iPad review, Facebook drama, and Apple drama

It is episode 300 of The Vergecast! To celebrate, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul start the show by explaining inside jokes that have been stamped into the show over the past few years. Don’t understand what Scissor Vodka is? Are you wondering why Bixby is a dog? Do you need to know why Paul says his name at the end of each episode? Well, we took the time to answer that. Also, there’s some news that came out this week. We have an iPad review, some Mark Zuckerberg updates, and a little bit of Apple drama. There’s a lot more in between that — like Paul’s segment he does every week with the same name “Lonely Alone” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 03:14 - Joke explainer 16:13 - Mark Zuckerberg calls Tim Cook’s comments on Facebook ‘extremely glib’ 21:54 - Apple Music had a better Weeknd than Spotify 24:03 - Apple hires Google’s former AI boss to help improve Siri 31:16 - Apple iPad (2018) review 35:50 - Apple’s redesigned Mac Pro is coming in 2019 46:30 - Paul’s weekly segment compilation 49:38 - Paul’s weekly segment “Lonely Alone” 52:18 - Facebook wants a social media supreme court so it can avoid hard questions 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 IBM. 16 million new collar jobs will be created by 2024 and to help fill them, IBM's new education model gives high school students workplace experience and an associate's degree. 90 PTEC schools are already preparing graduates for tomorrow's STEM careers. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at ibm.com/ptech.

• 0:23Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship. I'm just gonna, greetings, mobile accomplishers.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Hey!

• 0:29Nilay Patel?

  I'm just biting Dieter from the jump.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Greetings, mobile accomplishers. So this is especially-

• 0:34Speaker 01

  No, no, just do it, do it right, do it right, do it right.

• 0:36Nilay Patel?

  What do you do it?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge Empire. I am your host, Dieter Bohn. This is the 300th episode. I'm taking over the show because I'm way better at intros than Neely.

• 0:51Nilay Patel?

  It's true.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Can I say my catchphrase now?

• 0:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:55Nilay Patel?

  That's your whole, I like your catchphrase, just saying. This is our 300th episode. I'm here, Neely, Paul's here.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's here. This is somehow good catchphrase.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  In classic Vergecast fashion, we, we started planning for this 20 minutes ago. Andrew tried to get us to start planning for this like three months ago. Andrew Marino, our long-suffering producer, but no, we, we, we said no, we only want to start five minutes before the show. And so that's what we did.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  So a couple, a couple of weeks ago, my, my good friend and colleague, Heim Gartenberg, pulled me aside. He said, did you know, episode 300 is a lie?

• 1:31Speaker 02

  And he pulled up a spreadsheet.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  At some point, when he was an intern, he was tasked with listing every single Vergecast. And it turns out, there have been two historical skipped Vergecasts.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. 69 is one.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  And it's like 117 is the other, something like that.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that we actually skipped them. I think we've lost them.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Did we lose them or like misnumber them?

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Who knows?

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  This is not, if you tuned in looking for technology news, we're going to get to it. But first, we're going to talk about how podcast RSS feeds work.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  And a little bit about counting.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  A little bit about, no, there was a whole, I think, I think they're lost to history. If you've got, if you have Vergecast 60 on your phone, send it to us. Because we don't have it. Uh, but yeah, this is 300. It's a big one.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and to celebrate, we thought that we would do the funniest thing that any person can do, which is explain our own jokes.

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  So, this is true, this is a fact.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  This is a service.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  It's a service.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  This is service journalism.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but Paul and I have been doing basically this podcast for almost a decade now. Cause we were doing the Engadget podcast before. Dieter had his own podcast when he was at Smartphone Experts. What was it called?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Which started, I just, I'm gonna point out in 2001.

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  That was the, what, the Trio Professional Show?

• 3:00Speaker 01

  The one.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  The Podcast for Trio.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Trio Central Trio Cast.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  The Trio Cast.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Which had the best stock music ever. It was called Hot Sacks on a Platter. It was really good.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Was it, was it just called Internet Radio back then?

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  No, they were podcasts, it was a thing.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so that, it just means that we've been doing this, we've been doing The Vergecast for six years, six and change. It started as This is My Next Podcast, like, we've just accumulated 10 years of inside jokes.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  And we never explain them or tell people why we're laughing. So the audience has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, and people are just hopelessly confused.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  All of the time. And they tweeted us and we do nothing. We refuse to acknowledge that The Vergecast is an impenetrable...

• 3:44Speaker 02

  We do chuckle silently to ourselves.

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But for this, our 300th episode, we thought it would be good if we just explain some of the things.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So here's the first one we're gonna explain. At the end of the show, we often say snip snip.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  And Vergecast fans know that our official beverage is scissor vodka, which is not real.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Right. The tagline of scissor vodka...

• 4:11Nilay Patel?

  Is cut through the night.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  And it's funny after that to say snip snip.

• 4:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so that's the whole joke.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  It's like, it's like fully worked for the tagline of a made up beverage.

• 4:23Nilay Patel?

  This is so funny.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  And if, if you don't, if you don't know, um, scissor vodka will never exist because the, uh, the trademark for applying the word scissor to an alcoholic beverage belongs to, who is it, Eli?

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  Francis Ford Coppola.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Uh, but the trademark's in Spanish, so.

• 4:41Nilay Patel?

  It's very cheesy, but we have some, so this all came about because of the song like G6. Hmm. Because LG was putting out the G6. Yeah. This uh, got so out of hand. Well, let's run, we have a clip, right Andrew? So, let's run the clip. There's a lyric in there that she's like, I'm drinking scissor, but for years, my friends and I totally misheard it. And we thought she said she was drinking scissor, which is, in my opinion, if you're listening to the show and you maybe have too much money, you don't know how to spend it, you want to make an investment. I have a complete business plan for a vodka brand called Scissor Vodka. Does it involve the song? It doesn't involve the song, although I think having a famous song in which people appear to be saying drinking scissor in the club is a good look. I just want to do an entire print billboard campaign, physical media campaign of like hot people.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  And they just, they're looking at you with their fingers like this and it just says, cut through the night.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  This is a radio show. People are in the car. What are your fingers doing?

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  They're making scissors, man. What do you think they're doing?

• 5:36Speaker 03

  I'm just giving it back to you because you know it's.

• 5:39Nilay Patel?

  If you're in the car right now, here's what I want you to do. I want you to look at the car next to you.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Very sly scissor sign. It's sort of a peace sign.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  It's a little thing, right?

• 5:46Speaker 03

  It's a peace.

• 5:46Nilay Patel?

  Look at the person in the car next to you.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  No, you're alone.

• 5:50Nilay Patel?

  But this is not. Why are you alone? You're on the road.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Cause you're commuting places. People always drive their cars alone.

• 5:54Nilay Patel?

  No, but in the car, the other cars around you, a slight scissor shape and then just mouth the words, cut through the night. And that, people are gonna do that.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Cut through the night is good.

• 6:06Nilay Patel?

  For scissor vodka.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  I would.

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  So I'm, again, I'm seeking directly to your heart now.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  This is a beautiful.

• 6:11Nilay Patel?

  If you have more money than sense and you would like to make this happen for me. I mean, that's just the worst thing I've ever heard in my life. I have a second one for a trampoline vodka, which is just the word bounce. And it's just, it's just, it's endless TV ads of people leaving clubs.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Cut through the night is great.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  Cut through the night is great. Bounce is awful. Cut through the night is awful. Cut through the night is great.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  No, cut through the night is fantastic.

• 6:30Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  And there's already a song that everybody's.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  I already want to cut through.

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  You're drinking a scissor in the club. Now I'm feeling so fly. I did not remember bounce.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  I did not remember how desperately I was trying to keep that from going off the rails.

• 6:46Nilay Patel?

  I like that at this point in the show, we've just given it. Okay, so that's, that's, so Zeraka. That's where it came from. It's gonna be in our heart forever. Okay, at the end of the show, Paul.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:55Nilay Patel?

  We just, everyone says your name. We did the show live, and at the end of the show, the whole crowd just chanted your name.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  That was a really special moment for me.

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  Do you want to explain why this has started happening?

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, apparently, I can't remember even if it was InGadget, or The Verge, or This Is My Next, but at some point, I admitted that I have a hard time saying my name, pronouncing my name.

• 7:19Nilay Patel?

  And your name?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Is Paul.

• 7:21Nilay Patel?

  Is Paul, which is not hard to say.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  I, a lot of times I kind of swallow the L. Anyways, there's a problem saying my name, and so, uh, it was Josh, Neelai and I at that time, and we just all tried to say my name a bunch of times.

• 7:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  And then it was funny to say it at the end of the show.

• 7:39Nilay Patel?

  This is before there were professional podcasts we had to compete with. We're like, good radio, it's five minutes of us saying Paul, over and over.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  This is pre-cereal content.

• 7:48Nilay Patel?

  It's before cereal. We didn't know what you were doing. We were like, we're not gonna solve this murder, we're gonna say Paul's name.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Recently, because it's so far removed from the context, and like, why would anybody find it funny? I've thought about retiring Paul as a, as a catchphrase.

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, now we just re-upped it. Yeah, now five years of Paul.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  I guess we re-upped it. So anyways, maybe I'll do, I'll run a Twitter poll. Um, I've been thinking a lot about it.

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  I think having your own name as your catchphrase is really strong.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  It's pretty strong.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  It's kind of incredible. Okay, we also say promo code at the end of the show.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:24Nilay Patel?

  This is, I don't know why we're not, we should explain that one, because that's just a good deal.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:29Nilay Patel?

  The promo code for The Verge merch store. Is promo code. Just go there and type it in. You get like some percentage of things off. Money, some percentage of money off.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  While also sort of commenting on modern podcast media.

• 8:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the promo code is a promo code.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  All right. Dieter, do you want to explain greetings, mobile accomplishers, the way that you began the show?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a, it comes from the launch of the Palm Trio 680, which was the Palma West device designed for consumers. It was the thing that came out right around the time of the iPhone. So it was like, all right, so the iPhone, now we've got the Trio 680, and it's big innovation is that it came in four different colors. And they got rid of the external antenna nubbin. And Palm's market demographic for this, they accidentally like told all of us was mobile accomplishers. And I thought that was the funniest thing on planet Earth. Then CEO Ed Coligan wanted us all to know what a mobile accomplisher was.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  They're like a professional, but they're really mobile. They're not really just a, it's not just for professionals, though. That's like the wrong word. Cause it's, it was Palma West, and so it was bad. So it's not so much people that work. It's people that accomplish things.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  Is there a modern day term for this?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Every company does this. I think what we have. Yeah, no, it's a really standard thing. They just told it to the wrong audience. It was like an internal marketing deck. And it turned into a like actual thing that he thought was appropriate to say while standing on stage announcing a phone.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft used to do this all the time. Remember the Ken? When the Ken came out, they showed us like their target audience and they had like invented hip kids.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:11Nilay Patel?

  And like this hip kid.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  It hadn't existed before. Cool kids that never get bullied.

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Microsoft got really mad at me because I took all the Ken ads and I like remixed them to Dead Kennedys songs. They didn't like that.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  They should have loved that.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  They sent me an email. They're like, "Please, please take this down." I think they're still, they're up somewhere. All right. This one's easy. Bixby the dog.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Bixby the dog.

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  We mention Bixby all the time, and we suggest that it's a dog.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 10:40Nilay Patel?

  I don't think we ever explain why we keep saying that. But it's because...

• 10:43Speaker 02

  I mean, we did the first time.

• 10:45Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then have failed to say it ever... Bixby is a dog with shoes. Bixby, every time I hear the word "Bixby", I think of a dog wearing shoes.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  It's just like a, like a word association thing.

• 10:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I can't not think of it. And now it is my quest.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Like, I say "Bixby", you say, "A, a dog with shoes."

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And people on Circuit Breaker Live, they sent us fan art of dogs wearing shoes, which is great. Uh, and my, my goal is to have it be so common that, you know, when Samsung put out, puts out its next phone, the Bixby logo is actually a cartoon dog wearing shoes. They should, they should be all in.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Isn't it a cartoon, isn't it a dog butler with shoes?

• 11:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  It's a butler dog.

• 11:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's like the classic dog butler trope. But I think just like a anthropomorphic dog wearing shoes, that could be a butler. It's like a casual butler. You know, you know, it's not like Mr. Butler.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  He's a butler, but it doesn't define him.

• 11:29Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. He's, he's a butler in a polo shirt. All right. Speak, by the way, Dieter, speaking of, uh, Trio, this is true. We did hire you because of your WebOS expertise at a time when that seemed...

• 11:40Speaker 01

  I, I'd like to think you hired me because I ran a, a, a multi-site network of smartphone communities that had more traffic than Engadget at the time.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  That's what you thought.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  That's what I thought. It turned out, no, no, you hired me for WebOS.

• 11:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, if you've listened to the show a lot, you'd know that we, uh, we often bemoan the death of the web and the death of open technologies. Dieter brings up Palm every five minutes. He can't help it. But there is, uh, we have a clip here of just how deep in the game Dieter was. This is what, from when Palm was dying?

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is from August 2011 when they, when they killed, like, two months after they had just announced the pre-three and the touchpad and the Veer.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Uh, then CEO Leo Apoteker, uh, like blew up WebOS and canceled everything. And then they sold all the touchpads for a hundred bucks. It was a whole thing.

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's, let's listen to it.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Here's another yes or no question. We ostensibly brought on Dieter because of his WebOS expertise. And now that WebOS is irrelevant, is Dieter irrelevant?

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  A year from now, is Dieter alive?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Dieter, I have some unfortunate news.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I saw this coming.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  We're going to have to license you.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Do you think HTC could make use of Dieter?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  I think, Dieter, I think the thing is, is that we are going to explore options.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Okay? Have I worked with you guys for 49 days? Because you gotta at least give me 49 days.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  Paul, I'm gonna say you were extremely rude to Dieter.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Dieter?

• 13:01Nilay Patel?

  It was hard.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Dieter, I'm so sorry.

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  I didn't know you guys. I was brand new. I couldn't tell if you were joking.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  No recollection of that, but apparently that was a fresh wound in Dieter's mind.

• 13:13Nilay Patel?

  He's never gotten over it. That's why literally every time WebOS Palm or the web comes up, Dieter just sounds sadder. It's because he's reliving the trauma.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I always thought he was reliving the trauma of the death of WebOS, but he was reliving the trauma of the time I recommended that he lose his job.

• 13:32Nilay Patel?

  All right, and then the last one that we're gonna explain. We start every show by saying we're the flagship podcast. I will say this joke is potentially gotten out of control. Like, it's, it's left my ability to contain it. So, the other day, our CEO Jim Bankoff was tweeting with obvious and deserved pride, because Tim Cook, we're gonna talk about the story. Tim Cook had told Kara Swisher on her MSNBC show, he like threw some shade at Mark Zuckerberg, and then Zuckerberg was on Ezra Klein's show, and he like fired back. And Bankoff was like, "Great day for Vox Media. Listen, like, watch this show and listen to this podcast." It's like, that's where the news happens. And people were responding to him like, "Flagship podcast only, bro."

• 14:17Nilay Patel?

  Just like, "Don't do that." I was like, "This is getting a little out of hand." So, this is true. We were at one time, one of the only podcasts at Vox Media. Uh, we obviously launched The Verge with The Vergecast. Now there are lots of them. The company, as it's grown... Uh, very smartly decided to like, call that a podcast network and like have ads and like a sales team and uh, produce like there's an infrastructure. And one of the things you do in a podcast network is you promote one of their shows. But I had been, for a while, we had a bunch of podcasts. So I was saying The Vergecast was the flagship podcast of The Verge. But now a part of this network. And I decided that we should have a beef with The Weeds.

• 15:01Nilay Patel?

  The Weeds has yet to acknowledge that this beef exists, or that The Vergecast exists. We're gonna get there.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  But I will say, that's why we say it. Cause we wanna be the flagship of the podcast of Vox Media Network.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Where does the word flagship come from?

• 15:14Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't know.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  I've always assumed you just have like an affinity for boats.

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  I love boats.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  That's my internal narrative.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  In an armada, there is a, there is a ship that carries the flag of the country which it is killing people for. And that flagship is the, the, the ship that houses the admiral that's in charge. Which is clearly me, of all of Vox Media's podcasts.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Wait, if Jim Benko, our CEO-

• 15:42Nilay Patel?

  The flagship doesn't kill the other ships in the armada. Yeah, that's, that's our guy's- They'll work together. Like, we're, we're a team. But they, our fans have interpreted it-

• 15:52Speaker 01

  A team of rivals?

• 15:53Nilay Patel?

  A team of rivals, yes. Jim Benko is Abraham Lincoln. Alright, that's as much of joke explaining we're gonna do. If there's other ones, let us know. But that, so, that, that brings us to the conclusion of our 300th episode celebration.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Congratulations to us.

• 16:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we did great.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Go to 298th episode. We'll do it again in two episodes.

• 16:12Nilay Patel?

  Alright, let's talk about some news. There's actually a lot of Apple-like news and the news happened in the form of various dramas, some which are hilariously low stakes, some which are obviously more important. So we should just talk about the Zuckerberg one. So, uh, Tim Cook really did go on Revolution, which airs-

• 16:30Nilay Patel?

  This Friday, the day that the Vergecast comes out, April 6th.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so today, for the people listening, so pull over your car and get on, watch, watch some TV. Kara Swisher and Chris Hayes interview Tim Cook in Chicago. Dieter was there. We talked about on the show last week. So Kara and Chris Hayes asked Tim Cook, what would you do if you were running Facebook? And he said, I wouldn't be in this situation. And then he made some comments about how Apple values data. They don't sell your data. They don't, you know, ad supported businesses. Fast forward, Zuckerberg goes on the Ezra Klein Show. They talk for an hour. Ezra asks him about these comments. And Zuck replies, you know, I find that argument that if you're not paying, somehow we don't care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. Uh, and Zuck said Facebook is free to use because it's focused on connecting people and people can't afford to pay.

• 17:17Nilay Patel?

  So having advertising supporting models, the only rational model can, that can support building service to re- reach people. And then he basically implied that Apple's giving us all Stockholm syndrome, which is incredible. To the contrary, I think it's important that we don't get, all get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more, convince you that they actually care more about you because that sounds ridiculous to me. Which is kind of funny in the context of the phone, the iPhone 10 being a thousand dollars this year. But that's like, that's two big CEOs, just like head to head.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  Like Apple saying Facebook's business model incentivizes them to not care about you.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. Done. So Cook was like, I would not be in that situation. It was like a whole long thing. Uh, at the end of like talking about a whole bunch of privacy stuff. And it was like the, the wrap up of like, well, what would you do if you were Zuckerberg? He's like, I wouldn't be Zuckerberg. It was hilarious. I do want to say that calling it glib, saying like, not calling it a lie, but like, in not, not the same as the truth, whatever Zuckerberg's phrase was, is whatever. Going so far as to like, take pot shots about Apple only being for rich people, also whatever. But I, like, the core of that is, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on caring about customers. Uh, and, and just, the only way you're allowed to care about customers is if you charge them money. Like, he's not, he's not wrong? Don't think he's wrong.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Well, there's, there's different kinds of, of caring. There's, there's how much you love your customers in your heart.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  And then there is how do you want your users, your customers to use your platform? And Facebook, I've talked about this on the Vergecast, I feel like Facebook's problem and Instagram's problem and kind of Twitter's problem is that as free services, they are trying to maximize how much time and attention you give them instead of maximizing how much satisfaction you derive.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  But Zuckerberg's changing his whole thing. His whole thing now is time well spent. That's he wants that to be Facebook's core metric. He's way out in front saying people are spending less time on Facebook. We think that's fine. We want to improve the quality of that time.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  But Facebook as a business model doesn't have an intrinsic motivation in that direction, which is possibly how they got so wrong.

• 19:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, I, Facebook is making a lot of changes, like new privacy policy, new tools, all that they're going at. They're doing stuff now. It's like very clear that Mark Zuckerberg commanded this company to like change its ways.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:42Nilay Patel?

  And I say that specifically because yesterday there was a call with reporters, Casey was on it, and Zuck just repeatedly said on the call, look, I created Facebook. I run it. This is my responsibility. And when he says I run it, he has the ownership structure of Facebook is such that he can't be ousted.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:00Nilay Patel?

  He owns a controlling share. It's like he is the dictator of Facebook. That's how he has constructed the company.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  So shareholders can't show up and hey, stop giving users quality time. We want more time.

• 20:13Nilay Patel?

  It, I mean, that's the argument he's making. Now, whether or not, you know, there's some arrangement by which shareholders, like massive shareholders can get together, who knows? But the way Facebook is constructed, he's very much shielded from the way that would normally happen. So I, I'm with Dieter, like.

• 20:32Nilay Patel?

  Facebook wants to say they care about people, but the entire evidence is they didn't care about people enough until this scandal broke. And now they're making this huge public showing of care. And like, that's a long way back. Whereas Apple is like, I don't know, there are stores around the country where like, Apple people will physically care for you. Like you show up with like a broken product and Apple's like, we're gonna, I don't know, ask you a bunch of-

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Put a wet, they'll put a wet cloth on your forehead.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, that's their business is to sell you things in exchange for money. And when you have that relationship, Amazon like famously is customer oriented because they sell you things for money and they're like, they know that if they don't treat you well, you'll stop, they'll stop getting money from you. Facebook doesn't have that. They have to treat their advertisers very well.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  And that's just like a different, it's like, look, we're an ad-supported business. I, I get where he's coming, where he's coming from. Like, I think more about our audience than our advertisers. But we are actually structured such that it is not only inappropriate, it's hard for me to care about the advertisers. Like the company has a wall between us and that side of the business. It's my job to care about the audience. I don't know how you do that for a software product like Facebook.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  I mean, especially again, he's, he's not in charge of user experience. He's in charge of Facebook.

• 21:50Nilay Patel?

  Right. Anyway, so that's drama one. We're gonna come back to Facebook later. Drama two, when I said very small, is super funny to me. So The Weeknd just put out a new EP. He put like two exclusive videos on Spotify, promoted Spotify. Like, The Weeknd was like, listen to my new thing on Spotify. And then the numbers came out and Apple was super excited, uh, because the label said, more, more streams happened on Apple Music. So the lead single-

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Which is interesting because Spotify has like, what is it, 120 million subs and Apple Music is like half that?

• 22:27Nilay Patel?

  So Micah wrote a great piece about it. Spotify has 120 million more users, had two exclusive videos from EP and was like, where the weekend did it. And the lead single, Call Out My Name, did 6 million streams on Apple Music and 3.5 million streams on Spotify in the first time it appeared. But then Spotify came back and were like, these numbers are wrong. Spotify said it initially gave the wrong numbers to Republic Records and it was actually streamed 7.5 million times, so obviously more than Apple. But Micah went and checked with the label and the label said 6.5 million and the label then directed, uh, Micah, to Spotify's public tracker, which also says 6.5 million. So counting is really hard. And now Apple

• 23:12Nilay Patel?

  Music and Spotify are literally in a war about counting streams, which seems like an extremely basic thing for these services.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  I said it at the top of the show, counting is, is a thing.

• 23:24Nilay Patel?

  Counting is very hard.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Up until, up until like, I don't know, a year ago, your views on YouTube videos were always 301 for like the first six hours. And they're like, oh wait, now we can count. We know it's more than 300, but that's all we know.

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  But no, YouTube did it on purpose to prevent some kind of gaming that was going on.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a whole, a really good explainer video about that. Just search for YouTube 301. Counting is hard.

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's funny because Spotify keeps getting sued. We had Sarah on to talk about like royalties. Like if you can't count how many streams, you're never going to be able to pay these people to write a lot of money. You know, why do they keep getting sued? All right. That's drama, that's drama two. Drama three with Apple, which is actually, I think, a great move for them. They hired, uh, Google's former head of search and AI to come run Siri. I can, John Gianandrea is his name.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  Head of Google Search and AI, now runs Siri. Dieter, is this? This is a good thing?

• 24:22Speaker 01

  It's a great move for Apple. He clearly knows, you know, what he's doing. And the, I mean, the big questions for Siri are the big questions that there have always been. Like, there was that information story that, like, you know, internally, the team was confused, didn't know what it was doing. There's the perennial question of whether or not Apple's privacy models prevent them from getting enough data to build up an AI model. I kind of think that it doesn't, that they're going to be fine there. You know, it's gonna take a while for him to suss it out. But, I mean, I guess my takeaway is if, as like a person who's like a manager, the idea, like, if Siri's, like, management structure and the teams aren't getting along and it's all confusing, if that's like a problem,

• 25:04Speaker 01

  I have to believe that problem is tiddlywinks compared to the organizational structure at Google, which is just like a million people doing whatever the heck they feel like all the time.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  He's got a good shot. What's weird, and this is like not about AI, but I read somewhere, correct me if I'm wrong, he's reporting directly to Tim Cook.

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  Good.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  The AI person should report directly to Tim Cook. But I'm pretty sure somebody said that he's like the 26th person.

• 25:29Nilay Patel?

  16.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  To report directly to, 16, okay, sorry, 16th person. That's too many people to report to a CEO.

• 25:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Right?

• 25:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Just, that's just a lot of people. You're supposed to, like, actually pay attention to the people that report to you, and 16 people is a lot of people to pay attention to.

• 25:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like, our HR department gets real antsy when somebody here has more than 10 people reporting to them.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 25:50Nilay Patel?

  They think he'll be a bad manager if he had more than 10.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  They're right.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  So, this makes me, it reminds me of the, you know, the Microsoft reorg has like five different AI divisions. But there's definitely this vibe I'm seeing from companies where like, you, because you, there are multiple ways to do AI. You can have a product and you can add AI to it as a value add. Or you can have... AI as like almost like IBM style, almost like an operating system within your company. And the applications you build can like go to that AI for augmentation.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Like, does that make sense? So in one scenario, each each team that's building an app is adding AI functionality or machine learning functionality to their app. And the other sense, the company has a huge AI division that is the additional smarts for any app in their company.

• 26:47Nilay Patel?

  And I think that's how Google kind of does it. That's how Microsoft appears to be going.

• 26:52Nilay Patel?

  That's I don't think that's how Amazon does it because they also like run a store. So I'm pretty sure the Kindle team isn't like adding AI to the bookstore.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  So Google promoted this guy named Jeff Dean to run it. He did Google Brain.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  To run search and AI.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  To run search and AI. Over at Apple, Gianandrea, the thing that's interesting about him, if you're not familiar, is he he used to work for this company called MetaWeb way back in the day. But he was the the guy who was like behind Google's knowledge graph so that the Google search could understand like entities and things and their relation to each other. And if he's going to bring that sort of capability to Siri or improve that sort of capability in Siri, I think that that could actually be a really important piece for fixing Siri's problems. It like it knows that there are things and they relate to other things and that that that is what allows you to ask follow up questions, which Siri can kind of do. But there's like every time Siri gets something wrong, I often feel like it's like making a category mistake.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Like it just it's just reading the text, trying to figure out what the text means and then going out and finding something. It doesn't realize you're asking for like a specific piece of information and that information has relation to other pieces of information. And I think that him going to Apple might mean that Siri is going to get smarter in that way.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  There's a really good tweet I saw this week. Someone asked Siri, how long can a lobster survive out of water? So Siri went to Wolfram Alpha and took the maximum recorded lifespan of a lobster and divided that by the world's water area. So the answer is, this is Siri's literal answer. The answer is 3.23 times 10 to the negative seven years per mile square.

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  That's great. Ready to go Siri. Here's the question, though. What you just described is Siri doesn't have like a built in search engine functionality. Like, Google's very good at this because they have a knowledge graph, they have a search engine. Search engine is designed to answer questions. You just sort of add some like voice recognition to that or voice input to that. Like, you've got Google Assistant, right? And like, and you can build from there, but you start with this very strong foundation. Siri relies on Bing to its great detriment. Siri relies on Wolfram out. Like, do they want this dude to build a new search engine? Because that's like fundamentally the thing you have to do if you want to own this experience.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Now, I'm trying to, man, this would be way better if I could remember any of the old names of old search engines.

• 29:26Nilay Patel?

  AltaVista.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  AltaVista. Lycos.

• 29:29Nilay Patel?

  Ask Jeeves.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  What was the first one that was called like a web crawler? It had like a spider as its like logo.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  Spidertron.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  There was like Hotbot.

• 29:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Hotbot was good.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  They're all dead now. Hotbot was my go to.

• 29:42Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  You know what?

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  Does Apple buy DuckDuckGo? It's like that, right? Like, to me, that's that hiring one person from Google is a great move. But the core piece of this infrastructure for the assistant is what Dieter is saying, which is understanding what you're saying. Webcrawler, by the way, is the one you're thinking of.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Webcrawler was called Webcrawl.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Excite.

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  Are you just listing old search engines?

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Oh, excite.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, dude. Talking about the death of the web, man. All right. I'm gonna read an ad.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  AOL.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, AOL's great. Theverge.com slash search. That's not, I don't think that actually works. It's also not great. All right, I'm gonna read an ad. And when we come back, we're gonna talk about Dieter's iPad review and what's going on with this Mac Pro situation.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

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• 30:48Speaker 01

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• 31:16Speaker 01

  All right, Dieter, your review the... What is there to say? You reviewed the new iPad. It's the iPad 6 generation. You really cut yourself off. Here's the problem that you had. Last year, you wrote an entire review of the iPad. They just said, "It's an iPad," over and over again. I did.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  You thought you were so clever.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Because you assumed that they would do something else. The next year.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Pay yourself into a corner.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  They really... Like, I applaud you for the effort. Yeah. And then this year, you just block quoted yourself. I did.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  And what else was I gonna do? Like, it's the same thing. The processor's faster, it adds pencil support, the end. Actually, I do want to say one thing. I stand by the score. I stand by everything I wrote about it. But I am kicking myself a lot, actually, for not having a couple of paragraphs, once again complaining about the biggest problem with the iPad, which is there's no multi-user support on it. So, sharing it with your kids or sharing it with the family is a huge pain. Yeah.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  What do you think a world would look like? Because something that you were saying near the end was the complete lack of competition that Apple has.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Is probably slowing things down.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Honestly, we're gonna review the Huawei Tab Pad, whatever the heck it's Android tablet. There's the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3, whatever the heck it is. But they're like, Android is bad on tablets, still. That's always been the story.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  I'm willing to give another shot, but like I've used that Samsung tablet. It's not good. What would a world like with, look like with actual competition? God, I just don't know, but please tell me, other than a Chromebook, what you can buy for less than 500 bucks? That is as good as an iPad. Like you can get a Windows laptop. That's pretty good. You could, there are a couple of Windows tablets, but I don't think they're very good at that price. Sorry. If you want a touchscreen device, under 500 bucks, what else is there?

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  A 2013 Nexus 7. Right. I have a 2013 Nexus 7. It's kind of dying and I don't know what to do.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't disagree with you at all. It's just, there's nothing. It's so weird.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  No, the thing is that there's a lot, that there is a lot, like Samsung makes a lot of very nice tablets. No one gives a shit. Like you can buy-

• 33:47Speaker 02

  I guess if you want to watch-

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  Are they very nice?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  If you just want to watch Netflix, the world is your oyster.

• 33:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, Dieter, they're like nice pieces of hardware. Go buy an Amazon Fire tablet. Say that again, Neil. The, like, they all have different letters. I can not, I can never tell them apart. Like Samsung Tab Q, like any random, you know, like 200 ish dollar Samsung tablet. It's like, they're basically clones of the iPad mini. Yeah. They're nice. Like- What's going on with the iPad mini, by the way? Uh, Apple continues to sell it.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Harsh neglect is what I like to call it.

• 34:21Nilay Patel?

  I like that it costs more than the new iPad. It's 399. It's very confusing.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  We use the iPad mini a lot on the Circuit Breaker show. It's nice to have like a tiny little, tiny little iPad. It's like a nice little media control device.

• 34:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I wish it had wireless charging.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 34:37Nilay Patel?

  I'd like to just like keep it on a stand. That's why I use, that's why I have the Nexus 7. The only tablet with wireless charging ever made. Cause I just like leave it on a stand and that's like a little Sonos thing and boop, boop, boop, and it works.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  It's like, it's like, uh, the world just isn't like complete without like real competition in this space.

• 34:55Nilay Patel?

  Competition? That's the theme of the Vergecast. That's what we, that's what we do on the flagship.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  I will say, uh, I bought an iPad specifically because there were so many cool music apps.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  And Linux actually has a famously bad, uh, real-time audio stack.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  And that like it's just like, obviously Macs have a history of music production. Windows is now great for music production and iOS is awesome for music stuff. But you just don't see a lot of music stuff on Linux because it's just been historically and still apparently, as far as I know, just very bad at real time audio.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  And we've been talking about the least interesting iPad stuff, Apple stuff. We should talk about the more interesting Apple stuff.

• 35:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah. Do you want to do this segue here? I had one, I had one on my mind, but I want to hear yours.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  No, let's do yours. Mine was, mine was bad.

• 35:49Nilay Patel?

  So this, let's do it. This, this is like a thing. So that history of like audio production on Macs. Is really. It's because they're like professional computers that do audio well. But Apple, the Mark Gurman had a big scoop in Bloomberg. Apple is thinking about moving Macs to a different processor. He didn't specify which, I think everybody assumes it will be A series processors who are very fast. And then Apple did a sort of tech crunch today. Matt Panzerino went to Apple and they told them that the, the new Mac Pro, which they promised last year would be coming out in 2019.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Right. But the ARM rumor is Apple will be switching to ARM in 2020.

• 36:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  So I don't know if these are really.

• 36:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, Gurman's story says that he says the Mac Pro might have an ARM co-processor.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Like the Mac, the iMac Pro has.

• 36:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But it's unclear.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  But that's used just for like security stuff and encryption.

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Cause Apple's moving all their like bootloader and stuff.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  But my dream is Apple could make like a, a pro hardware that is just completely, just forget that anything else other than Final Cut Pro and Logic exist.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  And just, and just make a computer with like, oh, we have, get the Mac Pro Video Edition. It's got a great like workstation graphics card. It's got really fast RAM. It's got really fast like Xeon processor. Also it has this dedicated chip just for like improving your video transcoding in Final Cut. Like we just like added a couple of random extra application specific chips.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  To just make our Pro apps just the fastest thing in the world.

• 37:35Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  They should just, they should ship the, the trash can again and just have one of those little Elgato USB sticks plugged into the back of it.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  That'd be amazing. No, when I was, uh, when I was like a kid, my family owned the shortest live Mac in history. The, uh, the Centrus 660 AV. Uh, it was, I think on the market for 57 days. Like some insanely short period of time, uh, because Apple was a mess.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  The Quadra?

• 38:01Nilay Patel?

  No, no, that's, that's why it was the shortest. They changed the name to Quadra 660 AV later.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 38:07Nilay Patel?

  But like in the middle of its lifespan. Uh, that, that computer, uh, it's true, had a dedicated AT&T DSP chip in it for transcoding video. That's why it was AV. It had.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  I had the 6100 AV. I made like, I had Adobe Premiere that I installed with floppy disks. And I made stop motion movies on a Mac 100 years ago.

• 38:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it had little RCA video out. It was hilarious computer. Um, I think this move, this potential move to ARM. Dieter, when you're talking about iPads, you've got the iPad Pro, which is the, it's a computer, right? The future of computing, whatever, whatever Dieter thinks about happens over there. And then you've got this other iPad without a keyboard connector, a slightly smaller processor, worse screen. Like it seems like they're going in different directions. Does that seem right to you?

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I don't know what direction they're going with the iPad. Like it, it was the, it was the bare minimum. They did the minimum possible amount of work and it almost feels like they didn't put in a smart connector just because they wanted to keep differentiating the iPad Pro. But again, we're all assuming the iPad Pro is going to be upgraded later this year and they're going to pull out the home button and put Face ID on it. So that seems silly. I don't know. I have no idea what's going on. Like the iPad, they just like, they just put out another one because they wanted all the iPads to support the Apple pencil. Except the iPad Mini, which still exists. Um, that's as near as I could tell. The, the question for the Mac is like, we're assuming it's going to be an ARM based processor, but that's actually going to be, um. Pretty hard. They went through one process of transition already back in the misty

• 39:41Speaker 01

  mists of time from the, you know, whatever was the Motorola based stuff to Intel. I feel like the transition from Intel to ARM on the Mac in 2019, 2020 is going to be a little bit rocky for existing Mac apps. I think that they're, it's just going to end up being like a harder shift. It's gonna be like, well, there'll be an emulation mode, but it'll be really, really bad. And everyone is just gonna port over their iOS apps to some sort of Mac style interface. I don't see any other way to do it. And because it's not like the, there's a great, like the Mac App Store is not, not a good, not a good place to hang out, I'll say. But like, Mac apps are still good, but there's so many

• 40:24Speaker 01

  more Electron apps. That's like where all the excitement is. And there's like lots of reasons that Electron apps are bad. And yeah, I don't know how they pull this transition off as smoothly as they did with the transition to Intel.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  I think the transition would be easier than it was to Intel.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  You think so?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Because the compilers have gotten so much better at, at being able to target, because any code that you're writing in C or C++ you want it to be able to run on ARM and you want it to be able to run in x86. But then if anything that you make with Apple's own tools, like with Swift or Xcode, Swift in Xcode with Swift or Objective C is obviously totally able to compile to ARM.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Because the iOS is a target.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  So you think it'll be easier not because there'll be a really good like emulation mode, like Rosetta? You think it'll be easier because everybody will just be able to make ARM versions of their apps really quickly and easily with the tools that are out there right now?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Right. So as long as it's not abandonware and someone just still has access to their own source code, they can just recompile the app for ARM and fix any like little warnings that come up and then redistribute it.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  And that was-

• 41:29Speaker 02

  And Electron apps obviously move right over. That's not a no problem at all because it's a wrapper.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Because unless of course the Mac is, you know, locked down like the iPad and you're not allowed to install anything except what's in the X.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Well, then I will, I don't know, I'm gonna be angry. And I'll be mad and I'll yell.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's like a really-

• 41:48Speaker 02

  And I'll abandon Apple.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  So it's true. Dieter pointed out, Apple obviously moved from Power PC processors to Intel. First, they moved from 68K processors to Power PC. That was a whole shift. Then they moved from Power PC to Intel. And then, I think we forget this all the time, they moved the entire Mac operating system.

• 42:06Nilay Patel?

  Right, they they had OS nine, the classic Mac OS.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:09Nilay Patel?

  And they just sort of like, here's OS ten. And now we've had that, we've had that for so long.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Carbon was like the intermediate.

• 42:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so they had all these like, they had Carbon and Cocoa. And then they promised that Carbon apps would like, live in the new world.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 42:23Nilay Patel?

  And then they kind of like went back on it and moved over to Cocoa. It was a whole thing. And the, all the boxes had colors, there was the blue box and the yellow box. Remember all this, it was crazy.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  The boxes had colors?

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Cause the original Nextstep environment was called, it was like a whole, they said managers before. My point is, all of the people that did all of that are gone. Right, that was AV Tavanian and, uh, uh, um, Scott Forstall, all the old Next people. But they don't work at Apple anymore. So like.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:52Nilay Patel?

  They've got to do it again, and they have these great playbooks, but the people who ran the playbooks are gone. Uh, Steve Jobs, little known figure in Apple history, was like in charge at the time. Uh, and he, you know, he had the juice to be like, we're throwing all this away, we're starting over. It's Apple still Apple, they could do it again.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Linux runs completely, seem like you can run Linux on the Raspberry Pi, it's just a different compile target.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Like, switching architectures nowadays, I feel like, is, is so, almost trivial. It's not actually trivial, but it's close to trivial.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  So if the performance is there, I mean, that's, I mean, that's still kind of the question, like at the high end. You know, Intel just came out with six core, four gigahertz laptop chips that can, you can still have a laptop that gets like ten hours of battery life. Uh, you know, is, does Apple have something that competes at that speed in general computing?

• 43:46Nilay Patel?

  So this is, I think this, the, the two stories coming out together are super interesting to me. So like Apple, you know, the TechCon story is great. You read it, but Apple's all about like, we hired our own pro users, so we could watch them work and like, design a system for them, which is like insane. But that's what they did, and they, you know, they're like, it's Apple, they're like, the London Symphony Orchestra works here now, like, we just did it. I love it when they do stuff like that. And then there's another story about them moving the architecture. But you can't tell Adobe Creative Cloud now has to run an A300 processor. Like, you can't promise a new computer coming out next year. And the rumor is you're switching architectures. Like, you need to have a roadmap to make all that stuff work over time. So presumably this coprocess thing could happen.

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  Or, you know, I think the little MacBook is a great target for a faster ARM processor.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  Because that thing is just woefully underpowered. Like, maybe they dual-track it for a while. But, ooh, that's a lot. Also, I have no idea why the Mac Pro is coming out in a year.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seems like it's been a while. Well, the last one was 2013.

• 44:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's just like, does it take a year to build a tower?

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Did Apple completely wind down Mac Pro as a concept within the company? And they were just selling off old stock? And then at some point, like, last year, they finally realized that they should make another one? And then they had to make a whole new team to remember how to make a computer?

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, I don't know, like, a lot of people build PCs in a weekend.

• 45:14Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Someone send Tim Cook a link to PC Part Picker right now.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's what people want, right? They want a modular tower PC. And Apple's like, it's gonna take us over, it's gonna take us two years to build this thing. Which is bonkers. And, you know, they're obviously gonna be beautiful design, but like, main gear is like, here's another design today.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 45:40Nilay Patel?

  Razer's like, there's more LEDs, more LEDs than you can think about. I hope Apple puts LEDs on it. I think they go hard for Razer. Like, Tim Cook's on stage, you don't have the problem with all these LEDs are. They're not controlled by Siri.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're all, um, the whole surface of the computer does that weird melty color thing that the home pod does.

• 46:00Nilay Patel?

  That'd be great. I would be super into that. All right, I'm gonna read one more ad. Then we're gonna, to be honest with you, we're gonna dunk on Facebook and then we're done.

• 46:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, this episode of Virtuous Cast brought to you by IBM. By 2050, the world population will reach nearly 10 billion and food production will need to grow by 70%. Farmers are going to IBM and Watson to help increase their crop yields. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at ibm.com/smart. All right, there's a lot of Facebook, but before that, Paul. Yeah. Every week, you do a segment. It always has the same name. And so to verify. Every time. That they all have the same name. Yeah, some people think I'm lying. Andrew, in honor of episode 300, has put together a short audio clip of you saying the same words in a row. Andrew.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Paul. Every week, buddy, you do a thing. What's it called?

• 46:53Nilay Patel?

  It's called Gadget of the Week.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, this week it's called Gadget Surprise. Games are gadgets too.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Gadget Secrets. It's called Gadget Guys.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  It's called Pokemon Go Tips and Tricks Review. Called Gadget Secrets. Gadget Flavor. The gadgets have eyes. Cobohype. It's called Let Me Touch You With Science. Costco Cool.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Medium Format in the Moonlight.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Having a Coke with you. Cookie Pods. Plugs for Pro. Speaking of things that you can't buy. Wetherspoons. Still exists, Dieter, are you sad? Put this computer in that computer. It's called Dry Your Sweaty Palms. It's called Please Don't Talk To Me, Can't You See I'm Busy? It's called Dieter Wouldn't Let Me Make A Slurping Noise. Hey, Look At Me Now. It's called Friendship Is Like A Query. It's called Stronger Together.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Guess He's Got A Birthday Coming Up.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Not So Far Away. It May Be Possible For Me To Think In Mandarin And For You To Feel Instantly In Spanish. 4-4-4-4.

• 47:47Nilay Patel?

  4-4s.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  4-4s.

• 47:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  It's called 4-4s. Vroom, vroom goes the car. Let Me Hug Your Robot Heart. Gates All Around. All Around. I See Seed. Semi-colon. So Much Seed. I Like To Call My Dinner With Andre. It's Called Spin Safety. Toothpaste Pods. Mezu? Me Too. Smalt You Later. Froyo Pods. It's Called You Say Surveillance, I Say Seuss-Valence. Yoda Phone 3. Still Yoda-ing. Who Will Let Me Out Of This Yarn Prison? It's Called Untitled. Is there a refrigerator in this thing? Dog food pods. Kitchen in the cloud. That cloud is spelled with a K. Micro is more mini than many. You know, Dan. The duck face is no longer cool.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Smells like a competitive foothold in the machine learning. Water pods. Can form an emotional bond with members of the household while providing them with love, affection, and the joy of nurturing and raising a companion. It's called one, two, one. And you spell out one, then it's the number two. And then you could say W O N or just O and E. Robot dogs are people too. Whiskey pods? No. Color me surprised. The internet of claps. Robots teach me how to breathe. Mustard back off. Win or lose two, the sequel to winning. A kin for your wrist. Not my editor's choice. USB secrets. Fingers are round if you think about it. Warm robot hugs. Bounce shot.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Shoes, you've got them. Because this one's called Untitled. Swag for me. Swag for you too. The little robot that could.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  I know it got boring after a while when I was saying the same thing over and over, but anyways. Yeah, it's just three minutes of dull repetition.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  All right, what you got? Oh, this week, like every week, it's called Lonely Alone. And I wanted to introduce you to Freebo. That's F R I B O. A robot built for lonely young people, specifically Koreans. This robot, it's, it's, there's actually like, they've actually done research about this robot. I think this robot was like invented by like researchers, not like, it's not necessarily a product. It's based on a Raspberry Pi. But the idea is you put this robot in your home and your buddies put this robot in their home as well. And then like you get home and the robot will tell your friends like, hey, Paul just got home. Or like you like open the fridge, the, I don't know, other things.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  The idea is that to make people who live alone have like ambient notifications about what their friends are doing and their friends are notified about what they're doing so that they're more connected with other people. And some of the people who were studied, they did it like a month trial. Felt more connected. They ended up like calling each other more because you know, like if you know your friends just getting home from work, like maybe that's a good time to call and catch up. One person mentioned that like they had a hard time waking up in the morning, but all their friends were waking up early. So they started waking up early too. But that's really cool. I'm, I know some people who they live alone or with like roommates

• 51:06Speaker 02

  they don't really know. And the way they stay in touch with people is Discord. Like basically at night, they're at their computer all night and they just have Discord open with an open audio channel. And it doesn't mean they're always talking, but they just have like that ambient companionship. I think it's really, it's really interesting.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think this is incredibly sweet and nice. This thing isn't for me because it's meant for young people, apparently. So I don't have that. Also, what if you don't have friends? Then the robot can't help you?

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay. We did a story this week. Sorry, Dieter. Same. We did, no, we did a story this week about lots of people, young people in South Korea bought Bitcoin and Bitcoin fluctuations are causing depression in South Korea among millennials, which is just a wild thing to connect. But maybe they should all have little robots.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. What if you, maybe here's the thing, set up a little corner store that sells free bows and also monitors in-person Bitcoin exchanges.

• 52:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  So you can meet someone with similar interests and now you can both go home with free bows separately and keep tabs on each other like spies.

• 52:16Nilay Patel?

  I like it. All right. Let's talk about Facebook real quick. It's dominated the news week. It's not like, it's very wonky. If you're really interested in it, I highly recommend you sign up for Casey Newton's daily Facebook and Democracy newsletter. The interface is a very good, obviously you all know Casey's a very funny writer. He's really deep in it. He's pulling out all the, he's basically synthesizing all the coverage that happens every day about Facebook, which is almost impossible to keep up with.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  And what we're talking about is the Tinder apocalypse.

• 52:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, so Facebook changed their data policies this week.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  That immediately broke Tinder, which logs in over Facebook and shares much data with Facebook.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  That's hilarious.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  I tried to log into Tinder and it's a, it's a, it's like, oh, well, you gotta authorize with Facebook. And then you get like more like granular, it's more explicit about like what you're actually granting Facebook. So, but you're like, okay, I'll go to the Facebook app. Yes, I authorized Tinder, even though I have authorized Tinder before. Go, it kicks you back to Tinder and Tinder's like, hey, you gotta authorize with Facebook. And you're just stuck in a loop or like, that's what it was yesterday.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  So that's that.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:26Nilay Patel?

  Mark Zuckerberg also on a phone call with reporters described himself as a power user of the internet.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  Which is my favorite phrase in the world.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  Slates, Will Arimis said, would you use apps like this? How do you protect yourself?

• 53:42Nilay Patel?

  Response was, I certainly use a lot of apps. I'm a power user of the internet. And then suggested that everybody turns on two factor. We're gonna make that a shirt. Just like, give us another.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  I'm a power user of the internet?

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. There's our designers today, they literally got so excited about designing shirts and having a competition that at one point, our art director, Will Joel, who's wonderful, slacked me and was like, this is really distracting us. Like, we're gonna stop doing this.

• 54:09Nilay Patel?

  But so that call was really interesting. The Zuckerberg interview with Ezra is really interesting. A thing that strikes me is Zuckerberg is saying a lot of big ideas about how he's gonna change Facebook without a lot of like sense of how complicated it is. So his biggest idea is basically like Facebook is a government, right? Like he, they talk about Facebook like it's a government. And he's like, I don't wanna be the person in California deciding what's acceptable on Facebook and all the places Facebook serves. We're gonna like, find a way for communities to do it themselves. Which is a lot of authority to hand off. Also, no one's ever figured out how to do that in history.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Including Facebook, which has tried to do it. They used to have a voting system and nobody voted. Or, I mean, like, hundreds of thousands of people voted, but they wanted at least 30% of all its user base to vote, which was an impossible task. So they never, nothing ever passed. What was this voting system? So, we did a story about it today. I think Addie did it?

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  Addie did, yep.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so they're in the late, I don't know, it was 09, I think. They had a system where they like wanted to propose rule changes. And so then they put out two different terms of service, giant, you know, legal documents. And they're like, "Okay, users, we will do whatever you tell us to do, whichever one you vote for. The rules are, it's binding if 30% of you vote." And let us know. So people had to see the thing, read the thing, understand the thing, and then vote on the thing. And they got, you know, like, the first, the first time they did the ballot, it was, I don't know, 600,000 people, which seems like a lot, but it worked out to like, you know, a 10th of a percent, 1% of their user base. And they only wanted it to be binding if it was 30%.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  So their first cut at doing something like the community leads it was like crazy town. And so whatever community-based standards he wants to create, the problem is that moderating is hard and people won't do it for free. And it's different from place to place. And so you can't apply the same rules across all 2 billion people because you can't get a big enough percentage of those people to agree on anything or even engage with the process in the first place.

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  So this is what I mean. Like, the, his ideas for the future of Facebook are huge ideas. They're super interesting. And then you pull the thread and they like fall apart. So he pointed out that in surveys, when you ask millennials around the world how they identify themselves or what their, their most like, uh, uh, core sense of identity is.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Power users of the internet?

• 56:45Nilay Patel?

  Power users of the internet. Uh, yeah, they're just like typing in their Reddit handles. Um, um, no, they say they identify as citizens of the world, not ethnicity, not nationality. They're citizens of the world. And he's like, "We gotta do something to reflect that."

• 56:57Speaker 01

  The confusing thing about that to me is if anybody, like, It's very scary to me that millennials are identifying as citizens of the world when they get asked that question because like, aren't they getting punched in the face for it all the time? Just for being, you know, insufferable? I don't know.

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  I was thinking an online poll. I don't think they're like running around being like, "I'm a citizen of the world." I mean, I don't know what the kids are doing these days. But it strikes me that I don't see many teens or anything. Anyway, my point is, there's no such thing as a citizen of the world. Like, you can idealize and then create policy for. There's no such thing as a citizen of the United States that you can idealize and create a policy for. Like, we run massive, messy elections, people are disagreeing, that's Twitter's entire business. But you just, you can't do it for a citizen of Chicago. You can't idealize the citizen of Chicago and build a policy that makes sense for that person.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  There's no generic citizen.

• 57:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's no generic citizen of the world. Like, that thing, it's fun to think about, but when you actually try to build a, what Zuckerberg literally says, "A good functioning democratic system," is what he wants Facebook to be, you can't just like make rules. You have to let people participate in those rules, and you have to very clearly define the communities. And he hasn't done that, like, that is where this idealistic idea just grinds into the reality of politics.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  This, I mean, this, I think it kind of works on Reddit where you have a, a general Reddit Terms of Service, and then every subreddit is run by a group of dictators, basically.

• 58:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  And then some, some subreddits have a process for modifying the moderation team. But Facebook, you are, you aren't always in the umbrella of a specific community. Sometimes you're just out there on Facebook in a general sense. So what does that mean? Who runs that? I, I, something, I mean, this is probably a real tangent, I'm sorry, but... A really interesting governance model that I have been seeing is called the RFC process. And Rust uses it, the Rust programming language, which Mozilla started, uses it.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  And now a lot of other open, like, big open source projects, I believe Facebook's React uses it. And the idea, it's a request for comment or request for change, something like that. So it's like, right now, the rules are this, or the programming language is this. Here's what I think would be a good change. Then, community members can pile in and comment on that change. And the stakeholders of that specific part of the, of the, like, the Rust compiler, or the Rust standard library, some aspect of the Rust programming language, those stakeholders have like a stronger voice.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  But ultimately, because they're, it works better because they're going towards a technical solution. That ultimately, people end up agreeing one is-

• 1:00:02Nilay Patel?

  Right, and there's like probably some objective. And you have people who care, and the thing is small, and it's not scaled to two billion.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  And you also do have people with firm authority who can, in some sense, like, be voted out if they are doing bad at-

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  I think that's great, that's great when you have these small things that are organized around a goal. When you're trying to run Facebook as a government. Another one of Zuckerberg's ideas is that you'll appeal if you think a post has been taken out unfairly. If you don't like the ruling, you can then appeal to an independent third party that doesn't work for Facebook. And he says, kind of like a Supreme Court.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:00:39Nilay Patel?

  And I'm like, that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard in my entire life.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Is it?

• 1:00:44Nilay Patel?

  It is so, like, it is, it sounds really-

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  Why is it dumb?

• 1:00:48Nilay Patel?

  Great. The second you pull on that, it completely falls apart. So, if you want to build a court system- Well, you gotta decide, like, who is on the court? Step one, who's on the court? Can you imagine Facebook appointing? Just think, you want a generic, like, their, their first person they appoint is some extremely generic, middle-of-the-road, like, lawyer, right? Who's like, done a lot of speech work.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:15Nilay Patel?

  That person gets immediately attacked by everyone, left and right, because now they have this power.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:21Nilay Patel?

  And every decision they've ever, does that court set, so that's step one, you just gotta staff it. How many people are on the court? Because you know what you have, you have an infinite volume of appeals.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  So do they get to reject some appeals? Or are you just gonna have infinity people on the court to deal with their infinity problems? Who knows? Do their decisions create precedent? Are there gonna be Facebook Supreme Court lawyers?

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  What, what did we?

• 1:01:43Nilay Patel?

  Like, the second you pull on this thread, you're like, oh shit. You know what took a really long time and was really hard? Uh, building the government of the United States.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  When did we get so far away from this concept that the, what people do on the internet using platforms and like, forums, for instance, and like Napster? They are ultimately liable for their own actions. And if you make a, a system, let's say Napster, that is entirely predicated on people doing something illegal, then maybe you'll get shut down for that. But otherwise, you aren't super liable for what your users do. I feel like that was like a principle of the early internet that we have slowly.

• 1:02:28Nilay Patel?

  That's still around.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  And almost entirely backed away from.

• 1:02:30Nilay Patel?

  We, no, no, no, not even a little bit. So what you're describing is this part of the Communications Decency Act, CDA 230. Lawyers and policymakers are talking about it all the time. And it, it basically says you're not liable for what users do on your platform. And it gives platforms permission to exert a bunch of moderation control and still remain, and still maintain that shield against liability.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  So you're allowed to moderate, but it doesn't make you liable for everything?

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's like a weird misconception.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Keeps you from turning into a media company that's responsible for the things that happen.

• 1:03:01Nilay Patel?

  Right, and this has been around for 20 years, right? That thing is what allows Facebook and Reddit and YouTube to exist.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  The Verge.

• 1:03:10Nilay Patel?

  The Verge, like, we have comments, like, I'm not liable for what people do in our comments. We heavily moderate the comments because we want to have a good community.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:03:17Nilay Patel?

  But if you post. You know, some, if you post the entire text of some copyrighted book in our comments, like, I'm not liable for it, I should probably take it down. Mm-hmm. So it's that shield, CDA 230. It's a really important shield. There's a lot of debate around what should break the shield. So, child porn breaks the shield. If people are posting child porn in your user-generated content platform and you don't do anything about it, you're liable, because you should do something about it. There is a new law called CESTA that just passed. If people are using your platform, Craigslist, to do sex trafficking, you're liable. Craigslist and all the other ones reacted by changing what kinds of ads they do entirely. They don't even want to touch it. Well, didn't Microsoft change its policy in reaction to that, too? Yeah, a bunch of platforms reacted to CESTA by saying, "We're not doing this other

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  thing." And that's, CESTA was to prevent sex trafficking. It was to break the shield of CDA 230 by preventing sex trafficking. So that conversation on CDA 230- That makes you liable, now. Makes you liable, if people are using your platform for sex trafficking. So don't you need to monitor your platform entirely now? Or just not allow those kinds of things, which is what Craigslist did. We're just not doing these kinds of ads at all. That whole genre. The whole genre of ads. We're shutting it down, because we can't, we can't appropriately monitor. So like, the contours of CDA 230, I was actually just talking about this with Sarah Jeong today, because she's really interested in that. She knows way more about it than I do. But, the contours of it are, people are rethinking the contours of it. And one of the things that's interesting is, the argument for, they shouldn't be liable,

• 1:04:43Nilay Patel?

  one of the arguments for CDA 230 existing, is it allows companies, like Facebook, Google, Reddit, YouTube, AOL, to exist. Just like, flat out. They can exist, because they don't, they're not liable, and they can exercise some control over the platform. Now, you have a company like Facebook. It exists. It was allowed to exist, free of this liability. It has fundamentally a monopoly over the kinds of things. It doesn't have a lot of competitors. The competitors have it just purchased. So should our rethinking of this industry change? Because it's no longer in the we need to nurture it phase. It's in the these are giants that control information flow phase. And should we ask them to accept more liability? Should we change the contours of 230?

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  I don't know how you can make a platform with a billion-ish people on it. And that platform is around those people communicating or whatever, connecting with each other. And have any guarantee from that platform that no one's going to use that to harm anybody?

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  I think that's like a really reductive way of thinking about it, right? So Zuckerberg also in his interview with Ezra Klein, Klein asked him about what's happening in Myanmar, where Facebook was being used to like basically incite ethnic cleansing. And Zuckerberg was like, yeah, we noticed these messages are being sent on Messenger. We detected them and we stopped them from going through because we have this responsibility to do it. So they just did that, right? That's Facebook's choice. The question of how they detected the messages is kind of interesting. Like was there an AI farm doing it? And we asked Facebook, Facebook got back to us and they said people are reporting them. So that once we figured out that they're being reported, we like took some action. That's them doing it on their own. The question is just like, do you impose a duty for them to do it by law?

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  So instead of voluntarily doing that, do you say you have to do these kinds of things? And if you don't, now you're liable. That's like, that's the more like sophisticated approach to modifying 230. It's out there. Like when people talk about regulating Facebook, that in addition to the don't sell our data, be better about privacy, kind of GDPR stuff. There's also the, we know you're spreading hate messages. You can detect them, people can report them. Do you have a duty to stop it? Or we'll hold you liable for them? Like that's, it's a much narrower cut at it. Just like. I don't know. It's illegal to show liquor ads during the day. And if you do it, you should need to stop it. And if you don't, they'll find you. Like, it's the same kind of idea.

• 1:07:16Nilay Patel?

  On TV, I mean, anything, you could watch liquor ads yourself anytime you want.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it seems easier to make laws around like specific transactions, but just covering what people are saying to each other and expecting a company to have a better definition of what is okay to say than, like you said, the American government's been around for a while, building up this nice cocktail law.

• 1:07:42Nilay Patel?

  It took like, it took the founders like a long time to figure out.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  Ultra clear.

• 1:07:47Nilay Patel?

  They had a convention, they were all in Philadelphia, they argued about how the court should be structured. Like, that's what I mean. Like, you pull the thread on some of these things, Facebook, Zuckerberg is saying about how Facebook will run, and it just falls apart into insanity. And the way he talks about it is like, you know what a neat idea would be? A Supreme Court for Facebook. And it's like, dude, you are one of the richest and most powerful people on the planet. Like, maybe you should have more than like neat ideas. Right? Like, you should, you should be communicating effectively about how you might actually implement your world government idea.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Let me ask a question about that. Facebook has been on an insane media blitz. They've thrown all of their executives out into the slurry of Twitter. Sometimes that goes well, sometimes not so well. Zuckerberg has done, he did a bunch of interviews, did one with Recode, New York Times, and Wired. He did Ezra Klein Show. He just did this hour-long conference call with reporters. In fact, it was supposed to stop and he said, no, no, no, I want to take some more questions. They've, he's been on this insane media blitz.

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  He's gonna testify in front of Congress now?

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  He's gonna testify in front of Congress. The thing is, the question, and like Neil and I talked about this a little bit earlier, when he says, what if there was a Supreme Court that was independent from Facebook, but could arbitrate, blah, blah, blah, blah? The, the question is, is he, is that as far as the idea goes? And that's all he's got, and he's just being radically transparent? Or does he actually have a plan and he's not telling us? Or is it some third option? Like, I don't know, he's super naive. I don't know, maybe that's the first option. My sense is, that's all he's got. He doesn't actually know what the solution is. So if you're in his position, you know you need to fix it, but you don't actually have the fix. What do you do? And so I'm not defending any of these half-cocked ideas.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  I'm certainly not defending a lot of things about Facebook. But I guess if the alternative is he just continues to be a weird, emotionless robot who issues press releases and clams up and barely says anything at all. I guess I'd rather him be out there saying, "Yeah, no, we gotta fix it. I don't know what to do." The thing he's not saying is, "I don't know. Here's an idea. I haven't gotten anywhere with it." He's like proposing a bunch of interesting thought experiments for fixing Facebook. But like, what he needs to do is finish that thought and say, "We are way behind. We have to deal with it. We don't know what to do. I just have a few ideas. We're gonna work on it." Instead, he presents them without clarifying whether or not there's anything behind them.

• 1:10:15Nilay Patel?

  And the thing that I think just drives me insane is like, what was he thinking about before?

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  He was thinking about how to shuck corn in Iowa.

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  Did he just really wake up today?

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  Well, okay, so I think part of the problem here is that, because there are multiple sides. People disagree. There's no generic citizen, right?

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  People disagree. And a big part of the disagreement is right now, people disagree on what fixed looks like. So to get rid of the idea of we're gonna figure out what the solution is, there's a huge disagreement, at least in America, of what the outcome should look like. So on a conservative side, you have a lot of people complaining about being censored on Facebook, or censored on Twitter, or censored on YouTube. And meanwhile, what I hear more from the left is, "We're being harassed. We don't feel safe. You know, there is hate speech on these platforms." And so that's what they want to get rid of. And so the picture of what a fixed Facebook or any of these platforms looks like is different for the two different sides.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  And so I don't know if you have to come to an agreement.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, but I think-

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  Is it a Venn diagram?

• 1:11:22Nilay Patel?

  So you're saying we haven't even defined the problems? But, right?

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  We haven't defined an ideal, um, we haven't defined a paradise.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  Sure, but some of the problems are like, well, not like, you know what you shouldn't do? There shouldn't be like Russian bot farms seeding Facebook with misinformation during our election. It seems like just, no one wants that. There shouldn't be Cambridge Analytica hoovering up data outside of the Terms of Service and then using it for whatever they use it for. We know that shouldn't happen.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  Well, I feel like we've heard some proactive things from Facebook on it. He's not just riffing on those things.

• 1:11:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then the things that he is riffing about is what you are describing, which is I'm not gonna make a decision about what is and is not allowed on Facebook. Right, because that walks me into you're censoring me or you're allowing hate speech. We're gonna let these communities decide. And that, honestly, is like, I get where he's coming from, because that is how we literally define like speech laws in our country in a lot of ways. Like, the best legal definition of pornography comes down to, I know it when I see it in the community. And like, different communities can have different standards, and like, that's literally how we do it. But, he's not running a government, man. He's running a company.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  And like, if he hadn't thought about the problems of running Facebook at this scale in the form of a government before, I think that's why I read these answers and they all just seem like neat ideas that he's having to have as he thinks through it out loud in public. But it's like, what, what were you thinking about before? Like, through all of 2017, when all this was happening, where is your like, you know, blue ribbon commission to figure out how a Facebook Supreme Court might work? Where was the big public thing about Democrat, like a good functioning democratic system for post-removal? Like, that's what you should have been doing before. And I, the idea that this media blitz is gonna rehabilitate him, it might.

• 1:13:16Nilay Patel?

  You know, he's doing the work, he's out there, he's taking the questions, he's going in front of Congress. But the gulf in trust is because they didn't do the work before. Also, his ideas are insane.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Have you guys seen the film starring Emma Watson called The Circle?

• 1:13:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:13:34Nilay Patel?

  No. It is suggested to me all the time by content suggestion algorithms and I-

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  It's a social network and they start a government.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  I read the book. The book is a fun little YA novel. Uh, the movie I hate watched it. I'm like, I'm gonna watch this. I know it's gonna be bad, but I'm gonna watch it. And you can't even hate watch it. You can't even like watch it knowing that you're watching a bad movie. It is horrific.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  I made it all the way through.

• 1:13:59Nilay Patel?

  Alright, that's an accomplishment.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  We got, were you mobile? Did you accomplish this on mobile?

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Mobile?

• 1:14:04Nilay Patel?

  Alright. Are you a mobile accomplisher?

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  Oh gosh.

• 1:14:08Nilay Patel?

  Alright, we're done. That was Vergecast 300. It highs, lows. There was a montage. There was some deep Facebook stuff.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  It's a classic Vergecast because Neil, I forgot to do the thing you were supposed to, which was promote my new YouTube show.

• 1:14:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Dieter promote your new YouTube show.

• 1:14:25Nilay Patel?

  Just a, just a mess. I don't know why people have been listening to the show for as long as they've been listening to it. And people, more people keep listening to it. If you're new, it's never been better than this.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Maybe people have just been coming back hoping we would explain all of our jokes. And now they're finally satisfied and they'll walk away.

• 1:14:43Nilay Patel?

  Dieter promote your show.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Uh, there's a new show on YouTube, uh, called Processor. Uh, technically it's called Processor with Dieter Bone. Which I'm really happy about because before there was a title for it. I had this period where I didn't want to give it a title. Uh, so everybody just started calling it The Dieter Show, which was very awkward for me.

• 1:14:59Nilay Patel?

  I liked it.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's, it's gonna be a show where like we, we try and do like little, little video essays about tech topics. So the, the, the, one of the episodes we're working on right now is about the, what's a, what's a computer ad? And why everybody got so mad about it. I don't want to give away all my ideas. But it'll be, it'll be a little bit more YouTube-y than what we usually do. Uh, so that means like it'll be, I don't know, a little bit, little bit rougher, I hope. Um, but that should be a little bit more fun. And yeah, just, uh, just a lot of, I don't know, deeper thoughts about tech than you usually get from like your standard hands-on. I, I'll talk about specs, but, uh, that's like not the point.

• 1:15:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  Big ideas. It'll be fun.

• 1:15:35Nilay Patel?

  In my privileged position, I've already seen some episodes.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  Very good. Let me tell you.

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  Wait, when's the first episode go up?

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Well, in theory, the first episode is going to premiere on Wednesday, April 11th. It is possible that I might actually do something sooner because I am going to have a piece of exclusive news at some point in the near future. And when I'm able to publish it as an episode of Processor, I will. That's very exciting.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  What a tease.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Little tease.

• 1:16:04Nilay Patel?

  Deagre exclusive. We also have other shows. Why'd you push that button? Season two continues. This week, they did a whole thing on Finstagram. You know what Finstagram is?

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  Fences, yes.

• 1:16:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  I have a Finsta.

• 1:16:16Nilay Patel?

  Our secondary fake Instagram.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:16:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I really want to get it. I want to get a Finsta. I mean, it's easy to do. But they did a whole episode on what Finstagram are, why people have them with the very excellent Taylor Lorenz, who is one of the, I think, the sharpest sort of internet culture reporters out there. So listen to that. That's great. You can listen to Recode Decode, Kara Swisher. You can listen to Recode Media, Peter Kafka, both excellent shows. Casey Newton was supposed to be on this show today, helps talk about Facebook. He's not here because he was reporting an episode of his forthcoming podcast, Converged, Casey Newton. That's gonna be a thing. So keep an eye out for that. And you can just like go on the socials and find us.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  I believe it when I see it, Casey. I want it in my-

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  You won't see it. You'll hear it.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  I want it in my iTunes, or sorry, Apple Podcasts.

• 1:17:00Nilay Patel?

  It's called Apple Podcasts now. Yeah, you know that. Anyway, yeah, rate, review, do all the good stuff. That was Vergecast 300. We've either done 298 or 300 episodes of this show. Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  Here's to another 300.

• 1:17:13Nilay Patel?

  Here's to another number in that area. But thank you, everybody, for listening for all this time. It's wild that we've been doing this show for this long. It's wild that The Verge exists. It's wild that we have an audience. We thank you for it. Rock and roll.

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  Paul.

• 1:17:28Nilay Patel?

  Probably use the internet.

• 1:17:46Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by IBM. By the end of this podcast, nearly 10,000 new malware variants will have been launched. But now AI can help protect your data from threats wherever it lives with IBM Security. Let's put smart to work. Learn more at ibm.com/smart.