Apple event preview, social media hearings, and monopoly week

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, Russell, and Dieter dedicate half the show to The Verge’s monopoly week, which dives into the future of tech monopolies. They also discuss the social media hearings that happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. In the second half of the show, the crew updates us on what to expect for next week’s Apple event, from the mysterious third phone to the updated AirPods rumors. There’s a whole lot in between that — like a whole section dedicated to Roombas — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 01:33 - Trump says Amazon, Facebook, and Google represent a ‘very antitrust situation’ 08:08 - The 7 biggest moments from Wednesday’s social media hearings 26:13 - This week in Elon Musk with Sean O’Kane 30:39 - The 9 most plausible rumors about the new iPhones 35:28 - Pixel 3 XL found in a Lyft, had already leaked enough for driver to recognize it 37:39 - New 6.5-inch iPhone X model reportedly called the ‘iPhone XS Max’ 38:25 - Third-party USB-C to Lightning cables are reportedly happening 42:41 - Five things to expect at the Apple event next week 45:16 - Paul’s weekly segment “The decline of dirt” 50:59 - Google’s Pixel 3 event will take place on October 9th 51:53 - BMW is the latest automaker to introduce its own in-car voice assistant 52:04 - Netflix and YouTube are most throttled mobile apps by US carriers, new study says 52:20 - Razer confirms it’s working on a second-generation Razer Phon 53:17 - Samsung teases foldable smartphone launch for later this year Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. You know what's not smart? Flying your drone on a windy day. That's not smart. But you know what is smart? Hiring with ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter's powerful technology finds people with the right experience for your job and actively invites them to apply, so you get qualified candidates fast. Now, The Vergecast listeners can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/verge. That is ziprecruiter.com/verge. This episode of The Vergecast also brought to you by Microsoft Azure. Amplify your ideas and take advantage of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics on a trusted cloud that's designed to help you achieve more. Start your free account today at azure.com/trial.

• 0:37Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Podcast Experience. Dieter Bohn is here. Hi, Dieter.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Hi. This week, I'm your acquaintance on a first-name basis.

• 0:48Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good. Oh, good. Oh, you're at like, Dieter's at the XOXO Festival, so like, lots of acquaintances on first-name basis.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  Again, very topical. Paul Miller, how you doing, buddy?

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:58Nilay Patel?

  Did you hit record?

• 0:59Speaker 02

  I'm good. I am definitely recording. It's good, so I'm so good.

• 1:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm proud of you, man.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 1:09Nilay Patel?

  Just a huge week of things. It is Monopoly Week here at The Verge.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13Nilay Patel?

  A well-timed theme week.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  It definitely was.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  I'm a thimble this week, I think.

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  I've always been the car, and I shall remain the car. But Russell's here because, in addition to The Verge holding Monopoly Week, the United States government decided to hold Monopoly Week.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  Tons of hearings on Capitol Hill.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  Lots of statements. The Justice Department suggesting it would just start wandering around the states of our great nation, just asking questions.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was weird.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  That was a weird one. So, let's start at the start with Donald Trump.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say, he's sort of the font from which all this springs.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  As always. I don't know if this is connected to the hearings this week. So, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook, appeared in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee to talk about election interference with an empty chair from Google, which is a whole thing that we should talk about. And then Dorsey went on to talk to the House Intelligence Committee about moderation on Twitter.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  Which is a weird thing that also happened.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  It was a big day for Jack.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  Jack, he posted his heart rate online.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Yes, I actually really liked that. I thought that was a good move.

• 2:18Nilay Patel?

  It was good. But, and so that's like, happening. The Department of Justice suggested it would start working with states to talk about how platforms are stifling ideas. Which is incredible.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Well, and like state attorneys general, which is like a very weird, I have a lot of questions about how that's gonna work.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill called the Stop a Bezos bill.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:41Nilay Patel?

  Which is just, it's great, designed to tax Amazon for underpaying workers. There's just like a lot going on, and then our coverage of monopolies in general, we had Tim Wu earlier this week on the Vergecast, talking about the case to break up Facebook and why you just want to do it. But we gotta start with Trump.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  Who last week said, "Amazon, Facebook, and Google represent," and I quote, "a very antitrust situation."

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:04Nilay Patel?

  Not a regular antitrust situation.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  This was maybe a separate incident, but the reason he got mad at Google was, there was this thing where he Googled his name, I guess, and he's like, "When you Google my name, it's all negative things about me."

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  And not good things, which, who among us is not at this moment? But, um, and then this, and he was literally just like, this is in some ways, and then he sort of, you know, went on this, there were more tweets as there are, and was kind of really unhappy with Google, and I think this, and then, you know, within the next week, you get Orrin Hatch is sending a letter to the FTC saying, "Hey, we should really look at whether Google is a monopoly and maybe think about doing this." And Jeff Sessions is saying, "Hey, I'm meeting with a bunch of state attorney generals to talk about, you know, anti-competitive moderation practices."

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Now, I mean, that one maybe is more social network-y, but it's still, I mean, I think the other thing is because these hearings, which seemed from afar to be potentially not a great setup for Twitter, because Jack Dorsey has not really done this kind of thing, and he has a reputation of being kind of dopey in some circumstances.

• 4:24Nilay Patel?

  Jack Dorsey, his entire affect is that he's visiting you from the astral plane. And that he, he only has moments to spare before the vortex closes and he must go. Right?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  A Stephen Strange kind of thing. But anyway, he, he did, he came out really well, surprisingly.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  But Google just got kind of...

• 4:43Nilay Patel?

  Cause they weren't there.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Cause they weren't there, so people were just like, let me take two minutes to dump on Google and then ask Ms. Sandberg a lovely question.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  I will address these comments to the empty chair.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  I mean, we should, we should do like the congressional hearings and the antitrust. We should probably try and separate them with the, well, with the antitrust stuff, there's, there's a ton of smoke, there's a bunch of talk and like, it seems like there's, there's enough like people talking publicly that it's clear that there's a bunch, been a bunch of stuff happening privately. And the thing that I don't know is, did, was a bunch of stuff happening and then they, then they like talked to Trump and then Trump started saying stuff? Or did Trump start saying stuff and like, oh God, I guess this time we're actually going to start talking?

• 5:18Nilay Patel?

  All the information I can offer you about this, to answer this question, is the full quote that Trump gave to Bloomberg.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 5:24Nilay Patel?

  "I won't comment on the breaking up of whether that, or Amazon, or Facebook. It's, it's hard to quote Trump, I'm doing my best."

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:32Nilay Patel?

  "I won't comment on the breaking up of whether it's that, or Amazon, or Facebook. As you know, many people think it is a very antitrust situation, the three of them, but I just, I won't comment on that. Conservatives have been treated very unfairly by Google. I will tell you where there are some moments where we say, wow, that is really bad, what they're doing."

• 5:52Speaker 03

  It's really bad what they're doing, it's bad.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  But what if Donald Trump doesn't understand the difference between like, a social network and like a Google search engine? Because with that anonymous New York Times thing, he just tweeted the word treason? Question mark? And what if he thought he was doing a search?

• 6:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know. Okay. Dieter, I think from reading this, the answer to your question is, there have been people talking about it. There's a reason, you know, Tim Wu was on the show this week, talking about it. He's been talking about it. He's about to publish a book about it. I assume there are other, Tim knows a lot of people. I assume there's other folks he's talked to about it. So I imagine there's some like conversations happening about it and that those have filtered their way up through every level of the government. I just don't know if you can connect the hearings and this antitrust energy to what Trump is saying.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Well, I think my read on it honestly is that these things happen extremely slowly. And like, there were people under Obama who were quietly talking about this and then have gotten progressively louder. And anything that this translates to is probably going to be... Like, in terms of actual action, like, three to five years out in the horizon? Just because I don't think that any of the agencies that you'd be looking to to actually do something like this are currently in a position like the... It's the Department of Justice and the FTC, and like, they're not, they're just not there yet. I mean, again, I could be wrong, but...

• 7:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, the FTC is holding hearings next week.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  The FTC's... Well, they start next week, and they're gonna go for the, like, until January. So they're definitely interested in hearing about it. But I think the, one of the things that is frustrating about, like, going from reporting on tech to reporting on the government is that things, especially things like this, happen really, really slowly in government. And the result is that everyone's trying to catch it early, and so it's just like, do people in Congress say mean things about Google? And like, how, how mean are they willing to go? How far are they willing to go out on the limb? And the farther they go, the more you get nervous that something will eventually happen and will be really hard to stop once it starts happening. And so I think most of what happened this week was just sort of nudging that ball kind of further out.

• 8:08Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's talk about the hearings, then. So, first hearing.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:12Nilay Patel?

  Russell, at the point that you were making, you wrote a piece for us today, saying it's getting uncomfortable for Google.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, certainly.

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  So, let's talk about why there was an empty chair. Because there was indeed...

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:22Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is like, stagecraft of the highest order.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:24Nilay Patel?

  They've got the CEO of Twitter, the COO of Facebook, they asked Google to show up, Google said, "We'll send our, like, SVP of Public Policy." They said, "Not good enough."

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  Larry. They said, "We'll send our SVP of Public Policy." They said, "We'll take Sundar." They said, "No, you can have Ken Walker, SVP of Public Policy."

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:44Nilay Patel?

  And they said, "No, you're not allowed to come. We're putting an empty chair there."

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  That's, I mean, that's like, ridiculous.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Well, I think the interesting thing... So, I mean, like, Zuckerberg has played this game, too. Like, for a while, there was a warrant for his arrest in the European Union, because... Or, I think... Because there's one of these things, he was like, "Look, I just did this in the US. I don't really wanna, like, I can't just fly to Brussels every time people are mad at me." And they were like, "We have a warrant for your arrest." Like, "We require your presence." And like, I mean, I think it is a power play, and part of it is, you have to kinda come in and kiss the ring and recognize that you're like, subject to the power of the government. But also, one of the interesting things about it is, Google, and this is kind of one of the weird ways in which Google is a weird company.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  I don't know that Sundar actually would know a ton about, or I mean, would really be, like, certainly Larry Page. Like, what do you think Larry Page's take is on like, like, RT being on YouTube? Or like, or like, influence operations on YouTube and general moderation practices there? Like, what is his level of caring and knowing about that?

• 9:52Nilay Patel?

  But I think that is the point.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:54Nilay Patel?

  Fundamentally, the point is, you created these platforms, you've built them to this massive scale.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  He did not create YouTube. He just bought it and then it got bigger.

• 10:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, he, someone, Google.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Someone out there. But that's the thing, is it's so cellular that there's no, like, person high enough up to really say the thing. And I think that's the frustration, is they're like, "All right, like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, like, we can, we can like, yell at you, and then if you're unhappy, you can cause things downstream to happen that will be, will address our concerns." And just like, yeah, like, maybe Kent Walker was actually the highest level person who knows, like, who just deals with any of this stuff.

• 10:35Nilay Patel?

  No, the point is, you, Larry Page, are in charge of Alphabet, Google's one of your companies.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  We, the government, see there's weird conspiracy theories that pop up in search. I search for my own name, there's only bad news, I'd like to ask you about that. And YouTube is full of conspiracy theories.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, "Your problem, Larry Page."

• 10:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna hold you accountable.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:56Nilay Patel?

  If you don't show up, like, the next person down is the CEO of Google, which owns YouTube.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  We'll take that, right? Like, at least it says CEO, comma, Google on the name card.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:06Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, you're the most responsible person. Even if Larry Page is like, "Look, Sundar's got it, I'm doing flying cars and contact lenses that let you see through space." Like, he's, you know?

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:18Nilay Patel?

  At least you get the person who's the most accountable. The person who can be like, "The buck stops with me, I'm in charge of Google."

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:24Nilay Patel?

  Ken Walker, lovely guy, he's like, "I'm Google's lawyer. The buck, I will pass, my job is to pass the buck as fast as possible."

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:33Nilay Patel?

  Or to suggest that the buck legally does not exist.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Well, also, I think, I mean, I was surprised because I think as a journalist, a lot of the times I'm watching these things and it's sort of like, "Well, like, the senator said a bunch of stuff, and then Zuckerberg said a bunch of stuff we've already heard," and like, they just went back and forth for a while. But the people who are doing it, like, the people who are called in front of even this congressional committee, and like, it's not like they do anything. They're not gonna like, throw you in jail at the end of it.

• 12:03Nilay Patel?

  Unless you're in the European Union.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  But like, they really do not like it. They're like, getting yelled at, in I think a way that they rarely get yelled at as human beings.

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  I like, take the subway. Like, I'm subject to this level of scrutiny all the time. But, there's, like, I think if you're, if you're, you know, if you're Larry Page, like, this just never happens to you, and you're sort of not prepared for it. And so I do think there's an aspect of like, "All right, we have to fix YouTube, just so I stop having to go to Congress and talk to them." Because if, if this is a problem, I'm gonna get called in front of Congress again, and it's gonna ruin my whole week, and I just don't want that to happen. And like, that becomes the motivation.

• 12:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, fine, I'll take it, but they say no one-

• 12:44Speaker 03

  That's how our democracy works, yeah.

• 12:45Nilay Patel?

  Two people like, Larry Page is like, "Look, I wanna go to Burning Man."

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:51Nilay Patel?

  "Please fix YouTube moderation."

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that is 100% it. Cause there's never like, really gonna be an economic incentive to do it. So like, it really is just, we're going to make the executives, a senior enough executives' life inconvenient and unpleasant in this limited way, that, that will sort of mean something.

• 13:12Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so Google sends the empty chair.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, the chair was, was already there, but yeah, in, in abstractly, yeah.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Wouldn't it have been amazing if Google literally sent a chair, though?

• 13:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, a super colorful hilarious Google chair?

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Like, Congress demands that they send, that they, Congress doesn't like anybody they send, but they make them send somebody. It's like, "You must send us a nameplate with the word 'Google' on it. That is your contribution to this."

• 13:33Speaker 03

  And it has the little Google Home on top of it, so you can ask it questions about like-

• 13:38Nilay Patel?

  We've sent the Google Assistant.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  About the world, yeah.

• 13:41Nilay Patel?

  You're aware of it.

• 13:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so there's the two of them, there's the empty chair. What happens in this hearing?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  The thing was, the Congress, you know, the senators want to look tough. And so it was a really easy one for them to just dunk on Google. So Tom Cotton was mad that they backed out of the Project Maven, which had been a whole employee uprising. There were also a bunch of folks who were mad that, I think Marco Rubio specifically was mad that they were, again, as The Intercept reported, have this dragonfly project to get into China, the sort of censorship-friendly Google, which has been extremely controversial. And then just sort of a lot of unanswered questions about targeted advertising. And I think Rubio said maybe they were too arrogant to show up.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  But it was just like, it became this kind of dunk on Google and then ask, you know, Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey, like, you would never betray America like that.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  I mean, that was a literally, they were like, you would never put the interests of your own country against some project. And Sheryl Sandberg was like, I'm not familiar with what you're talking about, but as you've asked the question, no. And Jack Dorsey was like, yeah, no, me neither, I don't know. And that was the perfect thing, because the senator could look tough and be like, how dare you, Google? And then it completely let Twitter and Facebook off the hook, which has really not been how it went up to this point. Like, previously, Facebook was the kind of scapegoat figure. And Twitter and Google were like, look, we, you know, we wouldn't take these Russian ads. Well, we took a few of them, but it wasn't as bad. We never did this terrible stuff that Facebook did.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  And like, that was, and so that's the really scary thing, I think, is that like, mostly, Google has gotten off the hook from the tech backlash, such as it is. And this was kind of a little bit of a shift.

• 15:38Nilay Patel?

  In the piece you wrote today, you quote former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:43Nilay Patel?

  T-Wheels, I like to call him. Calling Google not showing up as, quote, "a strategic mistake of virtually incalculable proportions." Jeez, I mean, it was dumb. That's a lot. Yeah.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  Well, I also think, like, if you imagine what people like Tom Wheeler, like, do in their post-government careers, it's like, you sit on the board of Coca-Cola or wherever, and you, and they say, like, Congress is mad at me, what do I do? And he's like, well... You gotta show up. They're gonna yell at you a bit. It'll be fine. I'll talk you through it. But like, really, the like, you gotta show up is like, it really is important.

• 16:22Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, so there's, so Google like, made this error. But in the first meeting, Sandberg and Dorsey, they get asked to fight bots on their platforms. They got asked about deep fakes. Our next subhead here, right under all that, Marco Rubio suggested he'd beat up Alex Jones. Like, a lot going on.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. That was a real moment.

• 16:42Nilay Patel?

  But so the bots and the deep fakes, did you, when you were listening to these answers, did you feel they were sincere?

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Mostly. I think, like, I don't, I'm just like, not really impressed. I think people were, people were sort of impressed by like, that the members of Congress sort of knew about deep fakes and bots. And they were like, each, we've had four or five of these now. Depends if you count the diamond and silk one. And each time, they get a little bit better.

• 17:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  But I was, I'm always kind of like, are deep fakes really the concern? Is this actually, is this actually what we're worried about on Facebook? Or is this not, like, it's just sort of, I'm concerned about this. And then Jack Dorsey kind of runs his fingers through his beard and says, oh, yeah, it's very concerning. I'm also concerned about, we're working on it. And everyone sort of feels listened to and heard.

• 17:25Nilay Patel?

  Dorsey did a lot of, like, kicking his own ass. Like, he's like,

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Not enough.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  Our rules are confusing, and that is pretty bad. And we have been thinking about labeling the bots. And, gosh, I don't know. I'm just-

• 17:36Speaker 03

  He said that, he said their own policies, he was like, it's not like you could just sit down with a cup of coffee and understand them. And I was like, yeah, no, I know. I've been trying.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  I will say, I really hate that the government is at all involved in this, just because of all the grandstanding and the ring kissing. And it's very frustrating to me. But I will say, if, if all of these companies just had clear content policies, seems like so, so much could be simplified.

• 18:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the dream, right? Like, if only the United States of America had a clear content policy. But like, instead, we have like, the history of First Amendment regulations.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  A unified United States. I'm just saying, if every, if every, if every company had some sort of, in a sense, a contract with its users, right? Saying, hey, you're allowed to post anything on our, our site, which is ours, by the way, as long as you don't violate these things.

• 18:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  And, and then if, if the company starts-

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Blocking you when you haven't violated any of those things. You have some sort of right to, I don't know, appeal or say like, look, the contract, you're not honoring the contract that you made with me when you said, I could post on your site as long as I followed the rules. So what's up? I feel like there would be a clearer conversation here. Instead, there's these very amorphous, we're trying to, I mean, you know, Jack Dorsey acknowledged sort of what people have been calling shadow banning in the sense of, you know, we have an algorithm that's running, we have things that we think are bad, and sometimes it flags the wrong people as bad, and so we're trying to improve the algorithm. But without an ability to appeal to some clear set of rules, it's really hard to know.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  So Paul, are you saying that you're looking for like, an agreement for the end user who, for the license to use the software, like an end user license agreement, or something like that, is what you're saying?

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, like an EU LA.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  You need to manage the digital rights, the digital rights that people have.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  In the new millennium.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  We need to manage them somehow.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  Some sort of copyright millennium situation.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Also a policy about privacy.

• 19:51Nilay Patel?

  This has to stop. Everyone, everyone got the joke already.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Well, okay, I'll say, this is, so, the thing that, and, okay, so all platforms are bad in their own way. I will say, Facebook very, very recently introduced the ability to appeal when something has been removed, and it was very much applauded, but YouTube has been doing this forever, and they have been doing the three-strikes sort of system forever. And I think a lot of what we're seeing is just that Facebook and Twitter have been really inconsistent and bizarre and kind of under-resourced in moderation in general. But also, doing this stuff at scale is really complicated and hard, and that, that sort

• 20:38Speaker 03

  of crunch of resources of like, how do we do this for 2 billion people at once, is, has been what shapes the lack of like, a clear policy, which then kind of feeds back of like, none of these rules make sense because we're, we're like, building the plane as we're flying.

• 20:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Paul, I completely agree with you. If all these companies had extremely clear rules that were based on their values, and you could participate or not, and they would like, say... We don't want this on our platform, we're cool with it. That would be great. They're not doing that. I think these hearings, as grandstanding and silly as they are, are the pressure that the government can put on these platforms to like, shape up and improve. And then I think there's also the problem of, this isn't just a consumer product problem. Right? It's not just in the market of United States social network users, the platforms are treating people unfairly or inconsistently. It's also, they're being misused by foreign governments to interfere in our elections.

• 21:41Nilay Patel?

  Which is what this first hearing was about. Right? The second hearing was about Dorsey and content moderation on Twitter. So the first hearing was very much Sandberg and Dorsey saying, "This is a real problem, it's out of control, we need to take steps to fix it. Here are the steps we're taking." And then, you know, the Senate saying, "If only Google was here to tell us about their steps to protect the republic." It was the second hearing that got into moderation. And I think, as Russell was saying earlier, those things are getting lumped together. Because you do want to moderate out, very harshly, Russian election ads. Right? Like, you don't want those in our system. But they often look like regular election ads. And like, what computer is going to be able to figure that out is like, a challenging problem.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  Well, also, I mean, as they've tried to put in restrictions, the thing they've said is, it's, you can't do it like the, like television ads, where you say, "This is a campaign ad." Because so much of it is motivating people around specific issues. But so then they end up labeling things as political content, or not political content? Which is really dicey. Like, it's, A, it's very hard to do in a consistent way. And sort of do it in an automated way. But also, it's just a really sort of squishy distinction of like, what is, what is politics and what is ethics? And this is like, and just the whole thing has become, just like, drawing a line around what the sensitive stuff is,

• 23:11Speaker 03

  has proven really difficult.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  In my perfect world, they'd allow all the Russian ads. And that they'd also work on doing this thing of showing who's, who's buying the ads.

• 23:22Nilay Patel?

  But the Russians, but they're lying.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  That's a beautiful world.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  But no, when, when, when the Russian government starts a dummy corporation called, the Center for Truth in Government. And what you see is the Center for Truth in Government bought this ad. Your mind as a consumer of Facebook does not go to the Russian government is lying to me to get me to vote for somebody else. Well, here's an idea. Don't trust ads.

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  Coming up next, we're going to hear from Microsoft Azure on how intelligent data is impacting the world of sports in this advertising segment from Microsoft Azure.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  The Portland Trailblazers have a loyal following.

• 24:04Speaker 05

  We have a building with 20,000 seats in it roughly. A little over half of them are season ticket holders and those are filled every night.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  But the challenge is filling the other 10,000 seats. And the person who is up to the challenge is Mike Schumacher. He's the Director of Analytics for the Trailblazers.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  We have all these leads and a lot of people that we could contact via email or like social media, but we also have a sales staff that can reach out on the phone.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  In sales, a call can make a world of difference. But calling some 200,000 people who went to see the Trailblazers last year is unrealistic. That's where machine learning comes in. Rohan Kumar is the Corporate Vice President of the Azure Data Team at Microsoft.

• 24:49Speaker 06

  Predictive analytics can be used to drive a much deeper customer engagement. You could essentially think about predicting customer behavior. You know, data tells you things which your intuition doesn't.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  For the Portland Trailblazers, it meant using the machine learning capabilities in Microsoft Azure to find that hidden fan.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  Things like watching specific sports channels. If you are a heavy LinkedIn user or if you're a cord cutter and you have, say, a streaming device, those are also data points that were more predictive in identifying someone that was interested in purchasing tickets.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Mike and his team were able to get more Trailblazer fans to games using Azure's workbench. The result? In the 2016-2017 season, the sales campaign got one out of four people to buy tickets instead of one out of 20. Curious about how AI and machine learning can transform the way to do business? Sign up for a free Azure account today and play around. Get started at azure.com/trial, A-Z-U-R-E.com/trial.

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  I'd like to thank our advertiser, Microsoft Azure, for sponsoring The Vergecast and supporting the Vox Media Podcast Network. Here's what we're gonna do. We're on This Week in Elon. Liz is on vacation this week. This Week in Elon with Sean O'Kane. We're gonna come back, we're gonna talk about some Apple rumors. Check it out, This Week in Elon.

• 26:14Speaker 07

  I'm Sean O'Kane, transportation reporter at The Verge, filling in for Liz Lopato, and this is The Week in Elon. Now, of course, when I fill in, it's like the first kind of slow week in Elon ever, but to be honest, after the manic Musk-related month of August, I'm actually not complaining. The biggest thing that happened this week was an extension of the now months-long saga of Elon Musk suggesting a guy is a pedophile. Quick recap: early this summer, a youth soccer team got trapped in a cave in Thailand. There was a huge search and rescue effort. Elon Musk started building and testing a small submarine tube thing that he thought would help get the kids out of the tight, partially flooded cave, but it never worked out. The kids were rescued regardless. One of the guys working on the rescue effort took a shot at Musk's attempt to help. Musk claimed on Twitter out of the blue that it's possible the guy's a pedophile, and

• 26:59Speaker 07

  last week, he actually doubled down on that claim by trying to say how strange it was that the rescuer in question hadn't sued him. Turns out, the rescuer is working with a lawyer to prepare a lawsuit. This week, we learned from BuzzFeed that he essentially tripled down on this claim. You see, after the double down, BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Mack reached out to Musk about the potential lawsuit. Musk kind of snapped back at him, saying he didn't know what he was talking about, claimed Mack was, quote, "defending child rapists," and said, "I fucking hope he sues me." Now, Musk told Mack this, along with a few other choice things, in an email that he prefaced with the phrase "off the record." I'm not gonna get too deep into this, but typically journalists treat off-the-record conversations as a two-way street. For Musk to just start his email that way and then unload a tirade without Mack agreeing

• 27:44Speaker 07

  to that term left Mack with the opportunity to basically publish Musk's comments in full, and he did. Now, why does all of this matter? You could argue that it doesn't directly affect any of Musk's companies, but it definitely does indirectly. Musk, who says he's been putting in 100-plus-hour work weeks at Tesla, is a total sucker for distractions and has a penchant for spending spare time picking fights in places where other people would just be fine to let things be. Whether it's trying to build a tunnel to Dodger Stadium or arguing over how many tears he might have shed while on the phone with the New York Times, or swiftly announcing and then swiftly abandoning an effort to take Tesla private, he just can't stop himself. And all those things have happened just in the last few weeks, mind you, which is wild, because at the beginning of August,

• 28:28Speaker 07

  Musk seemed to be at peace with Tesla for the first time in a very long while. The company had finally hit his ambitious production targets for the Model 3, even though those goals had been delayed a bunch already. He sounded relaxed on a quarterly call with analysts. He even apologized for having lashed out at them on a similar call earlier in the year. And then all this self-inflicted chaos hit. You know, for a moment, it actually seemed like the storm over Tesla had lifted. But looking back now, it feels more like the beginning of August was just the eye of the hurricane passing through. Listen, Tesla still has to prove it can keep up the pace of Model 3 deliveries, which is key if Musk wants the company to ever turn a steady profit. Meanwhile, there are lawsuits piling up over the privatization attempt, two ongoing SEC investigations, and a TIF with the National Labor Relations Board.

• 29:13Speaker 07

  Business Insider also published a few new huge stories this week about poor workplace conditions at Tesla's Gigafactory, sourced from 42 current and former employees. And there are legitimate questions being raised about the company's home solar energy business, which is kinda maybe seeming to go nowhere right now. All I'm saying is there were plenty of fires to put out before Musk took a boring company flamethrower to the month of August. The BuzzFeed thing is enlightening, because it shows that even when Musk seems to go a bit quiet in public, he's still picking some of these fights behind the scenes. So while this might have felt like a particularly quiet week in Elon, there's no reason to believe anything's changed. In fact, one of the few things Elon Musk did tweet this week is that he's going to appear on Joe Rogan's radio show after we tape this segment.

• 29:57Speaker 07

  I don't know about you, but that sounds like more thunder in the distance to me. Anyway, this has been Your Week in Elon. Liz will be back next week with all the madness that's sure to ensue.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  It's time, next week is the Apple event. Dieter and I are gonna be there.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 30:10Nilay Patel?

  Veeran Pablik, our video director, who by the way, this week, put out amazing review of the Mavic 2 Zoom and the Mavic 2 Pro. Go look for that on YouTube. But Dieter and Veeran and I will be there.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  I don't know if we've ever published more detailed information about how a video camera works than we have in that drone review. It's, uh, it's pretty amazing.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  My favorite part of that video is after a lengthy discussion of color grading, uh, Veeran stops, looks at the camera and says, "But let's get back to talking about D-Log." It was amazing. It's like perfect. Alright, we talked about a bunch of stuff last week. Some new rumors this week. Most troublesome to me is the fact that Apple has chosen to name their phone after my daughter. Which is truly truly something else. So the rumor is, this was 95 Mac and Boy Genius Report reported it, that the larger iPhone XS, we, the iPhone XS Max. Look, I know a lot of people from Apple listen to the show. I know a lot of them follow me on the Gram.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Here's what I think about the name. Shut the company down and, uh, so, uh,

• 31:16Speaker 02

  whatever the Dell quote, do that.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Dell said long ago.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  So the going theory, the going theory is they can't call it a plus because the plus implies it's got something more beyond just a bigger screen and a bigger battery. And traditionally, the iPhone, uh, you know, 6, 7, 8 pluses had like an extra lens or some other extra thing on top of what was available on the normal size iPhone. But that the normal size iPhone XS is going to have all the same stuff. The only difference between the XS and the XS Max is that the XS Max will have a bigger screen and more battery. And that is not enough to imply it's a plus.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  Wait, hold on, hold on.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  I think that's dumb. I think it's overthinking it.

• 31:56Nilay Patel?

  You have to be so deep in like the Mac web to give a shit about that.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Completely agree.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  And it's not like legally, like they'll, they'll, like I'll sue them having bought a Macs and being like, I assume that this would have an extra. It's just that like in their own logic of how naming things works.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  Yes, in Apple world. So instead they've stolen my daughter's name. I'm just putting that out there. We don't know if it's true.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  I'm more angry about the X versus 10 thing because seeing iPhone X, like I've trained myself to think iPhone X and I'm doing okay with that, but something about putting the S next to it, iPhone XS, and then having Max, which also ends in an X in it, it makes you say XS. It doesn't make you say XS. Seeing like all those X's there.

• 32:40Nilay Patel?

  Yes. It is very confusing. We don't know if it's true. It's just two sites of the track record are saying it's true.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  I just, I can't wait for a couple of years from now and Nilay has to explain why, why he chose to name his daughter after an iPhone model.

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  It's the worst.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Hey, can I drop a hot exclusive?

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  Yes, Paul.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  I have reason to believe one or some of the iPhone models, or possibly the Pixel 3, or both phones will have CBRS support.

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  What is CBRS?

• 33:14Speaker 02

  It's a stepping stone. It's the new 3.5 gigahertz spectrum. It's a stepping stone to 5G.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  So it works, works for small cells. It's so 3.5 gigahertz, very similar in like capacity to wifi, but there's this whole new like way that they're doing it. Basically, if the spectrum is unoccupied, you can broadcast on CBRS. So like for a building or stadium, that works. If a priority license shows up, you have to get out of the way, but there's still a little bit of spectrum left. So I'm, it's pretty exciting.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Wait, who's got the priority license?

• 33:54Speaker 02

  They're called PALs. P A L, which's Priority Access License.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  But like, who are they? Is it like the honcho from Verizon comes in and he gets?

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Well, I think the FCC is still trying to figure out exactly how they're gonna break it down, but basically the map will have, the biggest priority is the Navy, because they still use this spectrum a little bit on a couple of ships. So if you're on a coast where these Navy ships dock and they fire up their radar, whatever uses 3.5 gigahertz, they will send a message to like a central server that will say, yo, get off of this section of the spectrum.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  I, I'm not thrilled about this. The Navy's gonna be, gonna be scurrying up my wifi? I've had it up, I've had it up to here with the Navy.

• 34:41Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so Paul, why do you believe, so this is, they basically have a new radio, right? That's using small cells for last mile. Why do you believe-

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Their last, last block.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  Why do you believe that either iPhones or the Pixel will have such a radio?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Well, a company kind of out of the blue contacted me called Xtenet and they were like, "Yo, based on the, you know, the upcoming phone releases, we thought you should be aware of this cool technology called CBRS." And so they gave me this whole briefing based on a context that it seems pretty obvious.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  So obviously, I have no concrete information or reason to know for sure. Qualcomm has the only known, like, ready CBRS modem.

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  There's a very similar spectrum that's already used in Japan.

• 35:32Nilay Patel?

  What are the chances that they rolled you-

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Google tested out CBRS back in like 2016.

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  And they're putting out like an HTC phone that's like four inches thick.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  I may have been tricked by an advertisement from Xtenet.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  But if not, this is very exciting technology.

• 35:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, so is that a plus, Dieter?

• 35:50Speaker 02

  And Verizon's gonna, it said there will be phones on CBRS by, on their network by the end of the year.

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  That's a plus? Weird radio band you never heard before?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  The plus versus max is whatever. Max sounds trashier. It's worse in some ways aesthetically. Mostly, I'm just mad that like, how many more things are we gonna tack on to the end of the word iPhone? Uh, you know, my, my Twitter joke about this is that we're entering 2012 iPhone brand name territory here. It's like, stop, just call it, just call it iPhone 1 again. Call it iPhone A and B.

• 36:25Nilay Patel?

  You've got iPhone, you've got the regular iPhone, you've got the iPhone 4G Plus that runs on CBRS. Uh, you've got the iPhone 4G Plus Max, you've got the iPhone-

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Which is like, you get an iPhone 4G Plus, you get to hang out with Eli's baby. They go together.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm so mad about this. I really dislike it.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  I will say the way-

• 36:46Nilay Patel?

  She came out months before the iPhone.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Just keep repeating that for the next five years because that's what's coming for you.

• 36:55Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  I will say the way that cars handle this, having brushed up a little bit on the transportation section, but like Ford makes a lot of different cars, but when they come out with a new car, they just have some new name for it.

• 37:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  And it doesn't have, it doesn't really tell you anything about its relation to the other cars. It's just like, this one's a Civic and this one's an Accord. And you're like, what's the difference between the Honda Civic and the Honda Accord? And the guy's like, well, let me explain it to you. But they just, they just have different names for different things.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  There's all kinds of trim models for cars. Here's what I think Apple should do. They should sell the naming rights like stadiums.

• 37:31Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, to Qualcomm.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  The iPhone Qualcomm.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so two, three phones, we think.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  A big iPhone XS, a little iPhone XS, and then this very mysterious LCD phone, which seems to be the one that no one knows about that hasn't leaked in any way.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Well, in like, a few ways, but not, not in like a super substantial, we definitely know. Like, we expect it to be dual SIM. There's been a rumor that it's gonna be delayed, I believe. And, yeah.

• 38:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we have straight up pictures of the other phones in the watch, right? I mean, like, this one, there's not like a hardware leak or like, you know what I mean?

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:14Nilay Patel?

  There's, there's just this like, supply chain rumor that they're gonna do it. Then, this is like a new thing from last week. We talked about all this last week, except we didn't know the name, which again, I wanna just remind everyone, it's extraordinarily, personally frustrating to me. USB-C charging, they're gonna bundle the cable in the phone. And then, we found out this week, it appears Apple's gonna start letting third parties make MFI USB-C lightning cables. I'm still just generally up in arms over Apple's MFI program in lightning. It's crazy that they added fast charging to the phone and then didn't let anyone make cables for it for a year. And now, they're like slowly- I mean, they're just like driving you into their ecosystem. That's what they do.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, we should, um, we should be clear if you're, if you're, if only like have been half glancing at the news. When Neil says there's gonna be a USB C cable for the iPhone, that means that USB in the other end is still lightning.

• 39:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  They're never gonna put USB C in the iPhone because they hate consumers.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  But are you, are you saying, are you saying that me with my old MacBook Pro and my old Anchor charger and my old charging bricks, all of those will not work with the new cable?

• 39:24Nilay Patel?

  No. So you have like a 29 watt Anchor charger, right? For your MacBook Pro?

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, with USB A plugs.

• 39:32Nilay Patel?

  With USB.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no, no, I don't charge my MacBook with my Anchor. I'm saying all the ways I charge my phone. I plug it into my MacBook Pro that doesn't have any USB C. Plug it into my Anchor that doesn't have any USB. I plug it into like an old Samsung.

• 39:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Charging brick that doesn't have USB C.

• 39:50Nilay Patel?

  No, I think they're gonna switch the default in the box of the iPhone to be a USB C brick with a USB C to lightning cable that does fast charging. But it's just power, so you can probably still use an old lightning cable with a type A plug at the other end.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Do you think they'll ship a type A cable and a type C cable? That seems not very appley.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  I think they're gonna, they're gonna push everybody to see. That's the rumor.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  There's also the rumor they're not gonna include the dongle, right?

• 40:14Nilay Patel?

  Yes. And then they're gonna take away the headphone dongle. And the final blow.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Which is Best Buy's best selling Apple product.

• 40:20Nilay Patel?

  And, and as it shall be forever. Uh, another, another product that Apple will not let anyone else make. No MFI headphone dongles in, in the market because Apple doesn't want other people to make them. Uh, no battery cases with headphone jacks, as far as I can tell either. They've announced some and they've kind of like fizzled away. Apple's control that port, man. Really, really gets me. You know, Max is gonna end up working for the EFF one day. That's my plan for her. She's gonna, she's gonna bring down the scheme. Uh, and then there's obviously watch, we haven't heard anything new about the watch since last week. So I mean, I think we're expecting to go there, see a bunch of new stuff. And then presumably the phones and the watch will come out fat. Like immediately, the third phone, like Dieter's saying, there's a rumor of a delay. And then we're gonna see what, a bunch of software updates. We'll see tvOS 12, we'll see

• 41:03Nilay Patel?

  Mojave, we'll see iOS 12. iOS 12 isn't like beta 45. They just released it today. I mean, they did ship the beta update that made it stop telling everyone there was an update. So that was a win.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  That was hell.

• 41:16Nilay Patel?

  And that's it. There's not much more. Like, we're gonna go, we're gonna come back.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think that they're gonna do Macs and iPads at this event. That seems like too much.

• 41:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I just realized calling it the Macs is gonna make everybody confused with Max.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, someone was tweeting me, like, you walk into the Apple Store and be like, show me the Macs. I'm like, which one?

• 41:34Speaker 02

  Also, for a very uninformed customer, there's the iPhone XS, but there's the Pixel XL. So obviously, the iPhone is smaller.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:48Nilay Patel?

  It's just not good. Hopefully, they do something else. Speaking of which, the Pixel 3 XL was left in a cab.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, left, yeah.

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  And our headline is great. It had already leaked so much that the driver recognized it.

• 42:03Nilay Patel?

  We're expecting that, what, next month sometime?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, the rumor is October 9th. And yeah, that's, we're just waiting on that. I do, I am team little Pixel, I think, this time around. Not because of the notch. I'm like, the notch is big and dopey and I love dunking on it on Twitter. But it's more like, I just, I don't need a phone that big. I have, switching between the iPhone, the Pixel 3 XL and the iPhone 10, or Pixel 2 XL, excuse me, and the iPhone 10, like, I just don't need that big a phone. And like, I think I'll be fine with a smaller one.

• 42:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have the Pixel 2 XL and it just seems it's a surfboard. Although, then I look at like the Note 9, I'm like, what if I had a bigger surfboard? There was an answer, we were talking, the AirPods 2 probably come in, seems like it, AirPower, maybe the mix. And I was joking, like, they bought Beats and they're just slowly killing the Beats headphone brand. But then today, Beats signed a deal to become the NBA's official headphones. So Beats, they're there for all of your leftover W1 chips.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Would you say that, would you say that the Beats go on?

• 43:03Nilay Patel?

  I, I wanna, I'm gonna make you listen to advertising again.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Before advertising, air power is gonna happen.

• 43:12Nilay Patel?

  With certainty, or are you talking, did a citizens band radio service guy call you and tell you that?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  They promised they'd release it and they haven't said peep about it since.

• 43:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Air power is the next, FaceTime will be an open standard. Hmm, that's rough.

• 43:28Nilay Patel?

  We'll see.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  We gotta get our power puns ready for next week. No, just, there's gonna be a lot of power-related news. We're gonna have to come up with a lot of headlines. Power struggle, something like that. I don't know.

• 43:42Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna break for an ad. When we come back, my friend Paul Miller is gonna do a thing.

• 43:48Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Republic. On the show, we talk about startups developing new technology, building new services, and launching products. You hear about their journey and growth. But you ever wish you could get in on the ground floor as an investor? Now, thanks to Republic, you can. Republic lets anyone, anywhere in the world, invest in promising startups with as little as $10. When you invest in Republic, you own an actual stake in a company's future, meaning if they succeed, so do you. Whether you want to invest in tech startups, female founders, or another thing we've got figured out how to sell on podcasts like socks, head over to republic.co and become an angel investor today. That's republic.co.

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  All right, this ad's really weird, because it's not really an ad. It's from our own company. Well, it is an ad. Just go with me on this. It's for Chorus, which is the platform that The Verge runs on, and Vox.com runs on, and Eater runs on, and all the other sites run on. Chorus is now open for business. If you are a premium publisher, you can come onto the Chorus platform. The Chorus team wants you to know that it will solve the headaches of modern digital publishers. Chorus offers a best-in-class suite of publishing tools for modern multimedia storytelling, for smart data-informed multi-platform content distribution, and integrated premium advertising, which I know we all love the most. When we started The Verge, the thing that we saw first was an early version of Chorus. And now it's like a software product. We have a software company. And you can buy software from that company. You should do it.

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  You can buy software from a company. It's wild. It's a wild idea for Vergecast listeners to buy software from Vox Media. But you can. You find out more about licensing Chorus at voxmedia.com/encourse.

• 45:16Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul, we're back.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Yo.

• 45:19Nilay Patel?

  Every week, my friend.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  You know, you're sponsored this week.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  I know.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  It's a great week for you to be sponsored, Mr. Smash the System.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Every week I do a segment that is sometimes sponsored and is called The Decline of Dirt. The Decline of Dirt is brought to you by Darn Tough Vermont Socks, proud supporter of and probable inspiration for the sock emoji. Thank you Unicode 10.0. Made in the USA and unconditionally guaranteed for life. Visit darnough.com/verge for 20% off your first order. That's darnough.com/verge. And I don't think I'd be speaking out of line when I say, "Do your own research on socks and then buy the best socks that you can find on the internet." I don't think Darn Tough is gonna is gonna contest that claim at all. Okay.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  The Decline of Dirt. Uh, there's a new Roomba vacuum.

• 46:19Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  This is very exciting, right? Roomba goes around your house very slowly, collects a small quantity of dirt and puts it in a box, but then you have to take the box out of the Roomba and throw in the trash, right? You're interacting with dirt. There's a new Roomba, like the Core i7, what's it called? The i7 Plus, that has a station that it plugs into, sucks all the dirt out, and you get about 30 loads, right? So now, you're only dealing with dirt like 1 in 30 times. But maybe soon, there'll be another robot that will maybe put that little trash can to a bigger trash can, and then you only have to deal with garbage when you're taking it to the street. And you know, like, so on and so on, soon we'll

• 47:02Speaker 02

  deal with less dirt overall. Also, the new Roomba maps your house, spies on you with a low-res camera, and it costs $1,000. Or $9.40.

• 47:13Nilay Patel?

  I bought one. I bought one right away.

• 47:18Nilay Patel?

  Tell me about this house mapping. That's the thing that I'm most interested in because I've bought and returned a dozen of these vacuums because they're all dumb.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Well, it's

• 47:27Speaker 01

  They've done the house mapping before, but it was, it didn't persist from like session to session. And so like they could show you what they cleaned, but it looked like an old Delta map, basically. But it wasn't like great. And I think on this model, it persists longer and they can use it to improve the algorithm for where it goes to clean.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Well, and also it's going to keep track of where it cleans and you'll be able to, for instance, say Alexa, have my Roomba clean the living room, right? So you could like label the rooms and have it go do

• 47:58Speaker 03

  Wait, is there, there's like an actual integration with personal assistants? Like you can do an if this, then that, like?

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, Alexa or, or Google Assistant.

• 48:07Nilay Patel?

  They built skills for all these things.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  Man.

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But I just want to point out that it is

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Hey Google, clean the living room.

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  It is extremely obvious that Dieter bought this thing and then read the spec sheet a thousand times and excited.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Shut up. You shut your mouth.

• 48:22Nilay Patel?

  What is it? Why doesn't it have a low res camera?

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Because it's just for mapping and navigation.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I have my Roomba, I've got the Roomba 980, which is the best top of the line one so far. And I bought it because it's the only model of Roomba that doesn't just completely get destroyed by cat hair. It works really well. It's easy to clean, but having to pull that dustbin out, it's, it's a pain. And I am very excited to like have to do that once a month instead of once a day. My favorite, the favorite part of it, the best part of my day, the best part of my day is when I come home and I go walking around my house looking for the Roomba because it's inevitably gotten stuck on something. And it's always like, oh, little guy, who'd you get in a fight with today? Oh, you and that shoe just really went at it, didn't you? Here, let me help you out. And like to not have that moment of joy, I'm excited about it because I hate joy.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so it has the camera to avoid shoes?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  No, it has a camera to map stuff.

• 49:17Nilay Patel?

  Oh, alright.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  I mean, the fundamental thing is we have to translate the Roomba's understanding of its space into like human understanding because we were going to name rooms for it to go clean. And so that's where like the mapping comes in. If it was just like this, this like robot intelligence wanders around your house cleaning, we wouldn't need that.

• 49:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's not that intelligent. Like I like I've had one.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  I didn't say it was that smart. I just like this is it has some understanding of like where the walls are and like as long as you didn't have to talk to it, that was fine. But once you have to talk to it, it has to do this more invasive stuff.

• 49:57Nilay Patel?

  I think my perspective on this is every year on this show, I buy a Pixel phone when it comes out. And this year, we're going to debate whether I'm buying a $1,000 vacuum or a $1,000 Android phone.

• 50:12Nilay Patel?

  All right. Uh, I'm, Dieter, I'm happy for you, man. I'm happy that that you bought a robot. I think we should all be.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm happy for me, too.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  And Russell raises a very good point about the trade offs between AI and privacy.

• 50:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the, the Roomba people had to be like, look, we're not storing this data. I mean, we're storing some of it, but we're going to keep it safe. Like.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  I mean, that's what they say.

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They're like, we're not going to sell the map of your house. I think it'd be great if Roomba pivoted to like extremely granular maps of where dirt is in America.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would wa- I would look at that infographic. I would click on that content.

• 50:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like when TiVo does its aggregate data and they're like, everyone pause this commercial tonight.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Where is the dirt?

• 50:53Nilay Patel?

  From his like, in the living room.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  It's, it's by the fridge. Makes sense.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, hang on. This will be all news by the time you hear, listen to this podcast, but Google invites for October 9th hardware event just went out.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wow.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  It'll be in New York.

• 51:07Nilay Patel?

  Hey, that's fun.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Hell of a town.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we were just talking about that. And we think that's just the Pixel or you're going to do more?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  I mean, there's, there's the two pixels and there have been pretty, there've been a ramp, there's been a ramp of rumors about a new Chromebook that might be a detachable Chromebook codename Nocturne.

• 51:23Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  And if you go look at the dev channel for Chrome OS, you'll see a bunch of very interesting stuff that they're doing to make it more material designing and more Androidy and better on tablets.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  That is an unusually goth codename. Nocturne.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  They, all their codenames used to be like classic Metroid characters or classic Nintendo characters.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's more on brand. Nocturne is like, man, yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, right?

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Quoth the Raven.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  Notch turn.

• 51:52Nilay Patel?

  All right, lightning round. BMW latest automaker to introduce its own in-car voice assistant. Dieter's just shaking his head.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  I mean, fine, whatever.

• 52:03Nilay Patel?

  Russell, Netflix and YouTube are the most throttled mobile apps by US carriers, new study says.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, throttling, it's bad, I'm not a fan, but if you have to throttle something, YouTube is probably a good choice.

• 52:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, take the data away. We just live in a 480p world now.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:19Nilay Patel?

  That's where we're gonna be. Paul, Razer confirms it's working on a second-generation Razer phone.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Success.

• 52:27Nilay Patel?

  Sliding around is gonna go nowhere.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  That sounded like a one-off, right? Razer phone, one-off. But no, maybe it's a two-off.

• 52:34Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they're gonna up the refresh rate on this one? Like, what more can Razer do? They've added all of the features.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  I have no idea.

• 52:43Nilay Patel?

  I was just hoping you were excited.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Add CBRS.

• 52:46Nilay Patel?

  Paul, did you get a job as a CBRS lobbyist? What is going on over there?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Paul, if you're so deep on CBRS, can you tell me about this thing where they're considering taking away the portion of the citizen ban that gets used for sending out the atomic clock time so that different devices can stay in sync with the atomic clock?

• 53:06Speaker 02

  I have no idea about that, but I bet if CBRS is involved, it did a good job.

• 53:14Nilay Patel?

  Paul, I think it's time for you to appear before Congress to talk about atomic clocks. Dieter, Samsung teases foldable smartphone launch for next year. Or later this year, actually. You think they're gonna put out a foldable smartphone this year? Not much time left.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  I think they could. I think that it's about time. I think that, like, we've seen enough prototypes that it's possible. I think that the first iteration is gonna be very interesting and ultimately disappointing because in order to make a foldable phone, you need to make space for a hinge. In order to make space for a hinge, you need to make space for batteries, and... I don't know. I don't wanna crap on it before we've seen it, but I do think that we should not get our hopes up too, too high for the first version.

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited. It's my next phone. Okay, lastly, I just wanna point out the pace of new mirrorless cameras coming out is very high right now, which is very exciting. So last week, there was a bunch of Nikon stuff. This week, Canon put out the EOS R system, which is their big new mirrorless system, has actually killer lens selection. And then Fujifilm put out the new XT3. If you're-

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Which charges via USB-C and has a headphone jack and has a microphone jack.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  If I had LTE, I would just use a phone.

• 54:18Nilay Patel?

  You hear that Fuji? Razor can do it, so can you.

• 54:23Nilay Patel?

  I would absolutely, that's the next conversion points is one of these mirrorless cameras is just like, yeah, it's also like a mid-range Android phone.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Wasn't that the last thing Kodak did before it like officially died?

• 54:34Nilay Patel?

  No, a bunch of-

• 54:35Speaker 02

  I definitely, definitely went to a meeting with some camera company that was, there was an Android phone on the back of the camera.

• 54:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, there was a minute when just gluing a mid-range Android phone to the back of your thing was how you made everything smart. And you could like always see the interface. I'm just saying, we, everyone went at it the wrong way. They took point and shoot cameras, and then they put mid-range Android phones in the back, which was mistaken. I'm saying, the cameras are getting real good. Take one of these mirrorless things, put, just glue like an S9 to the back of it. Samsung, you could do it. Samsung made this product. It was just not a very good camera. Anyway.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  What if it was modular, where you could like take the camera on and off of the phone?

• 55:17Nilay Patel?

  Like a mod?

• 55:18Speaker 01

  That's literally what Red is doing.

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  Like a moto mod?

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Their module is like, a thing that can take any, literally any, the SLR lens that you want. They're like, well, make it, we're making a module and you can attach anything to it. It'll be great.

• 55:30Nilay Patel?

  They're also out there being like, it turns out we had no idea how to build a phone. It's gonna be a little delayed.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  But the Vergecast has now arrived at the point where we've invented modular phones. So I'm gonna wrap this one up.

• 55:45Nilay Patel?

  Just some stuff to plug. Home of the Future with Grant Imahara, great to work with by the way. He sent us such a nice note today about how much fun he had doing this. But Home of the Future is wrapped up. Go on the YouTube channel, check that out with Grant. You can listen to all of Converge with Casey Newton. You can also listen to Interface. If you were into what we were talking about today, Casey is covering social media democracy every single day with that newsletter. Go to verge.com/Interface, check it out. You can also listen, if you like Casey, you can listen to Recode Media this week. Peter Kafka had the week off. Casey hosted Recode Media this week. Check that out. You can also listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can follow us everywhere at Verge. You can go to Apple Podcasts, rate, review, leave a comment.

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  I am dying to know what you think of the interview episodes. Tweet at me, I'm reckless. Russell is at Russell Brandon. Dieter's Baklon. Paul's Future Paul. And a little thing to hype, Kara Swisher has a new podcast coming out in the fall. Keep an eye out for that. Alright, that's it. Rock and roll.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Paul. Paul, promo code.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Vergecast, brought to you by Audi e-tron. Despite all of its technology, there's a lot that the all-new Audi e-tron doesn't offer, that's doesn't offer. For example, it has no tailpipe emissions and no need to fill up at the gas station. You just plug it in at home. Quattro all-wheel drive system offers no reason not to tackle roads in almost any weather. And a long-range capabilities and high-speed charging, e-tron is a new way to think about electric mobility, which makes sense. It's the first fully electric vehicle from Audi. e-tron was built to defy the elements and upend the conventional wisdom, so in truth, it's not lacking anything, a twist that you did not see coming. After all, it isn't just an electric car, it's an electric Audi. e-tron is here and the future is electric. Visit Audi.com/e-tron to learn more and stay informed.