Amazon HQ2 cancelled and Apple's rumored March 25th event

Nilay, Dieter, Casey, and Paul react to Amazon cancelling plans for their second headquarters in NYC, Apple's rumored spring event and announcements, and some new Android phones hitting the market soon. Stories featured in this episode: Amazon cancels HQ2 in New York after backlashAmazon HQ2 defeat is a win for Queens activists but a ‘facepalm’ for tech leadersAmazon is buying mesh router company EeroJeff Bezos says National Enquirer is threatening to publish his nude …Apple’s Netflix competitor will reportedly be unveiled in March... or maybe AprilApple is reportedly planning a March 25th event for its subscriptionApple just made it easier to find and manage subscriptions in iOS …Apple's video service may launch without HBO and Netflix support …Apple reportedly demanding a staggering 50 percent of revenue with ... Apple's new deal for journalism should send publishers runningEarth is dying and this couple is crowdfunding a sex buttonNorth Focals glasses review: a $600 smartwatch for your facePhone makers aren’t even trying to keep their secrets secret anymoreGoogle launching Pixel 3 Lite and Pixel Watch in 2019, says Nikkei …The LG G8 has a vibrating OLED screen for a speaker Thanks to Microsoft Azure for sponsoring this episode. Get started with a free account and 12 months of popular free services at Azure.com/trial today. 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?

  On this episode of The Vergecast, a bunch of Amazon news. They're pulling out of New York. They're buying Eero. Jeff Bezos is involved in a whole bunch of scandals. We're pulling Casey Newton in to talk about that. We've also got to talk about the Apple event that's rumored to be happening on March 25th, and we're going to end on some gadget news.

• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.mobi of phone-optimized system of websites. I'm Neil, I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Paul Miller is here. Hello. And we got Casey Noon. How's it going, Casey?

• 1:46Speaker 03

  I'm doing great. Great to be on with y'all.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  Casey, the host of The Interface. You're a host, right? That's a thing you do? You host a newsletter?

• 1:54Speaker 03

  That's right. The Interface has taken over my body and we now have a symbiotic relationship.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  Worried about you. Just letting that one go. We have a lot to talk about today. There's a bunch of Amazon news, like an unrelenting amount of Amazon news this week, but there's two things I want to plug. First, if you noticed, Bill Gates was on the Vergecast this week on Tuesday, the deepest 33 minutes of my life with Bill Gates. We talked about having to collect better data about the lives of women and girls. We talked about building better toilets. We talked about anger management. We talked about billionaire tax rates. Phil is like a hard guy to interview. Casey, I think you've said this to me, right? He's like a challenging interview.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  He's a very challenging interview. I mean, obviously, one of the smartest people in the entire world. I would suggest he maybe scans your question for keywords more than really try to wrestle with the meat of it sometimes.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  But I think, I think, I think he was there with us. So, listen to that and see, tell me if I did a good job. But I enjoy talking to Bill. That was on Tuesday. Last week, I did an emergency episode of the Vergecast, which people seem to have liked, with Sprint's lawyer, who is suing AT&T over the use of 5G. Got into it. He says it's textbook false advertising. The Sprint T-Mobile merger right now is, there was a hearing in the House about whether it should happen. It seems like it's under attack from the Democrats. It seems like it's a little bit under attack from the Republicans. And John Ledger, CEO of T-Mobile. It's a true fact. Because it's under this like weird political pressure, John Ledger has deleted all of his mean tweets about President Trump, which is a truly insane

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  thing to do. There's a bunch of T-Mobile and Sprint stuff. It's very boring. It's in the weeds. You can go read on the site, but go listen to that episode about why Sprint is suing AT&T over 5G. That's available, too. And then I want to, before we begin the show, just say Better Worlds are a hopeful science fiction project. It's all done. You can binge listen to all of it. You can watch all the videos on YouTube. You can read all the stories at verge.com/betterworlds. Huge project. Want to give a shout out to everybody who worked on it because it's great. But now, I think we have to talk about Amazon. Today, as we're coming to air, Amazon has decided not to build HQ2 in New York City. So, if you will remember, Amazon held a public competition for cities across North America to bid on where it would build its second headquarters outside of Seattle.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  This competition was started great, and then immediately everyone's like, this is stupid. Cities are promising to change their names. All it did really was give a lot of people a lot of time to think about whether or not they like the idea of tax breaks.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the answer is they're, they're a pretty medium idea.

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  And then, so there's this huge competition, you know, like cities across Midwest are like, this will revitalize the economy. It's like lots of excitement, lots of criticism. In the end, Amazon says, okay, there's two winners, drum roll please, we've picked New York and Washington DC, which is like, we picked the Harlem Globetrotters and the all the rest of you are the Washington. So they picked, you know, the two big cities where the tech talent is, their reasons are sound.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  Neil, are you suggesting that trying to build a big tech hub in like a rural Wisconsin is a bad idea?

• 5:02Nilay Patel?

  It's not going great.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  Can you explain the Harlem Globetrotters, Washington Generals aspect? I understand that there's a sports thing going on.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  So the Harlem Globetrotters are a world famous trick basketball team? I don't know how you would describe them.

• 5:19Speaker 05

  Right, like a non-competitive stunt basketball.

• 5:22Nilay Patel?

  Right, and they always play the Generals who always lose.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  Oh, I didn't know that part.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's like the thing, you know, it's, I don't know what other sports might afford you, there are cities like New York and DC in this world, and then there are cities like Omaha, which like wanted to be part of this and it's like, what are they?

• 5:39Speaker 05

  How dare you?

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  Right, and so Amazon says, well, we wanted to go where the talent was. And it's like, well, you should have just said New York at the beginning. So in Virginia, in the spot they're going in Virginia, that seems to be going swimmingly. They said they're gonna put 25,000 jobs there, they're gonna put, they were gonna put 25,000 jobs in Long Island City in Queens, which is part of New York City, and the sort of Queens community said, well, hold up, we're already here, right? Like, New York State, why are you offering $3 billion of tax incentives to Amazon to like redevelop this community that we live in? And I think that's like a reasonable question to ask your lawmaker, and so in Virginia, it seems to be going fine, like it's a pretty corporate part of Virginia, but in New York, the backlash was, we weren't involved, like the local community wasn't involved.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  So you see the city council starts, you know, three months ago, this goes down, over that three months, the city council starts asking very hard questions of Amazon. New York has full of very powerful labor unions, they're asking Amazon very pointed questions about their workforce, Amazon saying, we don't, we don't really want to have unions. You see lots of local organizations participate. On the other side, actually Nat Garen wrote a great piece about this for us today, which I recommend that you'll read, on the other side, you have New York's tech and business communities who are saying, this is great. This is awesome. We're so excited to have, you know, Google's in New York. We're excited to have Amazon in New York. This is going to revitalize this startup ecosystem. It's going to put more money in it. We're going to do more business development. So there's a deep sense of excitement.

• 7:05Nilay Patel?

  Amazon's consistently pointing to public polling. It's like 70% of New Yorkers are excited about this deal. The problem is the 30% of New Yorkers who weren't, were in Long Island City in Queens.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  So today, Amazon announces it pulls out. Mayor de Blasio put out a statement. It's like, New York is, you have to be tough to make it New York, which is kind of an amazing shot at Amazon. And I think what we're just seeing now is, to Dieter's point, Foxconn's in Wisconsin. They got a massive amount of subsidies to go into Wisconsin. That project seems real shaky. Amazon in New York, they were lured in by a $3 billion subsidy package. Governor Cuomo said he would change his name to Amazon if they came to New York. He did not do that. But you see this like, appeal to the big tech companies. And I think here in New York, there's just, there's literally enough people at sort of the grassroots level to say, hey, we need to actually think about these deals way harder. Like, we're New York. We don't have to, we don't have to just

• 7:58Nilay Patel?

  take the terms of the big tech companies. And what's super interesting to me, Mark Bergen at Bloomberg pointed this out today. He covers Google for Bloomberg. Google is buying like, half of the city at the same time. They just announced a deal to buy like, most of the west side of Manhattan's buildings, like, just like, two weeks ago. And so Google has this massive presence in the city. They're buying more real estate. They're going to own more buildings. They're going to put in more employees. But because they didn't hold this public competition, and they didn't ask for these tax breaks, that's actually seen as a sign of success. Whereas, Amazon is like, you're a monopoly. You're trying to extract monopoly rents for asking for tax breaks to build, to build buildings in Queens and put in $25,000 jobs. So it's a lot. It is unclear. The

• 8:43Nilay Patel?

  funniest thing about this to me is that Amazon has, is basically like, well, it turns out we don't need a second site anyway.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. They're just like, yeah, we're done. We're not going to do this again.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  So it just seems like this reality show that they put on completely backfired on them. Casey, is that kind of your read too?

• 9:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, they, they really expose themselves to be completely disingenuous here because they're still going to hire 25,000 people. They're just going to spread them across the country and apparently into Canada as well, which means that you get a lot of high-paying tech jobs dispersed into a bunch of cities that need them, but that can also absorb them. And those cities don't have to front billions of dollars in incentives in order to get them. So, you know, my read on this is this seems like it's actually a very good outcome, not just for the city of New York, but for the country at large. But, you know, the thing that this has been making me think about is what a shock it

• 9:41Speaker 03

  must be, not just to Amazon, but also to local politicians. I used to cover local politics. And when you're running for city council, or mayor, or state rep, the thing you talk about more than anything else is the economy and the jobs that you're going to bring. And that has been a winning argument for decades. But what has happened is that we now have these examples of these cities that have essentially zero unemployment, where people make very high wages, and they've become weirdly unlivable because no one can afford to buy a house. The restaurants are all shutting down because they can't source the, the cooks. And so even if you could make the case that Amazon was going to get

• 10:24Speaker 03

  this, this amazing number of high-paying jobs, the average New Yorker already has a job. And the only thing this thing was going to mean for them is that their rent was going to go up. So it really has kind of scrambled the equation of being a local politician and being a company that wants economic incentives.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  And it's funny because New York is not, I would say, a perfectly well-run city.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  Also, I think by law, no New Yorker is allowed to say the city is well-run, so. Compared to San Francisco, compared to Seattle, which are both facing enormous questions about where people will even live, New York has like a sort of a different set of problems. And even if you're priced out of Manhattan, which most people are, you can go live in Queens and you can go live in Brooklyn. And the idea that you suddenly would not be like, real estate prices in Queens were skyrocketing. So the idea that you would put a big tech company there and then you would displace that population, I think, just did not fly.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  So I just, I just want to read some quotes. So that's like the, that's the one side, right? Which is the city planning side of it. Once the people on the ground got involved, the questions came fast and furious. But on the, on the tech side, Julie Samuels, who I have spoken to for years, she used to be part of the EFF, now she runs Tech NYC, which is a nonprofit advocacy group for tech companies. Her quote to Nat, "This is terrible for New York." They're talking about tens of thousands of jobs that were going to be in New York City that now aren't. General Assembly, which is sort of a tech training organization here, their CEO Jake Swartz said, "Amazon's departure is a facepalm heard around the world and is self-owned by the entire NYC ecosystem." Wow.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Can you hear a facepalm?

• 12:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  It's just, the problem is, and then you die, is like... I just tried to make an audible facepalm and forgot that I'm wearing glasses and not contacts, and I may have just broke my glasses. That is an audible facepalm.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  One of, one of my very favorite organizations in the city is called Pursuit. It used to be called Code for Queens. They taught sort of underemployed people how to code. They actually had this track record of taking average salaries from like $14,000 a year to $70,000, $80,000 a year through their program. Very fond of them. Ju-Ke Su, who's the leader of that pursuit, he says, "We had just met with the Chair of Economic Development at Amazon yesterday. This was meant to be a long-term process of investment. We were just at the start, and I don't know what happens now." So you see, the tech ecosystem in New York was like gearing up. To staff Amazon, to take Amazon investment. Whereas I think the, the other part of the ecosystem, which is the people who live in New York, were like, you made this deal without, without involving us in any way. So this is a big break.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  I think it's gonna lead to a lot of questions about how many subsidies you really need to give some of the largest and wealthiest corporations in the world.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Which is such a great and overdue conversation to have, right? Like, I think the burden of proof should be on both the companies and on the governments that are going to offer these incentives to, to really prove to residents of these towns that not just that jobs are going to materialize in the ether around them, but that their quality of life will improve, right? That should be the whole discussion. If you want billions of dollars, tell me how my life is going to improve.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  Casey, on your podcast that was like a quiz show, it was really fun. I listened to every episode. One of the episodes was about a startup founder in New York. Do you feel like these, these people that Neel is talking about, are there enough tech jobs in New York or is there like a shortage there?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Everyone that I've talked to over the past year in New York has said the, the tech economy in the city has never been better, right? New York is a magnet for talent, period. And there are more and more places where people can work if they're in the tech industry, Amazon included, right? There are already Amazon offices in New York, let us not forget. Google is the other big example, which, which Neel I already mentioned. And, you know, as always happens, some of those people are cycling out of the big companies. They want to start something smaller. They're raising money from a growing number of New York-based venture capitalists. So, you know, I do not see this as a death blow to the New York tech economy, right? I see it as, you know, a bunch of industry and lobbying groups aren't going to get

• 14:37Speaker 03

  quite as much money from Amazon now that it doesn't have quite as larger presence there. If indeed it doesn't wind up building just as big a presence as it all already intended to, right? Like, the company has no credibility on this subject.

• 14:49Speaker 05

  Mine is the overt sweetheart deal aspect.

• 14:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right.

• 14:53Speaker 05

  Maybe a covert sweetheart deal.

• 14:55Nilay Patel?

  It is very hard to think about these sweetheart deals and Dieter brought it up for me not to think about Foxconn, which last I heard, like, literally, people in Wisconsin have been sending me emails, like, they don't appear to be building anything, they're just pushing dirt around to, like, get tax breaks.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Wait a minute, every construction project looks like that for, like, the first six months. Every major big building.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, there's like that huge Bloomberg story where it's like, all Foxconn has succeeded in doing right now is building a test bed where people are making 60 TVs, like, a year. Like, what are you doing?

• 15:23Speaker 05

  If you're gonna make 8K, 5G, AI, you need a deep foundation.

• 15:30Nilay Patel?

  You gotta dig all the way down.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  You need 1,000 feet for each K.

• 15:35Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying right now.

• 15:36Speaker 04

  That's what I'm saying.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Foxconn, by the way, in order to collect their first tax break, had to hire, like, 250 people. They missed the target by 80%.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 15:44Nilay Patel?

  People there that I've talked to are like, they could have literally just hired, like, 80 people to sit in a room and they would have gotten this, like, first set of tax breaks and they couldn't do it.

• 15:55Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, alright, so that was one piece of Amazon, but speaking of, like, the giants and Amazon being a giant, Dieter, I think you had as many feelings about this as I did, and you wrote a great piece about it. Amazon bought Eero this week, another company that we really like. I mean, I have Eero routers, Dieter, I think you have Eero routers, Walt Losberg has Eero router, like, these were great products.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  I even subscribe to Eero Plus, which I really like, which is a service, this is a subscription service in Eero that gives you access to one password, a VPN, they've got, like, a beta of an ad blocker if you want it, they've got, like, a malware blocker. Eero tells you what's on your network. So, okay, you know how on the Vergecast I, like, have a half-baked story idea and then I expound upon my half-baked story idea and Neil says, "Well, now you have to write that," and then I get real mad and then sometimes I write it? Same thing happened with this. Like, I emailed Amazon right away with, like, eight questions and I, and then I, "Well, we won't, we won't talk to anybody, but here's answers to your questions." And then I was like, "Well, okay, I've got these answers, they don't, they're not, it's not much. I don't know, I guess I'll write something." And then at, like, 8 at night.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  And I texted Eli, I'm like, I don't, I can't, I don't, I just don't know how, ah, feelings. And he's just like, just write the story. And then I wrote the story.

• 17:08Nilay Patel?

  It was true. I was like, just write down everything you've said to me. Just stop overthinking it.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  It really struck a chord, though. Like, normally when a little tech startup gets bought, up until relatively recently, people were like, hooray, it's gonna be so good, they're gonna get all these resources, it's gonna get integrated with this other ecosystem that I already love. And think of all the possibilities of what they'll be able to make now that they're connected to this larger company. And think of how it's gonna be able to connect to all these other gadgets. And, you know, it's not gonna go away in a puff of smoke when they run out of money. And everyone just, maybe not like enthusiastic, but everyone's like, cool, good on ya, this is, this is good news. But overwhelmingly, the reaction to Eero getting purchased by Amazon was just, bleh. Just, people, people were just, I mean, I tried to sum it up in like, you know, three words and blah, blah, blah.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  But like, people were just felt exhausted by it. And I don't even think it was necessarily because people hated Amazon particularly, although there is a little bit of concern about their, you know, data privacy and stuff. But it was, it was more like, well, I guess, I guess we're only gonna get to use things that are made by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. That's just, that's the world we live in. The end. The CEO of Sonos keeps, keeps tweeting at us, saying, we're still here.

• 18:24Nilay Patel?

  I have a tweet that I have not sent to, in reply to Patrick Spence. It's been in my drafts all day.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  That says, you'll make more money if you update the playbar. And I, just like a little too rude, I'll say it here. So my comparison, I think Casey, you'll enjoy this, is to Google and Nest. Like, do you remember how excited people were when Google bought Nest? It was like, for a couple billion dollars, I think it was three. Tony Fadell was gonna ride into Google and build them into a hardware powerhouse, they're gonna compete with the i. And like, there has not been a more disastrous acquisition that I can think of at that profile.

• 18:59Speaker 04

  No.

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  Can you?

• 19:00Speaker 04

  Not at all. It's Google's worst acquisition.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  Like, I have a Nest thermostat, it's very good.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  But like, that's, that's it. Like, that's the thing that they do. They're like... They turned my heat on and off. They didn't build out that ecosystem of products they thought they were going to. They bought Dropcam and just, I mean, that is one of the most spectacular flame outs.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  Ever. They bought some little company that made like a, I forget what it's called. They, they made a hub with all these wireless radios in it and they shut down the hub and killed the service and those 400 people were extraordinarily mad and they've never put out another product to replace it.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Actually, speaking of, of, uh, wacky wireless standards, I know you want to finish the next thought, but I also need, this is, the Vergecast is the perfect place for you to talk about Thread.

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  Thread?

• 19:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I'll, I'll get to Thread.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but anyway, so like, there's been that acquisition. I think we see Apple buy companies, little companies all the time. And like their features just kind of get rolled into apps you don't want to use and like now you're part of another ecosystem. Google just like buys things and they disappear into the Google ether.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:01Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft buys Wanderlist and now every day I'm like, is this the day that Wanderlist stops working? It's just that, I think that's the exhaustion, right? These are not seen as victories. Now these products are going to be stable and on a good course. It's how fast will the big company starve this into oblivion?

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Or screw it up or whatever. Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 05

  Part of that sensation for me is that mo- most of these companies feel like, or, or give off this vibe that every time you use something that's not made by them, that's a personal failing. Like the fact that they didn't make your light switch or your car or your door handle or your kitchen faucet or your email app, like they have failed and they're sad about that and they're working very hard and eagerly to, to win your business so that they can have your whole entire life inside of their ecosystem. Uh, uh, maybe that's why people are like nicer to Microsoft nowadays because Microsoft realized it lost some of that dominance in people's lives and so now it feels like it has to play nice.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. It turns out that the less power that companies have over you, the, the better you feel about them.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  It's really interesting how these companies, as they grow and grow and grow, just sort of wind up playing themselves, right? Like, growth winds up causing problems for them faster than they can solve the problems created by growth, but growth is the only logic that a company knows. And so, you know, it just sort of like plays out until disaster strikes. And, you know, with the Eero acquisition, this is exactly the way that I felt, you know? Like, the Eero founder is a super nice guy and he built a great product. You know, we have Eero at my house too, and I think it does a really nice job. But with the flip of a switch, all of a sudden, that's all Amazon data now. I will have no say in how that data gets used, and I will likely not even know how that data gets used, right?

• 21:52Speaker 03

  And that doesn't matter when it's a tiny startup, although arguably, there might even be more security concerns there, right? But when it's a really big company and it has access to all of your data, there is just this point of exasperation. And the last thing I would say is that just last week, Kashmir Hill at Gizmodo finished up an amazing series in which she tried to live without using products from each of the big five tech companies, and then, in the final stud, tried to spend a week living without any of them from all five. And guess what? It is basically impossible, right? You almost cannot touch the internet without touching Amazon Web Services. And so, there really is no longer any meaningful choice for consumers for most of the major services that we now rely on to live our lives. So, that's a bad thing.

• 22:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think when there is competition... So, my favorite... This is a total tangent, Casey, but just follow me on this. My favorite thing that The Verge covers in like great detail for no reason... IR blasters. Is insane... No, I hate you so much. Is insane party speakers!

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 22:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, it's just a... It's right, like, we've got Amazon, we've got like Jeff Bezos accusing Saudi Arabia of hacking his texts. Like, there's all this huge stuff we cover, and then, you know, we like make a point of covering... Sony put out its like fifth-generation light-up party speaker. And one, I think they're hilarious and we should cover them. But two, there's like actual competition in that market. And it's proof that no one actually knows anything. Right? Like, you don't know what consumers want. Like, you think everyone wants to live in a totally minimal Instagram house with like one HomePod. But it turns out, they're actually out there buying speakers with built-in air horns that light up.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  And like Sony makes one, and LG makes one. And there's like this massive vibrant competition there. And I think that makes people feel good.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Totally. Neil, I, there's a perfect software analog to this. Dating apps, right? None of the big five makes a dating app, although Facebook is working on one right now. And dating apps are a true design playground where almost every year, someone figures out some new behavior, some new mechanics, some new design.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, but, but then the next year, that dating app gets bought by the dating app conglomerate.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  There is a dating app conglomerate, yet you're right. But even that is not owned by, by Facebook, right? And, and so it is one spot in the economy where there is legitimate innovation. And the fact that, you know, that IAC, uh, which owns all the dating apps is not itself owned by Facebook, is the reason why that's the case, right? So where we do find competition, consumers are almost always better off.

• 24:26Nilay Patel?

  So, we can move on from this. I am trying to get Nick Weaver, who's the CEO of Eero, on our interview episode. I'm pushing real hard. I think he's, this deal's gotta close before he's like into it.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:36Nilay Patel?

  But the one thing I, he did say to me very briefly, literally one word. I asked him how long he was working on it, and he said years. So I don't think this is like they ran out of money and they were desperation selling. I'm gonna try to get him on the show and we'll, we'll push him on it a little bit more. I'd also like to know how much they sold for.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:53Nilay Patel?

  Um, so when, when he's ready to talk. But I, I do think there's this narrative that like, you run too fast, you run out of cash, and like desperation sell yourself to one of the big companies. But I know that like, the big companies have been looking at Eero for years because it is a great product and a good team. And this is, this is apparently what they chose. So I would love to get more details on this. But, you know, Sonos, like, stay strong, buddy. Update that playbar. Like, there's one thing in my life that is not owned by Google or Apple.

• 25:22Speaker 04

  The perversity of all this is I'm scared of investing in Sonos because they aren't owned by a big company. So who knows how long they'll be around. It's sick and wrong for me to think and say that. But that's sometimes how I feel about like a non-mega company.

• 25:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I think that's, I mean, how many cloud-enabled devices have like gone belly up? Like stopped working because the cloud service goes away. Sonos is at least a public company, right? Like, they're not, they're not like a VC disaster.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  You can check to see how long it'll be till they go down.

• 25:56Nilay Patel?

  I think it'll be a while. I'm reviewing the Sonos AMP right now, by the way. It's great.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, just to wrap up the joke I made earlier. Eero was talking like it was gonna bet big on the IoT home smart gadget, smart home standard Thread. And literally, nobody else was like, you go for it, man. We believe in you. Everyone, yeah, that's gonna be the one. And then didn't bother. And I can't imagine Amazon cares about that at all. And so that's just, I don't know.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, so when they put out the second generation here, I did forget to talk about this. I received many lectures about Thread and how Thread was gonna be everywhere. And Thread is the thing. And by the way, speaking of Nest, Google versus Nest on Thread, like rent the company asunder.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  Because no one wants to use Thread.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  Are you saying we need a Thread dead redemption?

• 26:48Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 26:49Nilay Patel?

  Yes. So anyway, so Eero bet on this smart room wireless standard called Thread. Amazon is all in on like Zigbee or Z-Wave. I think it's Z-Wave.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  It's got a Z in it.

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's one of the two. We've made a lot of jokes about the Z-Wave Alliance on this show. That's all I remember. Like, I don't remember which one it is. I just remember the idea of the Z-Wave Alliance being very funny. But anyway, so Amazon's all in on this other standard, and I bet Eero has to drop. It's heretofore unused thread support completely because who cares? It's just a very, they were the one team that was like all in. Okay, last Amazon story. Casey, I'm gonna let you drive this one. This is truly at the nexus of social media democracy and medium, which I believe you enjoy dunking on. Tell me what is going on with Jeff Bezos and his dirty photos.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  I can't imagine one person is listening to this show that doesn't know the outlines of it.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  Literal outlines of it?

• 27:41Speaker 03

  And when I say the outlines of it.

• 27:42Nilay Patel?

  No! This story hit as we were trying to wrap up the Vergecast last week. So if you listen to the end of the Vergecast and we seemed a little distracted, it's because we were reading graphic descriptions of what was going on.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  We were reading the greatest medium post of all time by Jeffrey P. Bezos, who is the founder of amazon.com and also has been going through a divorce and also is an enemy of the President of the United States and also an enemy of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. So he's got a lot going on. And when recently he learned that his intimate messages, including both texts and photos, were hacked off of his phone or off of somebody's phone, he hired the best investigator in the world and gave him an unlimited budget and say, and said, you know, go, go find out who my, my enemies are.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  And so what he recounts in the blog post, as you now know, is that it appears that American Media Incorporated, AMI, which is run by a guy named David Pecker, improbably, were extorting him, saying, you need to get out there and put out a statement saying that there is no political motivation to the fact that we are publishing your, your text messages. And if you don't, then we will publish more intimate messages that we have from you, including some nudes. So Bezos wrote about it in a sort of incredible way. Like he, he wrote about it with almost this calm amusement. And, and clearly an air of self-satisfaction that he had gotten these goons to.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  out themselves in writing and he was just sort of able to publish all of their emails. And now AMI is scrambling. It says it's going to investigate. It's in a very precarious position, both financially and legally. Financially, because it's losing money and legally because it cut a deal with federal prosecutors over some, you know, Trump-related corruption. So the whole thing is just one of the wildest stories I've seen in nine years of writing about tech.

• 29:51Nilay Patel?

  But the deal they cut with prosecutors was a promise to not do more crimes.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  Which is an incredible deal to make. We promised to not commit more crimes, which I feel is like the deal you always make with a prosecutor.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  That's right. But with, you know, with these Trump associates, you never know. You always want to get them on the record saying they won't do more crimes.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  And then they might have done another crime, which is incredible. So it turns out it's the brother, right? I mean, CNN has it, the Daily Beast had it. But there's this like, there was a whole news cycle where there's a lot going on with Saudi Arabia and Jamal Khashoggi, their ability to hack iPhones was in the news. And I think Bezos was trying to make that link. And he hasn't provided any proof of that link because he mentioned Saudi Arabia in his, in his letter.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  But I think now we're conclusively on it's the brother leaked it.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  But what do we know about the brother's motivation?

• 30:48Speaker 04

  He's a MAGA.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  It's so it's just like he's going to help out his guy Trump.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  I mean, who knows? But that's the, that's the state of play as we record this. By the time we, you hear, listen to this episode, 15 more Amazon stories that shake the world will have happened. So don't blame us.

• 31:06Nilay Patel?

  It turns out the brother is going to sell his wifi company to Amazon, too. The deal gone wrong. You never heard of it. Um, yeah, I mean, look, at this moment in time, I think, you know, if you listen to this show, what we talk about Apple and Google and Microsoft and Facebook all the time. I think we have uncovered Amazon. I think to a large extent, the tech press has somewhat uncovered Amazon. And I think this is a moment, you can just see it coming. And I think we're gonna, we're gonna spend some more time thinking very critically about Amazon.

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• 33:04Speaker 04

  So it's like Apple event rumor time, which is very exciting.

• 33:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  Some conflicting reports out there. I can run this down. So John Pachowski over at BuzzFeed, who has like years, years has been one of the people who has nailed the date for Apple events, came out and said, hey, there's going to be an Apple event, March 25th, but it's not what you think. Don't expect this rumored iPad mini. We may not even know, there may not even be hardware, who knows? Probably not the AirPod 2s, AirPods 2, whatever. But it's going to be focused on, it's going to be focused on, you know, services, some kind of subscription business. And then Reuters was like, oh, we're here in April for an event that's going to have like, you know, Hollywood celebrities in it. So.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Jennifer Aniston will be on stage and maybe it'll be April. So a little bit of conflicting. And but on top of that, like in the lead up to this, instead of getting a bunch of like phone leaks, we're getting a bunch of leaks about what's going on with two subscription services. Apple is, you know, wanting to roll out. And the first one, and I think the one that, I mean, actually, they both need a ton of explanation. But I think the, the one that I still don't understand is the video subscription, the TV service thing. But we're starting to get a little bit more clarity about that, right?

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then there's the, the newspaper, the publisher one, the Apple News one, which is built off a product that exists called Texture. So I think we kind of have a feel for it.

• 34:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  But start with the video one, because I'm sure no listener is confused about how dear, near and dear this is to my heart.

• 34:41Nilay Patel?

  It's going to support Atmos.

• 34:42Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 34:43Nilay Patel?

  I actually don't know if it is. Just go with me. So Apple has not been shy about the fact that it's spending like a billion dollars on content. Right? They like on the last earnings call, Tim Cook was like, we have a deal with Oprah. They hired two executives from Sony Pictures to like, go do more development deals. They're, they're buying shows and unusually for Apple, they put out press releases when they make these deals. Right? So we get press releases sort of on the regular. Apple buys another show from so and so. So we know one thing, which is whatever Apple premium video service is coming, it will have a bunch of shows for a bunch of people on it, Oprah included. Yeah. So that's, we just, we know there's content. So that makes you think, oh, it's like Netflix.

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's got this like Netflix vibe to it. But then there's this whole other set of Apple services that they're really interested in selling. Right? There's iCloud storage, which Casey will rant about, given any opportunity.

• 35:43Nilay Patel?

  There's shared photo streams. There's, you know, this forthcoming premium news product. There's like just a bunch of stuff that you can pay Apple as a service to get. But so then it's like, well, is this going to be more like Amazon Prime? Where you, you, you pay Apple just one chunk of money and you get all this Apple stuff, including some video content?

• 36:00Speaker 04

  But there's a whole other video part to this, right? Where they, they get a cut and yeah.

• 36:06Nilay Patel?

  So then the third thing that they've talked about, Tim Cook talked about on the last earnings call, is the fact that they take a, a cut when you subscribe to stuff in their stores.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 36:15Nilay Patel?

  So if you sign up for HBO on the Apple TV. Apple gets a cut of that.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  Right. And some, some streaming companies are very unhappy about this. So Netflix won't let you sign up for Netflix in the Apple TV or on your phone. They want you to go to the web and sign up because they don't want to pay Apple. It's 30% cut. Spotify has been very angry about this for a very, for a very long time. But if you're not Netflix, right, if you're TNT, right, like, it's very hard for you to demand people go elsewhere to sign up individually. And people don't want to sign up individually if they don't have a cable company. So Apple is like, we're just going to bundle premium channels into our video offering. We'll take a cut and that will become services revenue on top of our big content thing. That looks like what Amazon does with the Fire TV. So now you've

• 37:05Nilay Patel?

  got like a third option for what this video service looks like. So we know there's some premium content.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  We know what Apple's TV app looks like.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  Do we? Does anybody really? Apple's TV app is, is a confusing dumpster. It, it's, and if, if it's any indication of the coherency and quality of what their upcoming video services are, we're doomed.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's right. I'm just saying you can go look at it. Like, you, we know what it looks like. Dieter, I think you're much more existentially referring to the fact that no one can comprehend it. Like, no one can truly see this because it is such a mess. Like, your, your brain cannot fully understand what's happening. But you can look at some pixels on a screen.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:47Nilay Patel?

  That Apple ships that are called, it's called the TV.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Apple's TV app is like a, a, it's like the, the software design equivalent of a Magic Eye poster. You have to be very special to, to see it and see, see it for what it is. And then once you do, it's just a really bad drawing of a whale.

• 38:02Nilay Patel?

  The user flow of searching for something in Siri on the Apple TV and then watching that thing is bonkers.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:09Nilay Patel?

  Right. So you're like, play American Gods. And it's like, I found American Gods. I'm going to open the TV app. The TV app will ask you if you want to open Stars. Stars will open and then it will start playing. And it's like, why did this thing happen in the middle? Like just, just because Eddie Q is like, I need more TV app opens. So this like horrible thing happens in the middle. Anyway, you have this sense of what Apple kinda wants to do. They wanna funnel you. They, they have been open. I think Eddie Q has actually said this to me. That eventually a TV app will be the home screen of the Apple TV.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:42Nilay Patel?

  And they just haven't gotten there yet. So now you still have this app grid. But eventually you're gonna open the, you're gonna turn on your Apple TV. And it's gonna show you the TV app with a bunch of content you can watch and suggestions and all this stuff. Which by the way, Apple can use to drive demand to its own shows. If you don't pay for the service, which is a thing they will almost certainly do. They can take paid, they can take money to advertise its show higher in the list. All of this stuff cable boxes do, right? So this all kinda lands at Apple's gonna turn this Apple TV into a cable box. It's gonna have its own content, right? But just instead of Comcast, which promotes NBC, which it owns. Disclosure Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, which owns Vox. You get it.

• 39:24Nilay Patel?

  But instead of Comcast, which owns NBC and promotes NBC content and then takes cuts of everybody else's content. It's Apple, which owns this interface, which has its own content, which takes cuts of everybody else. So they're basically building to me what sounds like a replacement cable box, like a unified interface. And in this moment, when all these cases, I literally talked about this yesterday. When everyone is asking you for a subscription fee, it actually doesn't sound so bad. To be like, a bundle is better. I'll just pay one provider, some money, and they will deliver everything to me. But the big questions are who will sign up to be in that bundle?

• 39:57Speaker 03

  So I, I find this entire thing exasperating for the exact reasons we've been talking about the whole show. Which is just the concentration of power into four companies, right? It's not enough that Apple provides us with our phone and our cloud storage and our tablet and our computer. It now also needs to own our entire media diet.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  And what I'm interested in seeing is whether at this next event, Apple sort of at least either introduces or signals that it's going to introduce what M.G. Sigler has been calling Apple Prime, right, which is sort of, is there sort of one price that you pay and you get your cloud storage and your Apple Music and their garbage publisher offering? And, you know, the season six of Planet of the Apps, like, because I imagine that many people would find that compelling, you know, if Apple priced it at, you know, $100 a year. It would be more like Apple to price it at $400 a year. But to me, that's like sort of the next interesting turn of the screw.

• 41:01Speaker 05

  Well, my, my feeling with all of this is, yes, I'm terrified and scared of Apple. Yeah, or not, I don't, I'm not scared of Apple, but just, I'm exhausted by Apple wanting to own my whole media diet. But also, I'm at a point with this whole, this narrative with Apple, Apple starting a TV thing. It's like, it's sorry, sorry to be a little blue, but shit or get off the pot. Like, stop, stop working on your beautiful pie in the sky. Like, start delivering value to anybody in the world. Like, start presenting actually like, good, like, make a really good TV show and put it on your service and make us wish

• 41:44Speaker 05

  we had your service. Instead of like, pretending like, oh, well, I'm still working on, you know, it's like a, I don't know.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 05

  It's frustrating as a tech story.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  They made Planet of the Apps, Paul.

• 41:55Speaker 05

  I know, I know.

• 41:58Nilay Patel?

  That didn't make you want more Apple content?

• 42:00Speaker 05

  No.

• 42:00Nilay Patel?

  I will say, they're, they've hired these executives, they're signing all these deals. There are these rumors that Tim Cook is like editing all of these shows. And he's pulling everything back to be like, family friendly. Like, he personally, I think the Wall Street Journal reported, Tim Cook personally spiked a Dr. Dre like biography show.

• 42:20Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 42:20Nilay Patel?

  Because it involved Dr. Dre's biography.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, there's this notion that he's trying to protect Apple's brand.

• 42:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:30Nilay Patel?

  Which is in stark contrast to like Disney, which is launching Disney Plus. And Julia Alexander and her team is obsessed with Disney Plus and like tells me about it every day. They're launching in the same timeframe. Every part of Disney is making content for Disney Plus. You know, they invested in Vamtech, which is the streaming company started by Major League Baseball. It's like power the underlying thing. They're gonna present the interface at Disney Investors Day in April. Like, they're like going at it with Disney Plus to compete with Netflix.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 42:57Nilay Patel?

  If you'll notice right now, Netflix is promoting the shit out of Disney movies.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  Cause I think they want you to like watch Frozen one last time before it goes away to Disney Plus. But like, but wait, hold on, but they bought Fox, right? And so, you know, Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney is like, we're gonna let Deadpool 3 be R-rated. We understand there's a place for that.

• 43:17Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  And their Disney brand won't get destroyed by R-rated Marvel movies. Apple, I don't think is in that position because they're not a content company.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:27Nilay Patel?

  Right, so the first Apple R-rated show, people are gonna be like, an outrage! And Apple, like iPhone sales might be affected. And that's like too much of a risk for them. Whereas, you know, Disney is like, yeah, you know, we understand.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:40Nilay Patel?

  That's gonna be just really hard for them to manage.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  So I have, I have two thoughts. To Casey's point about will people just want a bundle? Like, how many people do you know? I suspect it's more than you expect. Will just watch garbage on Netflix because they're already paying for it instead of like spending $399 to rent a movie? Right?

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm one of those people.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  Crackdown just came out and on the Xbox and like a bunch, it's not that great of a game, but I'm gonna play it because it's part of Xbox Live. There's just, people will like go to watch the mediocre stuff because they've already paid for the bundle. Rather than just, you know, spend, you know, a latte and rent the movie that they might actually want to watch.

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  Totally.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  So there's that. So I think Apple could actually have an advantage there and that maybe the content doesn't have to be that good. But two, with regard to the point I was making, people like HBO, people love Disney, people love Apple, nobody likes Comcast, nobody likes Time Warner, very few people like, I don't know, Spectrum, whatever. And so if Apple's going to be in the business of selling you a bundle, the risk to them isn't just that they're going to put out something R-rated and they're worried that, you know, moms are going to get mad at the iPhone because their kids watch something dirty on Apple's service. It's like, people might love the company less because like, they'll think of them as a cable subscriber, you know? Like, the same thing that we were just talking about earlier with Amazon. And

• 45:03Speaker 04

  like, Amazon bought Eero and everyone was like, ugh. Like, at some point, Apple's going to cross some invisible line and nobody's going to know when they've done it, until like, something else happens after they've crossed that line, and a bunch of people are going to go, ugh, Apple. Like, I feel, yeah.

• 45:20Nilay Patel?

  I agree with you. That line is so much farther away for Apple than it is for any of the companies that like, make money on data.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, Casey literally writes a newsletter every day about how far over the line Facebook is today. Right? And like, the line is ever in the distance.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  Casey, as we record this right now, disclosure, my wife works for Facebook, how far over the line is Facebook right now?

• 45:43Speaker 03

  Well, Facebook had a pretty bad over the line day because it turned out that they used their access to all data about all of our whereabouts at all times to identify threats to their platform. And so when they're worried that somebody might come do something violent at, you know, a Facebook office, they will just monitor that person's location in real time. They also use this data with their employees. So, according to this report, which was from Sal Rodriguez at CNBC, one time, a group of interns didn't show up for work, and they said they were going camping or something and Facebook couldn't reach them. So, they just used their location data to figure out that the interns had been lying and were just playing hooky. So, in case you wondered what the future of work is going

• 46:25Speaker 03

  to be like, Facebook had a really nice glimpse for all of us today.

• 46:29Speaker 05

  Facebook spits on your lines.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. All right, well.

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  I don't even know what to do with that. Like, that's like the nightmare situation for Facebook.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:43Nilay Patel?

  Facebook is never, ever going to be able to convince people that it doesn't listen to them.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 46:48Nilay Patel?

  Right? If like, even if they don't, and I fully believe that they don't, because it's just like too hard to accomplish. And also, they can just do that. They can just figure out where you are and be like, do you want to see an ad for this store? And everyone's like, they're listening to me. But it turns out they're just secretly recording you because your brother was a contractor five years ago. They're never, they're never gonna get the goodwill back to convince anyone.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 47:09Speaker 05

  This is all making me, me very angry. And I just realized, can, have we said anything nice about a technology? I guess we complimented Eero's products pre, pre-acquisition. Can we all just go around in a circle and say something nice about a publicly traded tech company? I don't want it, I don't want it to get like a reputation of being like a negative show.

• 47:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's fair. I'm looking at the rest of our rundown. I think this is a good idea, Paul. I will say this, Amazon, Amazon is beloved. Even though they, they take a lot of heat and rightfully so. Uh, whenever people go do surveys out in the world about how people feel about the tech companies, Amazon is consistently one of the most beloved. Even our own survey, which we did last year and we're gonna do again soon, showed us like, people love Amazon. And I think that says a lot about, you know, I think it's kind of hokey, but they insist that they're a customer-focused company. And I think the customers actually feel that way about Amazon.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  I have one. Uh, I learned this actually yesterday from a newsletter reader. So I write a lot about misinformation. And, uh, there's, were some stories yesterday about how Facebook was, uh, how Facebook algorithms were promoting, uh, anti-vaccination groups and, and presumably, uh, you know, helping them find a lot of people who they wouldn't find otherwise. And one of my readers works at Pinterest and she informed me that Pinterest actually has an anti-misinformation policy. And you cannot post pins that say that, uh, you know, vaccinations will, uh, will, will kill your baby, uh, or something like that. And I thought, uh, one, I was, uh, really surprised to learn that Facebook had, or I'm sorry, that Pinterest had a misinformation policy I hadn't heard of.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  Uh, but I think, uh, those kinds of policies are good because, uh, that kind of, uh, information actively harms people.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  I got a twofer.

• 48:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  Google just updated G-Board for iOS. I like Google software a lot and, you know, it attracts me, whatever. But like, they make, they make some nice software and I think the G-Board is a very good keyboard. Minus some bugs that are kind of inevitable because they don't have access. Well, anyway, the point is, they added haptic feedback to their software keyboard. And the combination of Google's nice software with Apple's incredibly nice hardware, which has the best haptics I've ever felt on a phone. There may be some Android phones that are close, but whatever. It was great. Like, I, I had this moment where, literally for the first time in 15 years of using touchscreens on phones, 10 years, however long it's been, I turned on haptic feedback on a keyboard because it's so nice.

• 49:35Speaker 05

  It's just nice.

• 49:36Nilay Patel?

  I like it too. I wish they would dial it down one tick.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  Oh, come on.

• 49:39Nilay Patel?

  I wish the thunks were one tick less thunky.

• 49:42Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  But I, I have it on two. I just.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  We're saying nice things, Eli.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  It is a nice. Give me a thunk slider, that's all I'm saying. Paul, what was the, what was the keyboard metric? Kotar.

• 49:54Speaker 05

  Kotar.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember this? We came up for a metric for how laptop keyboards felt, like ages ago.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Paul, what's your nice thing?

• 50:02Speaker 05

  I should have thought of this before I came up with this exercise.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  Because we gotta go, we gotta let Casey talk about Apple News, which is gonna take us down.

• 50:11Speaker 05

  I really like DeepMind. They're doing StarCraft 2 now. They're kind of at like that, that early stage where they're showing off their work, but they're not like, out there necessarily beating the best in the world in fair matches. But the, Google's DeepMind stuff is really cool, really interesting, artificial intelligence.

• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  There you go. All right. Everyone take a break. Pallet cleansed. They're still good in this world. The Verge celebrates effort and innovation. That's a true thing that we do. We do not, I think, celebrate charging 50% taxes to already destroyed media companies.

• 50:44Speaker 05

  Burn it all down.

• 50:46Nilay Patel?

  Casey, can you, can you walk me through this one?

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah. From the, uh, "Kick 'em while they're down" school of, uh, tech company partnerships. So, uh, right after the industry lost more than a thousand jog. Why am I laughing? Like, what a fucking nice. So the media industry loses a thousand jobs, more than a thousand jobs since the start of the year. That's a real number. And Apple wants to put together a sort of souped up version of Apple News that people pay them to read. And so they've been making deals with publishers. And the deal was leaked by someone to the Wall Street Journal. And as the Journal reported it, the way that it will work is that you'll pay Apple something

• 51:33Speaker 03

  like 10 bucks a month. Apple will just keep five of those dollars. And then the remaining $5 will be divided among every media company that is in that bundle participating in the program, but based on some kind of engagement numbers. So, you know, if you read like 60% Verge stories and The Verge had a subscription, then like The Verge would get $3 or something like that. But, but in reality, you're probably going to be reading stories from dozens of publishers, or at least more than a dozen publishers. And so, you know, we're talking about a few cents per user per month going to, going to the actual outlets that are producing

• 52:13Speaker 03

  this journalism. And the reason that I find it so infuriating is that Apple has more than $200 billion in cash and marketable securities. It literally has more money than it knows what to do with. And, you know, a lot of people are saying, oh, Casey, like, this is just an opening bid. They're playing wizard chess. Like, I'm sure they're going to come down eventually. I am honestly almost as offended by a 30% cut of publisher revenue in this stupid program as I am by 50%. This is not a program that is going to meaningfully support the journalism that we need to have a healthy democracy. And for all of the humanitarian

• 52:54Speaker 03

  speeches that Tim Cook gives around the world about privacy being a human right, and that, you know, the great and good country that is America, I wish he would take more of an interest in the health of our media ecosystem. And rather than starve it of revenue, try to find a way to promote these companies. Tell the world you're, you're taking a 0% cut and see if that doesn't buy you some goodwill in the world.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  And that's why iMessage should be on Android.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  Well, so Casey, you made this point and some people got into with you on Twitter. I agree with you, but I'm gonna push you on it.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 53:32Nilay Patel?

  You said this is extortion, right? Because Apple controls this massive amount of demand.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:36Nilay Patel?

  And so if you want to play, you have to be there. And so you're, you know, I read a theory that, you know, they're negotiating in the press.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:45Nilay Patel?

  They're leaking 50% so that when they offer 30%, people take it and that's still too high. But you think that's, it's like this use of the market is unfair.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Well, I will cop to have probably legally misusing the term extortion.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  People explained to me that extortion has some very specific requirements that this probably does not meet. So I will...

• 54:06Nilay Patel?

  It generally involves pictures taken from Jeff Bezos' phone.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  So, so set that aside, right? But, you know, the, the market share number that I found suggests that about 60% of Americans have an iPhone. And we know that Americans get more and more news of their, more and more news each year from their, from their phone. Right? And so the only way for publishers to, to reach a huge number of their constituents is through the iPhone. Right? So again, because we have no meaningful competition in this country, um, you know, our industry is once again dependent on the whims of a platform to see whether it can survive or not.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  And, uh, you know, lest this sound like a bunch of media navel gazing, uh, Lord knows we do it. These problems are coming for your industries, folks. If you're in a commerce business and Amazon exists and has this much power, like you are under threat. If you wanted to build a social network, uh, and you can't find any customers and Facebook clones you the minute that you launch, you are under threat, right? Like, so if you're listening to me sounding, wow, like Casey sounds incredibly disturbed right now and I hope he's in therapy. I just, I just want you to consider what, look at the big five tech companies. Look at the industries that they're in now and look at the industries that they could easily get into. And then ask yourself how safe your job is and how you feel about it.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  Because the, the stuff that the media industry is going through, this, this headache is coming to a lot more folks and it's coming really quickly.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  You know, what gets me about that in particular is that the media just went through this whole cycle with Facebook.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  Right? And it destroyed, literally destroyed media companies in its wake. Like, Mike does not exist. Say what you will about Mike.com, if you find me in the street and buy me some beers, I will, I will say what I will about Mike.com. But it's just gone. Like, they just had to fire everybody because they made this huge bet on Facebook. And the metrics Facebook was using for success kind of feel like Apple's metrics, right?

• 56:12Speaker 03

  Very much so.

• 56:13Nilay Patel?

  Get more engagement on our platform and money will appear. And if you're like, well, in Apple News, we have to get engagement to get more money, specifically, those incentives get out of whack. Like, that is how you get into the clickbait hellhole.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  Is saying there's money tied to engagement.

• 56:28Speaker 04

  Also, also, just like, how transparent is Apple in this moment about what stories it promotes?

• 56:36Speaker 03

  Not at all, right? And we don't know who the editor of Apple News is, or maybe we know, like, who's the number one editor, but it's not as if, you know, like, they're all on Twitter saying what they think about the news of the day. So it's completely opaque. But, but, you know, to me, the, the, the bigger point here is if you're a publisher and you're going to participate in this program, this is likely going to diminish your brand, right? Like, you are not going to get some big lift because you're a premium publisher in Apple News. You are going to be scrapping for views along with whoever else is in that program. You have become just one more modular widget that has been stuffed into this Apple ecosystem. And for the most part, your readers aren't even going to know what they're reading. And Apple might say, well, no, they will because, you know, they're paying a subscription

• 57:20Speaker 03

  and so they're going to be paying more attention. But I honestly believe that the more people participate in that program, the more kinds of publishers that you're reading. It all just becomes one undifferentiated slurry of content, and the only thing that you know is that you read Apple News. And when people say, how do you get your news? You're going to say, Apple News. And, and what that does is it means that readers have no relationship with their publishers. They have less and less reason to just go and subscribe to, you know, let's say, The New York Times and pay The New York Times 15 bucks a month. And, and again, the bargain is totally unfair because Apple is doing almost none of the work in exchange for 50% of the revenue.

• 57:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, they've designed Apple News.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:58Nilay Patel?

  And they bought Texture. I don't know if you've looked at that.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, they, they built an RSS reader. Congratulations.

• 58:04Nilay Patel?

  I wish that were true, but it's not. By the way, I took, uh, I, Facebook and Twitter are well off my home screen and I replaced them with Feedly. And I have never been happy. Nice. Just shout out Feedly. I don't think they're publicly traded, but Paul, there you go.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  I, I use Feedly as my source, but I actually use Newsify with, uh, cause I like its interface better on iPhone.

• 58:27Nilay Patel?

  The next episode of The Verge should just be us arguing with RSS readers.

• 58:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 58:31Speaker 05

  Why is RSS, I mean, I know the Google Reader thing, I mean, even when Google Reader existed and so many people lamented the death of Google Reader, but like the reason it died is because people weren't using it very much. Like messaging is kind of actually a difficult thing to do. But aggregating news turns out it was solved a long time ago. Somebody made this RSS dot XML file. And it works really well. You could subscribe to the publications you find interesting. But I guess that's just not as, as, as interesting as an algorithm that finds, finds stories for you.

• 59:06Nilay Patel?

  No, I, I think it's that and we have to move on. So I'm going to say one deep thought and then we're going to move on. I think it's that, but I think fundamentally people want to be where people are. The reason people liked Google Reader is not that it was an RSS reader. It was an RSS reader with a really rich social component. Right? Like people were having discussions about stories. They were recommending story, like it was, it was a more social RSS reader than just Feedly. Like Feedly to me is only great because I have a Slack room full of The Verge to talk about every link that makes me interested in Feedly. But if I didn't have that, it would just be kind of like lonely. And I think Facebook has a, you know, it's a social network. All your people are there.

• 59:44Nilay Patel?

  Twitter, you're like, I want to see what anyone is thinking about any story and dozens of bots later, I can see what some human beings are saying about a story. Like I, I think there's that element. You know, the biggest apps on the home screen of any phone, the most popular apps are all social networks. And I think there's a reason for that. I don't think you can tell people like.

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  Isn't a social network?

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  Apple News is preloaded by one of the richest companies in the world on some of the most premium and most popular phones in the world. That's their, that's their strategy is to preload shit and get you to pay for it. That's why Apple Music is a success and Tidal is not.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  This is the, the Little Mermaid theory of app success. You want to be where the people are.

• 1:00:23Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  You know, they're gonna make a live action Little Mermaid and it's fucking horrifying. I just want to put that out there. All right, we're gonna take a break. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:00:57Speaker 06

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:01:38Speaker 07

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:02:08Nilay Patel?

  Paul.

• 1:02:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Nilay Patel?

  Every week, you're a shining ray of light because you do a segment about gadgets. Has the same name. What's it called?

• 1:02:16Speaker 05

  It's called, "Why Didn't You Push That Button?"

• 1:02:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh no, I know where this is going.

• 1:02:24Speaker 04

  I don't, I don't want to talk about this.

• 1:02:26Speaker 05

  I don't want to talk about it either, but I-

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  I don't want to talk about it.

• 1:02:30Speaker 05

  I'm contractually obligated to talk about this Kickstarter called Lovesync, which is a button to express your interest in having sex.

• 1:02:38Nilay Patel?

  But like one person, not to the world, right?

• 1:02:41Speaker 05

  To one person. Okay, so just in case someone missed the news cycle, I don't want them to feel like this is going over their head. So there's a Kickstarter, it's a button, it's called Lovesync. You and your partner each have a button called Lovesync and you can push it and quote unquote anonymously. And so if, and it means that you're interested in having sex. If your partner doesn't push the button, nothing happens. If your partner also pushes the button, that means you both won't have sex. And then it's really, it's up to you what, what happens next.

• 1:03:14Nilay Patel?

  This is, this is Tinder for monogamists.

• 1:03:18Nilay Patel?

  It's Tinder for the same room. Like you don't, you can just say words.

• 1:03:25Speaker 05

  I keep on thinking-

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  Words are awkward, Eli, come on.

• 1:03:27Speaker 05

  That there has to be like, like a game theoretical aspect to this. But the more I consider it, I don't think there's anything to it.

• 1:03:39Nilay Patel?

  Like- The more I consider it, Paul, the more I desperately want to move on.

• 1:03:45Nilay Patel?

  That was, that was Paul's gadget segment. We'll see if we do it again next week if this continues. That might be where it ends, Paul.

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  You know we're from the Midwest, right?

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  It's suspicious.

• 1:03:57Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's talk about some gadgets, that's what we're here for.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, you want to tell me about the, the Northfocals? So it dropped a ton in price after the review?

• 1:04:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, they cut them almost in half in price, they're like $5.99. Although, uh, so if you know what these are, they are, um, smart eyeglasses that use like a laser, the MEMS laser to like shine a little thing. They're like the Vaunt thing that I tried, but they're like actually a real product. But they dropped the price to 600 bucks. But if you want to get prescription, that's extra. If you want to get like tort- A shell that's extra and you know, you have to spend more money so you can get yourself back up to a thousand pretty easily. But Ashley reviewed them and the result is exactly what you think. It's very good.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  A resounding seven.

• 1:04:39Speaker 04

  It's a resounding seven. Actually, we have an inside joke at the verge. What if it's a world of no sevens where you're not allowed to give it a seven? You have to give it a higher or lower score. And she was willing to go, if I can't give it a seven, I might give it a 7.5. If you want this specific thing, a smart watch on your face. That's what it is. It's a smart watch that you can look at with your eyeball.

• 1:05:00Speaker 05

  With poor iMessage integration.

• 1:05:03Speaker 04

  So wait, hold on.

• 1:05:04Nilay Patel?

  Horrific iMessage integration. I just want to, and I suspect the Vergecast audience is going to want me to go on this.

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Nilay Patel?

  In a world of no sevens.

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  Only the integer seven doesn't exist.

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:16Nilay Patel?

  But floating point sevens exist.

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  Yes, for sure. Yeah.

• 1:05:21Nilay Patel?

  I completely disagree with this notion.

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  No, no, no. In the world of no sevens, like, it's like, it's like imaginary numbers. Like, imaginary numbers don't exist in the world, but we can conceive of them. And we can do real operations with them that have real world results. Therefore, if the number seven doesn't exist, that does not mean that the number 7.5 does not.

• 1:05:39Speaker 05

  I mean, you say imaginary numbers don't really exist in the world, but do the integers really exist?

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  Does any number really exist if you think about it?

• 1:05:49Nilay Patel?

  But the loophole you have created.

• 1:05:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54Nilay Patel?

  Is that I can give it a 7.1.

• 1:05:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  I can give it a 7.001.

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:05:59Nilay Patel?

  I can give it a 7.0000001.

• 1:06:02Speaker 04

  Yes, it's slightly better than seven, which doesn't exist.

• 1:06:05Speaker 05

  See, I think I'm with Dieter on this because egg on your face, you're being an obvious seven avoider in that, you know?

• 1:06:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Nilay Patel?

  Right. The goal of the world of no sevens is not to shame the seven avoiders.

• 1:06:20Nilay Patel?

  It is to force them to make another decision.

• 1:06:23Speaker 05

  Right, and you, by picking 7.001, you haven't made another decision. So you failed our test.

• 1:06:30Speaker 04

  You've made a decision. You've said it's slightly better than the 7, which doesn't exist.

• 1:06:34Nilay Patel?

  So that's an 8?

• 1:06:35Speaker 04

  No, it's not. Slightly better than a 7.

• 1:06:38Nilay Patel?

  I promised gadgets and we're doing math instead. That's where we are.

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  We got the confirmation from Nikkei that Google's gonna make a Pixel 3 Lite, and they're gonna make a Pixel 4, obviously, and they're also working on the Pixel Watch. Very curious to see what kind of processes they're gonna put in that thing. I don't have much else to say. Like, good luck, Google, with your...

• 1:06:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, so, smartwatch sales, I think we've, we saw were up, like 80%.

• 1:07:00Speaker 04

  Right, and Google managed to...

• 1:07:01Nilay Patel?

  Some massive spike.

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, they managed to hang on to like 10% of the market with Wear OS, which is shocking.

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  So yeah, like, it's, it's a real market, and it's maybe not entirely an Apple Watch market, for once. Cause like, people are buying some other stuff, but, uh, it's, uh, I don't know, it's, it's... I would say the burden of proof that they can make a good smartwatch is on Google, not on, um, you know.

• 1:07:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  That's, that's what I would say there. They got a lot to prove.

• 1:07:28Nilay Patel?

  To me, it's, it's all about the redesign of Wear. I, I know everyone's focused on the processor.

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Nilay Patel?

  But I, you know, I, I think there's just some inherent modular design stuff happening there, where like, one company makes the hardware, another company makes the software. You can't tie the performance together. You're extremely constrained, right? Like, maybe Google can solve that problem and they can get more out of that processor, who knows?

• 1:07:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  But the fundamentals of Wear OS, to me, are still just messy.

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  Well, the fundamentals of like, the architecture of it are potentially messy. The fundamentals of it being laggy is really bad, uh, and I see that as a processor problem, and I also potentially see it as a software problem. But I actually think the fundamentals of like, the software design are just as good as anything else. You know, like, you've got the four swipes in the four cardinal directions, and they do coherent, consistent things. Uh, they have an, an architecture for complications that actually makes sense if they can get anybody to do it. It's a design problem, and they need good watch faces, and it's a design problem that they need a hardware for a watch that isn't a big, hulking, weighty thing on my wrist.

• 1:08:28Speaker 05

  Well, well, so what you're saying is that they should put Fuchsia on a watch?

• 1:08:34Nilay Patel?

  It all comes back to Fuchsia.

• 1:08:36Speaker 04

  No, I, I actually think that that is a thing.

• 1:08:39Speaker 05

  A lightweight, responsive, or theoretically responsive, operating system.

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  And they have been testing it on smart displays, so...

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  I also have been using this Apple Watch and I really like it, but I remembered for the first time by accident yesterday that it has a button.

• 1:08:54Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. Yeah.

• 1:08:56Nilay Patel?

  Because, you know, the button is like flush and you never think about it and it doesn't do anything.

• 1:09:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Nilay Patel?

  Like it just opens a list of apps in case you want to multitask on your watch.

• 1:09:04Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:05Nilay Patel?

  And I, like the baby pressed it by accident. I was like, oh, this thing has a button.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Nilay Patel?

  I've been wearing it for two months. I forgot. Just forgot about the hardware button. We like know everything about the S10.

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  We know everything about everything. Like, uh, all the, Vlad wrote a really great piece that no one's like hiding their smartphone announcements anymore. So like companies are putting out teasers. You can preorder the S10 right now. LG has been putting out press releases for individual features of the, uh, G, Think Q, G8, um, for like three weeks. It's gonna have a vibrating OLED screen and that's gonna be a speaker, uh, which is cool. I guess we'll have to hear it.

• 1:09:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm super, there's, there's a thing happening with vibrating screens and speakers.

• 1:09:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Nilay Patel?

  Like the TV makers are all doing it. I have a Sony TV that does it. We saw LG do one at CES. Like it's the last thing on the face of the phone you gotta get rid of, right? You gotta get rid of the, the front. I'm super into the idea that we've all decided that our screens should make sound in this way.

• 1:10:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Nilay Patel?

  Like, it is very futuristic. I think my Sony TV actually sounds very good.

• 1:10:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  I didn't buy a soundbar for it. I just bought a subwoofer for it. It sounds great. I love, and LG is like pretty committed to making things sound good. Like that's kind of their brand for these phones. I'm super into the idea that all screens will just be speakers as well. I think that's super neat.

• 1:10:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  At the same time, I, do we learn about the S10 that it's gonna have an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor that you might not be able to put a screen protector on?

• 1:10:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was a leak and there was a screen protector that had a big giant hole in the screen protector, which is amazing.

• 1:10:35Speaker 04

  Anyway, that's.

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  Every part of your screen is protected except for that.

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  That's the, uh, the, the Think Q. Next is the Vivo V15, which is, they're continuing the trend of doing a pop-up camera, which I love that they're not, they're not giving up on that after just one iteration. Like they're just, they're sticking to it.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  It's a good brand.

• 1:10:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like, I kinda want one.

• 1:10:55Speaker 04

  Plus, it's, it's gotta be one of the few phones in, on the planet that you can be relatively confident it's not recording your face at all times.

• 1:11:03Nilay Patel?

  It's true.

• 1:11:06Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, MWC is coming. We're live blogging Samsung on the 20th. It'll be fun.

• 1:11:10Speaker 05

  Can I ask you guys to prognosticate about... So I'm kind of pretty happy with being on Android right now. I'm not crazy about the Pixel, and I thought I'd be really into the Pixel because of the camera. It just turns out I just don't like taking photos, so it doesn't matter that much. The main thing is call screening, because I screen like 10 calls a day. So is that gonna become a mainstream Android feature, you think?

• 1:11:38Nilay Patel?

  Are you screening calls from real people or from bots?

• 1:11:40Speaker 05

  No, it's all... Everybody wants to sell me healthcare, and they come from everywhere. And they want to sell me healthcare so bad.

• 1:11:49Nilay Patel?

  Just like doctors finding you in the street?

• 1:11:51Speaker 05

  I guess so.

• 1:11:52Nilay Patel?

  Shame if something happened to you.

• 1:11:53Speaker 05

  I don't know. Yeah, basically.

• 1:11:55Nilay Patel?

  So it's bots. You're getting spam calls.

• 1:11:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, bots. Robots are calling me, trying to sell me healthcare from all sorts of different phone numbers all the time. And I block everyone, but they keep on popping up.

• 1:12:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Speaker 05

  So I'm pretty reliant on... But you know, that's turned into my killer feature of this phone. But I feel like I could maybe live without...

• 1:12:14Nilay Patel?

  You can get that feature from a carrier. You have to pay for it. Yeah. Like, I have Call Protect from AT&T. It's free. So the free version is amazing. Yeah, it does, but my phone still rings, and it just says "spam risk" in huge letters on it. And I'm like, "Well, if you know..."

• 1:12:28Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:12:30Nilay Patel?

  There's no chance I'm gonna... But if you pay them some money, then that won't get through, which is a real kick.

• 1:12:36Speaker 04

  I have not seen any... I don't remember seeing any rumors that it's gonna become a generalized Android feature. The phone app in Android is actually technically a carrier app on most Android phones in this weird way. Like, the carrier gets some say in how the phone app works. And it used to be how messages work, although they seem to have fixed that problem a little bit. So it's caught up in the messy threads of carrier interactions with Google and with their services. And so I wouldn't hold your breath.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  Sorry. I will say that Ajit Pai, the Vergecast's favorite cartoon villain, he actually put out FCC letter this week saying, "My number one priority as chairman of the FCC is stopping robocalls. And if the industry doesn't act, I will be forced to take regulatory action." What? And the thing that, there's a specific, this is actually great. There's a specific protocol that the industry has been like working on, caller ID authentication, so things to stop these spoof numbers. The name of the protocol, it's an acronym, this is true, shaken/stir. No. True fact. You go look it up. It is incredible.

• 1:13:43Speaker 05

  What I was hoping is that there is an old timey railroad regulation that has some parallels to spam calling.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What we're talking about here is the regulation of common carriers. And I just want to point out that it is perfectly acceptable for the chairman of the FCC to say, "Hey, I'd like the market to figure this out, and if you don't, I'll regulate you." Which is actually what they should do with the internet. Just a thing I'm saying.

• 1:14:05Speaker 05

  All I'm saying is my plan is next phone, I'm aiming like $400, $500, and I think I'm gonna be really happy.

• 1:14:12Speaker 04

  Paul, I'm telling you, if camera's not, if camera's not your priority, I would keep a very close eye on what's coming next from OnePlus. They like, historically OnePlus phones are really great. They don't degrade and get crusty as much as Samsung phones do, and they're relatively cheap. I think that might be your next.

• 1:14:31Nilay Patel?

  Ooh. Good place to end it. We're gonna find out in Paul's Gadget segment next week, which I, again, once again, that's your only warning.

• 1:14:39Speaker 05

  Okay, I'm sorry.

• 1:14:39Nilay Patel?

  Never doing that, never doing that again. All right, that's the Vergecast. I want to end with the same place I started, talking about Better Worlds, our hopeful science fiction project. It is great. It has come to an end. You can now go read all of the stories, theverge.com/betterworlds. That's also where you're gonna find all of the videos, which are incredible. And you can listen to all of the podcasts. It's Friday, the show comes out on a Friday. You probably listen to it on a Friday in your car. The next thing you should listen to, you should binge listen to all of Better Worlds. It's a collection of basically radio dramas about hopeful futures. Pull over, search for Verge Extras in your podcast feed, listen to that, watch all the stories, feel some hope. Paul's right, we were a little down on this episode. Get some hope back in your life, Better Worlds. It's so good. I mean, it's so, so good, and

• 1:15:23Nilay Patel?

  so many people worked on it at The Verge. I can't list them all, but it was a huge team effort. Amazing. I want you to go check it out. You can also tweet at us, which is the opposite of being hopeful. I'm at Reckless, Paul's the future Paul, Dieter's Backline. Casey, where you at?

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  I'm at Casey Newton or at theverge.com/Interface.

• 1:15:42Nilay Patel?

  There it is. That's the plug I was looking for. You can read the Interface every day. Casey on social media and democracy. There's also a fair number of jokes in there. I'm just going to tell you.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  Lot of jokes. We have fun.

• 1:15:52Nilay Patel?

  Very. It's the way you gotta, you gotta deal with it. We'll be back next week. The Vergecast. We'll be back next Tuesday with an interview episode. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. Paul. Promo code.

• 1:16:20Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:16:41Speaker 06

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you, if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 1:17:06Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:17:22Speaker 08

  Support for this show comes from CoreWeave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is CoreWeave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose-built tech, building what's never been built before. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI. Ready for anything, ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to CoreWeave.com/ReadyForAnything.