still think that this is the right case for this chip? Because even configured correctly, you theoretically are still, you know, running into thermal limits on this.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  I guess that would be my question for you, the person who reviewed this laptop.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, so my answer is...

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  The chef has become the butcher!

• 12:21Speaker 01

  I hate to send it back to the kitchen.

• 12:22Nilay Patel?

  Who's the butcher now?

• 12:25Speaker 02

  My answer's probably not. Like, there are many benefits to the Mac. You get macOS, you get a thin computer, you get, you know, all the stuff, all the stuff that you get with a Mac. But, the, the thing that, like, this MacBook was supposed to do, was help address a lot of the malaise in Mac world. Where are the mid-range Macs? Where's the Mac Pro? What are they, when are they gonna, like, regularly update their Macs with the latest processors on a, like, a good cadence? Like, what's going on with the touchbar? What's going on with the keyboard? That sense of, eh, we were hoping that this MacBook Pro would be the thing that people could just be genuinely excited about. The thing that, like, everybody has said to me is, "Do you remember back in the day when Apple would release a new Mac and you would just be excited about it and that was the end of the story?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Because you knew it would be good and you, it was like, 'I can't wait'? Do you remember that?"

• 13:13Speaker 01

  But what is it like using a laptop with, like, a Core i9? Like, what, what is...

• 13:18Speaker 02

  I mean, it's stupid fast. I don't know what to tell you, like...

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Like, how many Chrome tabs before it slows down?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  The, like, the, the thing that you can do to slow it down is, like, just attack it with, like, serious video exporting, or, you know, serious Lightroom exporting, or that kind of stuff. But, to me, like, I honestly think that most people don't need a 15, they want a 13, and the 13 is pretty overpowered for what most people need. What Apple really needs to do is release a good mid-range laptop, and they don't have one right now. I, I was talking about this last week. Um, you know, after the software fix, this thing is great, but should you trust it? Well, the keyboard seems fixed, seems more trustworthy now. They fixed the software bug, that seems more trustworthy.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  Now, so, yeah, but that doesn't mean you feel good about it after like they they shipped a misconfigured computer and they are lying, they're lying by omission at least about why they redesigned the keyboard, right? Like, those things don't affect the computer's performance at this point, now that they've released the update and whatever. They don't affect the computer, but they definitely affect the sort of like, culture the computer exists in.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  I had the first gen MacBook Air, which I had like, it was like, one and a half, it was, it was like, not enough cores somehow.

• 14:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  And it would throttle.

• 14:30Nilay Patel?

  Did you say one and a half?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  I don't know, it was something weird. I just remember that it would throttle down when it would get hot.

• 14:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  And it would just literally freeze. And it would just sit there, be completely

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  I bought Becky that computer.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  And I had to get like

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  Ages ago.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Special third-party software, hacky stuff to like, keep, keep the

• 14:49Nilay Patel?

  Becky and I weren't married yet, so I did not install third-party software on our computer. I remember making that choice and being like, I can't, I can't support this. I don't know if this is forever.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  So I feel like this, it's not like Apple's never like screwed up in this way, and it seems like they've addressed this one better. My worry with this one is that Apple, like, Intel has released hotter chips than Apple's hardware can, can handle. And if the case is just Apple screwed up with software, yeah, that's disconcerting, but at least like, it seems like

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  So when the bug was found, the argument was, Apple put hotter chips than can handle in this case because Johnny, I have demands that everything be thin.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:25Nilay Patel?

  The misconfiguration revealed, Apple's made a mistake. Well, I think the most revealing thing is that Dieter is getting better performance in Final Cut, and all these other things that are not edge cases, after applying the update.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:40Nilay Patel?

  Right? And that, that is like, the, they should have noticed that. That should have been the thing that tipped off the misconfiguration, not Dave Lee. And I think the thing, you know, we talk about iPads and future and mobile and like, if this had been an iPad and Apple's ecosystem was as closed as their other ecosystem, there's a chance that no one would have ever found out, right? Like, you can't run those kinds of benchmarks. There isn't, there isn't third, there isn't the Intel Power Gadget for the A11 chip. People can't write their own kernel extensions to re-regulate the voltage control. Like, this is like a, this is a power of open computing story in like, a big way, because someone was able to run the tests, match them up to what they thought.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  Actually measure in a way that you cannot measure on some of the more closed platforms. And then other people were able to investigate the working of the computer to identify a solution. And I think the guy who identified the thermal problem, he told Hyam on our team that Apple solved the same problem in a more elegant way. So they didn't do what he did. They went higher up in the system and solved the same problem. But that, like, this doesn't happen with phones, right? Like, in a large sense, like...

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Well, except when they explode.

• 17:01Nilay Patel?

  You don't need the Intel Power Gadget to be like, "My phone's exploding."

• 17:06Speaker 01

  I mean, there is a wide feeling that Intel, especially as like Moore's Law slowed down. Intel's done a lot of things to kind of confuse the x86 instruction set and like optimize very specific use cases. And it is a very, very complex chip. And ARM is obviously a lot simpler.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  Especially if you design it yourself.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Obviously. Yeah. And so there is a vibe that, like, how much complexity can we truly sustain? At the same time, that's not, you can't give Apple a pass if everybody else was able to find the missing key.

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  Just... Sounds like an RPG, man. There's a super interesting Steven Sinofsky thread a few weeks ago, several weeks ago, about just sort of what's happening with Intel. And he was like, "When I ran Windows, we would go to Intel all the time and tell them what we needed as Microsoft to make the computers thinner or whatever. And Intel's response was, 'Just use our proprietary extension.'"

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, over and over and over and over again. And they consistently said no, because they wanted to preserve their options. And what they couldn't convince Intel that they should do was build better graphics. And you should go find it, read it, it's super interesting. Like, if you're into that stuff, Sinofsky's been posting a lot of that stuff lately. And it's just, Intel just like looked them in the face and like, "We don't need to do graphics. But would you like to use this proprietary extension that speeds up one function in Excel to lock Excel to our chip?" And they're like, "No, we would not." So Dieter, end of the line, do you trust the computer?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  I trust the computer, but I don't love the computer. That was my conclusion. And maybe that's unfair, but it's not just that, like, there are a couple of controversies and things that put a bad taste in your mouth, like, leading up to the software fix. It's that, in general, the grand experiment of this design, only the USB-C slash Thunderbolt ports, the touch bar, I don't know, the whole thing is just like, it didn't pull off the trick that it was supposed to pull off of pushing Macs forward and getting rid of dongles. And like, the whole thing just didn't quite get there. And the brutal truth is, it's good, it's a very good laptop, but I am more excited for the next big redesign of the MacBook

• 19:24Speaker 02

  now than I was before this thing came out. But like, it's great. It's the best laptop I've ever used in my whole life. There it is. It is like, and the most powerful, anyway. The best is probably still the MacBook, little MacBook, the second generation of that one, even though it's underpowered.

• 19:38Nilay Patel?

  2015 MacBook Pro with discrete graphics, live in that life. The number of people who have reacted to this review cycle by digging up 2015 MacBook Pros that I've seen on Twitter is a lot higher than Apple should want it to be. That thing, you know, we can talk about USB-C all day, all night, but I was just thinking back to the event where they, you know, the photographers and videographers and all the fancy people, and they just kept on showing us Pro workflows. And almost every single one of them involved reading a card. And all of the Pros they showed us were like, "The card read speeds are off the charts, so fast." It's like, "Why don't you just put a card reader?" Like, you're just showing us that what people need is a card reader in their computer more than anything.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  And it's just stuff like that that I think is, just leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth, that the industry is not ready, that the ecosystem of things is not ready for this computer to only have the USB-C ports.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Same. Bring back Firewire 800.

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  Firewire 400.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  400.

• 20:34Nilay Patel?

  That's my jam. Firewire 400 is like a remarkable I/O standard. Let me tell you about this. Firewire 400 is why the iPod existed.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:45Nilay Patel?

  They couldn't have made the iPod with a f- anyway, let's stop now. It was the best. Okay, I'm gonna read an ad, and then we're gonna have This Week in Elon with Andy Hawkins. Another wild week in Elon, and then we're gonna talk about these smart speakers.

• 21:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Rich Cast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Hiring isn't most people's idea of fun. It can be exhausting, it's not easy, and you know what? It's not supposed to be. If you aren't having tough conversations to make sure you get the right person for the job, you're not doing it right. But how can you stay focused in finding the most qualified candidate with ZipRecruiter? Their powerful matching technology scans millions of resumes across its network to actively find the right people, the right experience, and invites them to apply to your job. As applications come in, it spotlights top candidates to save you time and make sure you never miss a great match. It's so effective that 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a top-quality candidate through the site within the first day. So if you're hiring, it's time to get smart, Paul. Go to ziprecruiter.com/verge right now, where you can try ZipRecruiter for free, the lowest-risk price there is. That is some deep econ in the middle of the

• 21:44Nilay Patel?

  ad copy. Don't waste another second. Go to ziprecruiter.com/verge and start putting that technology to work for you. That is ziprecruiter.com/verge. Free, the lowest-risk price there is. That's not their tagline, but I like ZipRecruiter.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Hey, this is Andrew Hawkins, a transportation reporter at The Verge, and this is the Week in Elon Musk. Musk calls Tesla critics boss to complain about him. The unpredictable billionaire lashed out again this week, contacting the employer of a well-known but anonymous blogger who dared to criticize him online. Montana Skeptic is a somewhat well-known writer for the financial news and analysis website Seeking Alpha, who has spent years tearing down Tesla. Skeptic has long been upfront about the fact that he's a Tesla short, meaning he's betting the company's stock will nosedive at some point. This made him a target for Musk's loyal fans on Twitter, who doxed the blogger and revealed him to be an employee of a firm

• 22:45Speaker 03

  that apparently has invested in oil companies. Using this information, Musk allegedly called Skeptic's employers- And even threatened to sue him. Skeptic subsequently deleted his Twitter account, but not before posting a final message online in which he said, quote, "You might say Elon Musk has won this round. He has silenced a critic, but he has many, many critics and he cannot silence them all and the truth will be out." We all know that Elon is extremely online and extremely logged in, so it's too soon to say whether he went too far this time. SpaceX launches and then catches another rocket. This week SpaceX launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets from the California coast. According to The Verge's own Lauren Grush, "The mission was completed in a little over

• 23:30Speaker 03

  an hour. The rocket's booster managed to land on the company's drone ship in the Pacific despite poor weather conditions at the time. There was some confusion at first about whether it survived, thanks to bad lighting on the boat, but SpaceX later got visual confirmation that the booster touched down successfully." But the same couldn't be said for the rocket's nose cone. The company's recovery boat, Mr. Steven, saw the structure falling from the sky but was unable to catch it. This was SpaceX's seventh mission for one of its longstanding customers, Iridium. Musk's rocket company has a contract with Iridium to launch 75 satellites, which provide global telecommunications coverage. After this flight, SpaceX only has one more group of satellites to launch, and then its

• 24:13Speaker 03

  job for Iridium will be complete. Tesla whistleblower meets with SEC investigators. Martin Tripp, the former Tesla employee and self-described whistleblower, is meeting with the Securities and Exchange Commission to discuss his case. The meeting in itself doesn't mean that the SEC has opened a new investigation into the company, but it could be a sign that Tripp's case is gaining traction. In case you don't remember, Tripp leaked information to reporters about safety violations at Tesla's factory. Musk subsequently portrayed him as a disgruntled employee in saboteur. I love that word, saboteur. Keep an eye on Musk's tweets as this story progresses. Speaking of, Twitter locking accounts using Musk's name to combat crypto scams.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  This is a fun one. Twitter has implemented a new method for combating cryptocurrency scammers. It now automatically locks unverified accounts that change their display name to Elon Musk. If you have a non-verified account that is not associated with a phone number, changing your display name to that of the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla will result in an immediate lockout. Twitter will then ask you to pass a CAPTCHA test, as well as provide a phone number to regain access. The measure is designed to combat the innumerable bots on Twitter that are imitating Musk's very active Twitter profile to scam unknowing users in replies to his tweets. To which I say, live and learn.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  And finally, SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Race breaks new record. Last Sunday, Musk was in Los Angeles at the Hyperloop Pod Race put on by his company SpaceX. 20 teams of engineering students competed to see whose pod could go the fastest through the company's nearly-mile-long test track. The winner was VAR Hyperloop, a team of 40 students from Munich, Germany. Not only did they comfortably beat all the other teams, but they apparently broke a new Hyperloop record, achieving a top speed of 290 miles per hour. But while the event was about Hyperloop pods going really, really fast, it was also a celebration of all things Musk. There were Tesla vehicles, SpaceX capsules, Boring Company pyramids, and tons of merch

• 26:22Speaker 03

  for sale, as well as food trucks and an 80s cover band. Musk was there, as well as his girlfriend, Canadian pop star Grimes. It was like Bonnaroo meets the X Prize, if that's your kind of thing. This has been the Week in Elon Musk. For more news, check out theverge.com.

• 26:40Nilay Patel?

  That Elon, man. He's a busy fellow. That special Twitter rule is something else. I'm just happy that our staff responded to it by all changing their display names to Casey Newton. Which is incredible. All right, Teeter, you did another big review this week about a new Android, a new, are you still our buddy?

• 26:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, good buddy.

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  I don't, that's more threatening than I anticipated.

• 27:04Nilay Patel?

  All right, the, we saw these at CES, the three of us actually played with them together, the Lenovo smart displays.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  They're out now, it only took seven months, because it's a whole new platform, and you.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Lenovo's the first, uh, they're called the Lenovo smart display, there's gonna be other smart displays, it's the smart display platform. And, yo, it's really good.

• 27:23Nilay Patel?

  Is it?

• 27:24Speaker 02

  It's really, really good. It runs Android things, uh, and what that basically means is it's just a front end for the Google Assistant, like, you can't really open up a web browser, you can't really do anything with touch other than like, respond to stuff you've already asked for with your voice, there's a couple of things, like you can tap on the weather, but it just displays stuff and it, you know, the speakers could be a little bit better, they're like average, I maybe called them mediocre, maybe it was a little mean, but they're meh. I think it's a little too expensive at $249, but the experience of using this thing, if you are in the Google ecosystem, is head and shoulders above the Echo Show. It is a great kitchen TV, it is very easy to watch video on it,

• 28:03Speaker 02

  you, like, maps are great on it, like, all the Google stuff is incredibly good, um, and there's not much non-Google stuff.

• 28:11Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 28:11Speaker 02

  On it, actually, like, you can get web snippets, but, I don't know, it's interesting.

• 28:15Nilay Patel?

  What's a day in the life? Like, I imagine this, this is a kitchen, this is something you put in your kitchen?

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, you definitely put this in your kitchen.

• 28:23Nilay Patel?

  With the Lenovo smart display, like, how often would you actually engage with it?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  I mean, about as often as you would engage with like a Google Home or an Echo, uh, except that the addition of the screen means you get a couple more things that you wouldn't do, it's like the news briefings show video if you have video in your news briefings. If you're a YouTube TV subscriber, you're just like YouTube, asking it to pull up a YouTube video is great, and then just having, you know, a video playing in the kitchen in the background while you cook is really nice. You know, it's, it doesn't give you, beyond those two things, like, that much more than a, uh, a speaker without a display. You get video, you get, uh, timers that stay on the screen, um, Neil and I can argue about this, but the Echo Show is garbage because the timers disappear off the screen too quickly.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  And you, I don't know, like, the recipe thing is neat, although, uh, it sort of depends on like, how much do you wanna use, you know, recipes at Google found on the web instead of your own, uh, but it is like a really clever workflow.

• 29:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm actually most curious, it redesigns the webpages when you call up a recipe.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:25Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I got feels, right?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Like, this is breaking the web?

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Well, no, they, they, like, the, the websites give them permission to do it. They form a partnership.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  They're not just scraping rando recipe sites.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, neilasfoodblog.com. Where's my ad revenue?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  You gotta adapt to the API.

• 29:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  You gotta get some structured data in there.

• 29:44Nilay Patel?

  I just think it's wild that they, they form the deals. I'm sure they're getting their recipes right, but it's, it's one of those things where you take the web and then you build something next to it that's much more like a CD-ROM. You know, like, it's just a weird custom thing on the side.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  I think the thing is, the web is a mouse interface. And I feel like, I think about web browsing on your phone.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  It's not as good.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  See, you can't, you can't, you can't have regular, you can't have Sir Tim Berners-Lee's original web vision.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  Which actually wouldn't work, because it was just a list of, like, hypertext links.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  Does this thing have a browser, Dieter?

• 30:21Speaker 02

  No, I was unable to, I, like, I don't want to say definitively no, because it's clearly built off browser tech, and it may be possible if you really try to get a webpage to pop up, but I was unable to do it. If you ask it a question, it like plays, shows and plays like the snippet of text. And you can tap a button or ask for more information on whatever. You call up a map, you can like scroll through pictures, like, it's, it all feels like, like, an app interface for Google's, like, stuff and the way that Google sees the web. You basically look, when you, you know, when you go, go to like Google search on your computer on your phone? And like, there's all like the fancy results instead of, you know, the, the ten blue links at the bottom?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  That I rapidly scroll past.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Take all the fancy results you get from Google and then make a device, a kitchen device out of it, and that's what this thing is. Here's an interesting thing. I assumed that I just had weird Wi-Fi problems because I couldn't get Cast to work from Netflix. It turns out that this is a Cast display. You can cast video to it, but you cannot cast everything to it. Netflix will not cast to this display.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  What? Oh!

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Because Cast-

• 31:25Speaker 02

  It's not clear in my, it's not clear in my YouTube video, because I successfully casted Hulu, and I sort of used it in the same sentence as Netflix, and I, I, it was a bad edit in the video, so if you're gonna comment on that, I'm sorry, I screwed that up. It's right in the article, and I link to Android Central, which has the list of services that aren't, aren't supported by Cast on this thing. But it's real dumb that Netflix can cast to some stuff, but not other stuff.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  No, because Cast is like a weird protocol, right? So when you cast it, it's built on this thing called Dial, which is like another thing. And the first version of Chromecast was Dial, but the handler for everything was Chrome. So Cast sends the URL, it sends the auth token. The device says, "Oh, I have a handler for that. I will pass this URL and this auth token to the handler." And then for the Chromecast, in particular, the handler was always Chrome. So it could do any web video.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:15Nilay Patel?

  But I bet this thing-

• 32:16Speaker 01

  So you're saying that this thing doesn't have a handler for playing Netflix video?

• 32:19Nilay Patel?

  Right, and that leads me to believe it doesn't have the full Chrome underneath it, because they'd have to do Chrome. So Netflix needs to build a handler of some kind.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  It supports YouTube, YouTube TV, Facebook Video, Google Play Movies, HBO Go or Now, Hulu, Playstation View, Spotify Connect, Tableau and Vimeo. Which is a pretty comprehensive list.

• 32:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it doesn't have Netflix on it. There's one thing that makes your list comprehensive.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, if they were like, "We don't have Hulu," and they're like, "We have Netflix," we're like, "Oh yeah, Hulu, come, that'll be fine." But I bet they need to make a deal with Netflix. So I think that answers that sort of like underlying web question. Because it was just a Chromecast, like it would just work. But I bet they need a custom handler for this.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Remember a couple of years ago, I wrote about the Internet Bundle and I was afraid about smart assistants putting us in walled gardens and all the things? We only get to see the things that they made deals for? It's happening.

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  So I watched your video, and at the end of it, you're like, "I hate saying, 'Okay, Google.'" And that's the thing that stops me.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Seriously.

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  That's the thing, I would, I'm not like, I got a bunch of echoes, like, they're fine.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  I do like the idea, I mean, I'm, to be honest, I've been considering like making a full-on, like, get rid of Google move in my life. Like, try to like get off of Google Doc, like find replacements for all Google services, see if I can go a little indie. But right now, like, having Google's calendar, Google has like all my email accounts, like all that kind of stuff. That seems like so much more convenient and potentially so much more valuable than what Amazon can provide.

• 33:52Nilay Patel?

  Yes, and it's really hard to move that stuff. This is like a great segue into this interview that I did with the Google engineer.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  Let's do that.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Wait, I had one more question about the, I wanted to call it the Echo Show. The Lenovo smart display. What's the app store? So people can make like skills for it, basically?

• 34:14Speaker 02

  It supports the same like Google Actions that are on the Google Home. They can do some display stuff, but it's pretty clear that they are not as close to where they should be and where they want to be in terms of third-party support for things. There's no app store, of course. The, so there's more to come. And by the time this airs, with any luck, my exclusive interview with three of the engineers who worked on this product will be up on the website.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Got a day two story for y'all.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Look forward to that.

• 34:49Nilay Patel?

  So you're confirming that it will be up on the website?

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Well, it's gonna have to be now.

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  Perfect.

• 34:56Nilay Patel?

  So Paul, you were just talking about how hard it is to leave Google, got email, they got photos.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  They've got a bunch of other information as well. It's actually quite terrifying.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Tight embrace.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  A tight, very, but the same is true for like Twitter and Facebook. So Google and Twitter and Facebook and Microsoft, a bunch of other companies are rolling out this new thing called the Data Transfer Project, which is super interesting. So as you probably know, Google had Google Takeout for a while. Now, there's all kinds of ways to get your stuff out of Google, but you have to physically download it. They've got a, you've got to put it somewhere else that's like hard. So there's an engineer called Brian Willard, who is working on this thing called the Data Transfer Project, joined us. We talked about what the goals are, about competition in this space, about enabling competition. Super interesting. Check this out. We'll be back with Paul's segment. Hey, everybody. So we have Brian Willard from Google with us. Hey, Brian, how you doing?

• 35:48Speaker 04

  Good, how are you?

• 35:48Nilay Patel?

  I am great. So last week you had some big news sort of in the Google world, in the tech world. We talk on the Verchess all the time about vendor lock-in, proprietary protocols. You've been working on this idea of data portability for a long time. And last week you announced a huge new project being led by Google with some big partners to make it easier to move things around. What, what is that?

• 36:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. So we, we announced the Data Transfer Project, which is a collaboration between Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter to really make it much easier for users to be able to transfer their data on the internet. So it's an open source project, so anybody can contribute. It's not just those partners. And we're trying to build kind of the shared foundations to make it so that that vendor lock-in doesn't happen because we agree here at Google that that's not something that we want to support.

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  And so Google's been working on this for a long time. The first version of this was called the like the Data Liberation Front, like a it's like a renegade project inside of Google that became a real thing. And that became Takeout, I think it was called for a while. And now is it migrating into this? Is this the growth of it or is this something new?

• 36:49Speaker 04

  This is like the next generation. So they'll both coexist. So that's right. We launched the Takeout in from the Data Liberation Front in 2011. Fitz, Brian Fitzpatrick was kind of instrumental in getting that started. It's been exciting to see that kind of grow, both inside Google and then other companies kind of add that same functionality over time. And so the Data Transfer Project is more about doing service-to-service transfer directly instead of kind of Takeout is about downloading your data and getting a copy of it.

• 37:15Nilay Patel?

  So right now, you know, you can go to Takeout and you can download everything that you've ever uploaded to Google. You can go to Facebook and export a bunch of stuff. You can go to Twitter and download all your tweets, although just delete those. You don't need those. But what you're saying is, okay, then you have them. What are you going to do with them? This is more you can, inside of Google, you're going to be able to send it directly to Facebook?

• 37:35Speaker 04

  That's right. That's exactly right. And so when we look at kind of how our users are using Takeout and how the Internet's going, we see a couple of trends that that made us want to work on this project. And so the first one, mobile-only usage is growing. So people with only a mobile mobile device. And then Internet usage is growing in a lot of places where connectivity is either metered or it's not so great. And so for both those cases, downloading your data isn't really a tenable solution to that problem. And so with Takeout, we added a bunch of functionality so you could directly move the output of your export in the clouds. You can move it to Dropbox, you can move it to Box, you can move it to OneDrive. And so that kind of solves that problem, but you're still left with a zip file in the cloud. And so you have to be a little bit knowledgeable to know how to do something useful with that. And so the Data Transfer Project tries to solve all those problems. It transfers your data right in the cloud directly to another service provider.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  So you don't have to figure out how to make use of an inbox file that you downloaded on your phone.

• 38:23Nilay Patel?

  So that's really interesting because I look at some of the exports I've downloaded over the years and sometimes people ship you basically an entire fake website, right? Like, I think the example that comes to my mind is Twitter. You download all your old tweets, you open them, you basically get a Twitter website running locally off some cache data. But now, and then you have to like do something with that, right? And maybe that's useful to you, maybe it's not. You can't really send it anywhere else easily. Are you, how are you going to manage the translation between, you know, one service to another? Is that, is that the problem that you're solving? Like, you've got a bunch of data in Facebook and you want to send it to some Google service. It's obviously not a one-to-one. How do you manage that translation?

• 39:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. And so this gets a little bit technical, but we're breaking it down. And so you, you mentioned moving your Twitter data to, to Google. And so that's a good one to start with. And so when we think about that, instead of thinking like, we're going to move all the data Twitter has to Google, because if you imagine the opposite of that, you can't really move your shopping history from, from Google to Twitter. And so instead of thinking about company to company wise, we break it down into kind of data types, which we call verticals. And so instead of talking Twitter to Google, you talk about, okay, what do we do with your photos on Twitter? What do you, about your contacts list on Twitter? What do we do about your profile data? And so it makes it a problem a little more tractable to think about these verticals. So then we need vertical, then we run into the same problem, right? And so this depends a little bit. And so for some things like photos, right? It's super easy. It's, you just transfer them. Everybody knows the same formats for photos.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  There's JPEG, there's pings, all that. But for some of that, it gets a little more complicated. So contacts lists, there are a number of different formats. And so it becomes, just to your question, how do you transfer those? And so the way the Data Transfer Project tackles that is by building adapters. And so Twitter will build some adapters to translate their proprietary APIs into a common format. And Google will build some adapters that translate our APIs into a common format. And so Twitter doesn't really have to know or care what Google's doing. And Google doesn't have to know or care what Twitter's doing. But these adapters translate their APIs into a common format. And then anybody can kind of join and build adapters to their APIs and get access to this information.

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  So this is something I know you've been working on for a long time. What keeps everybody honest in that ecosystem, right? Like, Google seems, obviously you guys are pushing it forward, you've evolved your project many times over the years. Besides just a sense of good feeling and camaraderie on the internet, what keeps all the players in that ecosystem honest that they're going to keep their adapters up to date, they're going to... You know, tell everybody what they're doing. They're going to make sure that their exports are clean. How do you, how do you keep that in balance?

• 40:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a really good question. And so some of it is just being a good player. Like, I think there's going to be a lot of different motivations for different companies. Google has been committed to kind of doing the right thing by our users around portability for a long time. And so we're intrinsically motivated to do that. I think another interesting aspect to this is that you can look at, let's say startups. So instead of talking about big companies, let's talk about a small company. And so a small company wants to grow. They want to acquire users. Usually you need to get some information, right? They might be the next photo sharing service. They might be the next Twitter or something. And so they need your contact list and they need your photos, right? So in the past, they had to go spend a lot of engineering effort, which is pretty precious to these startups, to go figure out how to import this data. And so now there's going to be the data transfer project where they can just plug in and get access to all this user information if the users choose to go to their service.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  And so there's a big net win to companies to be able to allow users to transfer into them if they're offering a new or cooler service. And so we think by tying import and export together and kind of saying, hey, we have this ecosystem. When you build adapters, you really need to build an importer and an exporter. And so companies have a, if they're not motivated like Google by just doing the right thing, they, they have kind of a business reason to be part of this ecosystem because they want to be able to build the next cool service and then make it easier for users to come use that service. And so we think by tying import and export together, you solve some of these long-term problems. Like, how do you make people spend as much effort maintaining their export capability as they do their import capability?

• 42:14Nilay Patel?

  So I actually, I want to talk to you about competition in detail. So, but let's set that aside for one second. When you, you're announcing with big players, you're announcing with Microsoft, with Facebook, with Twitter. What were those conversations like when you went to them and said, hey, we're expanding the notion of data portability. We're going to build this new thing. We want you to be involved. Were they like, yes, we've been waiting for this? Do you have to cajole them? What was the shape of those conversations?

• 42:39Speaker 04

  I'll say it's varied and I won't name names, but I think some players were fairly excited. And some it took a little convincing, but one of the cool things about how the data transfer project is architected is we weren't trying to build kind of new API types or new standards. And so it's pretty lightweight to be able to go plug in a company to this. And so one of the things we had a lot of success with is because a lot of these companies have open APIs for some of their data, we went and built adapters for them to kind of demonstrate to them kind of the power of the system because it's kind of hard to talk about it directly. And so we went and used their open APIs, got developer keys from them and kind of built demos to show them what this would enable and kind of how cool this would be for users. And once we had, we were past the word stage and started having some code that was working,

• 43:22Speaker 04

  I think the conversations got a lot better and everybody was pretty excited to be involved.

• 43:27Nilay Patel?

  That's cool. I mean, so walk me through how it will work. I know we can't, it's a, you know, it's a radio show. We can't show people, but let's try it. So you, you've got your mobile phone, you download a new app, you know, Neil's photo sharing app, and there's a button that pops up that says, do you want to import your Facebook photos? Is that the interface you expect most people to see? Or are you going to go to datatransferproject.com and manage it all from a central dashboard?

• 43:51Speaker 04

  No, the first scenario is right. So I think kind of the open source project supports a lot of different use cases, so it could support both of those. We think that for a lot of reasons, that first one where you go to, you find your new app and you say, okay, I want to import my data and it shows you a whole bunch of places you can import your data from is the solution we're going for. And so you'd pick, let's say you wanted to pull your, your Google photos. You'd select Google from that list. You'd be presented with a Google Oa screen where we use Google's standard kind of login mechanism and account security to make sure you're really the right person. You'd complete that Oa flow and then you'd transfer the photos. And then one of the cool things about this project is we're trying to set it up with security and privacy first. And so the way the framework works is as soon as it's done doing that transfer, it'll then destroy those auth credentials. And so we won't have like long lasting connections to your data.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  This is kind of a, the user wants to do this, they do it one time, it's done. If they want to do it again, they can, but trying to do nothing tricky with users. Just have them really make informed choices with where they want their data to go and then make that super easy for them.

• 44:46Nilay Patel?

  And this isn't, obviously you work at Google, we're talking about Google Photos, but. This would be, the data transfer is initiated by the app you're using, right? There's no central cloud service managing this?

• 44:57Speaker 04

  That's correct. There's no central cloud service managing it. You can initiate it from the new service like we were talking about, or we envision, and this isn't built yet, but being able to be in the Google product and be like, "I don't want my photos here anymore," or "I want to go try this new service," and initiating it from, kind of, we call it the source service, but the place the data is already at, because maybe that's where you already had the relationship from. And so you could do it from either way.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  And so this brings to competition, right? And I think this is probably where you have a number of stories from the past, because most companies, and I include Google in this, I know you're saying Google has good intentions, but Google's still a company, they want you to stay in the ecosystem, right? So what is the incentive to get everybody to participate beyond, you know, making the playing field more level for new competitors? If you are running Google Photos, which is very good, does the PM of Google Photos really want to build an export function to send people to Flickr, RIP? Or is there some other value to that, where you're saying, "Well, if we build the export function, it's more likely that other people will participate, and you're the best product, so your import function will be better served."

• 45:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think when you look holistically at Google, and you can go back to Eric Schmidt, kind of when we started the Data Liberation Front, he's kind of set the culture down and it's maintained, and we want to win because we have the best products, not because we lock users in. And so sometimes, doing what's right for the user as a company is more important than any short-sighted, product-specific decision that might get made. And so I think we've had that history and had that culture, and so we're very excited about letting users make that choice, and we really, really want to win by having the best product. And I think having tools like this is one of the things that incentivizes products to make sure that they keep innovating and don't get stagnant. If you have a walled garden, you can get stagnant because your users don't have a choice. But if your users do have a choice, it kind of forces you to keep improving that product to make users be excited about interacting with it. And so I think tools like this are really beneficial

• 46:43Speaker 04

  to making sure that Google keeps innovating and has the best products.

• 46:46Nilay Patel?

  So you brought up Wellgard, and so I gotta ask, have you talked to Apple about iCloud? And import and export and data transfer to iCloud?

• 46:54Speaker 04

  We've had conversations with a lot of people, and I don't want to get into the internal things, whether ongoing. So I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of new people join this project, now that there's a lot more publicity around it. But it's hard to predict exactly who and exactly when.

• 47:06Nilay Patel?

  How long have you been working on this?

• 47:07Speaker 04

  I've been working on portability here at Google for six years. We've been working on versions of this for maybe four or five years. Had some failures, but we've been working on the data transfer project for a little over a year now, year and a half.

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  Tell me about some of these failures. Where has this gone wrong?

• 47:22Speaker 04

  So an interesting feature that we built that you can still use, you can go see it, is we thought we could do this with structured downloads. So instead of doing the service-to-service thing, we thought, and this is three or four years ago, wouldn't it be cool to be able to just instantly upload these structured exports from the other companies to Drive? And so we started going down this road. And so if you go to Drive today and you have a zip file in Drive, you can see the contents of that zip file. So we'll unpack it for you and show it to you. And so that was our first attempt to do this. And we built a bunch of infrastructure for how to parse zips, and then started to parse data out of the zips, and decided that that wasn't a road that would go forward. We would have to know too much about other companies' data formats, and when they changed those data formats, it would be on us to go update our import logic to figure out how to make sense of that. And so it's interesting that you can still see the artifacts of that in the Drive

• 48:07Speaker 04

  UI today. But we learned that that wasn't going to be a way to go. And so that's why one of the things that informed our design decisions around the data transfer project is that Google only has to care about Google APIs, and Facebook only has to care about Facebook APIs. And when either of us changes them, it's only on our company to make those changes, which I think is a much better dynamic than putting that burden on the importer to go figure out every time you make a change.

• 48:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it seems like this is also only truly enabled by the two things you're talking about. One, which is the overwhelming prevalence of mobile, a little bit of bandwidth constraint, but by how much work is now moving to the cloud in general, and the user expectation that all this will happen in the cloud versus on their local machine. Are you thinking about user expectation as you make these choices, or are you just trying to make something, anything, happen?

• 48:53Speaker 04

  No, we're definitely thinking about user expectations and kind of user use cases. And so we're mostly focused on the cloud stuff. But like an interesting use case is you can pick your favorite encrypted mail provider that does end-to-end encryption. And so a product like this doesn't really work for that use case because the messages are always encrypted and you definitely don't want to give your key to us to do the encryption and then re-import it somewhere else. And so an interesting approach to this, kind of thinking about user cases, is for scenarios like that, you can download the data transfer project and run it locally and kind of do that encryption so it still maintains end-to-end encryption on your machine and then re-upload it in a new encrypted form to your new provider. And so when we think about portability, there's a lot of different use cases. One is just making it easy for the mass markets because kind of downloading this code and

• 49:35Speaker 04

  running it via Docker or compiling it is probably out of reach for a lot of people. But there is a subset of people that that is appealing to and kind of knowing that they're running exactly the code that they see at GitHub is available to them, which I think is really promising for this approach, that it kind of suits a lot of different use cases.

• 49:49Nilay Patel?

  So again, I was looking at your Twitter and obviously the big companies are in the news all over the place. And even you have been tweeting about how data portability will enable more competition. So if you're fed up with Facebook but there's a huge network effect, or you're fed up with Gmail but there's a huge network effect of how Gmail Ops and Services, you can go and that's better for Google's team because they have to build a better product. Do you think that's actually going to play out in the sort of startup ecosystem now? Or is this really, it's going to get slightly easier to move from Gmail to Hotmail?

• 50:20Speaker 04

  Ah, that's a really good question, right? When I look at the ecosystem, I think there's a lot of work to do on some of the smaller distributed web stuff. And a little bit of it, I shouldn't make the call, right? Like, we want to provide these choices to users. And if people can build the products that they find compelling, we should make it really easy for them to move to them. But I think it's really hard to predict, and I'm probably the wrong person to predict like whether that succeeds or not. But like, I'm really passionate about making sure the users have the choice and we give them the ability to succeed if they can.

• 50:46Nilay Patel?

  So, right now, obviously, this is basically just a GitHub project. It's not shipping, right?

• 50:51Speaker 04

  That's correct. Today, it's not shipping. We really hope to kind of build it into the Google UIs that we give users the ability to do that in the future. We can't really control where other people put it in their UIs, but I really hope to see it cropping up there.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  So, it's not shipping? You've got to work it into Google. You've got these deals with your partners. Are you committed to, you know, across Google, it's going to be not just Gmail and Photos, but YouTube as well? And are they committing to it's not just, you know, Facebook's Blue app, but Instagram and WhatsApp as well? Or are you just sort of, they're signed on, we're going to see how the ecosystem develops?

• 51:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're all signed on to the principles and as with all forward-looking statements, right? Nobody wants to commit to things in stone. So, I don't want to talk about any specific product, but I think my plan is definitely to keep expanding this to more and more data types to make it more and more useful. But, yeah, I would hesitate to give dates on when things will make it into the product because a lot of that depends on kind of like the user feedback we get. If people are really cramming for a data type, or there's a really cool new place to take that data, I think we'll prioritize those, but we wouldn't want to share the internal roadmap too much because it's likely to change.

• 51:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm just curious. What's sort of the most interesting problem you've had to solve as you've been working on this for six years at a company like Google?

• 52:01Speaker 04

  Um...

• 52:02Nilay Patel?

  Or the hardest problem, rather?

• 52:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, the hardest problem. I think it's like just the number of different data types and kind of, there's not one solution that fits them all. So, transferring your contacts is different than transferring your mail, which is different than transferring your photos. And so, kind of trying to come up with solutions that allow the flexibility to meet all the different data types and also have a little bit of foresight because you can imagine, and we hope, the data transfer project is used for data like loyalty cards where Google's not in the market. And so, we don't want to, we want to leave it open enough so that the players that are in each of the markets that we're enabling get to kind of decide how it's run, but hopefully we can provide the tools to make it a lot easier for them. And so, kind of making sure we have the right solutions for the right spaces is, I think, an important issue.

• 52:45Nilay Patel?

  Are you running into any of the sort of larger policy concerns as you architect the tool? Like, obviously, there's the GDPR in Europe. Obviously, there's a huge amount of scrutiny in this country. Are you building around that stuff? Or are you saying, you know, this is the user's data. We're letting them do what they want with their own data. They've clearly already opted in because they're making the choice and we don't have to worry about that.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think we're starting from the principled approach as we've had a long history at Google about letting users take their own data. I think we are trying to be mindful about kind of these external events that are going on, right? And so how the slider moves between how easy it is to transfer data and how much we inform users about exactly what's happening is, I think, an interesting one where we'll continue to kind of move how our design decisions are based on external events, as I think that's an interesting conversation that's having on the web.

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, to me, just honestly, it seems like if you're more in charge of your data and you know that you're taking the action on it this directly, then that's probably a good thing, at least fulfills the spirit of what everyone wants you to do. But on the flip side, it seems like a bunch of new apps that make it super easy to import your data that you may not have a long relationship with is probably great in the spirit of competition. But now, suddenly, it's that much easier to send your data everywhere in a way, especially if it's happening in the cloud and you're not seeing the sort of tangibility of the data transfer happen on your machine. It seems a little dicey there, too.

• 54:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And this goes back to kind of my earlier point about there not being like one-size-fits-all solutions. And so kind of the way we're taking the approach on the open source project is that we're going to build the tools, but we're not actually doing the transfers, because each individual provider kind of knows their data types, knows their users best, and should be, get to make the final decision on, you know, how strict do we want to be with how we vet these companies, right? Google shouldn't be the person deciding that for Facebook. Facebook shouldn't be the person deciding that for Google. You should know your users. An interesting example of that is at Google, we have kind of a product called the Advanced Protection, which adds some extra security guards to your account. And so because we have these separate set of users that are in this space, it probably makes sense to offer different sets of protections to them that maybe make it a little bit harder

• 54:50Speaker 04

  to transfer their data than it does to an end user or a user without these additional security features that they're opting into. And so we have that. Other companies have that same kind of thing. And so it's really important that companies are able to make nuanced decisions about this, because there isn't one answer that fits every situation, every company, every data type, right? The protections that you use for your medical records are probably different than the protections that you should use for your URLs that you shortened, let's say.

• 55:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just thinking about it now, it seems it's your data, you should be able to make whatever mistakes you want with it, but there's like a user education process about, hey, we've never seen this app before and it's asking for all of your Google Photos. Maybe you should think twice. Are you trying to build something like that in where it's like, some scammer is going to make an app that just starts sucking in data and at the end of the day, it's the user's data, but they made a mistake and Google might have some obligation to call it out?

• 55:43Speaker 04

  No, that's exactly right. And we're trying to debate that, like how much we protect users themselves and kind of what we keep coming back for. We don't have set answers for that yet. I think there's a lot of different moving pieces there. But kind of one of the fundamental things we think is going to play a critical role in this is transparency, right? Like, we need to be very transparent, right? How many users have moved to this service? How long has the service been around? And really highlight these signals that will help users make good choices. And then also have some backstop where we know there are some legit bad actors out there. And so really highlighting those and using the data sources that we have from a lot of other places to feed into these kind of reputational decisions. But you're right, at the end of the day, it is the user's data. And so they should get the final choice, but we need to make sure that we're giving them the information to make that informed choice.

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  I mean, to me, the story of the internet in the past two years is the sudden recognition that every tool has to be constructed with bad actors in mind. Whereas, you know, I'm certain six years ago when you started, the hope was that users, they'd have the ability to download their data. That would be great. And now, now there's an entire other class of participants that it seems like it constrains everybody's ability in a pretty serious way.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's true. I think the other side of that, though, is when I talk to my friends that work in payments, right, they've been having these problems with risk assessments and kind of thinking about bad actors for a long time. And so I think learning some lessons from them will also be interesting. From back in the day, it's been interesting to, we've had these conversations for a long time. So it used to be people inside of Google brought up the argument that the data was much more secure on Google Server than it was on your home machine, right? Because it's much more likely that you have a virus that was going to rip up all this data from your machine. I think this is just an evolution of that conversation, that now we have to worry about the security of other services and not just the security of your machine. But it feels more like an evolution than kind of a revolution.

• 57:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, makes sense. So what is next for this tool? What's the next? It's obviously been announced, people are signing up. What's the next big step that you foresee?

• 57:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so two things. One, in terms of the open space world, we really want to make sure that we get a lot more partners involved, right? The partners that we had at launch day were all pretty big, and we want to make sure that we have a representative sample of the companies that are going to be using it. So kind of continuing our outreach and making sure lots of different stakeholders are involved is kind of goal number one for DTP. On the Google side, we've been working to kind of integrate in the products, make it in the UI, so users can actually use this functionality. And that involves tackling a lot of those questions that you just answered around, you know, how do we provide transparency? How do we make sure that we're informing the users the right way? But we really are dedicated to trying out making this a product as much as we can and not just having it be an open source project that results in some good publicity for a second, but really turning it into a useful tool for users.

• 58:11Nilay Patel?

  So are you going to manage the adapters? Or is the data transfer tool going to manage the sort of the adapter store? Or is that all sort of up to the companies?

• 58:20Speaker 04

  I think there's probably a two-pronged approach for that. One, because we're in such early days, we don't have a defined governance model established. And I think it's going to be important to have kind of that variety of stakeholders I talked about before involved before we kind of solidify what's the right decision. So it's not just these big companies making the decision, but we make decisions that are right for everybody. The other side of that is I imagine there's a world where there is some vetting that happens in kind of if you can be an official adapter that's in the GitHub, right? We need to have some controls over who can contribute stuff to GitHub, just so you're not, you know, contributing viruses left and right. But the other side of that is we really wanted to do this as an open source project because we want people to be able to go fork it. And so if they want to go build their own adapter, but for whatever reason, DTP isn't a good fit is the place to put that code, they can go fork it and build their own adapter

• 59:05Speaker 04

  and kind of get this functionality off on their own without there being any central gatekeeper.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that the gatekeeping question and the sort of user trust question are they're inextricable, right? And the question, I mean, it's, I'm very excited to see where you go with it because that question is, it gets at the heart of it.

• 59:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, and we've been wrestling with it and don't have finalized answers yet. But I think a lot of it goes around transparency and making sure that we make all these, this data as transparent to the user as possible. Because the users are fairly savvy, and if, as long as you present the data in a right way, I have faith that for the most part, they'll make the right decision.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  Awesome. Well, Brian, thank you so much for joining our show. I know we went a little bit over, but I appreciate it. Very exciting project. We're eager to see what happens next. Brian Willard, thank you so much.

• 59:44Speaker 04

  No problem. Thanks for having me. Big fan of the podcast.

• 59:46Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Paul.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  Yo.

• 59:47Nilay Patel?

  Every week, my man. You do the thing.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's called, what is it like to be a dolphin? So. The best. Yeah. I bet it's great being a dolphin. Then I really think about it, don't just write down the name of my segment. It would be great to be a dolphin, but you know. Except for the whole tuna net thing. Uh, I'm sure that's like, I mean, you know, sometimes people like, sometimes people get hurt.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  It's not all, it's not all roses being a human. Most dolphins are having a great time, but if you want to know what it's like to be a dolphin, you can check out the Dolphin View headset, which is, what's exciting about this is that LiDAR is so inexpensive now and it's like, it's bonkers how it's changed over like the past, I would say, three years. So for about a hundred dollars, you can put a LiDAR sensor on the front of these pair of glasses. This is like just basically an open source project. And then you wire that up to a chip that has some very simple software on it and then it sends like signals to like bone conduction headphones.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  So basically you're not, it's not like echolocation, but in a sense you are having a sound experience for, for what you are quote unquote, seeing around you. So the guy says like. Technologically enabled synesthesia. Yeah. Yeah. And so you can close your eyes and he says like, you can detect if like a door is open or closed, that kind of stuff. So I don't know. I always love this kind of stuff, like, you know, there's like sensors, you, you could put like an interface on your tongue so that you can like sense stuff. There's people have like sensors on stuff on their backs. There's like people who have augmented like senses of direction. I love this kind of um sensor augmentation kind of stuff. So this is. Can you get it? Is this available? It's a project.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  You go on GitHub, you, you follow the instructions for about a hundred bucks. Yeah. Which is crazy. Are you gonna build this thing? No. Cause I assigned Dieter a story just now.

• 1:01:51Nilay Patel?

  I have the power, my friend. I think you should spend a week as a dolphin. Dolphin week? Dolphin week. It's our much more confused answer to Shark Week. But instead of, instead of like providing shark or dolphin programming, it's just you being a dolphin for one week. Dolphin week at The Verge. I'll work on that. Alright.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  It's gonna be really bad with him on The Vergecast during Dolphin Week because like he'll only be able to communicate in clicks and whistles.

• 1:02:19Nilay Patel?

  That's right. I mean, at this point with The Vergecast, potentially an improvement. There's a bunch of Echo stuff that I did want to talk about, but that was just a good segue before. New Echo Dot is revealed in leaked photos. They're adding an equalizer to the speakers. Alexa Cast. Alexa Cast? That seems a mess. And then they, they added some interface stuff to the Echo Show. I am the only person in the world who likes the Echo Show. Maybe I'll try it out. But I just like it because I can, I can see what it's doing. Yeah. But it, it's not a computer, the way that I think the smart display fashions itself as a computer.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Alexa Cast, it only works inside Alexa Music is my understanding, but it basically works in the same way that other Cast things do. Um, where you can, you're listening to it on your phone and you're like, no, I want to listen to the speaker and then the speaker starts playing it instead. Right? So a little bit like Spotify Connect, a little bit like Google Cast. Nothing at all like AirPlay, I suppose.

• 1:03:12Nilay Patel?

  Why wouldn't they just support Google Cast? This actually makes no sense to me. But there's no lock-in advantage here. A beef. There's a serious Amazon-Google beef. But there's no, there's, it's, it, okay. They put out Alexa Cast. It only works on Amazon Music. Right.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  Which everybody uses.

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  My favorite music server. So it's like, they don't have a huge, they're not like taking their huge user base and saying you can no longer use these speakers. They're saying to their huge user base, you can, if they just use Google Cast, then Spotify people would be able to just like use their Alexa devices. Right. If they just use Google Cast, you could shoot Netflix to a Fire TV. Like Cast is like open-ish, right, in that Google way?

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Why does everybody hate Cast? Like, it's actually confusing. Is it not as open as we think? And like, does it support Google too much? Or is it just not that good? But Google makes it good with like special Google magic, fairy dust?

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  It is called Google Cast. Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Right, but the underlying is it's this thing called Dial, which is an underlying open standard.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  So like when the Chrome.

• 1:04:18Nilay Patel?

  Fundamentally, all it is is like, hey, play this thing at this URL. Tell that thing to play the thing at this URL. That's that's at the at its core. That's all Cast is like, hey, you hear me? Play that thing. And then it's like, cool, I'll play that thing. That's it.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Here's the URL.

• 1:04:35Nilay Patel?

  And everyone has to make their own implementation of it. And then Apple's is extra special because it sometimes does that, but most of the time it doesn't.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Just like straight Apple's AirPlay actually streams from the device sometimes.

• 1:04:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Dial was developed by Netflix and YouTube.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:04:50Nilay Patel?

  And I think their Chrome, Google Cast is something different now. So I was looking, I think they've they've embraced and extended.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:04:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, yeah, what's the solution? Is this, I mean, does Amazon just have to do this because of Google has so much power? And Google Cast is their thing?

• 1:05:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, I just probably, but like, imagine if you're Spotify.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:05:11Nilay Patel?

  Right, and you're like, you're you're the music service.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  You already have the AirPlay button.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  No, it's it's all Spotify, just like, you know, they abstract all of the protocols, of course. But you're Spotify's developer and you've got to support AirPlay, AirPlay 2.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Bluetooth, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, Alexa Cast.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:05:35Nilay Patel?

  Roku Connect, you know, we had we had Anthony Wood on the show last week. He's talking about Roku Connect. Like, suddenly you're the literally the fragmentation of services about you're gonna have a bunch of stuff in your house. You want your apps to talk to it.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Nilay Patel?

  It some there's something mistaken here. Like, so we're making some kind of mistake here when, you know, Spotify has to spend X more hours of engineering time supporting one more cast protocol as opposed to making its app better. Because the they're all so here, you should use them.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  Here's the thing, I tweeted some of this effect, I was like, if Wi-Fi were invented today, all, every company that makes these different casting standards would have made a different version of proprietary, different version of Wi-Fi. And you'll never guess who responded. The former CEO of Sonos, John McFarland, who writes, "They all benefit from the internet and Wi-Fi standards and cannot but do proprietary in return. They all suck too. How is their behavior different from stupid consumer electronics who worked to make universal remotes impossible?" Wow. There's just, there's just every, every, it's like, every trigger for Vergecast discussions, you got universal remotes, you've got IR blasters, you've got Wi-Fi standards, you've got Sonos. It's all there.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  I think that these casting standards are, they're like, sort of a lever of power for these companies.

• 1:06:56Nilay Patel?

  You know what's funny about that is that Sonos ran a proprietary Wi-Fi riff. Like, that's Sonos net. Like, that's what that is. It's a proprietary version of 8211B. Now they run on Wi-Fi a little bit. But you can still buy like a Sonos Boost and then have a second proprietary. It's true, it's a fact. I don't know what the mode is for proprietary casting. Like, it's not like Netflix is gonna give up and just pick one.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Hmm. The mode is you buy speakers that are compatible with the phone that you have. Or, if you happen to have speakers that work with your phone, you're less likely to switch to another phone because it'll no longer work with your speakers.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but how do, okay, I'll give you all of that. Now put Alexa Cast in that framework. If you are the one Amazon Music customer in the world who's like, "Thank God Alexa Cast is here," because now I'm only gonna be in the Amazon ecosystem.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  Alexa Cast is just straight up spite. It's just straight up spite for Google. It's leverage. They're, it's there so that when they're negotiating with Google to allow the Lenovo smart display in the Amazon store, which guess what, it's not there, that they're like, "Tell you what, we'll switch away from Alexa Cast if, you know, you, you know, give us something on this deal here."

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Microsoft needs one of these.

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft just uses Miracast.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:12Nilay Patel?

  Which is, by the way, another standard in this mix.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  That is an actual, but that's, see, that's streaming. That's not just a URL.

• 1:08:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Cause I was just thinking, cause like, obviously it's bonkers to think of you buy a speaker that's specifically designed for your phone or computer. But like if you-

• 1:08:28Nilay Patel?

  Is it bonkers? Because I have a HomePod to sell you.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  I know, I know. But like, I was thinking like, you know, I, I grew up very close to a Best Buy, like walking distance from a Best Buy. So I've been to Best Buy very many times in Circuit City and was it Future Shop? What was that other one? Future Store? Whatever.

• 1:08:46Nilay Patel?

  Future Store. This is, this explains a lot, actually. I, I grew up going to Radio Shack, so you're, you know.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  I'd go to, I'd go to Best Buy and hang out at like the, the, the cellphone kiosk and try to like up sell customers on like Bluetooth. Anyways, if you think about what Best Buy's layout was, was there was a computer section, there was a phone section, there was like, like a home audio section, there's a TV. Now, if you go to Best Buy, it's, there's the Samsung section, there's the Microsoft section, there's the Apple section. The, you know, there's the, it's-

• 1:09:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, Best Buy's turning into, um, so two things. Best Buy's turning into these collections of stores. And their growth, like they're succeeding, not necessarily because they're selling stuff, but, but because they sell tech support.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Nilay Patel?

  Cause there's a really good-

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  They do good profiles and you see you.

• 1:09:35Nilay Patel?

  Squad. They have like a, they have a whole tech support division that just like helps you out.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:09:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm sure encourages you to buy any Best Buy things. But that's their growth, because everything's so complicated. American teens need to get on the job because Best Buy is turning that into-

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  If somebody knows of an open version, open alternative to Google Cast, please let me know.

• 1:09:57Nilay Patel?

  I think it's-

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  This can't be that hard.

• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  Figure it out. All right. Real quick, we gotta end this. And Dieter, do you want to do your disclosure? My wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. Facebook is having a very bad time. Yes. It's, you know, we don't usually talk about Facebook on the show, but I, I think it's important. After basically a year of scandals now, they posted their quarterly results. The actual numbers in the quarterly results were not that bad. They posted 49% year-over-year revenue growth and they only missed their earnings targets by like 0.8%. Like literally cents. It was like, they were eight cents off. Like, like literally that was not very much.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  And the big headline was that-

• 1:10:38Nilay Patel?

  User growth is slowing. User growth in North America and the EU is slowing because they have run out of people.

• 1:10:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's the, that's the story. And their margin guidance, they're going from 44% profit margins to somewhat lower because they're investing in privacy, security, getting bad actors on, so they're investing in all this stuff. Their stock took a nosedive, largest one-day drop for any company in history today, off their market cap, like 110 billion, like crazy numbers. The one thing that I, that caught my eye was that they said, "The revenue from ads and Instagram stories and stories on Facebook, those ads are cheaper than ads in the feed, but users are moving to stories." So, they, they're in this, like, bad feedback loop. I don't think that's the entire reason for the drop. Explain that one more time.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, they're putting lots and lots of ads in Instagram stories now. Right. Those ads are cheaper than ads in the Instagram feed, they're cheaper than ads in the Facebook feed, but the users are moving to stories. The more people you, stories are a runaway success story from a user perspective. Right. But monetizing that behavior is less lucrative than monetizing the feed. So, that's like one forward guidance, they don't know if they're gonna make it up, they start, they rolled out a new metric, they're, they're still showing you each individual app, but now they're showing the family of apps, because they want to show consistent growth, and the family will keep growing even if Facebook stalls. So, just like a lot of bad stuff coming at Facebook, and the stock market killed them for it today. We don't really talk about stock prices on this show, we don't really talk about stock

• 1:12:16Nilay Patel?

  prices on The Verge, but I think it's, it's important to point out, only because the question has been, will Facebook have consequences? Hmm. For its behavior, for its lack of behavior, for whatever, and it seemed, today is the day where the consequences have shown up. And like, I, you know, obviously you should read Casey's newsletter, The Interface, we're now publishing it in the morning, as we're heading to midterms, you know, Casey writes a whole newsletter about social media and democracy, so we're putting it on the site as we get closer to midterms, it's important. So, there's a lot more color there and a lot more, you know, Casey has a lot of insights to read that, but I just wanted to bring it up on The Vergecast and talk about it for two minutes, because it, we're at the point now where the things that are happening to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and the other big social networks.

• 1:12:59Nilay Patel?

  It's very clear that they won't just have like a public perception impact. They're gonna start to have corporate financial impacts as well. And I think if anything is gonna shock these companies into accountability, it's literally the vertical line on Facebook's stock price chart today. Like, it's like clipping along, like, you know, stock price up and down. And then it's like, pfft, vertical line.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Hey, what would you do if you were Facebook?

• 1:13:22Nilay Patel?

  You know, I read, um...

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Because everybody's mad at them, both sides.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  I read a tweet storm from this dude, Ryan Lawler, who used to be at TechCrunch, you know, I think works for Samsung. But he's like, "Facebook has a huge problem where they don't make anything." They can't, it's not like Samsung where like the phone blew up and they're like, "The next one will be better, forget the old one, it's just Facebook." They can't roll out a new Facebook. And even if they did, it's still just Facebook. So they can't, they're not gonna benefit from this cycle of improvement or like aversion numbers or whatever. They just have to try to fix that thing. And like, is there only downside there? Like, are they just old? Are they ever gonna be cool again? I don't know the answer.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  I feel like this was a question like years and years ago, we talked about, maybe back in Engadget, was like, "Facebook, is Facebook permanent?" Like, MySpace died, is Facebook unkillable? And I think it's interesting, it's like, it seemed like, I really don't know how the stock market works at all.

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  But it felt like this was like some sort of sign that Facebook might not be unkillable.

• 1:14:30Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we'll see, there's still Facebook. There's nothing, nothing out there that can compete with it, right? There's nothing out there that competes with Instagram in that way. None of this is rubbing off on Instagram. So, it's a lot. Facebook CFO on the call yesterday said, "Our total revenue growth rates will continue to decelerate in the second half of 2018, and we expect our growth rates to decline by high single-digit percentages from prior quarters in both Q3 and Q4." So they're telling the market, like, "This is slowing down." The question is whether, there's lots of businesses that don't grow at the rates of Facebook, right? They're just like mint money. If that's gonna be their business, that's fine, but that is not the story they've told people. Anyhow, not to end on a dour Facebook note, but it's, it's important. It's out there. Read the interface of Casey Newton.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  That's what I do.

• 1:15:16Nilay Patel?

  That's what you should do.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  Well, and also, last week, you recommended that I listen to the Kara Swisher interview with Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:15:23Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  On Recode. That was...

• 1:15:25Nilay Patel?

  Very good.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  Intense.

• 1:15:27Nilay Patel?

  I wish Zuckerberg was more of a leader. It's like you get the sense that he doesn't want to make the decision. And like, this is a moment for him to make a lot of decisions about what he wants to do. Anyway, if you haven't listened to it, go listen to it. Speaking of listening to stuff, you should listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You should listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka, that's very good. Vox.com is doing a show on Netflix called Explained. The new one is about weed. Finally. Narrated by? Kevin Smith. It's so good. It's so good. And the cryptocurrency one is narrated by Kristen Slater, which I just have to put that one back out there. You can also listen to Speaking Casey Newton. Oh wait, no, I'm sorry, one more. The cricket one is narrated by Asif Mandvi. It's also a very good episode. I understand cricket now. Do you?

• 1:16:12Nilay Patel?

  I do. I watch it too. But I had to watch, there's like an animated segment where they explain the rules, and I watched it twice. I'm not gonna lie. All of this is very good. You can also, Speaking Casey Newton, listen to Converge with Casey Newton. That show's great. Both seasons, Watch What Pushed That Button are sitting there waiting for you to binge them. We had a meeting about season three, Watch What Pushed That Button. Kaitlin was in the office, Ashley, Andrew, our great producer. It was a fun meeting. That show's coming back very soon. And you can obviously watch us on YouTube, and go on Instagram, skip the ads and watch our stuff on the stories. It's really good. You talk to us, I'm Reckless on Twitter, Paul's future Paul, Dieter's Baccon. That's the show, we'll see you next week. Thank you very much. Rock and roll. Paul. Promo code.