Homepod review, Intel's Vaunt smart glasses, and Falcon Heavy launch

A lot of things happened this week in the world of The Verge, and we have some first-hand experience to share. This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul, welcome science reporter Loren Grush back to the show to tell us what it was like to watch SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket launch in person, as well as meeting SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Also, Dieter got an exclusive look at Intel’s new smart glasses, and Nilay reviewed Apple’s HomePod, so they share their experiences with the technology and discuss what it means for the rest of the market. There’s a lot more in between that — like Paul’s weekly segment “USB-C-crets” (I think that’s how you spell it) — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 02:17 - Intel made smart glasses that look normal 20:40 - Apple HomePod review 44:28 - SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch with Loren Grush 1:07:57 - Paul’s weekly segment “USB-C-crets” 1:11:44 - The Uber-Waymo trial: greed, ambition, and robot cars 1:15:01 - Inside the desperate fight to keep old TVs alive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Cyber Systems. It's S.I. Hey, Eli. How do you spell cyber? I'm doing it. I hate you, Dieter. I was helping. I think it's cyber. It's S.I.B.E.R. Look, they make a product called RoboForm, which is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chrome OS, and Linux with support for all major browsers, including Microsoft Edge. It's a product that lets you automatically fill in forms and passwords, so you don't end up reusing the same passwords over and over and over again, or letting browsers auto save your login information. RoboForm instantly generates stronger passwords. It saves those passwords automatically, lets you login with a single click. Just visit roboform.com and download today, or check out the app in the App Store for iOS or Android.

• 0:41Nilay Patel?

  For a limited time only, you get $10 off RoboForm Everywhere subscription when you use the promo code VERGE. So simplify and secure your online journey today with the RoboForm Password Manager.

• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, which is the flagship podcast of The Verge, and I believe every podcast everywhere. Oh. I'm just going for it this week. The best boat. Are you the finest boat in the land? I'm Eli. Paul is here. Hello. Dieter is here. Hello, hello. I will say this, last week was a little bit of a ride, because there was no news. We just fell right off the edge of that nonsense cliff. This week, in comparison, full of news. Yeah. Too much news. One of the newsiest weeks ever.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  And I will say this, Lauren Grosh is going to join us for the second half of the show, because she was at the Falcon Heavy launch. She hung out with Elon Musk there, one of the few people to interview at the Falcon Heavy launch. She watched it take off. Elon Musk, by the way, smells like Oudsway.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  Free advertising, man. We charge for that.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  I actually don't know if he does or not. We'll find out.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  I bet. We'll ask Lauren. Anyway, but Lauren watched the Falcon Heavy take off. She watched it break into its constituent parts and she watched two of those parts land. And then we all watched the car float around space.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  I watched the car.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  Which was amazing. So Lauren's gonna join us in the second half. But there's tons of just tech news this week. So let's start. Dieter, you started us off with a bang on Monday. You had the big exclusive on Intel's Vaunt. Glasses, which I don't wanna, I don't, I mean, it's exciting, but they kinda, they're kinda like a pebble for your face. Is that, is that the situation?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  That's the uncharitable way to put it. Um, I'm an uncharitable person, so that's one of the ways that I put it in the story.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  Uh, you know, face pebble.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, so, okay. These are smart glasses from Intel that, uh, the prototypes don't look exactly normal, but they, they could potentially look super normal. And the way that the, they got there is they cut out all the other crap that usually goes into their smart eyeglasses. There's no camera, there's no touch panel. The batteries are very small and the display is very low power, so they don't need to power a bunch of pixels and they don't need to have a bunch of colors and whatever. Uh, and the way that it works is it has a VCSEL, which is a shoot, vertical cavity, something, something laser. It's a very tiny laser.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  The best part of that is laser is also an acronym. So it's an acronym that goes into it.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Of an acronym. But a VCSEL is not like a pixel. Correct. Not a pixel.

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  Pixel is not an acronym.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  It's not. Don't look at me that way.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  We'll never know.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, keep going. A VCSEL laser, Dieter?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  It shines into a reflective area on the glasses, the lens, and then that reflects into the back of your retina. And so you get a perfectly sharp image beamed by a laser directly into your eyeball. And it connects over Bluetooth to your phone, obviously. Um, but all the electronics can be really small, so they can just fit in the, like, the front half of both sides of the stems of the glasses. And their goal is to... I don't know, like, they don't want to just do notifications. They say they have an AI, Intel talked about AI before, and like, they used to have what's his name from Big Bang Theory talk, but until, anyway. They intend to release this thing to developers as an early access program.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Don't call it whatever Google Glass called their thing.

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  The Explorer Edition.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Apparently, yeah, Explorer.

• 4:19Nilay Patel?

  You're exploring, looking like a moron.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  And they, they want people to make apps for it. Um, there's a whole bunch of nerdy history we can talk about here if you want to.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Yes, please.

• 4:29Nilay Patel?

  That's what we do here.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  I think the first, first thing, first, everybody's first question, it's safe to shoot light lasers into your eyes, correct?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  So I have not independently verified this with, I don't know, an ophthalmologist.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  But they say, Intel says, that this is barely a class one laser. It's like at the bottom end of class one. And you have to start getting approvals and regulatory blaws once you hit class two. So they're super not worried about it.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, light goes into your eyes all the time.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, but.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:05Nilay Patel?

  It's just slightly more focused light in laser form.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Laser focused, so might say.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  What if, what if you got burn in on your retina?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 5:15Nilay Patel?

  So, Dieter, wasn't there another crazy, like, virtual display? There's like a great picture of you. What was that thing called? That was also retinal projection?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Oh, that was, yeah, that was the Avagant glyph.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  Right, so that was also retinal projection, right? That they weren't like, there wasn't like an LCD in front of you. They were like beaming, yeah, full color into your eyes. It was just a huge headset.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was a giant, crazy, huge headset, and it had, I think it was a 720p resolution or something, and it was full color and blah, blah, blah. This is 150 by 400 pixels, monochrome red.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  And when you aren't looking sort of down into your right, in your peripheral vision there, you don't see it at all. It's just completely gone, which is kind of crazy. Like, I thought, I first, what I first used is like, this is broken. And they're like, no, it's not. I'm like, well, maybe it's misaligned. They're like, maybe, but do you see it? And I like, kind of glanced down, and there it was. I was like, oh, that's the point. It, if you don't want to look at it, you don't have to.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Does it feel like looking down at a book? Or are you like, how awkward is it to look down at it?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  You, it's, it's just sort of. I don't know, like, if you're looking at your computer, how awkward is it to like, look at the shift key? Or the delete key, actually, is probably a better.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  I'm a touch typist, Deeter. You know that about me.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  It's just sort of there. What's interesting is, having it on all day, you, you can like, learn to ignore it. And but if there's movement there, like when it switches from one thing to the next thing, because I was just looking at a demo loop. You notice it. It's like, you see movement in your peripheral vision. And because your eyes are never just laser focused straight ahead, they kind of roam around, you know, all the time. And so through your natural roaming around, if there's useful information down in that corner, you'll notice it and look at it.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  But you don't, because you don't have to focus on it. Right, that's the thing. Like, I, there's useful information on my computer screen all the time. And I'm like, that's probably some stuff. I'm not going to look at that now, because I have to like, look at it. But this is always in focus, right? So you like, look down and you just like, see it?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  If there was like a flashing red alert down there, would it maybe get your attention?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Probably, yes. It would probably be super annoying. They really want this thing to be not annoying. So they're, they're not intending on having it just blast all your notifications through. They really want every, all the information to be super contextual, um, you know.

• 7:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so here, here's my set of questions. So it's really.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  That's, that's all I'm here for, is answer questions about this thing. Because I've, I've been talking about it and writing about it and make, like, editing videos about this thing since literally December. And so, like, I don't know what is interesting about it anymore, because like, I've been spending so much time with it.

• 7:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're in it. Okay, so it's a pair of glasses. They look really normalish. They're a little bit heavier than regular glasses, but you wear them, and there's a cool display technology in it. We were at CES, we saw lots of cool display technologies integrated in glasses. I was like, it was just a theme of our show. But like, a cool displays, like a, just like a monitor, right? Like, they need to connect it to some software. And so to do contextual notifications, like, those come from your phone. Is Apple gonna let them? Read every notification on the iPhone and do some stuff and pipe it to these glasses?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, here's where we get nerdy. One, probably not. They'll have the same access to notifications that Pebble did, for example, and that wasn't enough for Pebble to be really successful. Now, you, there's no, the only

• 8:48Nilay Patel?

  Wait, we should also clarify that the Pebble guy works on the Vaunt team, right?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, his name is Itai Vonchak. He, I'm sorry, Itai Vonchak. He was the, he didn't found Pebble, he wasn't there at the beginning, but he was the one who created that timeline interface that Pebble had, where like you could like scroll up and back and forth through your timeline on the smartwatch.

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  It was really smart, had really neat animations. Anyway, the glasses input, they have an accelerometer and a compass, right? And so they can, it can sort of tell what direction you're looking and it could theoretically use that as inputs for gestures for like dismissing notifications or whatever. It may eventually also have a microphone, so that may get them to the point where they run into problems where you want to act on a notification and therefore it doesn't have enough OS access. But their vision, from what I've been able to gather, and everyone's making light of this, is that the thing gets programmed basically via JavaScript, which is crazy that they can fit a thing that can parse JavaScript on your, on your face. Just think

• 9:47Speaker 01

  about that for a second. But in between, like before he was at Pebble, he was at WebOS, or not, he was working on WebOS and he was working on the WebOS TV. And the interesting thing about the WebOS TV on LG wasn't that it was WebOS, is that it, the whole thing was designed from the jump to basically act like Google Cast, right? And so, he understood that like the important thing about a TV was getting streams of information from the internet. And reading between the lines of what they were willing to talk about the software, the important part of this thing isn't necessarily that it can gather information from the operating system from the phone. The important thing is that it is able to act as an endpoint

• 10:30Speaker 01

  for stuff on the internet. And all the phone really needs to do is provide access to the, to the internet. And then if you've got a cloud service, if you're Yelp or whatever, you can talk directly to the glasses and not, you know, have to deal with, you know, iOS's app limitations.

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  No!

• 10:46Speaker 01

  That's my, that's my idea.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  Wrong!

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Why is that wrong?

• 10:52Nilay Patel?

  Paul's, by the way, if you're in your car, you're listening, what you missed was Paul during that entire explanation, Paul inhaling air and getting denser and denser and denser. And then, and then bellowing the word no.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  This is what was, okay, in 2012, I wrote a absurdly insightful piece about Google Glass, then known as Project Glass.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  I was in on this early.

• 11:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Google thought it was-

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

  You gotta remember here inside.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  It was an internet computer thing.

• 11:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  That helps you connect to the computer.

• 11:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  No, no, helps you connect to the internet.

• 11:33Nilay Patel?

  That's right. You got it.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  I dove into the delightful and insightful and amazing history of wearable computing.

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Uh huh. Which were typically human augment, so the one of the-

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  What was the headline of this piece?

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Uh, "Project Glass and the Epic History of Wearable Computers." Subtitle, "How We've Tried to Become More Than Human." So good. So good.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  So, there's so much to say.

• 12:06Nilay Patel?

  Look, whenever you try something new, what I want you to look for is something Paul wrote in 2012 that says you're making a mistake.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  So, a computer-

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  As someone once said, "It's like a bicycle for the mind."

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Steve Jobs said that.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good guy. It should augment the human. And I, I don't know if Intel's like completely off base, but it, it just, the, the, one of the first things that this reminded me of is that there was a researcher in the early 2000s who was working with just like a little light that would light up in your peripheral vision, and it basically worked like a, like a string around your finger. It'd be like, it would remind you if you'd been sitting too long, or like, you, you've got something come up just like, "Hey, what are you forgetting right now?" And it would just kind of pop up as a tiny little reminder. Obviously, this could do a lot better at that, like putting text up. Then there's other researchers who are using, they basically made it like a shared text document or database of text documents where they would write down all their notes, and

• 13:07Speaker 02

  then when they were in conversation, like, let's say they were giving someone a tour of the MIT Media Lab, they'd be like, uh- Bullshitting someone on this tour and they'd like pull up notes and like read notes. Or so like, let's say you see somebody and you forget their name. A little prompt could show up and and remind you their name. And why, why the, the, the Google Glass was so creepy to have a camera because it was an internet camera?

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  But.

• 13:37Nilay Patel?

  Well.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  The idea.

• 13:39Nilay Patel?

  If you roll up on somebody with a film camera, just start taking photos, it's like that either.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm still confused about like where you're going, Paul.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  I, I, I wanna, I want a wearable computer that augments the person.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  But is not a new, a new tool for accessing the internet. I want things that help me remember things.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Right. They wanna do both. So what are the, what are the hypothetical examples like? And to be clear, like a lot of these hypotheticals, it's impossible to know if they're actual hypotheticals or if they're like, we're saying this is hypothetical, but really we're doing it. So one of their hypotheticals is when an incoming call comes in, we will be able to surface the notes from your last meeting. Or well, we know that it's that person's birthday and so you'll be able to start your conversation with, hey, it's your birthday.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  All of these examples of like contextually relevant information are, they, they set off my internal alarm bell with regard to like Google Now in particular. Because people have been saying stuff like this for years and it never seems to quite pan out. I think actually a really good example of this is Windows Phone. Windows Phone promised a world of integrated contextual information. And it was people focused and not app focused and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, and it just, it, I don't know, it didn't work.

• 15:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, I, I think the display technology is cool.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  And that's a neat idea. I, I, I don't know if I agree that WebOS TVs are meant to be these like endpoints. Like I have one. It's a smart TV. It runs apps. It is an integrated, complete thought of a computer that displays video on a very nice panel at the end. I don't, I, I, that's like a different. You know what I mean? Like, the idea that you're gonna connect a display to a sequence of cloud services that just like push important information to you and use your phone as a Bluetooth modem, that seems different. Like, it is meaningfully different, but it has to know about what's happening in your life.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, like, the other hypothetical, again, I don't know how hypothetical is, is it knows where you are, it has information from Yelp, and so as you look left and right down the street, it can actually show you augmented information about the thing you're looking at.

• 15:59Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Which is definitely something people are trying to do with, like, ARKit, and Google's doing very similar things.

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  That's interesting.

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  The advance here, as near as I can tell, Dieter, is the glasses don't look insane.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  They've built a display in the glasses that look more or less like glasses and weigh more or less the same as glasses.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  And because they run JavaScript, there have been other very small computers that can run JavaScript. The whole reason you make it run JavaScript is that so regular developers can write stuff for it. Everybody, every developer knows JavaScript. So everybody who can make a website could make a service for this, ideally. Here's what I want.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  And then you can mine Bitcoin on it.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  That's right. What about a fact checker? It's always listening to everything you say, and it just flashes bullshit when you start lying.

• 16:50Nilay Patel?

  That'd be incredible. Dieter, it just seems like the open question here is very much, how are they, like, are they just gonna sell this thing to Google and let Google, like, let Android phones connect to it directly?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:04Nilay Patel?

  And triage information that goes to it.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Right. The back half of this story is, well, maybe the front half, I don't know. Last week, depending when you're listening to this, Bloomberg got the scoop that these things existed. And, you know, I was under a bug, I couldn't talk about it, but Bloomberg did the reporting, and part of their story where they got the basics of what this thing were, right, they said that Intel was looking to find an investor for this thing to maybe spin out some other startup to actually sell it. And then the investor that they want is, you know, somebody with, quote unquote, retail experience. I think... If Intel tries to do this on their own, one, Intel doesn't do this, right? They make smart bowls that they never sell and they make chips. So it's gotta, they gotta spin it out somehow because Intel has no knowledge of how to sell

• 17:52Speaker 01

  stuff to consumers. But two, they need somebody that can either help them like get into eyeglass stores or they need someone who can help them solve this like platform access problem or both.

• 18:08Nilay Patel?

  There's only one answer.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  I've got two.

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  I know.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  You go first.

• 18:12Nilay Patel?

  Bixby glasses. Samsung buys the tech. Bixby on your face.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  How about this? A partnership.

• 18:19Nilay Patel?

  When you're not looking at it, it's a little line drawing of a cartoon dog.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, every time you look away, the dog starts dancing, but when you're trying to look down, the dog stops.

• 18:29Nilay Patel?

  You could never see Bixby. He's always there.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  I think it should be a partnership, a joint effort between Fitbit and HP to see who can destroy it the quickest.

• 18:41Nilay Patel?

  Who can crush this project?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Well, I have one other question, Dieter. Does this, the lasers in your eyes, does this have anything to do with how Magic Leap works? Do you, do you know?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Magic Leap had apparently, Sean Holster actually brought this up in his CNET article, had looked at similar technology, but we don't know if that is what they intend to use in a final product.

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  I think that the, the trend that you're picking up on, that all the implementations might be different, but the trend definitely seems to be we're not going to put a screen in front of your face. We're going to somehow directly address your eye.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:20Nilay Patel?

  Right, which is what Magic Leap is doing, what Avagant was doing, which is what Vaunt is doing. It just seems like we're not, looking at a screen is not the right answer for these products.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, or placing a holographic screen in front of your eyes is not the right answer for these products, which is what HoloLens is essentially doing.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Ideally, they'll be able to overlay your vision. So you'll be able to look at a person, like with Magic Leap.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, ideally, you get the AR kit or the AR core experience from a phone on your eye.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:48Nilay Patel?

  But I think we're just a long way.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  But you have real world objects in front of you that are being tagged.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Which is kind of why it needs a camera.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  It's really sucks. Let's catch toy two. Thanks, Google.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  But as soon as you put a camera on it, it gets rejected.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Nobody wants it.

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  So my great insightful piece was I went to the Indy 500 wearing Google Glass.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 20:08Nilay Patel?

  I was very hungover that day. That's just, I'm just gonna be honest with everybody.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 20:11Nilay Patel?

  And I walked around with that thing and all the people at the Indy 500 came up to me and said, "Is that Google Glass?" And I would say, "Yes." And they, without, without fail, young, old, rich, poor, whoever.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 20:23Nilay Patel?

  Can you see through clothes? It was just the immediate expectation of the product.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yes, that's what I'm saying.

• 20:29Nilay Patel?

  It was insanity.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  So I'm saying.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  You gotta read my piece, 2012.

• 20:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, read mine. We'll send each other links in Slack.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Okay, we'll send each other links.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so that's the bot. And then on Tuesday, we had HomePod review. What a day.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 20:45Nilay Patel?

  What a day. So Dieter's like been working on this thing for weeks. Becky was out of town over the weekend.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 20:53Nilay Patel?

  And I basically only talked to Siri for like two days. And I came, she came home and she was like, "Why won't you leave me alone?" And I was like, "Because you actually answered my questions."

• 21:03Speaker 02

  And then you wrote an essay on loneliness.

• 21:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I read it. So I picked that word in the headline, um, or in the first line, that it's just like a lonely product.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  And I mean that, you know, you can watch our video. We did, we played with it on Circuit Breaker. If you want to see how it works, go watch that stuff. I just want to talk about like philosophically, what is going on with the HomePod? Because when I say it's lonely, I, it sounds great. Apple's first claim is it's a great speaker. I think they've met that goal. I think it's really interesting that they own Beats. And I, you know, I took a tour of their audio lab, I like looked at all their fancy stuff. There's other people got it too. It's great. It was like a fun day. Uh, it was on the record. I asked, "Did you guys talk to the Beats people?" And Gary Greaves, who's like Director

• 21:56Nilay Patel?

  of Audio Engineering, was just like very carefully answered the question. You know, at various points in development, we allowed trusted listeners to listen to it.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  Trusted listeners.

• 22:07Nilay Patel?

  Trusted listeners.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 22:08Nilay Patel?

  Which I'm just reading is like, every now and again, Jimmy Ivy was like allowed to listen to a HomePod.

• 22:16Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that aside, but like Beats has this like very distinct sonic signature, right? It's like, it is, it's very bass heavy. Some people like it, some people love it, some people hate it. But it's like a very distinct signature. And if you listen to the way that Dr. Strange, I mean, when we talk about Beats products, they're like, "Sound quality is garbage. We gotta give it back to people. We gotta make it sound like the studio." All of the same kinds of language, but Beats does not offer you like studio sound. Right. It's just a very tuned sound for this kind of music. It's very, in particular, it is very bass heavy. The HomePod, same language. We want it to sound like a studio, and they actually did tune it to like a pretty flat response curve.

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  They told me, I was like, "Is it actually flat?" And they're like, "Well, it's, we made it a little fun."

• 23:08Nilay Patel?

  That is really interesting, because when you listen to it, most speakers have like a scooped frequency response curve. So they emphasize bass, they emphasize the treble, mid-range a little scooped. It's like an inverse parabola. The HomePod is flat, so you get all of this, you get all this bass. It's like, makes an incredible amount of bass for its sound, but you get all of this mid-range that you don't usually hear, or is like usually de-emphasized in some way. It just sounds really different and like really good and really spacious. That's great. I love that. Super into that. I think how it works is so unintuitive. It took, like, in the video, we have this animation of how it works. It took me forever to just like explain, because it just doesn't make any sense. It's a whole good device.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  I was watching that video with, with somebody who had not been paying attention to the HomePod stuff, and we would watch it, and then stop it, and then rewind it 45 seconds, and then watch it again, and then talk about it for five minutes, and then watch it a third time.

• 24:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so-

• 24:06Speaker 01

  And you did a very good job explaining it, but it's like, it takes a lot to figure it out.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  My notes from my conversations with Apple about how it works, I sent them to Danny Deal, who, one of our great reporters, has background in audio. They're basically like a graduate seminar in like sound reproduction theory. So, they're like crazy. So it's got these seven speakers on the bottom, and it's got this four-inch woofer that points out the top, which is not normal for anything. The speakers, our video and Apple's video, it makes it sound like the tweeters are arranged, like, coming out, but they actually have waveguides in front of them. So the sound comes down. It comes down from the bottom and reflects off the table.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  So you said you have to put on a real sound.

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  We actually put it in this podcast studio, Miles, one of our engineers, Andrew, our podcast engineer, they put it in this room on the carpet and just like instantly muffled. Cause it fires down. It doesn't fire out. It fires down into the ground and uses the table.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  So that's like super different. And those seven tweeters don't, they're not individual channels of sound, which is super counterintuitive. They use beamforming, which means they use like, like interference of the individual sound waves to cancel out and like focus the sound energy. And that they, if you put it against a wall, it creates three beams. If you put it in the middle of the room, it fires in 360 degrees, all directions. And all of that is happening in real time while they're tuning the room. And then they have a seventh microphone that measures the position of the bass speaker. And they can push the bass speaker louder and harder than other companies because they know that they won't blow it out. They can, they can stop it if they measure it. Every 30 milliseconds, they measure it.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  That is just an extraordinary amount. I think when I was talking, I literally said, that is fucking rad. And everyone just like looked pleased with themselves. Cause it's cool.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  That's great. Like, man, I want that all the time. I want some like crazy speaker computer that's like listening to itself. And then it's like HomeKit.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, HomeKit's fine.

• 26:04Nilay Patel?

  HomeKit is a disaster. What? Setting up HomeKit is so fiddly and insane and it doesn't have a canonical home. Where, where's HomeKit live?

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Wait, there's, are you saying there's no home for HomeKit?

• 26:16Nilay Patel?

  You cannot, HomeKit doesn't live anywhere.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  There's an interface for it on your phone, but everything connects to the HomePod. But the settings.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  It used to be the Apple TV.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  Or the Apple TV, or just an iPad that you have lying around.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  What?

• 26:30Nilay Patel?

  Yep. You just have an iPad in your house. It can be a HomeKit hub. So everything connects to a device, but the settings for that device are not linked logically to it. They're just like floating in space. And then every other device in your life has like another app, except for the HomePod. The settings for the HomePod are in the HomeKit app. But if you want to turn off the feature, it lets anybody text with your HomePod, which is a default.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  So I'm actually, I'm going to defend HomeKit briefly. I think that the problem you're referring to is real. I think it's the best Apple could do. I think they could very, very easily clean up the interface of the app itself. The fact that there's settings weirdly located under a compass icon in the upper left, for example.

• 27:11Nilay Patel?

  It's insanity!

• 27:12Speaker 01

  The difference between like scenes and devices, like it's all very messy.

• 27:16Nilay Patel?

  Can you imagine Steve Jobs looking at the Home app and being like, "Yeah, ship it." He would be like, "Everyone is fired." "This elevator ride is over."

• 27:25Speaker 01

  He would compare it to the situation on Android where every single app, every single device is controlled by a different app. There's no uniformity across them at all. And trying to, you know, unify all of your different smart home devices that are on different things is a nightmare.

• 27:41Nilay Patel?

  Sure, but then you just buy a SmartThings Hub and you open the SmartThings app and it's like relatively fine. It's not great, but at least it's like, you know, like it's like a unified interface.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to buy a special piece of hardware.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  You gotta buy a special piece of hardware with Apple stuff, too.

• 27:59Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, look, so that part is weird and bad. And then the Apple Music part, there's been just a lot of conversation about this.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  I said in our video, you can't really use it with Spotify. Other people, our friends, like other people that we're friends with, Jonathan Morrison, good guy.

• 28:16Nilay Patel?

  You know, he opened his video with, "You can use it with Spotify," and showed AirPlay to Spotify. Yes, you can AirPlay almost anything to it, but AirPlay isn't actually controlling it. So Spotify is running on your phone. And if you are the sort of person who cares enough about sound quality by a HomePod, you are now sending whatever bitrate og files to your phone, which are being decoded, and then over AirPlay re-encoded to Apple lossless, which is not great for sound quality, necessarily, sent over AirPlay to the HomePod. And then the HomePod can send AirPlay commands back to your phone. But if your phone goes away, it's all happening on your phone. And there's like remote, there's like remote buttons on the HomePod. What you want is to just talk to the HomePod and have it run Spotify. That's very different.

• 29:02Nilay Patel?

  And I don't know why it can't. It's an iOS computer, has an A8 chip.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  It's almost like they made a speaker.

• 29:08Nilay Patel?

  And Apple makes all of its money in hardware sales.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  That doesn't have any plugs in the back.

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  It's basically did.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  It's like, this is the best speaker. Oh my gosh.

• 29:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I don't think Apple Music-

• 29:19Speaker 02

  You can't plug music into it, but just know in your head how good it sounds.

• 29:24Nilay Patel?

  Gets you anything. Like, it doesn't make it better.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  But the fundamental question here-

• 29:28Nilay Patel?

  In the way that Apple's other software makes its hardware better. They make their money in hardware sales. Apple Music. Look, can I get really esoteric?

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 29:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay, it's true. It's wild. There's this concept in the world that digital copyright people always talk about called the celestial jukebox. Right? What happens when you have free, this is before people start talking about the cloud, the celestial jukebox. What happens when you can just access any song in the world from anywhere and it just comes to you? That's streaming services. It's like this thing, this like very esoteric idea that copyright people used to talk about all the time, came true in the form of these services. They are not differentiated to you and the consumer. Literally the only difference between Spotify and Apple Music to you is the range of songs in the catalogs. Catalogues are largely similar, and the interfaces on your phone.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  You take away the interfaces and you replace them with voice services, now they are completely undifferentiated. There's nothing that they can offer you apart from, on the margin, some songs that the other service doesn't have. There's literally-

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Well, some playlist curation. I got my first ever good daily mix, because they just cribbed from all my favorite playlists I've made myself.

• 30:40Nilay Patel?

  These are the ways that they are trying to differentiate, but they're not, they all do it.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  They can also differentiate by being available in more places.

• 30:50Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so Spotify-

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Spotify is available in more places than Apple Music.

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  Right, the celestial jukebox has a larger reach, right? You, you can connect to that jukebox using a wider range of devices.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  I think a celestial jukebox is, I think, I think that they can reach everything.

• 31:04Nilay Patel?

  Right, so Spotify is a horizontal service.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  If you're in space.

• 31:07Nilay Patel?

  You can get a car, if you buy a connected car, it runs a Spotify app natively in the car, right? You, there are all kinds of speakers of Spotify Connect. Uh, WebOS TVs have Spotify Connect, like, they're everywhere.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Maybe, the-

• 31:19Nilay Patel?

  PlayStation has Spotify.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  There's two fundamental questions that we need to talk about here if we're, if we're like complaining about this. One, um- Will AirPlay 2 be so good and get adopted so quickly that, and maybe it'll have some Siri integration, that this problem goes away because AirPlay 2 is deeply integrated into Siri in some way. And so whether or not the HomePod talks to it directly or not, this problem goes away too. Did Apple not include these other services and these other capabilities into the HomePod because they're philosophically against it or because they just haven't gotten to it yet? And I suspect the answer to that second question is yes and yes. I think that

• 32:04Speaker 01

  they haven't gotten to it yet, but there are some people that don't want to and there's some people that do inside Apple and they're both working to achieve their ends at the same time.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  That's probably way more nuanced and correct than what I was gonna say.

• 32:19Nilay Patel?

  I don't think Apple actually cares about whether or not it runs Apple Music. Apple Music doesn't make that many money. It never really will compared to the vast amount of money they make selling hardware.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  But to the point of how you led this conversation off, if they've truly made the world's greatest cantaloupe sized speaker, maybe it's competitive advantage.

• 32:42Nilay Patel?

  I don't.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Everybody wants to have a HomePod, but you gotta use Apple Music with it. Oh, well, it's the same price as Spotify. I guess I'll switch.

• 32:50Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that people care about sound quality. I'm somebody who does.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Everyone wanted, ah, see, this is what I was talking about two weeks ago. Everyone wanted the iPod because it had a compelling design and a compelling technological advantage. Is everyone going to want the HomePod in the same way? And the answer is, yeah, probably get a Sonos One because they have a different level of things they're paying attention to than we did back when the iPod came out. And we're just like, we're smarter, savvier consumers of how cloud services work than we were back then.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, so the compelling techni-- in your framework, Dieter, what Paul is asking is, is the speaker stuff a compelling technical advantage for the HomePod? Right?

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  And I think the answer is. People are out there with AirPods in their ears. They they do not care about sound quality. It is just abundant proof that they don't. The other products that Apple sells that are very popular are Beats speakers, which some of them are very good. Most of them sound not very good, right? Like they sound, they they have that sonic signature that people love or hate. There's not like a-

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Beats worked because it it the people who liked how it sound, loved how it sounded.

• 34:02Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  And they were a status symbol.

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  It was all cool. One, two punch. And they went, they were everywhere.

• 34:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, I I'll put, okay, I'll I'll put it to you this way. So we A B tested all the speakers in my house. It was a really, really long, but very fun day.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 34:17Nilay Patel?

  We listened to the same song over and over and over again.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  What was the song?

• 34:20Nilay Patel?

  It was, uh, because we had to film it. It was like a royalty free.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 34:25Nilay Patel?

  It's on the video. You can watch it. It's called Buffalo. It's very, it's real something. We all know all the words now. The words are nonsensical.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 34:33Nilay Patel?

  But we listened to it over and over again. It is, it was abundantly clear in that A B test that maybe the Sonos Play 5, which is much bigger, could do what the HomePod was doing in terms of filling the room and being spacious and all that stuff. But compared to every other speaker, the HomePod was just like obviously better. No contest compared to the Sonos Play 1 or the Sonos 1.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  Um, and everything else that we were trying. The Google Home Max does not sound nearly as good. But I think only crazy people do that. I think product reviewers do that. I think regular people who are not product reviewers buy a pretty nice speaker. It is probably better than the other speakers that they've had. They set it down, they turn it on, and they're like, that sounds pretty good. And they move out on with their days. And I will tell you, I have Sonos Play 1 in my kitchen. It sounds really good while we're cooking. There's not a, it's not like a active listening environment, right? The water is running, we're doing all this stuff. It sounds really good. That's it. You bar reached. You you can't improve that experience unless you are a very serious kind of music listener. So I don't know if sound quality is the thing that wins there, especially when-

• 35:38Nilay Patel?

  The interface, if you want to get back to what Dieter's saying with the iPod, the interface for the iPod was like brilliant.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:44Nilay Patel?

  Siri is the interface here. Siri is not brilliant. And that's like the other thing that makes it lonely is like Alexa is this vibrant platform and like maybe you don't use any skills, but there's all kinds of new skills. You can like monkey with stuff.

• 35:59Nilay Patel?

  You know, they made that ad for the Super Bowl. Now there's like a skill where Gordon Ramsay yells at you. It's like, there's like fun stuff happening with Alexa. It's like free to develop for you. There's a vibrancy to that platform. There's no vibrancy to the Siri platform, as near as I can tell. And to get a new capability of Siri, you've got to get an app on the phone. It's just like, oh, that's why I say it's lonely. Like, there's so much exciting stuff happening with voice assistants, but none of that developer or ecosystem attention is pointed at Siri in the same way. So you get this and like, yeah, you're set one time or a time, you know, as to play up on music, set up HomeKit, flip on a light.

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  But all the action is happening somewhere else. I don't know. It's just lonely. A brilliant, perfect, lonely thing.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:46Nilay Patel?

  That doesn't seem like Apple. Like, Apple's success is like the App Store on the iPhone. Like, make an App Store for the HomePod. Just do it. It's a A chip.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Well, they, I feel like Siri from day one, they were not capitalizing on their App Store.

• 37:00Nilay Patel?

  Massive lead.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, they weren't capitalizing on the fact that developers love to make quality things for Apple products.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Siri is, here's my, here's my theory of Siri. It is the most un-Apple thing they've ever done, and that is they got to market too early.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Wow, you're so right.

• 37:19Nilay Patel?

  But they could have just won.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  They did, but they didn't because they, the technology wasn't ready. People didn't know how to interface with a voice assistant. They didn't know what the like killer app for voice was and like the, the rules for like how you want to talk to this thing and opening it up to an app ecosystem, all the stuff that makes, uh, makes Alexa work was stuff that we didn't know about back then, when it first came out. And it, it established itself and established what people think of it, and it hasn't been able to shake it since. And some of that is fair. Uh, actually, most of it is probably fair, but some of it's unfair. Siri's actually relatively capable, except for, you know, setting timers.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  If you think, if you think of how we personify. How voice assistants are the most personified technology in our lives. If you talk to somebody, and they're a big dumbo. You're not gonna come back, I wonder if, six months later, I wonder if that dumb person is like, super smart now.

• 38:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe, and it's software, it gets smarter.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Software does. But most people don't become dramatically smarter in six months. That would be surprising and it'd be really exciting.

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  But it's not a person.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  If they do, then, but I'm saying, they, they end up getting, it ends up becoming a tragedy where they get radically smarter in six months, but then it turns out to be a degenerative disease and then they die six months later.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  Siri, did you just recap Flowers for Algernon on the Vergecast?

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yes, I did.

• 38:50Nilay Patel?

  Just checking, buddy.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Earlier off today, I made a really great, uh, corporate metaphor about, uh, the ones who walk away from Omelas too, so I'm having a banner day.

• 39:01Nilay Patel?

  I mean, do you guys wanna talk about Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of Nim, the greatest children's book ever written?

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Was it? Mrs. Frisbee?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  The Rats of Nim, very, very good book. Wasn't the greatest children's book ever.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Heard of it.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  I don't know about that.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  I just like the idea of clever mice running around, doing stuff.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Do they become dramatically smarter within the span of six months?

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, it depends on, how do you think, how do you think rodents perceive time?

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Here, here's, here.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Rat ears?

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Here's what Apple could do. Kill Siri.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Right?

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Come out with a new, here is, is, Apple Assistant, the hot new, gender neutral.

• 39:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Vastly more intelligent. Smart assistant.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  I like it.

• 39:53Nilay Patel?

  I, I just think, look, that, this platform thing is a thing I've been thinking about. Spotify is a platform, right? Like, people build apps that access Spotify and like, use it in surprising ways. There, we covered one this week where, basically, the recommendation algorithm is laid bare to you and you can like, adjust sliders and see what it gives you. Spotify builds its own weird little apps like Time Capsule. Like it's a platform for music that extends and people can do things with it. Sonos is like a little bit of a platform for like audio in your home. Right? There are lots of different kinds of devices that can connect to Sonos. It's all one party. It's a one-party platform. But you can like fit it into every little corner in every little way that you want.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  By the way, CEO of Sonos, Patrick Spence, was on Too Embarrassed to Ask right before the reviews came out for the HomePod. So if you want to hear how Sonos is dealing with this, before the HomePod came out, but nothing changed. You should go listen to Too Embarrassed to Ask from last week, I think it was.

• 40:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's funny, before I got the HomePod, I was like, this is a lot of bluster. And afterwards, I was like, it's not as much bluster as I thought. But like, you know, like Sonos, but like Sonos makes home theater stuff. Right? Like they make, they make little boxes that connect to other stereos. They make amps that you just like plug regular speakers into, like it's a full, complete thought about how you might put music in every part of your house. Alexa, Google Assistant are platforms that developers are flocking to. What you want is to be near the platforms where the action are, or the platforms that can extend and fit into your life. I think what Apple is doing, this is, I think, the second time I've said this about Apple product. They are asking you to adjust your life to fit their products.

• 41:37Nilay Patel?

  And I just don't think that they're providing as much value to you as you're getting out of that adjustment. I don't, right? Like, I don't think you're getting as much for the cost of the adjustment in return from the product. That's like the core piece of the HomePod that makes it seem lonely to me. It's just like you alone in a room, smiling at audio quality.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  And I feel like the unanswered question is, is the HomePod fully baked? Or is that actually Apple's ideology?

• 42:09Nilay Patel?

  It was already late. It's like the crazy thing.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  You could be late and non-fullly baked.

• 42:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's like rushed and late at the same time is bad.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 42:20Nilay Patel?

  So here's just a last one, then we gotta move on. We gotta get Lauren on the show. So it doesn't differentiate voices. So on Cigar Breaker, Paul asked it to read texts.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  Read my text.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  I read a Walt Mossberg text from Eli's phone.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, neat, whatever. It's not great. But what is cool is that when you say, hey Siri, You know, my phone recognizes my voice. So when I say it, my phone lights up and then it negotiates with the HomePod of the network. And the HomePod takes the query, which is neat. Yeah, everybody does that. Right. Wait, wait, just let me finish the thought. No, it's, it's just neat that they do it. Yeah, but everybody does it. But because they don't Remember that bit? Recognize voices. If you have an iPhone that isn't iClouded over to the HomePod, everything just goes off at once. Hmm. In both devices. It's like, literally, like, they just never had two people in a room at the same time with the HomePod.

• 43:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, they only had, what is it, select approved listeners? What were they called? Trusted listeners. It's just like, get, get some friends. I don't know. Anyway. I'm gonna read one more ad and then we're gonna talk about something much happier. Rockets! Cars in space.

• 43:33Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Mattress Firm. I have one question for all the "I'm gonna listen to podcasts to help me fall asleep" people. You struggling to get some sleep? If you answered yes, you're in luck, because there's a great tip for how you can fall asleep more easily. And that is basically to buy a new mattress. From Mattress Firm, America's neighborhood mattress store, which lets your budget stretch farther when you're looking for ways to improve your sleep. They're more than mattress experts. Their whole package helps you transform your mattress into a bed, from adjustable bases and sheets to headboards and bedroom decor. Do they make soft mattresses or just firm mattresses? Every kind of mattress. They got you covered, literally and figuratively. Go to mattressfirm.com/podcast to see what deals are happening right now as I read this sentence to you. There's 120-night sleep trial to ensure perfection and 120-night low-price guarantee,

• 44:16Nilay Patel?

  so you know you paid the perfect price. So, go to mattressfirm.com/podcast to learn how your sleeping can be monumentally improved. And if you're still awake, we're gonna start the podcast again right now.

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  Lauren Grush is here. Hello, Lauren.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Hi!

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  How are you?

• 44:32Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm okay. How are you?

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Well, I appear to have gotten more sleep than you recently, but you just came back from the Falcon Heavy launch, which seems like a real emotional roller coaster. Tell us everything.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, where should I start? Yeah, I mean, I've kind of been waiting for this launch for what, five years now? And yeah, I mean, as soon as I heard rumors of a launch day, I booked my ticket down to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where they launch from.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  I was told that you bought a one-way ticket. Is this, is this true?

• 45:06Speaker 03

  I did.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  What?

• 45:09Speaker 03

  I did. Well, I mean, it's a new rocket, so, you know, there could have been all sorts of technical issues. And if you'd been following the, um, the static fire, which is the test that they do before, uh, they fly the rocket, that static fire test kept getting pushed back and back and back. And then a government shutdown happened, which pushed it back a bit. So I figured, you know, something similar would probably happen for launch. Um, but I mean, it really worked out just right. Uh, the weather was really nice. I mean, we had some, there was, um, some delays when we were down there on the day. They pushed back

• 45:51Speaker 03

  the launch like incrementally every 30 minutes. And we thought it was going to be pushed back to the next day. Um, but then they ended up launching like 15 minutes before their launch window cut out. So it really was very lucky.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  So Lauren, you've been to, you've, you've like watched a regular Falcon launch, rocket launch, right? You've been present or like in the zone for that. Can you, having been, you know, within, I don't know how far away, how far were you? Like a couple of miles, a mile? How far away were you?

• 46:22Speaker 03

  Uh, three miles. We watched-

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Three miles, yeah.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  When you're at NASA, they have this, the NASA press site, which is like a nice little field, that iconic countdown clock. And, um, it's right next to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is that huge building with the NASA logo on it where the space shuttle used to sit and the Saturn V rocket, uh, was put. So, um, it's a really great spot to watch the launch and I really love being there for the launches.

• 46:52Nilay Patel?

  What was the, like, if you could try and describe the difference between experiencing the Falcon Heavy versus, you know, some other previous not quite as huge and insane rocket? Is it just, is it just bigger? Is it louder? Does it knock you over more? Is it just cooler?

• 47:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's all those things, really. Um, I'd say, well, well, the first thing, but even before it launched, is like, the energy in the air was just kind of crazy, because, um, I've been to these launches before, and it's really not a lot of people, um, you know, some people come in from out of town, but it's mostly Florida's space press corps. Um, but this time, I think they said like 400 reporters had requested credentials. All the major networks were there. I mean, I think I saw something that it ran on all of the news, you know, during primetime or whatever, or they took it live. So first

• 47:45Speaker 03

  and foremost, it was packed when I was down there. Then, when it launched, I mean, I was warned beforehand that it would sound like a bomb. And, and it, it really did. Like, it starts off as this low rumble, because it's far away, so you don't hear it right away, and then it just kind of engulfs the entire area. And I was screaming at the top of my lungs, and you couldn't hear me. Like, I was trying to yell at Christian, and you couldn't hear me. And, I, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's, it's so much bigger, and like, it, I would, I, even when you see a rocket, like, a regular rocket launch, you're just like, how is that thing in the air? Like, it's so big. And this time, this was like

• 48:28Speaker 03

  an even, you know, more heightened experience. I was just like, how is that thing flying into the atmosphere?

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so actually, I have this question. I think it's, I think this is just like really common. I don't think SpaceX gives you a good sense of scale with their videos? Because there's rarely any, like, human-sized elements in them, you're, they're really far away, and like, I've, I've seen people who think like the Falcon 9 is like a tiny little thing, but it's huge. So how, like, how big is it?

• 48:59Speaker 03

  Uh, oh gosh, I don't know the exact number off the top of my head. But it's something like the main core is like fourteen stories or seventeen stories. Yeah, it's about the si- I, I, I think I compared it to the size of our office building. So, I mean, consider that, like, you go to work inside a Falcon Heavy, um, or a Falcon Eye.

• 49:20Nilay Patel?

  And it never goes to space. Every single day.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  I, I was sort of, I, I feel like I read somewhere, possibly on the verge, possibly something that you wrote. Is that, this was, this was considered a success if it didn't blow up and destroy the, the, the launch pad. Is that, is that correct?

• 49:37Speaker 03

  Well, mostly, yeah, so there are, there were so many different failure scenarios for this because there were so many different moving parts. Um, they, not only were they launching it, but they were also landing all three of the boosters afterwards. So there was the possibility of, oh, it launched, but the boosters didn't land, or, you know, yeah, it blew, it blew up, so it kind of, the, the, the scale of failure starts at blowing up the launch pad. That's the worst case scenario.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  But that wasn't a big fear?

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Uh, I mean, everyone kept talking about it because the launch pad that it launched from was, is a pretty historic site. It's LC-39A, which, um, was used to launch the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. And it, you, it was used for eighty-two space shuttle missions. Um, and now SpaceX leases the site from NASA, which is why they launch from there. So if they had blown it up, they would have, you know, destroyed a landmark in space. And also it would have given SpaceX a huge headache because they're supposed to launch humans from that site later this year. So if they had blown it up, that would have significantly delayed that. And that's a program for NASA that they're doing.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  So there would have just been all sorts of headaches if they had blown up the launch pad.

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  Look, launch pads aren't about history, they're meant to be used. That's right.

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so let's, let's get to the thing. You interviewed Elon, which is incredible.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  I did. I did.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  What was he, was he just like vibrating with nervousness? What was his vibe?

• 51:12Speaker 03

  No, he was so exuberant. He like, he stepped out and you could just tell he was in the best mood. He was giddy, laughing, you know, like, just, I don't know. You could, he was just kind of glowing. It was a nice interview. Um, he walked up to me and I, I told him that we bought one of his flamethrowers.

• 51:38Speaker 03

  And he was like, he said, you shouldn't have done that.

• 51:43Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Too dangerous. So, that's on y'all.

• 51:48Nilay Patel?

  That's what we're here for. I mean, I was just, there's a point in the video where you ask him like, what are you most excited for? And he just like, looks at the rocket for a while.

• 51:58Nilay Patel?

  Right? And I was like,

• 51:59Speaker 03

  I do know exactly what you're talking about.

• 52:01Nilay Patel?

  And it's so funny. It's like, I, it's the dumb, like, I build like an Ikea bookcase and then like, for the rest of the day, I'm just like looking at it, like, I did it. And he's like looking at the Falcon, like the same way, but like 10,000 times more.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  So, like, what, what, do you get, what was like the most interesting thing that Elon said to you?

• 52:24Speaker 03

  I like talking about, um, the different possibilities for the use of the Falcon Heavy. So, he talked about how he'd be happy to, you know, have NASA use this in any way that they want with their plans. Um, and he also told us at the time that, um, cause I'd asked him about the, the trip around the moon that they were planning to do. Uh, some background, like last year, they said they were gonna fly two tourists around the moon on the Falcon Heavy. And he told me that they weren't sure if they were gonna use the Falcon Heavy to send people anymore. They're probably just gonna use the, their next big rocket, the BFR, to do that instead. So, no, no, uh, tourists going to space on the Falcon Heavy

• 53:08Speaker 03

  in the foreseeable future.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  What's the difference between the BFR and the Falcon Heavy?

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Um, BFR is a whole lot bigger.

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  So why do you, I heard him say-

• 53:18Speaker 01

  I forget, what is, what does the F nominally stand for? We know what it actually stands for, but what is the F in BFR supposed to like?

• 53:27Speaker 03

  Big Falcon rocket.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 53:29Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  I mean, he's just like a little kid. He's like, he blasted his car into space. And he's like making these jokes. But, why, so I heard in the press conference, he said, we almost canceled this thing three times.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:43Nilay Patel?

  Which is like, interesting, just as a phrase. Like, we almost, like, we tried to and we couldn't stop ourselves from making this rocket. It's like how it came out.

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  But why, why continue the Falcon Heavy if they're just gonna replace it with the BFR?

• 53:57Speaker 03

  I think for now, it allows them to get into a different type of market for their business. And eventually, once they have the BFR, that can take over the business of both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy. So, so think of the BFR as like a combination of those two. And for now, you know, Falcon 9's gonna focus on the smaller satellites and the BFR, and the Falcon Heavy can focus on, for instance, national security payloads that the Falcon 9 can't lift right now because they're too big. You know, so if they're, this, I think of this as more of like a medium-term solution as SpaceX continues to build and develop the BFR.

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  Right. Okay, let's talk about the car in space for two minutes.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 54:43Nilay Patel?

  I love, I love the car in space so much.

• 54:46Speaker 03

  I know.

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, every time I think about it, like, like I just get so happy. Like, is it, is, is it dumb? Like, what, I don't know, what do you think about this?

• 54:55Speaker 03

  So, I can completely understand every, there was a lot of backlash, there still is, to the car, you know. It, why, why not just auction it off and put something else that makes more sense, you know? And I totally think all of those concerns are valid. But at the same time, just look at the response that it got, you know? Everybody was, I mean, even my friends who give no, you know, they don't care at all about space. We're, you know, messaging me and talking to me, like, everybody was so into it. So I'm all about something that engages people like that and gets them involved.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  I mean, I bet a bunch of astronauts were converted that day, you know? Like, or soon to be astronauts.

• 55:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, the problem is that they're all like 10 years old and they think they get to go to space in a car.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, isn't the issue that like the rocket could have failed? So you need a payload that is not important, basically?

• 55:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that, that was their justification. But I also saw a good point, and that's, you know, anybody who has a research payload, it's really hard to get a rocket to take you to orbit. So even if it had exploded, I bet there were people out there that would have gladly put their, their research on there for free because, hell, you know, that's a free rocket ride. Why not? Or not even for free, but if a discounted price with the chance of explosion, you know, like, that's, that's a risk you always take when you go to space. So, you know, but like I said, you know, it's their, their decision. And I see both sides, but personally, I mean, those pictures are so good.

• 56:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think you're right. I think a lot of people, like, everyone knows about the car in space. It's just everywhere.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, it is a symbol of, I mean, it's basically the most cowboy America symbol ever.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  It's the most, it's funny, like, kids being, I, when I was a teenager, I think, I read a short story by Arthur C. Clarke called Sunjammer, also known as The Wind From The Sun, which is about a yacht race in space with like solar sails and stuff. And that...

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Was like, this captures why I love space. Like that short story did, and I feel like Car in Space also does that. The exact same thing that short story made me feel.

• 57:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  So Lauren. I think, I think, I just wanna say, it's like, if they hadn't put the dummy in it, it wouldn't have been as good. But man, that shot, and the, and I think the thing that, I don't know if anyone else noticed it, but he had his arm like draped over the car door. And I was like, that's just like, that little detail, it's just, it cracked me up every time. Like, so casual.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  He's not a tin too.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  A bunch of people say that they hated the car in space until they saw that the dashboard said, don't panic. Like, they, they sent him along with the Hitchhiker's Guide.

• 57:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Um, which is great. The, the thing that was tweaking me out the whole time when I was watching the live stream is because it was, you know, rotating in and out of the sunlight, you would see the shadow move on his hand on the steering wheel. And I kept on thinking that that meant he was moving. And I was like, ah, ah. Like, if I were Elon, I would have put just a, a little robot in the helmet. And right before the feed cut out, he should have just turned the helmet to look at the camera and then cut.

• 58:25Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, um, someone, someone told me that they should have had, um, robots in the, the, the hands and it just do a thumbs up.

• 58:33Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  Wait, this, the, the feed is cut forever, right? Or will we ever get back?

• 58:39Speaker 03

  I don't think so, no. The batteries ran out.

• 58:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  This is just, how did they attach the car? Do they, they tell you? That's what I was thinking about. I was like, how did like, how did it survive all that vibration? How is that dude sitting in it?

• 58:51Speaker 02

  There's a picture of it's like.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  I'm sure that's proprietary technology.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  But it was like mounted at an angle inside the rocket.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, um, so, we were having the hardest time figuring out because normally, how a normal payload works. They, they, they mount it on a payload adapter, which if you remember the Zuma mission, that, that was like what all the grief was about, was the payload adapter didn't, you know, separate, or that's the speculation, the payload adapter didn't separate the satellite. Um, so we were trying to figure out, you know, is the rocket eventually going to separate from the Tesla? And I think we've we found out that they didn't separate. So the rocket is forever mounted, or the Tesla is forever mounted to the rocket. So I thought the structure that it was mounted

• 59:39Speaker 03

  on might have been the payload adapter. And so it was eventually going going to jettison the car off from the rocket. But it looks like they'll be buried together.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  The tires looked inflated, but there's no way that they put air in that. There's no way that would stand up to the rigors of space. So what did they fill the tires with?

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, I'm fairly certain that the tires couldn't have been filled because I saw a bunch of tweets that were like, you can't put air in the tires because it'll explode.

• 1:00:07Nilay Patel?

  I just have this image of Elon.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  They looked inflated.

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  I just have this like, he had to figure it out, right?

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  Like, he's like in his hot tub, like, wine glass in hand, being like, well, you can't have air in the tires. And like, then he's like, go to work.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  To like, edit the car, alter the car, to like, rig it up to be space ready.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do need to know as many facts about the car that is in space as possible.

• 1:00:32Nilay Patel?

  The car is fundamentally ridiculous. It is a symbol of our national character.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  I think we've found a commercial excuse for spaceflight. I think all current space industry should pivot to car launches.

• 1:00:42Nilay Patel?

  All right. So Lauren, here's the real question. And then we'll let you finally get some rest. Why is SpaceX able to do this? And why are they just so far ahead?

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:00:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, it just seems like, you know, like, they started landing Falcons, and no one is catching up to them. Like, there's blue, I saw you were Instagramming that you went by Blue Origin. Like, there was this moment when it seemed like, okay, all this commercial activity is happening. But it's just like SpaceX, just like racing ahead. And you just don't see the rest of it. Like, what is driving them so far ahead?

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  Um, you know, I think that's a very complicated question. Um, but I think it's just a combination of different things like, you know, it's, I'm sure the way that they do business, the way that they manufacture, they probably found some, some, you know, streamlined processes there that we're not aware of. And also their, their business model is pretty smart, you know? They have a lot of private investment, but then they also, you know, have a lot of investment from NASA. And NASA's helped, like, they, what they'll do is they'll develop um, capabilities with partial NASA funding. And, you know, they get a lot of flack for that, but look at where they, they are with it, you know?

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  So I think it's just a combination of how they do business and, and how they, and the manufacturer, and just being forward-thinking, you know? Um, when it comes to space, ironically, there's a lot of people stuck in the past and, and then the old way of doing things. And SpaceX is daring to think differently about it, you know? And so they get a lot of criticism for it, but then here you go, you, they launch a car into space.

• 1:02:31Nilay Patel?

  But like, you know, ULA or Blue Origin or whoever else, like, they can't reorient themselves fast? Like, what, what's holding them back?

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, let's not knock ULA because, you know, they, like, they have a very reliable rocket program. Um, and I believe when I, I've spoken with ULA CEO and he just says that, oh, you know, um, the reusability just isn't economically feasible. And to be fair, it's not like SpaceX is saving a ton of money with their reusability program. Um, so I think it's more, they're like, ULA plays it safe, you know? Whereas SpaceX just is kind of being a little more daring on that front.

• 1:03:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I was thinking about it, you know, previously. Before the Falcon Heavy and this sort of like incredible run of SpaceX hype, like rockets took off all the time. We were launching rockets in 2001, right? Like, there wasn't this like incredible emphasis that's placed on it now. I think that's like part of the SpaceX story. Like, when UCLA launches a rocket, like, the world doesn't stop to, like, watch the livestream. Maybe they should see younger hipper hosts on their livestreams. Or they should put cars in their rockets. It's obvious.

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  They should. But, you know, I mean, let's, that's the other thing. Like, I do love SpaceX, but they do get overhyped a little bit, like, when it comes to, yeah, the Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket currently. But, you know, the Space Shuttle was a very powerful vehicle, you know? And so was the Saturn V rocket, and we've got other rockets coming online in the, in the coming years that will be more powerful than the Falcon Heavy. So, yeah, I think SpaceX just has figured out how to capture the imagination, and I think it's because they, they try to do new things. And they also just are kind of sexy, you know? Like, they make things look good.

• 1:04:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  And they're very focused on aesthetics. And let's be honest, that's kind of, you know, how you get people to like what you do.

• 1:04:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Um, so I was, you mentioned Christian earlier, who's one of our video directors. I saw Corey, one of our other video directors this morning, and he was saying that all of you were talking about how you were on this high after the rocket launched, and that you're like on a, on the downswing, right? Because it's like, it happened. What's the next big thing you're looking forward to?

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, there's a ton happening this year. Um, like, uh, I, the, I guess the next one I would say is the Mars Insight Lander is launching, uh, in May, and so that's going to send another lander to Mars. And then I'm really looking forward to the Commercial Crew Program, which thankfully, since the launch pad didn't blow up, hopefully that won't get delayed. Um, and that, and that's NASA's effort to put... To to put people on commercial vehicles and so SpaceX and Boeing are both developing the spacecraft and they're supposed to do demonstration missions this year. However,

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  a bunch of auditing has shown that they're probably that might get delayed to next year. But at least we're getting close or we're hopefully getting close. And I think that when astronauts launch on those vehicles, we'll see even more interest than we did for the Falcon Heavy.

• 1:06:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  Because that'll be the first time that we've sent people to space from US soil again. And it's been so long. I mean, the last launch was in 2011. So I think that'll be a huge event.

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Also, spacecraft is coming back, which is kind of where I was leading you.

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  No, all that stuff is expect.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Take your picture, Neil.

• 1:06:31Nilay Patel?

  But no, spacecraft, I mean, that stuff is amazing. It's amazing that you are such an incredible space reporter and we see your work on The Verge all the time. But spacecraft is coming back. Anything you want to say about it before we let you go?

• 1:06:43Speaker 03

  Yes, I, we've already filmed some really great stuff and I have, I'm setting up more shoots and I think we're going to have an even better season than the first, even though I really loved the first season. So I'm really excited.

• 1:06:59Nilay Patel?

  Awesome. Well, thank you so much for delaying your sleep a little bit longer to come on The Vergecast. I know it's been a pretty wild ride for you. But thank you so much, Lauren. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  Awesome. Thanks, guys.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

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• 1:07:40Speaker 02

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• 1:07:41Nilay Patel?

  It's just a long range.

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

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• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  Uh, are you worried about your landline going down or hammers?

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

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• 1:07:53Nilay Patel?

  SimpliSafe has got you. Bats? Who knows?

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Oh, not the animal bats.

• 1:07:57Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  I thought it was like some sort of like sonar interference.

• 1:08:01Nilay Patel?

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• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Nilay Patel?

  And not just a box of bats.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  Well, the bats, if it is just bats, they're definitely ethically treated.

• 1:08:42Nilay Patel?

  That explains the limited supply.

• 1:08:46Nilay Patel?

  Simplisafe.com/verge.

• 1:08:50Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul, every week.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:08:52Nilay Patel?

  My dude, you do a segment.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:08:54Nilay Patel?

  What's it called?

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  Always called USB Secrets.

• 1:09:01Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Here's what I got the dongle life so wrong. I, I believe I've already admitted on this podcast that I lost the dongle wars.

• 1:09:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  What I thought was happening was that we would be able to use high bandwidth, high quality connections that are at the bottom of our phones to power new listening experiences.

• 1:09:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  And we could have great digital audio converters in our headphones and our headphones would have power and noise cancelling, but we wouldn't have to recharge them because they'd be powered off of the phone.

• 1:09:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  We were.

• 1:09:41Nilay Patel?

  A promise explicitly made by Phil Schiller at the iPhone 7 keynote.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  And one of the reasons, what part of the trick was we haven't even shipped the AirPods yet.

• 1:09:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  So, I was wrong. You're just supposed to buy Bluetooth headphones and you're supposed to suffer, okay? So get ready to suffer. Essential came out with some $99 USB-C earphones. They originally launched with a dongle. And the dongle was not great. And their headphones are bad.

• 1:10:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  Vlad reviewed them for the site, gives them a five. Apparently, apparently, great microphone quality.

• 1:10:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, which is actually is important to me. These headphones, I tried them before I shipped them off to Vlad, they get stupid, break your eardrums loud. Like crazy loud, you gotta be really careful with them, which is interesting, I guess. They also make a $50 pair, which maybe that's okay, but either way, I think the fundamental problem here is building, requiring, offloading all the electronics and the DAC and whatever into the headphones.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  Is I think just more, it requires more audio expertise than I think most companies can bear. It's a harder problem to get right than I think people were assuming.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  Well, amplifiers are more of a physics problem. You know, audio processing, if it's just based on chips, like can get smaller and smaller. Once you gotta amp it, you need a little bit of room for amplification.

• 1:11:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a real mess. It was Helen Havla's birthday and I was gonna buy her USB-C headphones. She's always complaining about she can't find any. And I was like, at any price, I will buy a USB-C headphones. And it turns out, it can't.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Can't be bought.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  I was like, here's a bottle of bourbon, I couldn't figure out the headphones.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Elon Musk will fire a car into space before there's good USB-C headphones.

• 1:11:40Nilay Patel?

  Whatever.

• 1:11:42Nilay Patel?

  Sigh. Okay, tiny little lightning round, we're gonna wrap up the show. It's been just a huge week of news and I think this has gotten buried a little bit and I would just wanna call it out. Sarah Jeong, who's one of our terrific reporters, she's a lawyer, extraordinarily smart human being, is at the Uber Waymo trial. Waymo is Alphabet's self-driving car division. There's a whole drama about, and... Waymo employee going to work for Uber and stealing like 9.7 gigs of documents on the way out the door and like trashing the hard drives and like texting with Travis Kalanick about how they're gonna have jam seshes. Travis Kalanick was like, we gotta get this guy because quote, this is a quote.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Oh god, no, let me say it, let me say it, let me say it.

• 1:12:28Nilay Patel?

  Say it.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  The laser is the sauce.

• 1:12:31Nilay Patel?

  Laser is the sauce.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  The laser is the sauce.

• 1:12:34Nilay Patel?

  But it's funny because yesterday it was also Tesla's earnings results, you're referring to LIDAR. And Elon Musk was like, LIDAR, LIDAR is a dead end. Laser's not the sauce. Hooah! Anyway.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Kalanick also referred to Alphabet, but then Google, was he CEO, whatever, Larry Page, he said that he was quote, and I quote, he says on the witness stand in front of the jury, he said that, man, Larry was, quote, "super unpumped."

• 1:13:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Super unpumped.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Super unpumped.

• 1:13:07Nilay Patel?

  About the deal falling through. It's a whole thing.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  The whole thing.

• 1:13:11Nilay Patel?

  Look, read Sarah's coverage of the trial. In any other week, this would be the biggest story in tech by far. Right? Basically, Google is suing Uber, only it's Alphabet because of Google's insane structure.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Nilay Patel?

  But it's happening and all of these people are cartoons and the documents that are coming out are hilarious and insane and the judge is mad at everybody and Sarah is like, A, her Twitter feed is incredibly fun because she's just like live tweeting it all, but she's writing dispatches every day from the trial. Read that stuff. We're gonna have Sarah on the Vergecast next week to talk us through what's going on.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  This will be good for me because I realize that I have some catching up to do.

• 1:13:49Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot. It is, it is absolutely an insane case. It's gonna drag on forever.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  I just thought they were people, car people, fighting.

• 1:13:56Nilay Patel?

  No, it's literally, it's literally Travis Kalanick recruited an engineer out of Google by means of his intermediary company and on the way out the door, he stole stuff.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  And there's a laser.

• 1:14:08Nilay Patel?

  It's unclear what he stole, if it was important, whether it was laser sauce, no one, it's, that's what's happening in this trial.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  Okay, great. But Waymo is also, you know how you kind of don't like Uber? Like, they're kind of a bad reputation? Waymo is just, whatever legal case they have, whatever tiny little, you know... Chocolatey core of, you know, legal case they have is surrounded by a massive cake of, "Look how terrible Uber is."

• 1:14:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  And it's so much fun to watch.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Sarah's realized they're just suing Uber for being Uber. Read her coverage, we're gonna have her on next week. I'm just pointing out, in a week where it wasn't the HomePod and Vaunt and a car in space, this would be the thing that dominated and it's a little subsumed, so I just wanna call it out because Sarah's coverage, the trial itself is like hilarious and wonderful. Sarah's coverage is brilliant and incredible and you should just like, check it out. I also wanna call out, Addie Robertson wrote an incredible feature for us about the people who keep CRT TVs alive. It is so good, it's mostly because of video games, hilariously, that's the market, like, all video games where you don't want any lag, but there are people who just like, collect them. Just read it.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  A friend of mine collects CRT TVs and it's basically, there's like a story in every one.

• 1:15:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  He like finds people on Craigslist and then he has to go to their house and hear a history of this television.

• 1:15:32Nilay Patel?

  It's incredible. Yeah, I just wanna call out those things that are on the site this week because they're just really good and in particular, the Uber and Waymo thing is, I just, every night I read Sarah's dispatches and just crack up because they're so good. Also, the trial's hilarious. And Circuit Breaker Live is back, we did our first episode on Tuesday, people seem to like it.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, we timed it specifically to happen during the most important thing that's ever happened on the history of the planet since the moon launch, basically.

• 1:16:04Nilay Patel?

  You're like, "Do you wanna watch Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket land, the second most popular livestream in YouTube history? Or do you wanna watch us goof around with the HomePod? And I'll say this, somewhere north of a couple thousand people did, so do it alright."

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  I have some close-up footage of me smushing the surface of the HomePod, so you can definitely get that.

• 1:16:25Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty good.

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  It's great.

• 1:16:27Nilay Patel?

  But Tuesday's for?

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  Every week.

• 1:16:29Nilay Patel?

  Every week, it actually does have the same name every week.

• 1:16:34Nilay Patel?

  Four o'clock.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  What are you trying to say?

• 1:16:37Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying.

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  I don't understand.

• 1:16:38Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if you noticed a trend. Watch Sugar Breaker Live. We love your questions in the chat. Thank you, everybody, for behaving yourselves. It was incredible to watch a YouTube chat that was like positive and fun. Keep that up, or I'll ban you. And that's how I feel about YouTube. There's also a bunch of other stuff to listen to. This is exciting. If you're going to South by Southwest, The Vergecast and Why'd You Push That Button are gonna be live. We're gonna be live tapings at the Vox Media House at South by Southwest. So The Vergecast, me, Dieter, Casey, Ashley, Carmen, and then Ashley and Caitlin are gonna be Why'd You Push That Button live. They've got a pretty cool lineup of guests coming together. So if you're going to South by Southwest, look for that stuff. Come join us live. We'd be happy to see you. Why'd You Push That Button is coming back soon.

• 1:17:21Nilay Patel?

  I actually just talked to Ashley today about the episodes they're putting together. Casey Newton, that podcast is coming, Converge with Casey Newton.

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  I've been promised that so many times.

• 1:17:30Nilay Patel?

  It's got a good tagline now. The interview game that is easy to win, but not impossible to lose. That's the only thing. It's gonna be good. It's gonna be good. I'm excited about that. That's coming soon. It's gonna happen. But while you're waiting for all that stuff, like Dieter said, you can listen to Too Embarrassed to Ask with Lauren Good. She did have the CEO of Sonos on last week. That's a great episode. And we have a little promo from Recode Media. Check that out.

• 1:17:54Speaker 04

  Hello, Vergecast listeners. This is Peter Kafka. I'm the host of Recode Media. I just did an interview on my podcast that I think you will like. I talked to Mitch Lowe. He's the CEO of MoviePass. That is the much buzzed about company that lets you see about as many movies as you'd like for $10 a month. How can that work? Mitch Lowe, explain that to me. If you want to hear us talk about that, and you should, it was great. You can check out my podcast, Recode Media, with Peter Kafka. You can find that at recode.net or wherever you find fine podcasts like this one.

• 1:18:24Nilay Patel?

  So lots of stuff to listen to, or just listen to The Vergecast over and over again.

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  Hmm, that's what I do.

• 1:18:29Nilay Patel?

  That's all I do. It's weird. It's very self-indulgent. And we will see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:18:35Speaker 04

  Paul.

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  Laser sauce.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  Elon Musk will fire a car into space before there's good USPC headphones.