Verizon switches to Android Messages as default RCS / Jeff Bezos goes to space / Biden and Big Tech

The Verge's Dieter Bohn and Alex Cranz discuss Verizon switching to Android Messages as default for RCS, as well as the many gadgets from this week. Verge policy editor Russell Brandom joins to talk about President Biden's criticism of Facebook's handling of misinformation on their platform and the nomination of Google critic Jonathan Kanter to lead the Department of Justice's antitrust division. The Verge's Liz Lopatto and Joey Roulette talk with Dieter about Jeff Bezos' space flight this week. Further reading: Biden says platforms like Facebook are ‘killing people’ with COVID-19 misinformation Facebook pushes back against Biden remarks on COVID-19 misinformation Joe Biden says Facebook isn’t ‘killing people,’ but misinformation causes harm The Biden administration should take the First Amendment as seriously as Facebook misinformation FTC pledges to fight unlawful right to repair restrictions Biden to nominate Google critic Jonathan Kanter to lead DOJ antitrust division The space tourism industry is stuck in its billionaire phase Blue Origin successfully sends Jeff Bezos and three others to space and back An on-the-ground look at Blue Origin’s motley crew Jeff Bezos appreciates your efforts to get Jeff Bezos to space Verizon is also switching to Android Messages as default for RCS Pegasus spyware used to target phones of journalists and activists, investigation finds Dish cuts a 10-year, $5 billion deal to make AT&T the primary service provider for its MVNO The Dish ‘fix’ for the T-Mobile-Sprint merger seems more shortsighted than ever Playdate hands-on: a Game Boy from a different dimension Apple AirPods update to arrive later this year with iPhone SE refresh coming 2022: report Apple releases iOS 14.7 just as MagSafe Battery Pack appears on shelves The first real photos of Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack are here Apple MagSafe Battery Pack review: convenience over capacity OnePlus Buds Pro announced, coming September 1st for $150 OnePlus Nord 2 review: focused on the essentials OnePlus is merging OxygenOS with Oppo's ColorOS Leaked memo confirms OnePlus will become an Oppo sub-brand Amazon will let devs compete for your Echo Show’s screen and everything else Alexa just added Alexa finally gets a masculine-sounding voice option Amazon promises most Echo speakers will get upgraded to Matter 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This week on The Vergecast, Alex Krantz and I talk about a ton of gadgets. We have Russell Brand on to talk about a bunch of policy news, including what the president said about Facebook. And of course, we talk about billionaires in space with Liz Lopato and Joy Roulette. All that's coming up right now on The Vergecast.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to The Vergecast. I am your friend, Dieter Bone. You may notice from me introing the show that Neelai is on vacation, but we're not going to miss him because we have Alex Krantz here.

• 2:02Alex Cranz?

  Yes, I am here in the office with you, looking at you right now.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  We're in the same room. It is wild. And we also here are going to have one more guest.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's me. That's my, that's my music.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Our, our new guest is in a, I don't, I don't even know how to characterize that. Hey, Russell, how you doing?

• 2:21Speaker 03

  It's like a lake of cough syrup. It's like you're wading through a lake of cough syrup. I felt very mellow.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  That is a very, very chill walk-on song, Russell Brandom.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  There you go. I have a very strict, good vibes only policy, and I find the music really helps enforce it.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  That is amazing. Well, later on, we're also gonna have Liz Zapato and Joey Rillet to talk about billionaires in Spain.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Which is great, but we always start the show by talking about COVID. And I actually don't have a ton of updates here. There are, of course, some cases happening at the Olympics in Japan, and there's a lot going on there. There's, there's a lot of drama going on there. But we also have a bunch more to talk about with vaccines and their effectiveness and who is actually getting COVID cases. The answer is the unvaccinated. And that turns out to be a super contentious issue, which is why we have Russell Brandom here, because the president basically accused Facebook of murder? What, what happened?

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. So at the very, very beginning of the week, we got this sort of message from the Surgeon General that was very, it wasn't super remarkable, but it did mention technology platforms, which sets up the later Biden stuff. So, I mean, he was saying like, here's what school educators can do. Here's what research institutions can do. Here's all this stuff. And it was all like, very nice, sort of nudgy recommendations.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  It was a message from the Surgeon General saying, look, like misinformation is actually a problem medically speaking. Please stop it. Please figure out how to fix it.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. And here's like, our sense of what would be helpful to stop it. And, and a lot of it, I will say, is stuff that platforms have generally already been doing, right? If you go to YouTube, you see the sort of little COVID dashboard that is like sensible people saying sensible things about, about COVID. They've had that for, for a minute now. And it's so suggesting stuff like that. But then it kept coming up and they're like, well, what do you think? And they're like, well, there's sort of more misinformation on these platforms than we really want. And by they, I mean, Like the press secretary, the surgeon general did a press conference. So Biden's leaving the White House to go to Camp David. And these reporters come up to him and ask, so what do you have?

• 4:37Speaker 03

  What's your message to Facebook about vaccine misinformation? And Biden says, they're killing people. And he says, sort of, you know, we only have a, it's only this new wave among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people. And so who is they?

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Well, they did just ask him about Facebook. But then we get into this whole thing of how carefully was he choosing his words? He's getting on in years.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Well, and it's not like Biden is, has a, has a history of speaking precisely.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Ever.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  In his entire life.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  So even at the time, it was like, in our post, The Hill did a great job getting video up and we embedded their tweet and we were like, look, you can see the whole exchange. We're not trying to hide anything. Like, that's what he said.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  But they like immediately walked it back. And he was like, no, no, I mean, like the misinformation is killing people and we want Facebook to do a better job of restraining it.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  But Facebook, as you can imagine, is like super sensitive to this stuff. And then another White House person sort of said, well, we need to sort of have consequences if they don't rein it in. And now we've gotten to the point where, you know, as we're recording this, this afternoon, two Democratic lawmakers introduced this bill to sort of have, the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Would have the option to strip 230 protections from tech platforms that are not, they're being irresponsible with vaccine misinformation.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  I need to stop you right there for two reasons. Reason number one, if you get walk-on music, we also need to have audio stingers every time section 230 gets mentioned. We used to have a section 230 song, which is amazing. We could play that again. We won't do that, but just in the back of your mind, just imagine like a thunderbolt sound, like just every time 230 comes up for the first time. So I saw some tweets about this. Can you explain why the idea that stripping section 230 protections has nothing to do with information, like with misinformation? Why is that incoherent?

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Okay, basically, Section 230, you know, we sort of know it as the law that keeps Facebook from getting sued, but essentially, it's focused on things that are illegal. So there is some core crime. The classic lawsuit, which like Facebook has been sued by this, for this dozens of times, is, you know, this person from this terrorist group was on Facebook, and then my cousin was a victim of this terrorist attack, and the terrorist was using Twitter before the attack happened, and I'm going to sue Facebook for damages for sort of aiding and abetting terrorism. And this is the sort of lawsuit that Section 230 says, no, like,

• 7:25Speaker 03

  they don't have liability for the fact that this guy said this thing on Twitter, right? But the key thing is that it's, there is this crime, and the question is just whether Facebook is liable for the crime?

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Misinformation isn't a crime, right?

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  So you could strip the 230 immunity from Facebook for these particular sort of issues, like, you know, okay, in this case, Facebook can no longer appeal to Section 230.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Right, right, right.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  But what is the lawsuit gonna be? There, Facebook has not actually, no law has been broken.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Right. There actually has to be a crime in order for them to go after Facebook for allowing the crime on their platform.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Right. And also, like, what is the claim of what Facebook should have done differently if there's no place where they say, okay, look, like, a crime was taking place, you were sort of there, you don't want to be an accessory.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  It's your obligation to try to make sure, like, your equipment isn't used for illegal purposes. That doesn't really apply if it's just this legal thing. And then also, I mean-

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  We must point out, okay, problem solved, we're gonna outlaw vaccine misinformation. That's gonna be a pretty big First Amendment issue. So, oh, this is one of those cases where people blame Section 230 for something that is really coming from the First Amendment.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  That pesky First Amendment.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  I know.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Every time.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Every time.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  It's just every time. We've been talking about Facebook, so I must disclose that my wife works for Facebook Reality Labs, aka Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. That disclosure is especially important because on this very podcast feed, there was an interview with Mark Zuckerberg by our former colleague Casey Newton about the metaverse. You should listen to that, but I'm bringing it up because of course he had to ask Zuckerberg about this thing that Biden said.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Can you tell me like what happened there?

• 9:18Speaker 03

  It was sort of a Judge Dredd metaphor where he's like, no one is out there trying to solve crime, which is obviously false because Judge Dredd is out there trying to solve crime. Like, like he's like, you would never eradicate all the crime in a city and Facebook's like that. There's always going to be some bad thing, which like, by the way, we're all in New York now. If like the police commissioner got in front of a room full of reporters and was like, look, we're never gonna solve, we're never gonna fix all the crime. Like, that's factually true, but it's not a reassuring thing to hear from like...

• 9:52Alex Cranz?

  You don't, yeah, you don't say that. That's not a great thing to say.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Well, my thing is like, if you're trying to find some, a comparison for yourself that people feel good about right now, I don't know if I'd go with the cops.

• 10:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, I would probably skip that one.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay, so these bills are happening. When we see bills get, you know, introduced, especially about 2:30, some of them are just like, we know they're going nowhere. They're just there for show, or they're there to try and move the conversation, or score some points for the senator. I'm talking about Josh Hawley. What about the stuff that just like happened today?

• 10:23Alex Cranz?

  Will it actually happen?

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I will say so far, the reaction we've seen has been pretty chilly. I don't think that, you know, a lot of times you put something like this out there. It's an idea. You want to see what the response is, and if there's good response, you've sort of moved forward with it. I don't think they got the response they were hoping for. There's a real question of like, a year from now, which is how long it's going to take to do any of this stuff, because Congress has a lot on its plate. Is this still going to be the biggest problem we have with Facebook? Right? Because if it's not, if a year from now, we're arguing about privacy, or we're arguing about sort of, you name it, right? There's, there's 10 different things.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  I mean, a year from now, we'll be, we'll be coming up on another round of elections pretty soon, and that's going to change, it'll be an entirely different conversation, maybe.

• 11:11Alex Cranz?

  Well, and this bill only addresses like a specific kind of misinformation, right? Like, it's not all misinformation on Facebook. It's just COVID-related?

• 11:20Speaker 03

  So they don't mention COVID. They sort of say misinformation in relation to an ongoing health emergency. But it's like, yeah, like, what could they be referring to? But it is like, they wouldn't have to write another law for like, the next catastrophic pandemic, I guess?

• 11:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  But it is pretty specific.

• 11:42Alex Cranz?

  It's not great to like, I guess, say what people can and cannot post on Facebook. I feel like that's still Facebook's job.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  And I think, I mean, part of the weird thing for me has been, like, okay, so everyone should get vaccinated, the vaccines are safe and effective. I was telling this to an Uber driver the other day, where I was like, 90%. There are a lot of people sort of pushing back against the vaccines for whatever reason. And some of them are doing it on like, the most popular cable news channel in America, right? But I think there's a free speech norm of like, if Joe Biden got in front of a bunch of reporters and was like, Tucker Carlson is killing people, we would understand this to be like, even if, you know, I'm not actually disagreeing with that claim, but it would be a little over the line.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  It would be like a weird use of the sort of power of the, of the presidential podium.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  And I think we're not there with Facebook yet, even though, I don't know, like, that is what's happening. They're protected by the First Amendment in this situation. And like, even if you wish that they wouldn't say these things, you can't just sort of get up there and go after them. But because Facebook's so unpopular, and I think because it's sort of, it feels like, a, and there's all this tech regulation up in the air, so they see this as a place to sort of apply pressure.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  That's kind of where the conversation went.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Well, okay, to sort of wrap this up, the big question is, is this, you know, the White House is finding several ways to apply pressure. There are even leaks that they had a frosty relationship with Facebook that like kind of preceded all of this. Is this just a little bit of a pressure campaign, but it sort of isn't going anywhere? Or do you think that this is the start of like, a big thing that is separate from the tech regulation we're about to maybe talk about?

• 13:34Speaker 03

  I don't think any policy changes are going to come out of it. I do think this is a sign of like, Facebook is now a political football, and it's just going to get punted every time, like, one team needs to score points. No, wait, that's not it.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  This is a great metaphor.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  No, the punt doesn't, it's, they're gonna get field goal kicked. But anyway, it's

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Is there a kickboxing

• 14:00Speaker 03

  It's bad for, yeah, it's bad news for Facebook, is sort of the punchline.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  So, the other thing that the White House did not too long ago, we talked about it, is they put out a big executive order with multiple parts. We talked about this on The Vergecast, and one of them was Joe Biden instructed the FTC to do whatever they could to ensure, you know, the right to repair. And this was specifically talking about, like, I mean, tractor, he mentioned tractors, I believe, right? Did he mention farm equipment?

• 14:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, yeah, he mentioned farm equipment.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. I know you talk about farm equipment a lot.

• 14:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I love to talk about it. But, but I'm, I'm like, 90% confident that he mentioned it, and I didn't just insert it in myself.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  My understanding is, it's an executive order, he didn't actually specify do this thing. He just encouraged the, you know, hit the agency he's in charge of to do something, and now they are?

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Well, so, they did something. They issued this policy statement. In some ways, what they did was like, the FTC is now instructing the FTC to do something? It's a little weird.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  This is how my writing process works, by the way. I instruct myself to write, and then I instruct myself to write again, and then eventually it happens.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  It's just like, the outline gets more and more developed until the outline is the piece. Yeah. It's, it's very much like that. So, we're one step closer. It is meaningful progress. It shows the FTC is taking it seriously. I will say, like, there's a real world in which This was just farm equipment, right? Like, the, the, we saw this a bit in the campaign where people would say right to repair, and then they would say, "Well, no, we really just mean tractors," because they didn't want to pick a fight with Apple.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's not what happened here. So, the FTC basically said, "We're going to keep a big eye on any incursions of consumers' right to repair," and sort of use their existing authority against unfair or deceptive conduct by businesses to sort of prosecute those. So, everyone's kind of on notice.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  And the next step will be actually, you know, prosecuting someone, whether it's, are they gonna make the case that, like, Apple having special keys that shut out third-party repair shops are, like, is that anti-competitive conduct?

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Like, they've sort of set it up to happen. I don't know if I would, I don't know what the odds are that that's, like, immediately coming, but this is definitely a step in that direction.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Well, this could come in the form of, like, a lawsuit, or somebody else sues, and the FTC is like, "Yeah, pay attention to that," or the FTC sues, or are they just gonna issue a policy letter?

• 16:29Speaker 03

  No, no, it would, this would be like FTC versus Apple in federal court would be, I mean, or some other company that's, that's limiting right to repair.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  I mean, car companies have had a lot of issues with this. John Deere, the tractors, is sort of the other, like, there are a lot of sort of lower-profile, and, I mean, this is the other thing, is if you were gonna start somewhere, like prosecuting a right-to-repair case, maybe you work up to the Apple case, like, go after some little guys first, just to get your strength up.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  But I don't know, that's a strategy question. Like, it's gonna be a really interesting thing to watch.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Okay, there's one more thing I definitely want to, well, there's, there's a lot of things I want to talk about in the policy space, but let's talk about this nomination of Jonathan Kanter to lead the Department of Justice's antitrust division, because everyone's like, "Oh, my God, this is a huge deal," and then no one really fully explained why, so I'm wondering if you can, you can help us out with that.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so, Lena Khan is the other one. I mean, there have been a couple of appointments that, that all the antitrust people were like, "Okay, this is what we wanted, we're getting what we want."

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  You know, Tim Wu is at the National Economic Council, Lena Khan is chairing the FTC, and sort of directly in charge of a lot of the right-to-repair stuff we're talking about. Jonathan Kanter is sort of like the third one of those, and he's taking over the, the sort of antitrust division of the Department of Justice at a time when we have All of these federal antitrust cases against Google. And he has sort of been outspoken in taking on private clients against Google. I will say, looking into this, one of the things that pops up is in 2016, he wrote in the New York Times op-ed column about why we shouldn't let Google take over set-top boxes.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Oh, man, this is, this guy's gonna fit right in with the other folks we're covering.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Actually, can we, somebody tweeted at me that, other than on the Vergecast, they had never heard of RSS, Real Simple Syndication, and now it's just being taught in junior college science classes in college. And, one, thank you for letting me know that we are educating the children, Patrick Walker. Two, as long as we're giving history lessons, Google taking over set-top boxes was a genuine fear in 2016. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the cable companies lined up to make sure that that didn't happen because they were terrified that Google was gonna do to the television advertising industry what they did to the online industry.

• 18:58Alex Cranz?

  And they didn't at all.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  You can thank Jonathan Kanter for leading the charge on that one.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:04Alex Cranz?

  I feel like we can thank Google's engineers for failing. I think they're the real winners here.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, I mean, I think it is tricky because, like, the sense one gets is that he's been involved in the background of a lot of fights that, like, if you weren't watching the trial and seeing, oh, that's the guy, then it would never really come up that, oh, he's impressive. But, you know, he just fundamentally is one of the lawyers specifically, who is at the head of the progressive antitrust push. And is now basically in charge of America's biggest antitrust case, right? Like, US v. Google, like, we haven't tracked it a ton just because what happened is they filed it, you know, under Trump, and then...

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Just immediately went heads down into like two years of discovery and at some point they'll come back out of it, but like nothing has happened. It's just been going through like enormous sort of Tupperware boxes full of documents, but it's hands down the most important antitrust case in the federal government right now. Like there's no contest and this is the guy that all the antitrust people wanted sort of on the wall and now he's on the wall.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  It's wild.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  I want to extend the Game of Thrones reference, but I'm gonna let it go. I mean, there's, there is, there's one more big appointment we're waiting on because we're still short a regulator in the FCC.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  FCC Commissioner.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, FCC Commissioner. Yes, we don't have the Commissioner, much less like a full slate of people sitting on it.

• 20:41Alex Cranz?

  Everything's just in limbo over there.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  There are a lot of things that you could do with a Democratic majority in the FCC. I mean, for one, you just off the bat restore the Tom Wheeler net neutrality order. Like that is probably going to happen at some point. It's one of these things. Everything's trying to cram through the door at once.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  We're only six or seven months into, to sort of the Biden administration. So, I mean, it's happening fast, but not that fast.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Right. Last thing, we have to mention that Dish just gave AT&T $5 billion so that they could provide, they could be an NVNO on AT&T's network because T-Mobile isn't cutting it for them, which is the thing that T-Mobile promised to do, which is what gave them permission to buy Sprint and it has already failed.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, this is the classic thing is the promises they make before the merger are just not worth anything.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  And everybody knew it. We weren't, this is not a surprise to anybody. The only surprise is that AT&T actually has enough bandwidth to give to Dish.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  It's not good.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, Russell, when, when you get nominated to the FCC, we'll probably have you back on.

• 22:08Alex Cranz?

  Very excited.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, definitely. Well, I'll be the first FCC Commissioner with walk-on music. That's what I'm gonna bring to the commission.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  All right, we're gonna take a break and we're gonna be right back with Liz and Joey to talk about billionaires in space.

• 22:34Speaker 04

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• 22:58Speaker 01

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• 23:35Speaker 00

  All right, we are back and we have with us Liz Lopato and Joey Roulette. Hey, you two.

• 23:41Speaker 05

  Hey.

• 23:41Speaker 06

  Hey, welcome to billionaires in space.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Shouldn't it be billionaires in space?

• 23:52Speaker 06

  Oh, word. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 05

  It should just be silence.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Okay, so obviously Jeff Bezos and some other folks, including Wally Funk, went into space...dot-dot-dot. Just give us the setup here. And then Joey, I definitely want to talk to you because you were there. I don't know how close there means, but you were you were in the vicinity. So let's start with what happened.

• 24:16Speaker 06

  So I just want to like start with the petty stuff because this is what happens when you invite me on the Vergecast. So Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is like, yo, we're gonna send a billionaire to space and it's gonna be Jeff and he's also gonna bring his brother and some other people. Great. And then Richard Branson's like, I'm gonna go to space too, and I'm gonna go sooner. And then Blue Origin was like, you're not really going to space because you're not going far enough up. And then there was some like goofy fighting on Twitter.

• 24:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:48Speaker 06

  Anyway, we've recovered both of our billionaires. They're both back on Earth.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 24:52Speaker 06

  But most recently was the Blue Origin flight, which I think Blue Origin has bigger ambitions than Virgin Galactic. And maybe, Joey, you can, you can tell us a little more about that.

• 25:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Well, Blue Origins is like one of many different programs that they have, right? I mean, they have their whole New Glenn rocket program too, which is designed to go orbital. And whereas Virgin Galactic's space plane is, you know, just in the suborbital realm. So I mean, what Blue Origin is trying to prove with New Glenn or New Shepard isn't just, you know, that they have this space tourism business, but it's, you know, part of a bigger architecture that they, they want to tell everybody that it's reliable and everything. And they really need to do that, right? Because, you know, they haven't really won a lot of contracts. They haven't, you know, won the Air Force contract that they, you know, once kind of sued over. And they lost again to SpaceX on the lunar lander competition too.

• 25:48Speaker 05

  So they're trying to really prove a lot with, with New Shepard and their, you know, their space tourism goals. So it goes a little deeper for them.

• 25:58Speaker 06

  And to the space tourism thing. So obviously Jeff Bezos brought his brother, which is cute. His, his official name is Jeff Bezos's brother, but I think, I think Jeff calls him Mark.

• 26:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, that might be his name. I have to confirm that.

• 26:12Speaker 06

  But the thing that I, I find myself very curious about was how the other two seats were decided. And because the other two seats were the oldest and the youngest people to go to space respectively, but that was not originally the plan. So we should hear a little more about who these passengers are, I think.

• 26:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Well, so we have Oliver Damon, and I think this is like the most interesting, weirdest, most questionable story of the whole mission. He wasn't originally supposed to go on this flight. He was supposed to go on the next one. But he was bumped up to this one because the winner of this massive auction that Blue Origin hosted the month prior opted not to go because of scheduling issues. He bid $28 million, but there was a scheduling issue that, you know. Prevented him from going and I put heavy quotations on that. So Liz, you think we had funny conversations about that.

• 27:10Speaker 06

  I don't know who's too busy to go to space. Like, no, I can't reschedule. I just, I have to, I have to be on Earth for this, sorry.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Also, what kind of person that can spend that much money can't make people reschedule around them? Right?

• 27:25Speaker 05

  I mean, yeah, I'll say like rocket scheduling is the hardest thing ever and it's hard to manage that. But I agree. I mean, like, why? Yeah, it was weird. I mean, Blue Origin really wanted this date too. It was July 20th, which is the anniversary for, you know, the first time the man stepped on the moon. And so that was a significant, it was part of the whole optics that they were trying to nail. So maybe that played in, but that, you know, again, is, is assuming that the scheduling issue was, you know, exactly what happened, you know? They weren't, they were declining to specify what kind of issues they were talking about. So, yeah.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  So the only thing that didn't make this whole launch feel like a disgusting display of wealth and ego was that they brought along Wally Funk to me. Can you talk a little bit about her?

• 28:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, a lot of people were excited about Wally Funk and it was, you know, it really is a cool story because she was one of the Mercury 13 astronauts, which was this informal group of women who were trying to become NASA astronauts through training. They went through the training process. Wally Funk performed better than her male counterparts, but she was denied and she wasn't able to go to space because NASA didn't want to have woman astronauts at the time. So that, that sucks. And, and she kind of then went on to become this kind of, you know, icon advocating for women in space and kind of fighting the system that was preventing women from getting there. And, you know, the whole move here is that she finally went to space and Blue Origin invited her

• 29:00Speaker 05

  and it was this kind of justice, you know? And it was a great, great moment for Wally Funk. She's 82. She also became the oldest person to go to space. But it was a, it was a good story, you know? Like Wally Funk finally met the, the final frontier that she's been working for. So that was, that was kind of cool. A lot of people loved that story.

• 29:19Speaker 06

  I gotta be real, I kind of think that Jeff Bezos invited her specifically because he didn't want people to root for his rocket to like, blow up. Cause, cause then you're blowing up this like feminist icon.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  That didn't really work that well, though. Everybody, everybody still, still was talking about that. And, and some people pointed out like, how could you like wish that when, you know, Wally Funk is that word, but, but yeah, the, the discourse remained.

• 29:45Speaker 06

  Okay, so let's talk about what actually happened. Because I was a little bit shocked by how brief this trip was. Speaking of someone who's taken a fun ride on the vomit comet, where unfortunately, nobody threw up, like I've, I've been in zero G, it's super fun. But this was not like a lot longer than the vomit comet trip I was on. So Joey, like, what exactly happened? How high did they go? Like, what were the logistics of this flight?

• 30:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it all lasted like, you know, only 10 minutes. And a lot of people were shocked right out. My mom was like, oh, they're, they're already back. When I was telling her the story and I'm like, yeah, it was just a, a quick trip. But it lifted off, uh, early in the morning from this remote, you know, launch pad that Blue Origin has in, in West Texas. It soared like, uh, 66 miles high. Uh, the, that's beyond the line that they call, that they consider space and a lot of other spacefaring nations believe is space, um, which is, you know, 62 miles. And at that point, once it got to that height, um, the, the crew capsule separated from the rocket. The rocket came down for a vertical landing, just like, you know, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets.

• 30:55Speaker 05

  And the capsule floated a little bit in, in microgravity for, you know, about four minutes. And, you know, everybody unbuckled from their seats and floated around. Jeff Bezos was like, who wants Skittles? He apparently had Skittles on him and he, he tossed one into Oliver's mouth.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, they had activities, they had Skittles and they had, um, like ping pong balls or something, yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, it, it kind of reminded me of this one scene in Children of Men where they were tossing around. I don't know if you guys have seen that, but they're tossing around like a ball, like it was a fun experiment. Um, but yeah, in that, they were kind of just having a, having a good time. Wally Funk was, was like, ah, look at that, like this is crazy, you know? And then they buckled back in and then returned under a soft parachute landing. So it was a quick little trip.

• 31:40Speaker 06

  And you, Joey, like you were physically there in Texas. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about like what the run up to the launch was like and and what happened after everybody got back.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it was it was pretty interesting. Blue Origin trucked all the reporters out at like 2:30 a.m. to this press hangar. It was very nicely designed. There were nice couches. It looked like an Ikea set, kind of. And there was great Wi-Fi. But, but yeah, and and so for launch, everybody rushed outside to see it in person. And we were maybe like five miles from from liftoff. And there were a bunch of Blue Origin executives out there, too. And, you know, everybody was applauding and clapping and some were crying when it lifted off successfully. And the most like jarring moment of the whole thing was when the New Shepard capsule was returning for a landing and there were the sonic booms, which is this loud cannon

• 32:33Speaker 05

  like noise that just pummels your chest. And it was just deeply, deeply like loud and echoed throughout the whole like region. And that was really, you know, interesting to see in person. It scared the shit out of everybody because nobody was expecting it. You know, you never know when it's going to happen. It, you know, it's it's inevitable, but, but yeah, you don't, you don't know exactly when. So that was interesting. And then afterwards, you know, they they brought us to the the landing pad to check things out. There was also a press conference, quote, press conference that that happened afterwards. It was more of a, an awards ceremony, but yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Did it feel genuine and authentic there on the ground? Because I have been increasingly struck by something Liz has been talking about a while. It's just that the sort of choreography and optics of their live streams. SpaceX treats it like it's basically NASA. Virgin Galactic like just leaned all the way into infomercial like super hard. And then I found like Blue Origin was kind of somewhere in the middle. It had this infomercial moment at the very end of the live stream where they'd done all the stuff, they pretended to be NASA. And at the very end, they're like, if you want to go to space, send us an email. I was like, oh, my God. I mean, did it feel like a genuine, exciting space moment? Or did it feel like pretty, I don't know, like as manufactured as the livestream kind of does?

• 33:51Speaker 05

  You know, personally, I think it felt pretty genuine, but I think that's because I was there in person. And for a lot of people, for Blue Origin's audience, they weren't there in person. They were watching the livestream. And what you saw on the livestream was a lot of advertising, you know, kind of like Virgin Galactic. And, you know, they're, they organize these, these events and they cater these whole experiences for their potential customers. And, and Blue Origin kind of tried to do that too, because space tourism is extremely dependent on that kind of stuff. It's an early kind of business and they really need to, to generate that kind of excitement. But with, yeah, with Blue Origin, I mean, all the astronauts were wearing these like Omega watches that Omega was marketing and talking about.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  And it was funny because it was on the outside of their astronaut sleeves, which no one ever does. No one, no, you don't do that unless you're being paid to do that.

• 34:44Speaker 06

  No.

• 34:45Speaker 05

  They put it on Wally Funk too, which people, some people were disappointed, yeah. But, but yeah, and then Blue Origin had their fleet of Rivian trucks, which Sean, I think our colleague Sean had a story on. And, and I saw those in person. That wasn't something exclusive to the, to the livestream. They were, they were everywhere. There was maybe like five of them. And there was this little barbecue that they did where they used the, the pullout grills from those Rivian trucks to cook food for the guests and, and everyone. So there were a lot of marketing opportunities and it was, it was an important part, you know, role for, for Blue Origin. So some of the people I talked to, they were genuinely, you know, impressed and happy that this all happened. And it was a huge moment for them.

• 35:28Speaker 05

  But the overall goal is to sell seats, right? And so you have to market into some that's a little not very genuine.

• 35:36Speaker 06

  The trip to space is limited, so please reserve your seat now by calling 1-800-BLUE-ORIGIN.

• 35:43Speaker 05

  And then we'll make you sign an NDA to tell you what it costs to fly on it.

• 35:48Speaker 06

  And you can make that payment in four easy payments of redacted.

• 35:54Speaker 05

  Right. And that's, that's the other thing like that I kind of, you know, was, was a little, uh, was focusing on a lot because Blue Origin hasn't announced how much it costs to fly one of these things. Right now for Virgin Galactic, we know that it's around 200,000 to 250,000, but that's expected to go up. Um, we just don't know exactly how much, but Blue Origin hasn't said anything. They haven't given us a ballpark or, or anything about it. Um, and when they hosted their, their press conference slash award ceremony for the passengers, you know, they, they didn't speak to that at all. And they only allowed three questions from press. So, so no one was really able to ask about it. Um, I went, when Blue Origin took us out to the landing pad, Jeff Bezos made a surprise appearance

• 36:39Speaker 05

  for a photo op and, uh, someone asked him about seat prices. Um, and he just kind of laughed and did not, uh, answer at all. Um, and then I was able to shout, you know, a question like, hey, you know, Jeff, what does it cost to fly one of these things? And he finally said, um, we'll be announcing that later. Uh, and I'm like, oh, well, how later? And he, and he said, we don't know quite yet. Uh, and he said, they're really focused on the private pricing. And, and so it's, yeah, so it doesn't sound like they're really trying to, to let anybody know publicly what, uh, what those prices are.

• 37:12Speaker 06

  But Jeff Bezos did make it clear that the public was participating, uh, in his little, his little post-launch speech where he, uh, he said,

• 37:23Speaker 07

  I also, I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, cause you guys paid for all of this. So seriously, for every Amazon customer out there and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart very much.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  You're welcome, Jeff. From the bottom of my heart.

• 37:43Speaker 06

  Uh, Bezos has been like obsessed with space since at least high school. He was the valedictorian at his high school and he gave the speech about creating permanent human colonies aboard space stations. So the earth could be a nature preserve. So, you know, it was a little astonishing to me to hear him say pretty point blank is that like Amazon was means to an end. So thanks to all of you for, for getting me to space. I'm surprised you didn't thank the people who gave him tax breaks, but whatever.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  That's true. I think I've heard that the Expanse, the Amazon Prime show that's in space is like, was like, he definitely wanted them to make that show. That was a passion thing for him. But we should talk about the, you know, because Blue Origin is for tourism. There's the other stuff for him to try and move heavy industry to space. Blue Origin is trucking along, I guess. Like, they managed to do it. But it's as far as like, moving like, heavier stuff to space, or like, being like, other customers, you know, big space customers, not just tourism. I have no idea where they're at. They, he showed off like, the Blue Moon lander or whatever. But I can't tell if any of that stuff is actually happening, or if it's like, it's Blue Origin and a bunch of hand waving.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  It's Blue Origin and, I mean, and a bunch of hand waving. They, they need to get to orbit, you know? They, they have yet to launch anything into orbit. New Glenn is what will get them there, but they haven't rolled that thing out to the, to the launch pad yet. So, the whole story about moving heavy industry into space, that's kind of the, the cover story, that's the PR, you know, thing that they, that they want to say. Every company has that. And Blue Origin definitely has a long ways to go. I mean, they've launched this new Shepard rocket several times. Like, this is, this was their 16th launch for that. But that doesn't, that's suborbital, you know? It's, and it's a little easier to do. It's a, it's a hard feat, of course. But, but getting into orbit is a whole other animal.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  So when they do that, then they can start building, you know, the, the infrastructure to do what Jeff says he wants to do.

• 39:45Speaker 06

  I want to talk for a second about the response to all of this also, because I've been covering space, you know, for a while. And I have never seen any response so negative to a spaceflight. And like, from quarters I wasn't expecting. So I'm just going to read you a tweet from Dan Rather.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Oh, no. Dan Rather?

• 40:08Speaker 06

  Dan Rather. "I prefer watching the launches of independent bookstores. They're a lot more entertaining, and they actually occupy space."

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. How long did he spend workshopping that one?

• 40:25Speaker 06

  Which is like, first of all, that would be brutal coming from anybody, but like, I was genuinely shocked that it came from Dan Rather, of all people.

• 40:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:34Speaker 06

  And there's been this sort of backlash to Bezos in space in particular, because it feels like he's dabbling. You know, like, whatever, SpaceX, there are a lot of people out there who don't like Elon Musk, which is fine, but you get the sense that SpaceX is serious, right? Like, they're actually working with NASA, they've won a bunch of contracts, like, they're doing the thing. They're not talking about moving industry to space, although they are talking about Mars colonization, which is also crazy.

• 41:04Speaker 06

  But, you know, like, they're doing the thing. They've been sending missions to the ISS for years. They're about to launch people to the ISS soon. So I guess one of the things that I'm really curious about, Joey, is like, why is there such a different response to Blue Origin and to Bezos?

• 41:26Speaker 05

  You know, Bezos doesn't really have that cult following that Elon Musk does. And I think a lot of the support for SpaceX that we see comes from, you know, Elon Musk's cult following. And, you know, people love watching SpaceX do these crazy things, you know, launching humans to the ISS, you know. And, I don't know, I think, I just think the identity of Elon Musk plays a huge role in it, you know, which involves Tesla and all of his other ventures and his crazy ideas. Whereas Jeff, you know, people just, I guess, aren't as excited about it. And I think, you know, Amazon also has a lot of controversy, right? I don't cover Amazon and I'm not as, you know, familiar with it,

• 42:10Speaker 05

  but I think that also kind of plays a huge role. A lot of the criticism that people had of Tuesday's launch kind of spoke to that, you know, about, you know, his, how he manages Amazon. So that might hurt him a little bit, too, but... You know, as far as people and how they care about billionaires going to space, people just tend to gravitate closer to Elon Musk because that's just his cult, I guess. But also, it's the fact that SpaceX, yeah, like you said, Liz, they are doing a lot more than Blue Origin. They revived NASA's human spaceflight capabilities with the first launch of NASA astronauts in 2020 in, you know, over a decade or nearly a decade.

• 42:53Speaker 05

  So that is kind of a good narrative and a favorable story for SpaceX that makes them look almost heroic in a way.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  I will say that whatever the issues surrounding this launch, just watching the rocket touchdown vertically, I tweeted this, like, it will never not be cool to watch a rocket just come back down and touchdown vertically and land.

• 43:15Speaker 05

  It has like huge alien invasion vibes almost.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, right?

• 43:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it's, yeah, that's exciting for people. It's funny, when SpaceX landed their first booster successfully, Jeff Bezos, you know, quipped to Elon Musk, "Welcome to the club," because they had been doing that with New Shepard before Falcon 9 was able to successfully do it. But you gotta say, you know, the two rockets are different. Falcon 9 is an orbital-grade booster, whereas New Shepard is suborbital. But, yeah, it is a pretty cool badass thing to do, right? Like, it's this rocket that blasts off, which is cool in itself, and then it comes back for a landing, you know, blasting, firing its engine again, and then gradually slowing

• 44:01Speaker 05

  down to the pad and just kind of plopping right there, you know, after it deploys its legs. So it is, it's weird. It all happens autonomously. No one's steering this. And that's another crazy thing, because you're looking at this robot do it by itself. So, you know, it is, it is a pretty fascinating thing. I don't think that'll ever get old for me.

• 44:19Speaker 06

  So here's the money question for me, and this is, this is open to both of you. If money were not an issue, if you, if you had the money for it, would you take a flight with one of these companies? And if so, which one?

• 44:34Speaker 00

  I would be conflicted, but if, I mean, if I had that much money, I would, it would completely change my personality. I would be an even bigger monster than I am now. And so of course I would do it. And I would, I would do it with SpaceX because it goes the highest.

• 44:46Speaker 05

  I would go with SpaceX too, because it goes the highest, but let me, let me inform your rationale real quick. SpaceX is Crew Dragon. Their, their tourism architecture, as they currently have it, goes high, but for three days. So you're going to be stuck in this, this capsule for, for three days, right? Whereas these suborbital flights are far shorter, 10 minutes. You, you're, you're in microgravity for about four minutes on both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin systems.

• 45:16Speaker 05

  And Boeing hasn't really announced its tourism plans with Starliner yet. But on Crew Dragon, yeah, you gotta think about how long you want to be trapped inside of a little capsule for three days. I mean, is the view, the stunning views of Earth going to get old after the, the first 24 hours? Are you gonna have to go to the bathroom in front of people? And, and you kind of have to tell people not to look and, and will that, will that smell bad? And then will everybody get pissed off for the rest of the trip? And then there's fights and, you know, I mean, there's things, there's cycle, there's a lot of psychological factors you have to consider when your tourist mission is three whole days long. You know, especially if you're going with people you don't really know that well.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Man, like, like day two, you're like bored and like, imagine paying that much money to go to space and like, let's just watch some Netflix.

• 46:05Speaker 05

  Right.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  Right? Because it would come to that.

• 46:07Speaker 05

  I'm, I'm curious. Yeah, I, I can't wait to see how that plays out. And I think this is something that engineers are asking themselves too, you know, is, is this the right kind of service that we want to offer? Where we want to take people into space for three days? Is it, and we're going to see this play out in September or sometime in the fall. That's when SpaceX is going to try to launch their first space tourist. So that'll be a big step for SpaceX, but it'll also be a pretty big test to see how these people actually liked. Going into space into this little gumdrop for three whole days. So and I don't know if they'll they'll stream it live. They probably won't stream it live the whole time. But yeah, it'll be interesting to ask them questions when they get back on land.

• 46:49Speaker 06

  I also would take SpaceX because send me around the fucking moon, man. Like, send me around the moon.

• 46:56Speaker 06

  Look, if Boeing gets its shit together, I would happily take Boeing. But right now, it does not look like it has its shit together. And that just leaves me with SpaceX because, again, like, send me around the moon. Like, if you're gonna send me to space, send me all the way. You know, like, I don't want to argue about, like, what really constitutes space and how high up it is. I want to, like, be able to see the planet, like, that famous shot of, like, the Earth from the moon.

• 47:19Speaker 05

  That makes me want to say, one of the things that Wally Funk said during the little post-mission event, she has colorful, like, very amazing ways to describe her experience. But one thing she said was that she got high up and she saw darkness when she was in the capsule, but she didn't see the whole world like she expected. So she kind of suggested she was a little disappointed at that, which was interesting. You know, I mean, everybody else was giving really amazing reviews during the event, but Wally Funk was was real. And she said, you know, I wanted to see the whole Earth, but I didn't quite see it. But it was still fun, you know?

• 47:58Speaker 06

  Shout out to Wally Funk, a real one there.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Hell, yeah. Okay, so we know that SpaceX is gonna do its tourism thing in the fall if it can. Is there any other big rocket launches or Blue Origin stuff that we should be on the lookout for next?

• 48:12Speaker 05

  Well, SpaceX, SpaceX is a starship. They're trying to go orbital later this year. They're trying to do their first orbital starship test launch. Everybody's thinking, as far as space tourism, everybody wants to see Elon Musk ride some SpaceX ship, right? Like, it's it's his turn now that, you know, Branson did it, Bezos did it, what about Elon Musk? But he hasn't really said anything or expressed any pressing desire to go up there himself. Of course, until we have the capability to get to Mars, because, you know, then he'll be like, I'll I'll die on Mars, just not on landing, which is something he actually said. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe we'll see Musk, you know, announce that he'll go next time.

• 48:51Speaker 06

  Well, this is a this has been another episode of Billionaires in Space.

• 49:08Speaker 04

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• 49:53Speaker 08

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• 50:24Speaker 00

  All right, we are back. We are no longer in space, but instead, I mean, we've got a lot of gadget stuff to talk about. We've got a lot of just random stuff, really cool stuff. And then RCS. Where do you want to start?

• 50:37Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I think we need to start with RCS because I'm still trying to understand it. So every time it's mentioned, I like to be like, Dieter, explain it.

• 50:44Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm gonna, I was tempted.

• 50:47Alex Cranz?

  That might be just the rest of the podcast.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  I mean, I was tempted when Neel I was off to just like say, you know what? This is my podcast now. It's gonna be RCS, not just this episode, but all episodes. This is an RCS podcast.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  So what happened was Verizon is the third US carrier to formally adopt using Android Messages by default on all of the Android phones it sells.

• 51:09Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  And what that means is Android Messages uses RCS, RCS is Rich Communication Services. It is the next generation version of texting that replaces SMS and it enables, you know, Red receipts. Do you say Red receipts or Read receipts?

• 51:25Alex Cranz?

  Read.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  So do I, but everybody else says Red and I'm wondering if maybe-

• 51:29Alex Cranz?

  They're all wrong.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  Or Young.

• 51:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. They're all infants.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, you know, better images, better video, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It also allows for end-to-end encryption in one-on-one chats. And that's actually an Android Messages feature, not necessarily an RCS feature. Anyway, it's better, right? But the rollout has been terrible because it's this like supposedly open thing where if a carrier wants to implement RCS and use their servers to manage it, they can.

• 51:56Alex Cranz?

  So it's all opt-in?

• 51:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's all opt-in. Or if they don't want to, they can license Google servers. And then eventually Google's like, "Look, if you're not gonna do it, we'll just like turn it on for users without you." And so that's like a third way that people can get RCS now. If they just use Android Messages, Google like says, "Hey, carrier, do you use RCS? No? Okay, we're gonna do it then." But carriers were shipping Android phones that would default to like Samsung Messages or Verizon Messages Plus, everybody's favorite software. And so there was no guarantee that you would, even if you, you know, you'd get Android Messages. So Verizon's on board, everybody's on board, everybody that uses an Android phone in the US starting next year will have Android Messages for sure and

• 52:37Speaker 00

  then RCS will become the default. Actually RCS is being served by AT&T. Like, they say, "We do RCS." And I'm like, "No, you don't." Like, "Yeah, we do." Like, "Yeah, but I can't send an RCS message to somebody on T-Mobile." Well, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's this whole argument about you have RCS, you support the universal profile, which is like the spec. And then, even then, you don't necessarily interoperate. This happened with MMS back in the day. If you were on Sprint, you couldn't text somebody a picture if they weren't on Sprint.

• 53:04Alex Cranz?

  I had, I never texted anyone on Sprint.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  So anyway, we will have a more critical mass of users. There's already, I don't know, 400 and something million worldwide. Add however many million Android users are in the US, it's gotta be like 150 or something,

• 53:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  Right? Eventually getting all on the system. And yeah, there's like a legit shot that RCS could actually supplant SMS, and very few people would use SMS ever again, except.

• 53:33Alex Cranz?

  Except who?

• 53:35Speaker 00

  Apple.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  They have not said peep about RCS. I have asked for comment. I have gotten like legit no comments and not just radio silence from them. But in general, just nothing, no word. And so it raises this interesting situation where if you are on an iPhone and you text somebody on Android, it falls back to SMS. And that is fundamentally insecure because it's totally unencrypted. It's sent over this completely wacky part of the way that, you know, SMS goes over the networks. It's basically data now, but it used to go over the special channel that existed for like configuring phones. Like it was a whole mess. But that is what you'll be sending. And similarly, if you're on an Android phone and you text

• 54:21Speaker 00

  somebody who is on iPhone, you're a green bubble, right?

• 54:23Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  And so by not supporting RCS, Apple is actually potentially like causing like a security problem for its users or privacy. It's less private or less secure than people on Android that talk to each other, or people on the iPhone that talk to each other on iMessage. But it's also like, Google's also like sending insecure SMS too on Android if you talk to an iPhone. But the difference is, Google's just like, hey, Apple, if you want to join up, here's a spec, you're welcome to do it.

• 54:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  Like, they've been increasing, they've been turning up the pressure more and more. Like, so I tweeted that Apple, you should support RCS. And like, Roche Lockheimer, VP of Android and everything else, like retweeted me, which I have to admit is very awkward. Just, it's weird. But like, that's how you're gonna pressure Apple? Is you're gonna, okay, whatever. But I interviewed him for the story, and this was, this was his quote, "The fallback messaging experience on, quote, 'the other platform,'

• 55:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  "will not have encryption if it's still SMS. I think that is a pretty interesting dynamic. And I would hope that as everyone focuses on privacy and security, it becomes an important part of the discussion."

• 55:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, cuz like, I guess Apple's thing is, well, we just want everybody to use iPhone and we're secure, so it's fine.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 55:35Alex Cranz?

  But that's not realistically how any of the world works.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:38Alex Cranz?

  Like, that's not gonna happen. So the onus is really on them to make it secure.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:44Alex Cranz?

  And they're already kind of dealing with security stuff this week related to messaging.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Actually, you want to explain this? This is the big, big Pegasus hack that happened to a bunch of journalists. It's one of the biggest hacking stories of the week.

• 55:59Alex Cranz?

  I think maybe you might be able to explain it a little better than I can.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  Okay, so there's this Israeli company that provides software to that's supposed to help you hack into the phones of terrorists. And Amnesty found a list of a bunch of phone numbers of like legit journalists and people who are like in opposition parties in various countries on the world. And it was verified that their phones were infected with this spyware.

• 56:24Alex Cranz?

  Not great.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  Not great at all.

• 56:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, real bad.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  And, you know, how did this happen? What's what? How did they get, you know, infected? How did the hack happen? And it turns out that it happened via iMessage. There was a zero day, you know, hack where an iMessage would parse an image that got sent in without any user action or opening the message or whatever. And then the message could disappear and that would invisibly hack your iPhone. I hate to bring that up in the context of like RCS because it's like it's a different thing.

• 56:55Alex Cranz?

  It's different, but it's also kind of showing that like Apple really, I mean, obviously they care about security. They care about privacy. Like, like I think they've done a really good job with it for the most part, but but this quest to be like this weird hangup they have on iMessage is hurting them kind of over and over again.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's hard for me to know because like, you know, obviously people love it. If you're a green bubble, you're terrible.

• 57:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, I adore it.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  There's also like, if you want to securely and privately text somebody who doesn't have an iPhone, there's any number of ways you could do that, right? Just tell them to install Signal or WhatsApp or whatever.

• 57:33Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  It's just not the default. It's not the thing that's happening in the messages app.

• 57:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's requiring it's putting a lot of like. Work on you as the person you have to sit, you have to like walk them through it. Just like you'd have to be like, well, actually, your Android phone isn't like, doesn't communicate securely with mine. So I'm going to tell you how to get to the iPhone store and buy an iPhone to like fix it.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:55Alex Cranz?

  Like, it's just putting way too much work on people when that's the whole point of Apple is to take that work away.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  Right. If Apple's gonna get pressured into doing it, I kind of feel like they're obstinate enough where like, it's not secure and this, this whole thing is just not gonna, that's not gonna work.

• 58:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  I don't think so. I think it's more likely that all the carriers around the world are basically just using RCS. And it's like, well, why aren't you just doing this? So they'll do it, it'll do it later. And then when it's not a big deal and there's not any heat on it or something.

• 58:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it'll happen like a little, little note.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:26Alex Cranz?

  WWDC. We'll just see it at the end. I'm like, oh, yeah. And you will be like, yes.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 58:31Alex Cranz?

  And that will be the whole Vergecast.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. It's gonna be one of those like, you know, they do the giant grids of features. Oh, no, they do the, WWDC, they do the giant wall of features of like all the SDKs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 58:41Alex Cranz?

  Right there at the bottom.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  Tiny text and then right there at the bottom in the smallest font possible, they'll just put RCS. And I will like flip a table. If it's in person, I will stand up and run around. I'm so excited to not have to write about RCS when this is over.

• 58:56Alex Cranz?

  I'm excited for you, honestly.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  I want it to be done. I want it to be over. I want to not be the, the person who's always.

• 59:05Alex Cranz?

  Guys, he's just like leaking it out of his chair right now.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Can we, okay, let's move on.

• 59:10Alex Cranz?

  Let's talk about some fun stuff.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:11Alex Cranz?

  Like specifically the Playdate.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Ah, okay.

• 59:14Alex Cranz?

  It's almost here.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  Tell me, tell me what happened.

• 59:16Alex Cranz?

  Okay, well, so, so we, we actually got to play with a Playdate.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 59:21Alex Cranz?

  The, the pre-orders are starting next week. Next, nobody preorder because there's only like 20,000 and I want a chance. So nobody try. I'm really excited about it.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  So if, for people that don't remember what the Playdate is.

• 59:35Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's a little, it looks almost like a Game Boy. It's like half the size of a Game Boy. And it's a yellow, like game machine thing. It's got a black and white screen. And the big thing is it's got a crank on the side.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 59:46Alex Cranz?

  And I always thought the crank was for like charging it. I was like, that's so cool. No, it's for playing games.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 59:52Alex Cranz?

  That, which makes a lot more sense.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, no, but yes.

• 59:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think both are cool.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:58Alex Cranz?

  Make it happen. And it comes from Panic, which is a company, they've done a lot of really cool games. Firewatch is one of them. Uh, the, the Goose game that everybody played.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:00:07Alex Cranz?

  A couple of years ago, but they also were like originally a Mac company.

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, Mac apps, Mac app company.

• 1:00:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they made the best FTP.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Alex Cranz?

  Transmit, right?

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it was the best, I mean, transmit, but it was, it was overpriced, so you might use Cyberduck because you're cheap.

• 1:00:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  And so that was me. And but if you got, once you got the money, then you got, you got transmit.

• 1:00:25Alex Cranz?

  And you felt fancy. It was like a Cadillac.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. And if the truck, the little truck icon that.

• 1:00:30Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  If, if you know what RSS is, you know what transmit is. Basically what we're saying.

• 1:00:34Alex Cranz?

  Right, right. A lot of you are very confused right now. It's okay, but, but they're, they're better known now for, for their games.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:41Alex Cranz?

  And, and so they've made this thing and it's really fascinating to me. I was talking with Andrew Webster, who, who was the, he's our games editor. And, and he, he got to play with this thing and he's been playing with it for a couple of weeks, month, over a month now.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:54Alex Cranz?

  And he's, it's, it's like four games on it. He still hasn't finished all of the games. So they actually take a while, like some of them are story based. They take hours and hours of gameplay. And it's just like the, the idea is you're, they're gonna do an episode, like a flight.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Alex Cranz?

  Of games and you'll get a flight a year of brand new games on this.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  They're doing like seasons. So like every month or something, you'll get four more games and you don't know what they're gonna be. And then you're like, oh, season four, you're getting these four games and you get to keep them. They don't go away.

• 1:01:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  But yeah.

• 1:01:20Alex Cranz?

  It's just, and it's just weird to me because they're going into like making this whole game system, right? Like it's a whole new console from a really small company.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Alex Cranz?

  Like.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  And like a really hip, cool company. Like one of the reasons people are so excited is like, you just heard us talk about a 35 year old FTP app. There's a lot of affinity for this company.

• 1:01:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And, and so I'm. I'm fascinated by it. I have no idea how it's gonna work out in the long run. Like, what's the end game for this is what I keep going to.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Alex Cranz?

  Is this like, they're going into hardware now? It took a long time for this thing to actually come out.

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Alex Cranz?

  Like, years.

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  I played around with an early, early-ass prototype of one of these things two years ago.

• 1:02:02Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  At the XOXO conference, they had them like outside. It seemed great then, but I mean, you know, pandemic's slowing down, whatever. I will say, the screen is-

• 1:02:12Alex Cranz?

  That's my favorite part of it, honestly.

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  It's actually incredible. It's black and white.

• 1:02:16Alex Cranz?

  But it's black and white. It's one bit. Like, a Game Boy, a Game Boy was two bits.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  Right. There's no gray.

• 1:02:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. This is, this is just black, white.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  And that's it. And it's fast. And like, if you've seen black and white displays that are like, you know, not backlit, like LCD displays that are like, like E-paper, like Pebbles.

• 1:02:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  You could kind of have this vision in your head of being kind of like low contrast and kind of, this is not that at all. It's not like E Ink. It's very fast and it's refresh rate. I mean, it's not like, I don't know, it's not 120 frames a second or whatever.

• 1:02:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  It feels just like a normal screen, except that it doesn't have a backlight, so you use whatever ambient light is around to see it, and it's black and white.

• 1:02:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  It's cool.

• 1:02:52Alex Cranz?

  It is cool. And like, the games in it seem really, really cool. Like, they got the guy who made Katamari Damasi. I said that really, really wrong. But, just ruin that. All those years of Japanese down the toilet. But, you know, there's a lot of really, really cool, interesting games that have already been, that Andrew's been playing and he's had a lot of fun with them. And there are even more coming. And like, what's, are people just gonna get really excited and develop games for it? Are we gonna get like, big game developers being like, "Yeah, this seems cool", and like, just whipping out a game?

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Alex Cranz?

  I hope, like, I think that's, I think that's the plan? Like, that's what it feels like? Is the end game?

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  I think the interesting thing here is, I don't know that there is an end game. I think they figured out that they want to make a cool thing. They're making a cool thing. If the cool thing continues to be cool, they'll continue to do it.

• 1:03:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  And if not-

• 1:03:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's-

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  -shrug, I guess?

• 1:03:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like, we're only getting one season of games so far, right?

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:03:49Alex Cranz?

  They could just be like, "That was it." Thanks. And that's still like 26 games.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Alex Cranz?

  That's, that's better than like the Neo Geo Pocket.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  Right. Well worth, well worth your money, which is $180.

• 1:04:00Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  The cool thing about the preorder process is the cable sasser who, you know, running, running panic said that, quote, "We're not going to close the door on you."

• 1:04:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  So, um, who knows if their website will crash. I'm sure it will. They've got a lot of experience with FTP, but you know, who knows about running.

• 1:04:16Alex Cranz?

  Fingers crossed.

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, but unlike all of the other consoles that are happening, it's not going to be just like a fiasco, like waiting to see if Walmart will get stock. And you're not going to have to join a Discord or a Twitch livestream and find out if, you know, you're just, you're just going to put your name in, get in line and you'll get it when you get it.

• 1:04:32Alex Cranz?

  That's, that's all I've wanted.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  How pre-orders are supposed to work in my understanding?

• 1:04:37Alex Cranz?

  Was kind of like that.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. That's.

• 1:04:39Alex Cranz?

  My, my experience with the Steam Deck.

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  My experience with the Steam Deck was my, um, my order never went through and I gave up and then five hours later I got a confirmation email. And I'm like, okay.

• 1:04:49Alex Cranz?

  I forgot about it and five hours later I went and pre-ordered it.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:04:53Alex Cranz?

  And, but by that point I'd found out that you could like change the hard drive in the cheapest one.

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  I didn't know that.

• 1:04:58Alex Cranz?

  So, yeah, that came out later and I was like, yes, I'm getting, I'm going to get the cheap one.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  Garbage. I bought the expensive one. Cause I wanted the fast. Okay, whatever. What do you think about the fact, Andrew actually brought this up. We've got the Switch OLED, we've got the Steam Deck, we have the Analog Pocket, which, you know, we haven't really talked about anything, but it's this Game Boy thing that looks sick.

• 1:05:15Alex Cranz?

  I, that is the one I'm most pumped for.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  And we have, uh, the Playdate.

• 1:05:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like handheld is, you know, I think part of it is, is there's a lot of people who are making these things now who are, grew up on the Game Boy and, and there's a lot of nostalgia there to like, just hold it in your hands and not have it be a phone.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:05:31Alex Cranz?

  Cause playing, have you played Mario on like a phone?

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. The, you talked about the, the, the side scroller Mario.

• 1:05:37Alex Cranz?

  No, no, no. Like, like an emulator.

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:40Alex Cranz?

  Just the worst experience. It's impossible. And, and you're like, oh no, I need buttons.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Alex Cranz?

  And so I think there's a lot of nostalgia there and that's part of what's driving it.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I bought the Razer Kishi for both Android and iPhone. It's good. Actually, there's, um, I, there's another one called Backbone that doesn't collapse as small.

• 1:05:55Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  But it has way better buttons. And so it turns your phone into a switch, you know?

• 1:05:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  None of them will give. You swappable USB C and lightning, you gotta pick it when you buy it, which is frustrating as hell. But yeah, if you can get good games, like having having the switch style controller on either side of it that like clicks into the thing is really cool. But I think you're right. Having it not be your phone is like part of the draw.

• 1:06:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that was that was like, I have a Pixel 3A and I said, you know what? I'm gonna make this my game machine. I'm gonna put like Stadia on it when I was having a Stadia moment and like whatever.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  We've all gone through our Stadia phase.

• 1:06:28Alex Cranz?

  G-Force, all the, I was like, I'll put all the cloud things on here and like a Nintendo and an SES, SNES emulator and all of this. And I played for like an hour because it was like, well, battery life on a Pixel 3 is good, but like, doesn't support that. And you can't like, charge it. It just was like a gross experience. And then I go to my switch and I'm like, oh, this is how you're supposed to.

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:06:48Alex Cranz?

  I still have this, my hands way far out.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:06:51Alex Cranz?

  Because they're huge. But yeah, I like, I'm, I think it's great that the, that these are, things are all coming back. And it's just weird timing. I mean, maybe it's like, stuff is getting faster. You see that with a Steam Deck, you know, the battery is, is able to support it now.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:07:06Alex Cranz?

  Five years ago, completely impossible.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  And yeah.

• 1:07:09Alex Cranz?

  Just technology finally caught up. Maybe that's it.

• 1:07:11Speaker 00

  Well, and like, it's, it's, it's, you know, we saw this like Kickstarter thing where it's like, oh, hardware is easy now, but no. We know, we know from Ashley Carmen that it's actually not. But there are a few companies like, well, actually, if you take the time to do it well, it is possible to make a thing in a way that it wasn't, you know, 10 years ago.

• 1:07:28Alex Cranz?

  Analog's a perfect example of that. Like, they figured it out. It takes a while, but you get, you get nice stuff out of it. I got the, the Super one. It's, it's great.

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  On the other end of the spectrum is Apple. There's a bunch of rumors. There are, it seems like every week there's rumors. The latest is, um, there's going to be updated AirPods later this year, which, sure, we've been waiting for those. Also, a new iPhone SE refresh in 2022. That will be, it'll definitely be due. But the big news was Apple just up and released a battery pack.

• 1:07:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you were busy earlier this week.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  I had a hell of a time getting one.

• 1:08:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  There was like shipping problems. I'm in New York this week and, um, of course, you know, there's very few people in the office. And so like shipping is just confusing and the FedEx people aren't delivering here as often. So I wrote the wrong floor number and normally that's fine because like, how much crap gets sent to Vox Media all the time back in the day, a lot. So they, oh, it's fine. We know where this goes.

• 1:08:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  But nope. So I took an extra couple of days to get it. We went to, we sent Cameron Faulkner, one of our reviewers, over to buy one at the Apple Store because he just was right next to it. So he picked one up for me and I paid him back for it. It was great. As he was buying it, the person next to him was returning it.

• 1:08:40Alex Cranz?

  That was incredible.

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 1:08:42Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  The person who was returning it was returning it because it was too big.

• 1:08:45Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:08:47Alex Cranz?

  How?

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  Okay, it is big. It looks funny.

• 1:08:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  Here's the thing. I've reviewed it. It's probably going to be up on the website by the time you are listening to this. Everyone is like, "Oh, God, it's so big. How horrible." And then everyone else is like, "Oh, God, it doesn't have enough battery life. The battery's too small. How horrible." And sometimes those are the same people.

• 1:09:10Alex Cranz?

  They don't know a lot about how things are made, I guess.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. I don't want to be like a defender of this thing. I mean, I gave it a seven.

• 1:09:19Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  I think that if you have an iPhone, it is the most elegant battery solution Apple has ever made and that might exist for the iPhone, full stop. You put it on, it charges, it shows you the battery level, it tops, it maxes out your charge at 90%. It won't charge your iPhone above that because it knows that that is too hard on the battery. So it'll just stop there.

• 1:09:39Alex Cranz?

  So smart.

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  It works as a MagSafe charger. Just plug it in. And so instead of buying a $40 MagSafe puck, you buy a $100 battery. If you think of it as a MagSafe puck that happens to have a battery on it.

• 1:09:51Alex Cranz?

  That's a good deal?

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  Well.

• 1:09:53Alex Cranz?

  Almost?

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  It makes sense. I wouldn't say it's a good deal.

• 1:09:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Look, when you're getting really into the Apple ecosystem, a lot of things, you start to rationalize a lot more things.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. But everyone was like, "You know, Anchor just released one of these things." It's, you know, a little puck that has a, like, it's not official MagSafe, but it has the magnets and it has wireless charging. And so I bought one, like a bunch of people did. And it's stupendous. It's 50 bucks. It has a 5,000 milliamp battery. We should, we're going to talk about milliamps in a minute. But it also has USB-C and it can, it can do, it can charge via the USB-C, obviously, but it can also charge a device out of that same port. It goes both ways.

• 1:10:31Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  Which is smart and cool. But, you know, the MagSafe battery, of course, uses lightning, which can't do anything.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  You can charge the MagSafe battery via the iPhone. So if you're like, oh, man, I need to charge my phone really fast. You can just unplug the MagSafe battery that you're using as your MagSafe puck, plug it into the phone, and then the phone will charge faster. But it will also reverse charge the MagSafe puck. But that's the only thing the iPhone will reverse wireless charge.

• 1:10:58Alex Cranz?

  Ah.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Alex Cranz?

  That's okay.

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know.

• 1:11:01Alex Cranz?

  All right. My AirPods just sitting there.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  It'll charge your AirPods. The MagSafe thing will charge your AirPods, but not your iPhone.

• 1:11:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, I can't just put them together and make magic happen.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  No, I guess not.

• 1:11:12Alex Cranz?

  Rude.

• 1:11:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know. Get Android and then be a green bubble. That's how that works. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm not going to begrudge anybody this thing. It's very, very elegant, but we should talk about the milliamp thing.

• 1:11:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, explain it to me.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  It's 1,460 milliamps, which is nothing.

• 1:11:31Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  It's basically nothing. But milliamps are actually not a great way to talk about battery size and like battery power and longevity. It's not just like you never know how much the processor is going to draw and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's also just the amount of energy that it outputs. There's a formula.

• 1:11:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  It's electricity. And so a better metric is watt-hours.

• 1:11:57Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  And so the thing about the MagSafe charger is it can charge at a higher voltage, which means that it can push through more electrons, charge faster in some cases. When it's plugged in, it charges at 15 watts, for example.

• 1:12:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  It's 5 watts when you're not plugged in. But it's like the same concept of like warp charge on OnePlus, where it's just like it cranks up one of the numbers in the equation and then you can get charged faster through. So the number that actually matters for this type of battery, since it has a different voltage than most things use, is, I want to say it's like 11.13 or something watt-hours. And the anchor, which has a lower voltage, is 18 watt-hours. So it's this weird dynamic where the MagSafe battery actually isn't as bad as its spec number might make you think. And Apple, of course, buries it because they love burying spec numbers. But that doesn't mean that it's equivalent.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  And it doesn't even mean that it's 11 versus 18 equivalent battery, because I just got to tell you, this thing charged my iPhone 12 mini from 0 to 80, and that was all it could do.

• 1:13:03Alex Cranz?

  It just got tuckered?

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, just got a little

• 1:13:07Alex Cranz?

  Sleepy?

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's not much.

• 1:13:09Alex Cranz?

  Did it at least do it quickly?

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  Relatively, it was like two hours, give or take. But that was unplugged, right? You know, it takes, takes a minute. Because it's slower and they don't want, if they, if they did it faster when it was unplugged, it would have depleted the battery faster, probably would have been effective. You know, there's reasons.

• 1:13:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  Those reasons make sense to me. But yeah, you, you need to think of this thing as it's not a lifesaver. It's a lifesaver in the sense that it'll give you a little bit of extra battery. Put the thing on there and like you worry about a little bit less. Your iPhone stays charged for longer, whatever. But it's not the like weekender battery, right?

• 1:13:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  And as far as

• 1:13:41Alex Cranz?

  Bring your cord with you still.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  Exactly. As far as it looking dopey, sorry, take, take a battery that you don't think looks dopey and then try and tape it to the back of your phone and it looks dopey. They all look dopey, just admit it.

• 1:13:52Alex Cranz?

  Do you remember there was a battery a couple of years ago and it had like six or seven little suction cups on the back?

• 1:13:57Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 1:13:58Alex Cranz?

  And you would just stick your, your, your phone that needed to be wirelessly charged?

• 1:14:03Speaker 00

  I don't want to hear about this anymore.

• 1:14:05Alex Cranz?

  It was incredible. It worked for two weeks. It's sitting in my desk at home.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Alex Cranz?

  Hopefully not on fire.

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  Anyway, that's the thing. I, I prefer the anchor, but since I had to buy a bunch of them, I'm going to hang on to one of the MagSafe's just to have it around. And there you go. Should we talk about the OnePlus Buds Pro?

• 1:14:23Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they're, speaking of Apple.

• 1:14:30Alex Cranz?

  These look familiar.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's an argument that like they, they, they look exactly like AirPods Pro, except

• 1:14:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  the case opens like horizontally instead of at the top.

• 1:14:39Alex Cranz?

  And there's, there's more silver.

• 1:14:40Speaker 00

  There's silver on the stems.

• 1:14:42Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 1:14:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful touch.

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  The argument is like, there's only so many ways to make an earbud, but like, I don't know if I buy that.

• 1:14:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, I've seen a lot of like Bose does these giant satellites.

• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:54Alex Cranz?

  Jabber just jams into your ears and this is just an AirPod.

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:14:59Alex Cranz?

  Or AirPod Pro, excuse me, it's smaller stems, shorter stems.

• 1:15:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, isn't it OnePlus that had a bunch of their headphones seized by US Customs because they thought they were counterfeit? And they're like, no, no, they're, they're not, they're not. And what US Customs like, they, they look like it to us.

• 1:15:14Alex Cranz?

  Was it these headphones?

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:15:15Alex Cranz?

  Okay, it was a different one.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  The standard OnePlus Buds.

• 1:15:18Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  That looked like regular AirPods.

• 1:15:20Alex Cranz?

  So, so this is, this is just like reiterating on success

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Alex Cranz?

  for them.

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  As long as we're talking about OnePlus, I mean, there's also the Nord 2 John review that you should definitely go look at it. I don't know if we've discussed OnePlus merging, not merging, admitting, going back to being part of Oppo?

• 1:15:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we kind of talked about it weeks ago.

• 1:15:42Speaker 00

  Weeks ago.

• 1:15:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because I remember talking about my Oppo Blu-ray player.

• 1:15:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. It's just settled in for me that like they admitted that like they're going to merge Oppo OS or Oxygen OS with Color OS, like those things are going to come together. And I like, I actually feel like a kind of a sense of calm about it.

• 1:15:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  Everybody just sort of can talk openly about the thing that we would talk about before openly, we weren't afraid of it. But it was like frustrating that like, you know, Pontiac is different than Chevy. It definitely is, but it's definitely not.

• 1:16:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's the same.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. I guess the last thing before we round out is Amazon had a

• 1:16:17Alex Cranz?

  Developer.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  Event for

• 1:16:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they had this event for all of the developers. A lot of things happened there. We got a lot of news. And a big part of it is like developers are going to actually have access to the screen on

• 1:16:34Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:16:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. So they'll finally like be able to kind of mess with it and tweak with it.

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  Do something.

• 1:16:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, do something besides whatever Amazon dictates.

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  Oh, that's really interesting.

• 1:16:44Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, I think for me that the other thing that like happened at the same time as this, but I found much more interesting was this move for the, they finally offered a masculine sounding voice.

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  This is way, way, way, way overdue.

• 1:16:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's so overdue. And I think it's, I think it's kind of telling that the thing was called Alexa. It's still called Alexa.

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  We're very sorry for setting off your speakers. We'll do a rest.

• 1:17:11Alex Cranz?

  Apologies, guys. It's my name. I have to deal with this all the time.

• 1:17:18Alex Cranz?

  But you know, it still has this female sounding voice.

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:17:21Alex Cranz?

  Or female sounding name.

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:23Alex Cranz?

  Female sounding voice.

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  And they use female pronouns when they talk about it at Amazon.

• 1:17:26Alex Cranz?

  Right. They all, they all talk about she is, is a great little voice assistant. And so now there's this masculine sounding one. And they also conveniently, at the same time, introduced a new wake word.

• 1:17:37Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:38Alex Cranz?

  Which is a little more masculine sounding. I don't know a lot of women named Ziggy.

• 1:17:42Speaker 00

  I know, I know a cartoon named Ziggy. Little bulbous sad man is all. This is another thing that you would know if you were old, by the way, Ziggy.

• 1:17:52Alex Cranz?

  I like very vaguely see him in the back of my head and he's gone now.

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:56Alex Cranz?

  But, but yeah, so it finally has happened, the new wake word.

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  So, Amazon is doing the thing where they refer to these, these voices as original and new. I, from the very beginning, I have to say, I was, I was never happy with gendering digital assistants.

• 1:18:12Alex Cranz?

  Same.

• 1:18:13Speaker 00

  And this was, this was just like, it's not just like standard gender assumptions need to be fixed in our society, which they do. It's also like, you multiply that by they're not actual human things.

• 1:18:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:28Speaker 00

  They're computers.

• 1:18:29Alex Cranz?

  They have no gender.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  They, they have no agency. They're not, right? And so like, it always felt better to me. But the, the other thing with the voices is first, Google did the better job of, they just like gave them letters or colors or something. And then Apple did voice one and voice two. It's just weird that Amazon took this long to sort of get with the program.

• 1:18:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like, I think it's because maybe they were, you know, they were really the first ones to, to make the voice assistant be a thing. Like, I think Siri had come out before that. Google had, had stuff doing it. But, but Alexa was really where we finally like embraced the voice assistant, right? And so much of that was because they gendered it. Because they made it a, sound like a woman. They, they made it sound like a person.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:19:13Alex Cranz?

  So that it felt more comfortable in your home to have a tiny lady living in a speaker.

• 1:19:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:19:17Alex Cranz?

  And I think that was, they really struggled to kind of pull away from that.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:19:21Alex Cranz?

  Cause it worked. Like, then everybody's like, oh yeah, I don't mind having a tiny person in a speaker, even though maybe we should. I have many in my home, so I can't say anything.

• 1:19:29Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, I definitely have a lot of.

• 1:19:31Alex Cranz?

  I have so many, mainly Siri though.

• 1:19:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:19:33Alex Cranz?

  But, you know, I think that there was always this like. They were so clinging to that and it was just kinda scared, maybe.

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Alex Cranz?

  To move away from it and now we get Ziggy.

• 1:19:42Speaker 00

  Ziggy, sure.

• 1:19:43Alex Cranz?

  Although we shouldn't do that, we should not associate the male sounding voice with the male sounding. It feels like that's almost what they want.

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:51Alex Cranz?

  Whoever the bad guys are. I don't know who they are in this case.

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  The other thing that got announced is, uh, most Echo speakers are gonna get upgraded to Matter. I'm still not used to referring to it as Matter. Matter is the, um, Connected Home over IP Alliance.

• 1:20:07Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  Uh, which was for a while called CHIP. I like to call it CHOIP because I thought it was funny. Um, this is the new way for, um, smart home gadgets to just communicate directly with each other over IP, like every other computer on the frickin' planet does. It's more secure, it's easier to set up. There's a bunch of good reasons for it. It's basically the way that HomeKit worked. So anyway, Echo devices supporting Matter, uh, for sure is like a good thing because it means that like, we might have less of this hassle of when a new smart home standard comes out. Is anything gonna support it? Who knows? I don't know. Amazon is willing to support most things and they're supporting this and you won't have to buy a new one and hooray.

• 1:20:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. That's, it's just nice. I mean, they were always the ones who supported everything. So it was kinda weird that they weren't supporting Matter.

• 1:20:51Speaker 00

  Well, uh, God, I'm gonna say it. Matter is going to, Matter.

• 1:20:58Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 1:20:59Speaker 00

  It's just a question, is it gonna be this holiday season or is it gonna be next year?

• 1:21:03Alex Cranz?

  I feel like next year.

• 1:21:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Alex Cranz?

  I feel like they, they gotta ramp it up.

• 1:21:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. But once it's ramped up, I'm pretty sure that you could just like look for the Matter logo and that's, you're done. You know it'll work with whatever digital assistance you have. You know it will probably work locally. You won't have to think about the radios too much. The end.

• 1:21:21Alex Cranz?

  That's all I want.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  It's not gonna happen. It'll be, it'll still be terrible, but that's my dream.

• 1:21:24Alex Cranz?

  I love it. I like this dream. It's a good aspiration for all of us.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  That is a very optimistic, hopeful note to end the Vergecast on. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't listened to Decoder with Neelai Patel, his relatively recent episode was with the CEO of Blackstone Products, which is not a creepy investment firm. They make griddles.

• 1:21:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Speaker 00

  And I super want to griddle one.

• 1:21:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I want one of these now.

• 1:21:49Speaker 00

  But they run into exactly the same problems that every single tech CEO runs into when they are starting a new hardware company. It's really fascinating. Check that out. Also, want to point you to a story that Sean O'Kane wrote about Boosted. It's a postmortem of how everything went down and why the company ended up dissolving. It's very sad, so go check that out. There's much more on theverge.com. I'm not going to point you everything. You know how to type letters into a browser. If you want to find us on Twitter, you can tweet at us. I love it when you do, even when it makes me feel old. I am at Backlon. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. Russell is Russell Brandom. Liz Zapato is Ms. Zapato. And Joey Roulette is J O Roulette. Thanks so much for listening.

• 1:22:33Speaker 00

  And I get to say rock and roll this time.

• 1:22:35Alex Cranz?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:22:36Speaker 00

  Rock and roll.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. Your work lives in scattered places, and it's not only your team searching for context, your AI agents need it too. Jira taps Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more, and makes it easy to share with the agents you already use, like Claude, Purser, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly, or connect your agents through MCP. Spend less time hunting for context, less time asking, "Wait, what did we decide?", and more time actually shipping with Jira. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.

• 1:23:43Speaker 09

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