332: Pixel Slate, Google Fi, and Section 230

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul are back from Thanksgiving and ready to spill the beans on the tech news you may or may not have been paying attention to this week. 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

  A decade ago, during experiments onboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, Merck scientist Paul Riker discovered conditions that crystallize a specific protein. By studying these crystals, Paul and his team determined all new ways to improve the storage of structurally fragile medicines, devising lifesaving drug-delivery methods. Paul is just one of many Merck scientists dedicated to inventing for life. See why we invent at merck.com/inventingforlife.

• 0:39Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.mobi.biz, your single source for your local website needs. Which is actually true, because Paul is sitting at a local website design company right now. Hi, Paul.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  By the way, theverge.mobi.biz does not work.

• 0:55Nilay Patel?

  That's Dieter, everybody. Hi, Dieter. Dieter's here.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 0:58Nilay Patel?

  I'm your friend Eli. It's good to see you again after last week. I didn't listen to last week's show, which I didn't host, but I'm told it was great.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  There wasn't a show last week. I recorded a solo podcast about my turkey experiences, but I didn't publish it.

• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Too blue.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  Too much. Well, I hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving. I hope you all turned off motion smoothing on your parents' TVs.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna admit to everyone that I went Black Friday crazy with my dad, and I purchased no fewer than three televisions.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  Yes, just absolutely true. One for my parents' kitchen, one for my parents' bedroom, and then one for me. I've made up a great excuse that our old plasma TV was too heavy to hang on the wall of our apartment, and that justified the new television. I don't even know if it's true, but I keep confidently saying it, and that's enough.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Here's the question.

• 1:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  And it's an important one. Did you ask your wife about the TV? Because the last time you went out and bought a TV, you went out and bought a curved TV, and it caused no end of problems.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, I bought a Sony A8F, which is a super-high-end OLED. I think it'll be fine. I'm not...

• 1:59Speaker 03

  But is it flat?

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  It is. It is flat. I got a great deal on it, so that's why I didn't buy an LG. And so we're getting rid of everything in our apartment because of the baby. The baby is very small and very demanding, so she needs all the space, because she's starting to move around. So getting rid of everything, the TV stand, all this, so you gotta mount the TV on the wall.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  So your plan is to mount everything on the wall out of her reach?

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  Yes, just slightly taller than the baby. Every, every few months, everything will just move higher than her until she's like 18 and everything's seven feet off the ground.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Instead of the door jam where you like measure their height or whatever?

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just the TV is just moving up the wall. So anyway, so the particular reason I wanted the Sony was it has speakers built into it and has a subwoofer output. So I don't have to get a soundbar because I have pretty good speakers. I just got this like amusing. Anyway, that was fun. But yeah, I went Black Friday insane. All of these TVs came with absolutely insane motion smoothing turned on to the point where, where my family was like, please stop talking about this with us. We would like you to stop talking about the motion smoothing. Anyway, this episode of the Verchast is going to, I'm gonna just let you know, it's mostly gonna be Dieter screaming about the future of computing and how, how it is, how it is broken. So Dieter, let's start. You reviewed the Pixel Slate this week, coming hot on the eels of my iPad Pro review. I think some people in the audience

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  caught it. We both started our reviews, our review videos exactly the same way, which was...

• 3:23Speaker 02

  By design.

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know what to say about this thing. Or I don't know where to, where to start with this thing. So let's begin. Why don't you know where to start with the Pixel Slate?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  What is it? Who is it for? What is it, what is it, what, what does it run? Who, who should buy it? Why, what should they do with it? Why is there no headphone jack? What were they thinking with the keyboard? I, I don't even know.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  This is a bit of a tangent, but I, I watched a lot of television in the past two weeks and I noticed a couple, a few ads for Pixel Books.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  I didn't, I didn't see any ads for Pixel Slates.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, maybe, maybe that's because they were trying to decide whether or not they were gonna ship it in the first place. I mean, look, before we get too, too, too deep, like I did give it a 5.5. We were talking about a 5. We were talking about even lower. The reason I went with that score is if you are a particular kind of person, this thing will actually be pretty solid for you. In particular, if you're like, if you use it like a Pixel Book, uh, and every... Now and then you just want a tablet. It can do that job in a certain way. Okay. But in the same way that Neel I was like, I'm done making excuses for the iPad. I have to be done making excuses for Chrome OS.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  All these companies like we ever we are inventing the future of computing and it's a new kind of paradigm for how computers work. But everybody's answer for what the future computing is, and we can go through all four big screen platforms. I basically think of these things as anything other bigger than a phone, but still has a screen. We can go through the big four, Windows, Mac, Chrome OS and iOS. And if you look at what they're saying is the next phase of what computers are to replace the laptop. All of those answers are bad. And I don't, I don't understand it like off the back of my head, back of my head, uh, back of my head, whatever. For Mac, it's Marsa pad apps and those Marsa pad apps are just badly ported iOS apps. For Chrome, it's tablet mode and Android apps.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  And the Android app situation has gotten way better over the past 18 months, but it's still pretty bad. And in tablet mode, it's horrendous. For iOS, it's the camera roll, um, moving everything to the camera roll. And for Windows, it's, it's, you know, whatever we're calling metro apps these days, Windows Store apps. Running on, you know, 64 bit and running on ARM. And they, they still haven't caught up there either. So you look at, at all of the solutions for what we're supposed to get instead of just a MacBook Air or a Dell XPS 13. And everything that's supposedly moving computing forward is terrible. And I don't get it.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  So it's weird because the, there's just been like a three week now conversation about the iPad Pro and whether you can use it. And I think that conversation is really fun, actually. So John Morrison made a bunch of YouTube videos on his, on his channel about, um, on TLD today about, you know, musicians using iPad and what they're using it for. He edited a whole one. There's endless number of I more articles with Renee Ritchie explaining exactly how you can use an iPad for. I think that's great. I think it's, it's super interesting to have people out there making the, the like pro iPad all the time case. All of them hit the same point that I sort of focused on, which is at some point you're going to hit a wall. Right. And like, here's the wall you're going to hit and we know what it looks like. And here's how to get around it and you can kind of take.

• 6:50Nilay Patel?

  Two rhetorical approaches to the existence of the wall. One is, it's fine, I'll help you get around it. I'm your friend. Like here, throw me the rope, right? And then there's sort of where I'm at, which is, why is this wall here? Like, it's well-known, we've known it forever. And that's with the iPad. I think with Chrome OS, if you're gonna give people a tablet-y thing with a keyboard thing that clicks into it, you have to be at least as good as a Surface or an iPad Pro. And it just seems like they're really far away from that. And because fewer people even use that platform, there's less... John Morrison is not out there making Chrome OS videos about how to get Spotify to not look insane, or how to navigate the file system problems.

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  Like, there isn't that huge cohort of people who are like, "I'm gonna advocate for this platform and help you figure it out." And I think that's like an even bigger problem.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  There is a very active Crostini subreddit. So if you wanna run Linux applications on your Pixel Slate.

• 7:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so like, they're the people that get the 5.5, yeah. I mean, here's a song that's been in my head when I think about the iPad Pro and the Pixel Slate, non-stop. And it's a surprise, I think.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Are you gonna sing?

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  It gets to this thing that Neil I was talking about, that you always hit some sort of weird wall, and you can get around it, but you gotta like, figure it out. And that song, if you don't know, is Going on a Bear Hunt.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  I was expecting Cornflake Girl by Tori Amos.

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no. The children's song Going on a Bear Hunt. It's Going on a Bear Hunt, But I'm Not Afraid. And then, there's always like, "Oh, what's that thing?" And sometimes it's hall grass, or sometimes it's mud. And then it's, "Can't go over it, can't go under it, can't go around it, I'm gonna have to go through it." And then you just like, repeat it with random stuff that kids think is funny to have to go through.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  This is a real window into Dieter's upbringing in Minnesota right now.

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm not gonna sing the song, but...

• 8:45Speaker 02

  I will say, the original lyrics mentions a pistol, and if you try and find the lyrics now, everybody tried to like, get that out of the song.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  That's inappropriate, because if you're going on a bear hunt, you really should have a rifle and a pistol, but whatever. But there's always something. And I get that, like, the arguments to say we're just being Luddites, we're just asking these things to recapitulate how, you know, a windowed laptop system works. That's not the point. Like, I would be happy, in fact, I enjoy trying out new user interface paradigms. It's my favorite thing. It's probably the number one reason that I was a WebOS fanboy back in the day is because it had a new idea of how a phone user interface should work. And so there's lots of interesting new user interface ideas, and I want to encourage more of them. But when you have the bear hunt inevitable thing that you have to slog through, you have to have some sort of fallback, or some sort of solution.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Or, you know, you're just telling people, "Figure it out," and you can't. And, you know, you could go back to floppy disks, right? Like, or the headphone jack. All the solutions for this thing that supposedly moves things forward are frustrating. And it's okay to point them out and say that they're bad, but nevertheless like the idea of moving computing forward. And most of the discussion around can you use these things as your main computer? They confuse us saying, "This thing is bad," with us saying, "This idea of the future of computing sucks."

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Like, yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  The future, the idea of what the future of computing could be, could be great, but that doesn't change the fact that right now it's bad and companies should be called out for it.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  What are these new user interface paradigms that you're seeing? Because I feel like there's a shortage of them, because I feel like that's the only way to solve some of these problems. Like, you can't just make a phone big, and you can't just make a Windows desktop touchable. There's a, there needs to be a third way. So what are these new, new ideas?

• 10:39Nilay Patel?

  So on the iPad, right, the multitasking system, the iPad is a pretty dramatically new paradigm for how you should interact with apps and think about apps and spaces and groups. I think the Chrome OS one, to me, I want you to talk about this more, is super interesting because they've layered Android on top of a desktop browser effectively. And so that's such a crazy mashup of ideas there. I think Microsoft, because they didn't have any mobile thing to turn to, has actually done the best job of saying, okay, well, our laptops are just kind of like tablet-y now. Like, here's a Surface Pro. I saw Dan using his the other day in a meeting. I was like, that thing looks great. Like, he's just like swiping away. He's like folding it up. It's like under his shoulder.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, they just, like, they had to, Microsoft had the most amount of constraint because they had nothing else to rely on. So I think the Surface line is the closest to what is a full-fledged operating system on a tablet look like, but it's still Windows, right? Like, you still run into that, just some weird moments with that operating system because it's still fundamentally Windows. But Dieter, tell me more about the Chrome OS stuff, because that gluing together of Android and Chrome OS seems, it just seems unfinished to me.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  It is unfinished. The, the big UI, and maybe this isn't quite, like, maybe it's UX, I don't know what it is, but the big idea for Chrome OS and a little bit for Windows is, everything that's good about apps on your phone should also apply to your big screen computer. You should have apps that are as like, I don't know, bite-sized or, you know, a single-use utility, lightweight, iterated as quickly as, as they are on phones. All of that stuff should also work for you on a big screen. And, you know, there's like, you know, how to split-screen work and all of that stuff, but fundamentally, what Chrome OS is saying is, there are web apps and they are really good at certain things, but for the places where you hit those limitations, you should get all of the benefits that you get from mobile apps there.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  And then somewhere in between those two things, if you need power user stuff, Android is going to be, at least for now, until future, whatever, is going to be the framework for building those slightly more powerful apps. And honestly, at the end of the day, if you really need to get to that higher pro level... You're gonna do something like Crostini, you're gonna do, you know, some other Linux thing or whatever. It's not meant to be like a, in the way the iPad is like, the pro user is like the creative user who like makes media stuff. For the Pixel Slate, for Chrome OS in general, the pro user is like the app developer, the web developer, right? The coder. But, again, like, once you get to that point, the actual experience of it falls down really fast. In theory, it's great. In practice, it's like, you know, I harped on Spotify, but I could have harped on like YouTube Music

• 13:15Speaker 02

  or a whole, any number of Google apps that just are not designed to work well on a big screen. And that's on top of the way that Chrome OS is being Androidified. It's not just that you can run Android apps, it's also getting built into like the core of what the thing is. So like, it's got the quick settings menu, and there's some other, like, the keyboard is basically Android so far as I can tell. There's a bunch of Android-y things in it, and that's not going super well. And the best, clearest example I can give you of, like, how they haven't finished the job here is Nathan Ingram over at NGadget. If you read it, he wrote a little preview, he didn't write a review yet, because he didn't have time, because his review unit was completely busted and crashing into a boot loop

• 13:59Speaker 02

  for a different reason than my first review unit was. His was boot looping, because he's, like me, has reviewed a bunch of Chromebooks, and so he's got a whole history of like stuff that gets synced on his Chromebook. And it was trying to, because they had introduced this new feature that allowed your Chrome Launcher to have its app icon synced across different Chrome OS devices, which is a great idea, that your app launcher always looks the same, and like you understand where your stuff is, and anytime you open up a Chromebook, your stuff is in the same place, and you can wipe it and get a new one, and that's awesome. But, there were, there was enough history there that it was trying to install the same app, put the same app icon in the same place on his app launcher,

• 14:40Speaker 02

  and that was causing it to boot loop, because it was trying to put, you know, like Spotify and YouTube in the same position on the app launcher, and that crashed the device. That's incredible. Right? Like, finish it.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  This has been what Chrome OS has been since the beginning of Chrome OS of they iterate it so quickly out in the public, every six weeks, there's a new version. And that's incredible for security. It's great for getting new features, but it also seems to have meant that they're giving themselves permission to ship things that are half baked. And that's fine if you're talking about a $250 thing that's going to, you know, maybe education or like, you know, just like a

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  Wait, no, that's not fine. Like students across America are like, what is this boot loop? I guess I won't learn any science today.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  I mean, the fast iteration is fine, but when you get to the stage where you're selling a $1,300 machine, a $1,000 machine, or whatever, that is meant to compete head to head with the iPad and a MacBook Air and a Surface Pro, like, no, you, you gotta ship a finished product. And they just, they didn't.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  And not to harp on the fact that I watch television too much, but the Pixelbook ads are all about, hey, this doesn't ever break. Remember all these bad things from computers where they break? Ours don't break.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  Those are the iPad ads, too. It's interesting that message is the same message.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. The really cognitively dissonant thing is I like, I love the Pixelbook. I don't like the Slate. They're basically the same thing. One, you can just pull the keyboard off, which is an insane thing to say. But the form factor of the Pixel Slate, the bugs that are on it, the Bluetooth bugs that are on it, the form factor makes you run into the tablet UI problems way faster. And it just has some like fundamental software, possibly hardware, but I think they're software bugs. But as on the Pixelbook, it just, you, when you use it as a laptop, it feels fine. Like, the craziest thing about using the Pixel Slate is when you have the keyboard attached, everything feels fast and fluid and dynamic, and you can resize windows, and everything just like works pretty well. And like, you

• 16:47Speaker 02

  gotta open up an Android app and it looks funny or whatever, but you only use it for like, listening to a little bit of music here, or like, editing a photo there, whatever you use your Android app for. But then when you switch either one into tablet mode, the UI is just broken. Like, if you try and go into the multitask view, or you try and like, drag a window to the left or right, like, you're literally looking at lag of like, a second. It should be, you know, less than 20 milliseconds. So how can it be so good in laptop mode and such garbage in tablet mode?

• 17:18Nilay Patel?

  Do they answer? Do you ask them?

• 17:19Speaker 02

  The answer is that we'll fix it in six weeks when the next version of Chrome OS comes out, right? Like, that's always the answer, and that's always been the answer. And you can't have a big flagship device come out right before the holidays and have that be your answer.

• 17:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I feel there's like a deep sadness to this conversation for me because like, two years ago, I bought my parents a Chromebook Pixel. And I bought the most ridiculous one because I wanted it to last. And that computer, to me, seemed perfect for what they do, which is browse the web. And they could figure out almost anything to happen on the web, and the quick updates and the security stuff all seemed great. And I've been wanting to sort of update it, like, it's been a couple of years. It's still really fast. And the Pixel Book has those giant bezels. And I know that if they flip it in tablet mode, it'll get crappy. And then the Slate is just like, I don't want to put, I'm not doing this to my family. But it just seems like that moment when a tiny, fast, focused computer

• 18:14Nilay Patel?

  that was simple to use, that people understood right away, as they glom Android into it, it's just getting farther and farther away from the thing that people liked in the first place.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's true. CNET had a really good headline for their review. They said it was the anti iPad Pro in both good ways and bad. And like, that's it. Everything that's good about the Pixel Slate is the stuff that's bad about the iPad. Like, I had Michael Moore ship over the exact same box of USB junk that Neel I had, and I plugged a bunch of stuff in and like, yo, I installed a printer driver on this thing and it printed directly to an ancient HP printer. It worked! Like, it will not, it will try and do the stuff if there's support for it in the iOS. So everything that the iPad can't do, in theory, the Pixel Slate does. It has a real file browser that if the app bothers to update to see it, will work with whatever app you've got. But then, it's the anti iPad, because you know what the iPad is?

• 19:06Speaker 02

  It's stable, and the animations are fluid, and it feels fun to use. And the Pixel Slate is not.

• 19:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  Why do they ship it? Do you like, would they just rush it out for the holiday?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  I did not specifically get on the phone with somebody and be like, stop shipping, don't ship this thing. What are you doing?

• 19:25Nilay Patel?

  Sure, but like, you just get the sense that they rush it out for, it just one of the, every now and again, there's like a, a great product that you can tell they wanted to hit that date. And so the product just like bombs, right? Because it's just not finished in time.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  And that is what this feels like.

• 19:40Nilay Patel?

  And it's weird because Google's hardware division is supposed to be more cohesive, right? It's more unified. There's a person in charge of it and that just didn't, I don't know. It's like the phones, the phones have a handful of weird problems this time around that are getting fixed.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Here's what Google's hardware division needs. They need a Jobsian type figure. It should be Rick Osterloh, who's in charge of the hardware division, who a week before launch gets in a room and screams at everybody and cancels the launch. Right? Or like, or they, they get scared and they fix it. Like, we haven't covered this extensively because it's like, sometimes it's just forum complaints and sometimes it's much more real. But there've been like a pretty big raft of problems with the Pixel phone, right?

• 20:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  And like, they're fixing them and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, but like, there's, there's a bug where like, you take a picture and then it just doesn't appear in your camera roll. Right? Or there's a bug where if you open up the camera app in a third party app, uh, then the main camera app will crash. Right? Like that's, use this stuff, people. And when something crashes, don't think like, oh, it's Google, they'll fix it. Uh, like if you're in Google and using the stuff you run into these things, you need to be like, no, this has to be a perfect appliance. That like, I don't want a perfect appliance, right? Cause that's, that way lies iPad, iOS limitations. But, uh, you gotta move in that direction a little bit.

• 20:52Nilay Patel?

  Is this just Google? Like they just, they're like, everything's the web. We'll just, we'll just fix google.com on the backend and no one will notice. And it's like, you can't do that with Bluetooth.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, right? You can't.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  Every Google product has a Bluetooth product. It just seems, they're like, well, we're, the Bluetooth is broken. Like it should come with a sticker. It's like this, the Bluetooth will be broken for several weeks.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Well, and the slate in particular, like I had like my headphones would disconnect, I don't know, once an hour, if not more. And then when your Bluetooth headphones disconnect, uh, Chrome OS, when you're playing music from an Android app, doesn't think like, oh, I should stop. It just keeps playing. And so I'd be like on the plane and then all of a sudden, everybody is listening to my music and I wouldn't know it because I'm wearing like noise cancelling headphones.

• 21:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Oh, hi, sorry. Um, and then other times it would just like turn off and I wouldn't be able to turn it on and I'd have to reboot it.

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's horrible.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:41Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Well, 5.5 for the Pixel Slate. Future of computing still involves a lot of finagling.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:47Nilay Patel?

  You know what? It's weird that all these companies are like rushing into this direction. And yes, like we should, we're going to talk about iPhone, uh, sales numbers. You know, like Apple's not disclosing their unit sales anymore and they're kind of hiding the fact that no one really knows what the iPad is up to. It just seems like the push for you should have a tablet with a flippy detachable keyboard is not rooted a hundred percent in what people actually want, right? It's rooted in like a very sci-fi conception of what people should want. But I just, I, I look around and all these things come with keyboards attached to them. And they're shown with keyboards attached to them. And like the iPad case, people were arguing about it with me on Twitter, like,

• 22:27Nilay Patel?

  it's kind of meant, it's less easy to take the keyboard off the iPad now because it wraps around the whole thing. Like, it kind of feels like you just leave it on there forever. And it's like, well, you guys are just building laptops. I don't, those are just laptops. They're just like crap. Do people just want laptops? Like it seems like, did you talk to the laptop people? And like that to me is, I, that it's going to keep breaking down over time, right?

• 22:50Speaker 02

  I mean, I love devices with flippy keyboards. Be able to like put it into a tablet mode and like, sit on the couch, move it a little bit closer to your face and watch a thing or mess around on the web or play a game or whatever. It's great, but you don't want to do it quite that often and you really don't want the thing that sucks is like a laptop in order to get that. And I mean, we're just going to, we're going to keep on coming back around over and over again to the fact that like the Surface got it right.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  We make fun of it and it's like awkward and the kickstand like digs into your knees and like they had to do the little thing with the magnet keyboard stable and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like fundamentally, if you want a thing that you can use as a tablet every now and then, just the physicality of like, where does the keyboard go? There's like only so many like potential solutions for it. And I

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I will see. I feel like Apple did that smart connector. They moved it and it's gonna be harder for people to make keyboard cases now because they've got to wrap around the whole back instead of just clipping on to the bottom. But I am, I am eager to see what third-party keyboard stuff does to the iPad. Okay, we have to take a break. We're gonna come back. We should talk about Project Five, which is just a little more Google stuff. And then I've just got some yelling to do.

• 24:02Speaker 00

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• 24:44Speaker 00

  been working to discover and develop vaccines for more than a century. Dr. Hileman was just one of the many Merck scientists throughout our history who've been dedicated to inventing for life. See why we invent today at merck.com/inventingforlife.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Ladies and gentlemen.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  My fellow dirtbags and everybody else, welcome to This Week in Elon. My name is Elizabeth Lopato. I'm the deputy editor at The Verge. And I'm coming back after being away for two weeks. And so I'm just going to do a speedrun through the biggest news so far during that period. So let's start with SpaceX. Elon Musk has renamed the BFR to Starship, kinda. The spaceship and upper-stager starship, the rocket booster used to leave Earth, is going to be known as the Super Heavy. The Crew Dragon, the spaceship for shuttling astronauts to the ISS, will get its first launch on January 7th. It's a test launch. There will be no people aboard.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  Also, it looks like SpaceX has raised $250 million in loans, which is $500 million less than they initially sought, at least according to a Bloomberg report. So Elon Musk has tweeted that he's interested in working with Daimler Mercedes on an electric version of the Sprinter van. An electric version of the Sprinter van is actually already in the works, suggesting that, you know, it's pretty good insight about it being a good van. But Tesla and Daimler have collaborated before. Tesla supplied electric powertrains for a couple of their cars. So this might be, you know, Musk having ideas on Twitter before he checks them out, or perhaps this is opening a future discussion for future collaboration.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Also Tesla, Elon Musk told Axios that Tesla was single-digit weeks away from death during the Model 3 ramp-up. You may remember that during this entire period, Musk was adamant that Tesla was doing well. So, you know, people clutch their pearls, as I suppose people want to do. There have been more senior executive departures from Tesla, a senior securities lawyer, which is the kind that might potentially oversee Elon Musk's Twitter use, per the SEC settlement, and the head of physical security, who is gone after less than a year. The Model 3 may not perform so well in the winter. It turns out that the windows and charging plug sometimes get stuck. A new software update is coming to fix these issues.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  And finally, Mexican authorities have problems with the Tesla Tequila trademark. Musk tweeted that he intends to, quote, "fight big tequila." Well, I was in Tequila last week, and I can tell you it's a lovely, small town. I would not characterize it as big. Ah, onwards and upwards to the boring company. Elon Musk made a Ponty Python joke about a real life job opening. And after a lawsuit, the boring company is abandoning its plan to dig under Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles. Okay. Is that all of it? I hope that's all of it. But I will say that like, the absolute pace of news that happened suggests to me something else. As you may remember, if you have listened to this before, one of the things that I like

• 27:58Speaker 04

  to talk about is the way that there is this very sort of divided narrative about Elon Musk. You know, all these people who think he's a hero, all these people who think he's a villain, and just about nobody in the middle. And like, I was looking through like, this entire like, incredible news flow, and I was realizing maybe something that's probably contributing to this. And it's that there's so much news that you like, have to cope with it somehow, right? And like, my own personal narrative, which is like, this is just a rich guy, they do things, I don't know, is, first of all, not super compelling as a narrative, but second of all, it doesn't really provide me of a way, with a way to like, sort this out, right? Like, if your whole thing is Elon Musk is a genius, then like, this kind of news flow, you're like, oh, it gives you a perspective, right?

• 28:42Speaker 04

  Like, and so, you know which things to pay attention to, and which things you don't want to pay attention to. And similarly, if your whole thing is like, Elon Musk is a villain, then you know what things you want to pay attention to, and what things you don't want to pay attention to, and you don't have to like, just take the whole fire hose in the face. Because necessarily, any narrative is going to leave out some amount of relevant facts. That's just how narratives work, when you construct them from reality. And so, it seems to me that one of the reasons why this keeps happening is just that people are trying to cope with the absolute flow of news. And it's part of the reason why we have this segment in the first place, is that I have to cope with the flow of news, and I'm trying to basically give you a weekly recap, so that you can also cope with it. But yeah, that's this week in Elon.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  I'm Elizabeth Lopato, Deputy at The Verge, and I will see you next week.

• 29:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Dieter.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  What on earth is going on with Project Fi?

• 29:38Speaker 02

  So it's called Google Fi now.

• 29:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  So if you don't know, Project Fi is Google's cellphone service. It is a MVNO that sits on the top of T-Mobile and Sprint and US Cellular. And they just made it official that it's a Google thing now and not just a project. So, fine. They're also offering beta support for iPhones and then just a whole, they're like official support for a whole bunch of Android phones. So it'll work with any phone. And it's actually a really polarizing service. So the thing that polarized me for it is I didn't trust that Google would keep maintaining it. And I don't know if I could trust giving my phone number to Google because like, look what they did to Google Voice, look what they did to Hangouts, look what they did to Duo or ALO, blah, blah, blah. Like, do I really want a primary communication service to be a Google service because are they going to hang on to it for a few years?

• 30:23Speaker 02

  So that, I think, is like a little bit safer now. But it's also polarizing because the model in which you pay for stuff is like either amazing and perfect for you and your needs, or it actually kind of sucks. And basically, the way it works is your phone line's 20 bucks and then data costs 10 bucks per gig and then international roaming is totally free. And that's it. But there is a caveat that once you hit 15 or 16 gigs of data, they start throttling you unless you want to pay extra, then you can pay 15 bucks a month for data after that. So for some people, that means, like for me, for example, I'm on Wi-Fi enough that I manage to not use, you know, more than, I don't know, 10 gigs of data, 8 gigs of

• 31:05Speaker 02

  data, you know, maybe actually less than that, like 5 gigs of data a month. And so my phone bill could come out to, you know, 50, 80 bucks. And that's actually like cheaper than what I'm paying for Verizon right now, right? So that's great. Plus, it works if you travel internationally. But if you're the kind of person that uses 11, 12, 13 gigs of data or more a month, it can get pretty expensive pretty fast. But then it gets even more complicated because Fi does the one thing that nobody else does, which is they will let you put a Fi SIM in as many data devices that you want and not charge you extra for them. So

• 31:37Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the reason I like Fi is I've got a phone with a phone number, whatever. And I use it as my second line because I'm a crazy person that wants to have two phone lines. But I buy, you know, the LTE version of the iPad. I just bought the LTE Surface Go, which we could get into if you want. And it costs me literally nothing to get the, to put the LTE in there per month unless I actually use it for LTE, which means that I've always got a device that has this backup data built into it if I need it, and it doesn't cost me anything month over month, which is great.

• 32:10Nilay Patel?

  So you've signed them all up, but you're just not using it?

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it's just sitting there and then if I need it, it's like, it's just there. So, I mean, Windows is actually really, really, really good at this. They've, if you can get the LTE version of the Surface Pro and then they just released the LTE version of the Surface Go. If your Wi-Fi is garbage, it just quietly, silently switches over to the data connection and things just keep going and it's no problem.

• 32:34Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so why'd you buy an LTE Surface Go?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Uh, because I have an unhealthy obsession with tiny computers.

• 32:39Nilay Patel?

  What do you do with the Surface Go?

• 32:41Speaker 02

  So I only got it yesterday, so I'm still thinking through that, but I did review the original one. No, look-

• 32:48Nilay Patel?

  I bought it to figure out what I want it for.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Well, no, like, here's the thing, it is not super powerful, so you can't use it as a full-on laptop replacement. But because it's not super powerful as a tablet, you're like not tempted to like go crazy with work stuff, but you can do it in a pinch. And so basically, it's a tiny computer that unlike an iPad, won't limit me if I need to do some work stuff, it just takes a little bit longer. And that taking a little bit longer is actually weirdly an incentive for me to like not, when I am out with it, just do work stuff, but instead read books or, you know, watch some movies or do other sort of tablet-y things on it. I'll be honest, like, it's a privileged position for me, but it is like an experiment to see how I feel about having a Windows tablet be my like secondary non-laptop device instead of an iPad.

• 33:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or a Chromebook, but I want to try it. I'm excited for it.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  Well, it makes sense.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  On the topic of Project Fi, I wanted, when I got the pixels, like I could, I could do a whole Google experience and it does seem like a more modern phone carrier and I like that it's bundling services together, but man, I don't trust Google not to cancel something at all. Like, I really wish every Google project, like you could scroll to the bottom of the page and it would just say like, roughly three years, or it would just let me know how long. So the fact that they, the fact that they changed the name and it's not a project anymore is actually kind of a big deal. Right. Yeah. Big indication that they might keep it around, but I, I don't know. They've killed better named products.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that Google Reader.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Every time we talk about a wireless service, you end up at like talking about the asterisks for 45 minutes. So like the unlimited service on Verizon or like T-Mobile's, uh, you know, free services. Are they really net neutral or not? Like down the line with Google Fi, the asterisks are how much data do you use? Are you using a Pixel phone or one of the like blessed up Motorola phones that are actually able to switch between Sprint, T-Mobile, blah, because if, if you don't, if you use it on iPhone or something else, you're basically using it on T-Mobile as an NVNO. And David Braddock over at Android Police pointed out that being an NVNO on T-Mobile is not necessarily a great experience because the backend contract may mean that if T-Mobile feels throttle, it's more likely to throttle

• 35:03Speaker 02

  a, or feels congested, it's more likely to throttle an NVNO before it throttles the first tier T-Mobile customer. So it's possible that you're going to get worse service. Like you end up down a pretty deep rabbit hole, even with Google Fi, even with its relatively simple, you know, uh, plans.

• 35:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm just going to continue staying in AT&T jail until someone, someone comes to my house and breaks free for me.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  It's all I can do.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  I will say on that topic, this is a total tangent, but Google's, um, I forget what they're calling. I think they're calling it quick. Google's like upcoming hot new protocols for the web are going to be adopted as HTTP three.

• 35:39Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  And one of the hot new features. Is that a typical like web connection, you have an IP address, right? And so the service you're talking to knows who you are because your IP address. Well, with all these fancy ways to switch between services, or you hop to wifi, or you change carriers midstream or something like that, that's very confusing as a service provider. So apparently, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but HTTP three has this way of just giving you a unique ID so you can hop between service providers, but have a still seamless like application experience. So.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  Wow, there are no privacy or tracking implications to that at all.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  Something to look out for. Oh, yeah.

• 36:25Nilay Patel?

  Google's gonna give you an ID number.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  Just fire up news dot Y Combinator dot com. You can have some great, great controversy there.

• 36:33Nilay Patel?

  Perfect.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  A friend of the verge, ex-Reg editor, hero to all, Walt Mossberg, has been going on a Twitter tear about why would anybody ever use Gmail or Google? I'm switching to DuckDuckGo and Apple Mail to protect my privacy. It's the whole thing. And he's kind of not wrong.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Wow. I haven't looked at the thread, but I know what I'm doing with my time tonight. All right. Speaking of controversy, Casey Newton, let me guest host his newsletter this week. I just want to talk about this for five minutes and then I can be done ranting and raving. We can move on to something else, but.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  It's gonna be more than five minutes.

• 37:06Nilay Patel?

  So there's a new Congress. There is a lot of investigatory, regulatory scrutiny being applied to tech companies. As we speak, right now, this is a true story. Laura Lumer, who is a sort of far right reactionary person who was banned from Twitter, has chained herself to the doors of the Twitter office in New York, screaming things like, you want to steal my tweets in real life? Because she was banned from Twitter, right? So there's this, there's a streak of conservatism saying the platforms are biased against us. And so you end up, and then there's this regulatory scrutiny that's happening. So you end up with Ted Cruz, a few months ago, asking Mark Zuckerberg at a congressional hearing, aren't you supposed to be neutral to get the protections of something called Section 230?

• 37:52Nilay Patel?

  Mark Zuckerberg looked at him with his robot eyes and said nothing of substance. That's Mark Zuckerberg. And then, two days ago, Senator-elect Hawley from Missouri, who is the current Attorney General of Missouri, tweeted, "We should take, the new Congress should take a hard look at Twitter's status exempt from liability under Section 230 because they're supposed to be a platform for a true discourse of political thought."

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Yep. And I'll just add, like, this is a thing worth, like, actually understanding pretty, like, pretty deeply, at least at a basic, understand what the law says level, because I am sure that this is gonna come up when CEO of Google Sundar Pichai finally talks to Congress next week.

• 38:31Nilay Patel?

  Yep. So, I wrote about it, and I said, "Why do Republicans keep making fools of themselves over this?", which they, I think they're getting willfully wrong. But a lot of people get this wrong, so I just want to explain it. So, the story, the backstory here is kinda wild. In 1995, Stratton Oakmont, which you may remember as the shady investment firm from the film "The Wolf of Wall Street", sued, this is all true, sued Prodigy. You may remember Prodigy is the dial-up internet service operated by Sears. Just go with me on all of this. 1995. Stratton Oakmont sues Prodigy because they have a user on their investment message board saying Stratton Oakmont is shady, which, as immortalized by the film "The Wolf of Wall Street", was true. But Stratton Oakmont says, "This is defamatory.

• 39:16Nilay Patel?

  We want you to pull it down. You're, Prodigy, you're the ones with the money. You owe us the money." Prodigy goes to court. The court says, "Well, you moderate your message boards. You are exerting editorial control over these message boards, and that makes you the publisher of this content. You are now liable for defamation." Prodigy says, "Well, like, 60,000 posts a minute on Prodigy. Like, we can't do that. This is, we're gonna, we have to shut it down. If we're liable for all this stuff, we, we have to, like, quadruple the, like, the size of our moderation team. Everything will be slow. This isn't gonna work." Which, if you think about it, is exactly what the platforms say today, right? It's too hard to moderate this whole thing. So Congress passes a law, it's called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It was written by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon.

• 40:01Nilay Patel?

  Colin Lecker on our team, literally just interviewed him about Section 230 and the future of it. You can go read that. But Congress passes Section 230. It says two things. Number one, well, it says a lot of things, but the two most important ones are, number one, no provider of interactive computer service will be held, will be treated as a publisher of the content on that service provided to somebody else. So we're just flatly saying, these platforms are not publishers. They can't be held liable for decime. There's no conditions, there's no, you have to do X, Y, and Z, you have to be neutral. It just says, no provider of an information service shall be treated as a publisher. Okay, it's one sentence, super easy to read. You can go look it up. There's a link to it in the post I wrote with Casey. Number two, this is the important one, if a platform in good faith takes steps to restrict

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  or remove content it finds obscene, defamatory, harassment, whatever, even if that stuff is constitutionally protected, if in good faith they're moderating their platform against this stuff, they won't be held, they won't be treated as though they're in charge of it. Right. So two pieces of the law in response to Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy. One, they're not publishers. We're affirmatively saying interactive computer providers are not publishers. Two, we're saying even if they moderate, if they're doing it in good faith, and even if they're removing stuff that is otherwise constitutionally protected, they're still not liable for the other stuff. That's the whole law. What does good faith mean? Good faith is not like a, it's, I think that's where the misreading really comes in. Good faith, Twitter is doing this in good faith.

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  Does any listener of the Vergecast think that we think Twitter is a well-run company? They should not. Do we think Twitter is a well-run company? It is absolutely not a well-run company. Are they moderating their platform in defensible good faith? Sure they are. They publish rules. They talk about those rules. Those rules are available. They're transparent insofar as they're transparent. Most of the moderation actions on Twitter happen in accordance to those rules. When there's an outcry, they apologize, they try harder, then there's another outcry. It's Twitter, but right, like it's obvious good faith. Like they're saying, these are our rules. Does YouTube operate in good faith? YouTube is also super frustrating for everybody who uses YouTube. But do they have rules? Is there a system? Can you see the system? Can you understand to some extent how YouTube's moderation works? Sure you can.

• 42:15Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's like all it really takes. There's no like, are we holding, are we telling people we're neutral, but then we're secretly not? No, it's like, are, can you see the operation of the thing? Like, that's what good faith means. Are you not lying to people? Right? Are you, are you doing mostly what you say you're gonna do? And there's, good faith does not mean you're perfect. And it certainly doesn't mean you're content neutral. So if you take this law and try to apply it to the Donald on Reddit, right? Reddit owns the whole platform. They let moderators make whatever rules they want on every subreddit. You would not want a law that says, well, the Donald has to be content neutral. Right? They delete shit left and right that they don't wanna see. You would not want a law that says, the kitten subreddit on Reddit has to keep things that are off topic if it's about puppies.

• 42:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? So you, you have to like, give people affordance to shape the, the platform they're on. And there's no, there's no rule saying it has to be neutral. It just has to be in good faith. But like, that's a pretty low threshold as long as you're telling people what you think your rules are. So I think everybody's getting this upside down, particularly conservatives who want to say Twitter is a publisher. All these platforms are banning conservatives are publishers. And I think the reason they wanna say that is, hey, you're making content decisions. So you should be liable for those decisions. But if you misread 230 in this way, what you're really saying is Twitter, we're threatening you by eliminating 230 entirely. And now you're liable for every tweet is defamation or actionable. So really, we can destroy Twitter. We can destroy YouTube. We could destroy Reddit if we eliminate 230.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  Because there's, if Reddit is responsible, financially responsible for every post on Reddit, that, that isn't a company anymore. It's just a lawsuit machine. So like 230 is a law that enables the internet. The question is, on the sort of the left wing side, and this is what Wyden talked to Colin about, we want them to moderate. This is the law we wrote. The law we wrote gave them complete immunity, but we gave them the freedom to moderate. They should moderate harder. We should not have Nazis on Twitter. And on the right, they're saying, well, you're deleting right wing voices. We'll just take the whole thing away and now you're totally responsible for being a publisher. And so this law is like the foundation of every platform on the internet. Our comment section does not exist without section 230. Just can't, we would have to shut it down.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  Just to be clear on that, because I missed that the first time I read this. We are, The Verge is a publisher.

• 44:25Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  But the comments, because they are coming from a source that's not us.

• 44:30Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  We are not a publisher in the context of the comments.

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  No. So we are liable for what we publish and then we provide an interactive computer service, our comments and our forums. And we are not liable for what people do there. Now, if you have participated in our comments, you know that I will ban you at the drop of a hat. If you're rude or if you use the word bias incorrectly, I won't do that. I might do that. Don't try. Don't try. But you know that we moderate our comments. We want that to be a polite place. We moderate the shit out of our YouTube comments. We like do it all the time. We had to ban a bunch of flat earthers the other day on one of Lauren's videos. Should we have the protection to do that? I would argue that we should. Like we're not, it's not confusing what we're doing. But yeah, so what we publish, The Verge gets sued, right? People get mad at us, we get sued for defamation. It happens. We take it, we have a law firm, we like do the work because we think we're right.

• 45:19Nilay Patel?

  But we can't be liable for every person in our comments. So the law makes a distinction between what we do.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  So what was the big push a couple of years ago of Facebook should be called a publisher?

• 45:30Nilay Patel?

  Right, so Facebook operates in the shadow of 230. So does, to name a company, Etsy, like every company that has user content operates in the shadow of 230. So if you say, Facebook comes out into the world and says, we're a media company, right? They are now responsible for everything published on Facebook, right? We're no longer the provider of an interactive computer service. So I think they were very hesitant to say, we're a media company now, because they knew that removing this legal protection would kind of destroy their business. But we all think of them as a media company because, well shit, they buy and distribute a lot of media. Mike.com laid off everybody today because their entire business was one Facebook watch deal that Facebook took away. They have no more revenue, they're gone. That sounds like a media company, but like Facebook is like, we're a platform and we're gonna

• 46:13Nilay Patel?

  stay a platform. And so I think that's that big push. Like, you should call yourself a media company if you are one. And these platforms are saying, no, we're platforms, we're just gonna hide behind the shield.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  So the nuance here, I guess, is if a company, disclosure, my wife works for Oculus Division of Facebook, if the 230 is like, pretty unambiguously a good thing. However, it has enabled companies like Facebook, and to some extent Twitter, to do the things that a media company does and like mess with the world of media, but get to call itself a platform and not call itself a media company. So there's some sort of like, is there some sort of nuance that we could do with this 230 thing to be like, yes, you are protected, please moderate in good faith. By the way, if you do some stuff that like, seeps into basically being a cable channel or a media company or whatever, then like, there's some

• 47:04Speaker 02

  line we can draw, once you go over it into media land, that we can start talking about, it's like some other standard for you.

• 47:12Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's where we are now, right? So 230 is a law from the 90s. The internet is radically different. The number of platform companies that operate at scale has shrunk, right?

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:24Nilay Patel?

  There's not very many of them. You could write one law just for companies with more than a billion users. You hit a billion users, you have a different set of responsibilities. So there's like that kind of chatter out there. Paul, you will be interested in this. You could write one sort of law that says, if you operate a network or a platform, you have to be neutral to the users and provide an open playing field for, like, right? You're a dominant provider of a service and everyone relies on you. We're gonna regulate you and say, you're perhaps a common carrier. And you can't, you can't impose editorial control, right? Like, you can, you can map this to net neutrality, like, instantly.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  All those words sound so good.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  It's just when you look, looked at that, one, one interesting thing about this is, is this idea of what, what are the individuals rights in this, in this scenario, you know? I am investing my time on this platform. I'm building an audience and the platform obviously gets value from me. And so theoretically I'm abiding by a terms of service and I have basically agreed that they have the copyright now of all my tweets or some, I don't know what that status is.

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  You're saying you haven't read the terms of service that you agreed to.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  I, you know what? Please don't tell anybody, but I have no idea what my legal rights are as far as my tweets. But it is content that I generated and that I, I, it's from my mind. I think that's that feeling because yes, I don't think that this is, um, you know, going after Twitter with this 230 thing is a good idea at all. But I also think that Twitter has been demonstrably biased against conservatives and against conservative ideas and against ideas that it does not agree with.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  Wait, Twitter as a user community or as a company?

• 49:16Speaker 03

  As a company.

• 49:17Nilay Patel?

  So like, that's like up for debate, right? Like Casey would totally disagree with you.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. But, but, but that is definitely a feeling that I have and that a lot of people, obviously, mostly they're conservatives.

• 49:28Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Have, and so you, you, you start to really resent this company and fear this company that you've spent years of your life building connections, building an audience, building relationships on this platform and generating content for this platform. And this company has so much power over that situation.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  Right. And I, so that's a relationship that Americans now have with monopolies across their economic lives, right? So like, you know, it would be great if Twitter had a competitor.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 50:00Nilay Patel?

  That would be great.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  How do you? What if that, what if that competitor wasn't banned from the app store?

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I don't know, man. Like, what if, what if there wasn't a monopoly in app distribution? Like you keep going down the line and you're at monopolies at every single step. And I think. This 230 thing is both, it's a product of a time when it was not clear that's how the internet would work. And now, I think in the modern context, you do have both Democrats and Republicans talking about changing it, but in different ways. So, again, the Democrats, you know, they're like, "We're gonna pass FOSTA and SESTA and say, if you are backpage.com and you are knowingly making a ton of money on ads that might be related to sex trafficking, like, you're liable for that." And like, backpage.com goes away. And like, there's an ongoing number of ripple effects for like, sex workers in America who

• 50:49Nilay Patel?

  are now are saying, "We're less safe because we can't use the internet for our work." Right? Like, was that, in 1995, did they think that was gonna happen? Looked that we would be having this conversation now? Like, no, but that's the, we've modified the law in that way. There are other carve-outs you could make. You could make the platforms liable for directly inciting violence, right? You could absolutely do it. There's all kinds of carve-outs. You could say, above a certain size. If you've, you know, if you've got 90% of the market for tweets, Twitter. Right, you're, this is how it looks. Paul, this comes down to you and me disagreeing about one thing in particular, which is the existence and persistence of monopoly, right?

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. What if the carve-out is, as soon as you apply an algorithm that ranks what order things are displayed in?

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  Right, I think that is probably the most interesting one, right now, right? Is Facebook algorithmically favoring some news over others? And does that make-

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Is Google-

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  Is Google-

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Is Twitter.

• 51:44Nilay Patel?

  Right, and so, it's really hard, this law was not, it did not see that far into the future. So, I think next year, you're just gonna see a lot of 230 action. And so, the reason I wanted to rant and rave about it, is because it is fundamentally a simple law to understand. You can go read it, it's written in English, it's not like, the Constitution, you know what I mean? Like, it was written not so long ago by people who were thinking about the internet. It is just a few sentences long in the sort of active portions. And you can just understand what happened between Stratton Oakmont and Prodigy and how Congress responded and where we are. And then you hear people just get it wrong. And it's like, you're just lying. You're just making something up so you can yell at Mark Zuckerberg and everyone knows it's wrong. And I think that's like, for the Vergecast audience in particular, like all of us, regardless

• 52:28Nilay Patel?

  of like political inclination, we should just like start from a very objectively true place and then make some policy determination there. And like, you can think like I do, which is these monopolies are not going away and we should impose them with some amount of rulemaking that accepts the fact that they're very powerful and they should have some different obligations. Or we can do something, I think what Paul would like more, which is like, we should create conditions in which their competitors are able to compete with them. But you can't have monopolies at like the access level, the App Store level, the Cloudflare level, the user level, like, all those companies just have too much power, like up and down the chain. So net neutrality will solve everything. That's been my speech. Now, a message from Adam.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  You know what I always say? I always say, "Bring back Tom Wheeler."

• 53:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Paul. It's weird. You've moved out to Washington, you just start screaming "Bring back Tom Wheeler" everywhere. This is an advertising segment from our friends at Dell Cinema, talking about how binge watching has changed everything. Check it out.

• 53:25Speaker 05

  Kayla loves TV.

• 53:28Speaker 06

  I like to tell people that I invented binge watching TV shows. I'm in it for the long haul.

• 53:34Speaker 05

  And chances are, you're a lot like Kayla. Over 70% of Americans are binge watchers and they feel a deep connection to both the characters and the screens they're watching them on. Dr. Emel Steiner is an assistant professor who studies binge watching at Rowan University.

• 53:51Speaker 07

  With the newer screens that are now available because of the crispness, the higher fidelity, they allow viewers to see a more realistic world. And that social realism creates greater feelings of connection with the people on those screens.

• 54:07Speaker 05

  According to Steiner, it's not just screen size and clarity that creates that deeper connection.

• 54:12Speaker 07

  The technology today allows viewers to control not just what they watch, but where and when they watch it.

• 54:19Speaker 05

  And this is great news for Kayla.

• 54:22Speaker 06

  I used to feel truly embarrassed about the amount of binge watching that I engage in, but I feel grateful that the culture is totally supportive of this type of hobby that I have.

• 54:36Speaker 05

  If you're a person who can never say no to one more episode, check out the Dell XPS 13 with Dell Cinema technology. For incredible sound, color, and streaming, it's the laptop for people who watch things on their laptop from Dell Computers.

• 54:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, thanks to our sponsor Dell. Learn more about Dell Cinema's amazing color and Intel Core i7 processor at dell.com/xps13. That's dell.com/xps13.

• 55:05Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Paul, every week you do a segment, which I believe is called Bring Back Tom Wheeler.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, actually, I'm gonna change it this week.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  It has a different name. And that name is Smart Yoga Pants.

• 55:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Yeah. I'm so excited for these. Let me tell you why it's called Smart Yoga Pants on this very special week. Because I've discovered on the internet, Smart Yoga Pants.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  Okay, pivot yoga, right? They're pants. You put on the pants and then the pants are smart. And they know where your body is. And then they put your body up on a TV. Which kind of reminds me, now that I think about it, there's this book that I found, I think it's like at a used bookstore or something like that. There was a concept of, before the internet was really like, back when the internet was like Gopher and Usenet before the web, there was this idea that what we were gonna do moving into the 21st century was that we would digitize the real world and we'd have this digital representation of the real world. And that was kind of what the network would be like.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  But instead, we made like websites. And I think, but more recently, you know, think of like Waze and the whole self-driving car arena and then Smart Yoga Pants. I like, I like things that are digitizing the real world and, I don't know, it's cool.

• 56:42Nilay Patel?

  I like that you went from self-driving cars to Smart Yoga Pants. So basically, they measure how well you're doing yoga?

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, they tell you mostly you're doing bad yoga.

• 56:51Nilay Patel?

  Good, all right.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  So you talk to your smartphone and you say, how's this look? Pivot, how's this look? And then it will tell you how to move. Your knee.

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  So that you're doing yoga.

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  And that on the level of self-driving cars in terms of innovation is what you're saying.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Basically, or ways.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  All right, we have, we have a, let's do a quick lightning round. Apple claims the iPhone XR is its best-selling phone, will not say how many it has sold. The quote from Joz Weack is every week it's been on sale, it's been the number one selling iPhone. Yeah. Every, every day of every week that it's been on sale, is what he said. Joz is a, kind of like a straight shooter. We've like, talked to him a lot. He doesn't usually dance around, but I will say the follow-up question was how many? And he wouldn't tell CNN in that interview.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  I'm trying to remember if I predicted this, or if I predicted the complete opposite. And I'm sure.

• 57:40Nilay Patel?

  It's one or the other. I think every reviewer predicted the iPhone XR would be the one to buy, right? Like, down the line, I think, I said it, Joanna said it, Lauren said, like, just down the line, everybody who touched this thing said this is the one most people should buy.

• 57:53Speaker 03

  It's a deal.

• 57:55Nilay Patel?

  It's a deal. It's, it's, it's, it's the iPhone you want with the screen that you, we all live with.

• 58:04Nilay Patel?

  But everyone, you know, it's like cheaper. It has the edge to edge, as face it. Everyone knew, everyone kind of suspected it would be the one most people buy. The question is whether iPhone demand overall is soft. So Wall Street Journal had a piece about supplier orders being cut. There's been the usual sort of cast of analyst characters doing their thing about supplies being cut. And then there's Apple saying this now, which is out of character for Apple, right? Where they're, they're, they're trying to do an interview about Project Red, and they get asked this question. And they're prepared for it in this way. And they're not just saying we don't disclose numbers. So there's some narrative changing happening here in a way that they don't usually do. And because last quarter, they said, we're not going to do unit numbers anymore.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  It is likely that Apple will never say a number for iPhones sold ever again. Which has led everyone to think that the total number of iPhones sold is going, going to stay flat or go down.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  Maybe everybody's just buying Mac Minis.

• 59:00Nilay Patel?

  Everyone's like, I gotta take my iPhone budget and throw it as a Mac Mini. That would be incredible if next year they're like, actually, we're going to change our mind on the unit sales thing. Cause we just want you didn't see this Mac Mini number. That's like the dream. All right. Chris Welch reviewed the Roku speakers, which I think we all laughed at heartily. But he says they're sound really good and they're really simple to set up. And I, I have changed my, I think a lot of people are going to buy these. I think anybody with Roku TV who's like, needs some speakers, they can just like. And then they'll have it. Here's my favorite part of his review, though. Comes with two remotes. One is to work. The other remote has a button on it with two interlocking squares. And when you push it, the voice assistant just says, this feature is not yet available.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 59:42Nilay Patel?

  And Roku will not tell him what the feature is.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  What?

• 59:46Nilay Patel?

  It's literally just a TBD button. It just does nothing.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  And they won't say what it's gonna be for.

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  They won't say what it is. So part of his review is just, just sort of idly speculating on what that icon could be. So, yeah, he's like, normally I wouldn't recommend a product that is obviously unfinished. That has a button that's TBD, but it's pretty good and cheap. And then

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  Sometime down the line, the button will do something.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  It's even better. It's gonna be even better.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  Why does it need two remotes in the first place?

• 1:00:17Nilay Patel?

  One remote is a TV remote and the other remote is like, it's like a little square that you can like carry around your house and like push a button. Uh, it has two macro buttons. Actually, everything about this product is hilarious. It has two buttons labeled one and two.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:31Nilay Patel?

  You would think that they are like programmable, like start Netflix buttons. They are macros to the voice assistant.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:00:39Nilay Patel?

  So you push it and it issues the play rock music on Spotify command quietly to the voice assistant.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  It makes the speaker whisper a voice command?

• 1:00:48Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no. It like does it inside. So you

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:00:51Nilay Patel?

  You like hold the button down and you're like, play rock music on Spotify and you let go and the next time you push the button, it, it issues that command internally.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I wish it made, I wish it said it every time out loud. That would be so good.

• 1:01:04Nilay Patel?

  But in your own voice.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  It's like higher, it's like buying a robot to push your touchscreen for you.

• 1:01:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  It's like, it sounds like someone was working on a Kickstarter for these speakers that would work really well with Roku TVs. And Roku just bought them. And they were like, hey, we've got this one more feature. Roku's like, don't, don't worry about it. Just ship it.

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  I just, the, the, the three buttons on there. Anyway, so that's square remote with the one that you're supposed to take it around your house with you. And just like, fire off of, fire off of voice command macro hybrid whenever you want.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  All this to say, these are apparently wonderful products.

• 1:01:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they sync really fast. They work really well. They like, sound reasonably good. They're cheap, but it's just like, this remote is deeply hilarious. Motorola just doing its Motorola thing, just putting giant batteries, uh, in a new Moto G7 power. I feel like Motorola is quietly successful.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  I hate the Pixel 3 battery life. I almost think I have a defective unit.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  Uh oh.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  It, it just doesn't, doesn't get me through a day.

• 1:02:12Nilay Patel?

  Helen had to get a new one. I think you should swap it.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just, it's not cool.

• 1:02:19Nilay Patel?

  I feel like the Pixel 3 has, you know, the Pixel 2 came out, I was like, I love this phone, I want to use it, the screen makes me sad. Uh, and it was like, every day I was like, can I deal with this screen? I feel none of that with a Pixel 3. I don't know why.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  You don't covet it, you mean, or you?

• 1:02:32Nilay Patel?

  The, the Pixel 2, like the camera was so much better. That I was like, every day I was like, can I make enough, like, can I just give up on looking at things with my eyes? Like, why just deal with it today? And the answer is always no, but I thought about it. Pixel 3 is like, the screen looks pretty good, whatever, the camera's pretty good. But I just, it doesn't, all these little problems around the edges, they just keep, they just keep me away from it. I don't know. All right. Uh, DJ Osmo Pocket, tiny handheld gimme that shoots 4K. I feel like this is a very Dieter Bone product.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  A very hype for this thing.

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  The good thing is you've just got a laptop for editing this footage.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, right?

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Editing 4K out of Surface Go, that's just gonna be the best. Um, no, I'm excited. It has a USB-C port on the bottom, and then you can buy an adapter to plug a microphone directly into it, which is like, the thing that everybody who makes like, portable camera things seems to forget that you also want audio that doesn't suck. Um, it's got a cool little modular system, so you can plug crap into the side of it. You can use your phone as a viewfinder. It's tiny. It just looks like it's a blast. Um, and, not for nothing, you remember how much fun and how much we all loved the Flip cameras?

• 1:03:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  It's like, it's like a Flip camera for 2019. And I just, I love that idea.

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  We gotta give one to Kara Swisher. Do you remember she did a whole video series where she was charged in the Silicon Valley offices with her Flip camera? Yeah, it looked and sounded awful, but it was just raw Kara Swisher. Yeah, why are you stupid? Now she can do it with stabilized video.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  Stabilized 4K.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  And face tracking.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  She could, she could automatically stitch together a nine-frame like panoramic thing of an office where she's asking people if they're, why they're stupid.

• 1:04:11Nilay Patel?

  It's a good show, Recode Decode. I'm gonna plug it at the end of this one. Lastly, Microsoft reported to release a Surface Studio Monitor in 2020, which seems right. It seems like they should absolutely do that. So I can live my dream of standing at my desk, swiping Trello cards at people.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:04:28Nilay Patel?

  Just think about it. I was like, swipe. And then like your screen like turned red. And I was like, Neelai has assigned you a story. That's still my workplace dream. I don't know. Do you, do you, did you get a Surface Studio out there, Dieter? We reviewed one.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  I don't have one in San Francisco now.

• 1:04:42Nilay Patel?

  But Dan had it, right? We should, yeah, I'm gonna take Dan's away. I'm gonna start swiping.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  I wanted to use this chance to mention that in the spirit of buying discounted things for the holidays, Bitcoin's really cheap right now.

• 1:04:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. Paul, get out of here. Get out of here with your Bitcoin scam. What are you, are you a dealer now? Is that what you're doing out there?

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  No, I'm, I'm what they, I'm what they call, and this is a forable disclosure, a hodler.

• 1:05:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  That means you hold, that you buy Bitcoin and then you hold on to it.

• 1:05:11Nilay Patel?

  Do you have a Lambo yet?

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  I have zero Lambos.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  So not a successful hodler?

• 1:05:19Nilay Patel?

  Isn't that the end goal of hodling?

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  It's about the long term.

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  I believe you, I believe in you, buddy.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Anyways, it's, it's, it's at a great discount.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  No, stop it. That's spoken like a true hodler. You're trying to ramp up demand. And I see you. I watched The Wolf of Wall Street.

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  You should listen to Why'd You Push That Button this week? This was the third of their Instagram series. They talked about what makes a place Instagrammable. Our old social media manager, Zainab Hussain, was on that show. She's wonderful. So you should listen to her, too. You should listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You should listen to Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. You should listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. All wonderful shows. Happy that everyone is asking everyone else why they're stupid on the internet. It's great. You can listen to Verge's interview episode next week. We're gonna have Carolyn Sinders, who wrote a long, Casey and I are gonna interview her later today, actually. That's coming out next week. She wrote a long history of harassment and speech on internet platforms, which is great. I'm excited to talk about that with Casey. And

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  you can check out The Verge, everywhere The Verge is, on every platform. It's usually slash Verge. And you can go on iTunes and you can hit the button and give us a review, which I want you to do, for five stars. That's it. Rock and roll. Goodbye. Paul. Promo code.