Big tech at Capitol Hill, Elon Musk's brain machine interface, and Macbook 2019 reviews

Nilay Patel invites a cavalry of experts from The Verge (Makena Kelly, Adi Robertson, Liz Lopatto, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller) to discuss the Big Tech hearings that took over Capitol Hill, Elon Musk's Neuralink brain machine interface, and the new Macbook reviews. Stories this week: Facebook reportedly reaches $5 billion settlement with the Federal …Facebook tells Congress how it thinks Libra should be regulatedHouse Democrats are considering a bill to ban Facebook from the …Senators aren’t sold on Facebook’s Libra projectEU opens Amazon antitrust investigationThe unpredictable legal implications of Trump’s Twitter-blocking defeatElon Musk unveils Neuralink's plans for brain-reading 'threads'Boston Dynamics' robots are preparing to leave the lab — is the world ready? Apple is silently updating Macs again to remove insecure ... Apple MacBook Air (2019) review: the new normalApple MacBook Pro 13 2019 Two USB ports review: considered ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Verge Cast, we talk about the big tech hearings that took over Capitol Hill, Elon Musk's Neuralink brain machine interface, and we end on MacBook reviews. That's the Verge Cast coming up.

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• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of the Verge Politics Network. It's a lot of politics. I'm just going to be very honest with everyone. A lot of stuff happened in Washington DC this week. Not all of it was smart, but we're going to talk about it all. Anyway, I'm Neelai. I'm your friend. Dieter's here. Hi, how's it going? We have, we're kind of structuring the show a little bit differently today because we have so much going on. So first, Addie Robertson, McKenna Kelly are going to join us. They're here. Hello. Hi. Hi. We are going to talk about all of the hearings. There are, I think, four total hearings on Capitol Hill this week with all the big players. There's one about Libra. There was one where, Addie, basically Ted Cruz yelled at Google. I don't know how else to describe that hearing.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  Yes, many people yelled at Google. And then there was another hearing about antitrust issues with the big tech companies that McKenna covered. So we're going to talk about those. Then, I'm telling you, there's a lot that went on this week. Liz Lopatto is going to join us. We're going to talk about Elon Musk and Neuralink. Elon wants to put threads in your brain. There's a USB-C port involved. Dieter's very excited.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, Liz was actually there for the presentation, so we're gonna get like her firsthand impressions of watching them and talking to everybody afterwards.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  Liz has a USB-C port in her brain now. It's very exciting. And then we can have Rochessa, Paul. Paul's gonna join us at the end. We gotta talk about the new MacBooks. Dieter reviewed the Air. Dan reviewed the Pro. We're gonna end on some good old fashioned laptop reviews. So we're starting at whether Facebook should be illegal. We're going on to Elon Musk putting a USB-C port in your brain, and we're gonna land on Apple. Maybe he still has broken keyboards.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Vergecast.

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  It seems about right. Okay, let's start with these hearings. I would say in the shadow, in the background of all this, is news that broke last week that the FTC has decided, after months of negotiation, the appropriate penalty for Facebook's year and change of privacy scandals. It started, obviously, at Cambridge Analytica that kicked off an investigation. They landed a 3 to 2 vote. The three Republican commissioners voted for, the two Democrats voted against. 3 to 2 vote to levy a $5 billion fine on Facebook. Facebook's stock went up on this news because Facebook has been telegraphing that this fine is coming for quite some time, so it's priced into the stock. I think I put up a headline. I called it an embarrassing

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  joke. Just a note out there for Rochessa's listeners who wanna break into the media business. If you just call something an embarrassing joke, the radio will call you and say, hey, we wanna talk about your article. So I put on NPR over the weekend. It's true. I don't do it often, but it definitely works. My sense of it is that we should not levy fines that increase Mark Zuckerberg's net worth, which is more or less what happened here. But McKenna, you've kinda been looking at this stuff. It's in the background of everything. What's your sense of what's going on there?

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Well, everybody wants structural changes, right? That's what we're hearing. We want Mark Zuckerberg off the board. We want all of these things, but it's like, it's hard to gather what actually is going to be part of the settlement here, what kind of structural changes will happen. We've heard some talk about some kind of committee being built inside Facebook that might have like one representative from the FTC to be like, yikes, guys. Maybe this one decision you're making is a bad idea. And like-

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God, I would absolutely sign up to be the yikes guy.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. And literally, that's all it's gonna be, right? It's just gonna be a yikes guy who's like, yikes. And then that's it, right? And then Facebook will continue doing what they've been doing for however long now.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  The Yikes guy is the first job to get automated at Facebook, like just a bot that every time they submit like a new code poll, they're like, yikes. Everyone has to stop and be like, hmm. So it is, it, but kind of this isn't formal yet, right? It was reported in the newspapers. It, it very much feels to me, this is a little bit of a, a theory, but it feels to me like the Democrats leaked this ahead of the curve because everyone is unhappy with it. And the DOJ hasn't approved it yet. Right? So there's still time that it could potentially change.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, like the $5 billion, we've heard this from everyone is like a parking ticket for Facebook. They get the $5 billion. It's probably sitting around somewhere. They just kind of, it's like pocket change, right? So they get it done. Investors like certainty, right? So seeing that $5 billion done, agreed to, I mean, certainly put the stock up. I don't know. See, the thing is, is we haven't really heard much details about like the rest of the settlement, but regardless, the FTC got that giant fine in the headline that they wanted to be like, look at us, guys, we are able to be in agency with teeth. Which really, to most people who have been closely watching this at home, hasn't really, you know, a

• 5:59Speaker 04

  big fine is something, but it's not enough to really keep Facebook from continuing to act the way they are with data privacy, right? And I think that's the main concern from people on the left.

• 6:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And $5 billion is a lot of money, but in context, Facebook made $22 billion in profits last year. And depending on how you count and who you ask, it's somewhere between two weeks and a month of revenue. So they're, they're not hurting, right? Like it's not gonna, they've already set it aside. They said at least $3 billion aside. That was in their last earnings report. So investors have been pricing it in. And then you look at sort of their last shareholder meeting, you know, Facebook has this really weird dual-class stock structure, which basically means Mark Zuckerberg is the king and then everyone else is like, doesn't get to vote. So Facebook shareholders voted, um, kind of with overwhelming majorities to remove Zuckerberg as chairman of the

• 6:53Nilay Patel?

  board. Zuckerberg voted against it with his king stock, so that got voted down. And then they voted, uh, eighty, eighty-some percentage voted in favor of removing the dual-class stock structure. Uh, and Zuckerberg said no, because, uh, you know, he, I think he likes it. Uh, so you see there's, there's sort of the market, the regular market, the investor market is trying to change Facebook's structure. There's pressure from the Democrats to change how Facebook operates. And then in the middle of it, there's like this parking ticket. Now, I will say this, if you follow Tony Rahm on Twitter, he's a ex-Recode reporter, reporter for the Washington Post, he's, he's very loud about the fact that there's other elements to the settlement, right? There's, they've got to attest, like Zuckerberg has like, every now and again, promised that he hasn't screwing with your privacy. They

• 7:36Nilay Patel?

  have to, you know, submit some plans to protect your privacy. That stuff is, to me, like, they were already under a 20-year consent agreement with the FTC from 2011 around Facebook Beacon. Uh, and it, I'm just going to tell you, it didn't work. It didn't stop anything from that from happening. So making it and make those promises again, doesn't, they're just going to hire a bunch of lawyers. And that's great. You know, if you're out there, you're a young lawyer on the make, get into some data privacy compliance books, maybe get a job at Facebook, it seems like it's going to be very lucrative for you. But it doesn't solve that structural change for them. So anyways, that's the backdrop. Like, everyone's mad at this coming into it. And then McKenna, the Libra hearings, these are the first set of hearings. Tell us just sort of the basics of it for people who aren't

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  really following the hill as closely as you are. Who, who's holding the hearings? Who's showing up? What are they about? How do they work?

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Sure, okay. So as soon as Libra was announced, like mere hours after Facebook made the announcement, the House Finance Committee Chairwoman, Maxine Waters, and the Senate Banking Chairman, Michael Crapo, were like, "Stop." They were definitely concerned and were immediately scheduling some kind of hearing, right, to look into what exactly Libra is, pull in somebody from Facebook. They ended up bringing David Marcus, who is running Calibra and the Libra project. So they, both committees were able to get David Marcus. And basically, both hearings could basically be condensed into Mark Zuckerberg,

• 9:09Speaker 04

  David Marcus, Facebook, we don't trust you. Why are you trying to screw up the entire financial system? So that was basically Libra. And if, I think if it can be condensed down into anything. Now, okay, the Libra hearings were definitely a lot better than the other hearings that we'll get to later. A lot of the members asked a lot of really good questions, pulled out a lot of information, like Neelai, what you were talking about before the show, about David Marcus not having a lot of plans for like what's going on in Switzerland, right? And things like that.

• 9:43Nilay Patel?

  So just to unpack that really quickly for the audience. David Marcus was asked, like, "Why are you headquartering this in Switzerland?" And he was like, "'Cause it's a good place." Really good chocolate. Yeah, it was, like, he just seemed like he wasn't ready for the heat, which, for our cast listeners, if you remember, like, earlier conversations we've had about it. A lot of the pushback Facebook gave to me personally, when I was like, "They don't seem ready for the scrutiny," was, "Of course, we've talked to everyone. This is all just a long game of 12-dimensional regulatory chess. Like, we're just moving the Overton window, so everyone is over..." And then this was like people from Facebook tweeting at me about this stuff. And then you see this hearing and it's like, nah, I just think you didn't do your homework.

• 10:26Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so it was that, that was kind of the tenor of the hearing. But McKenna, what else happened real quick?

• 10:30Speaker 04

  So like we said, nobody trusts Facebook, right? So Brad Sherman, a member of the House Finance Committee on Wednesday's hearing, was like, you know what? Yeah, Facebook is innovative. Mark Zuckerberg's innovative. Libra, hmm, could be innovative. But do you know who is so innovative? Osama bin Laden.

• 10:53Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 10:54Speaker 04

  Osama bin Laden was so innovative when he signaled for two planes to hit the World Trade Center. And he basically said that Libra was 9/11. He said it was worse than 9/11, actually, I believe. Yes. Said that Osama bin Laden was like the most innovative person of the 21st century.

• 11:13Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I've just been baited into having to agree or disagree with that, that statement.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  You would think that members of Congress would like learn not to compare, I don't know, cryptocurrency or a lot of things to like world atrocities. But it continues to happen time and time again. And of course, Brad Sherman, Emily Bernbaum at The Hill tweeted today, something like, Brad Sherman wants you guys to know that he didn't mean it. He takes it back. He takes it all back.

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  A stunning day of blockbikes from The Hill, actually. Okay, so that's, that's Libra. I mean, basically the, the message from Congress was stop. Like you're already so powerful. We don't trust you. Will you stop on your own or are we going to have to make you stop? Right? And there's a, there's a clip of like AOC being like, you already own all of these things. Why should you own one more thing? And Marcus's answer was like, well, we just want to help people. And I, I just don't think Facebook gets to pull that card anymore. Like they had that card once and they just like lit it on fire over and over and over again. And now, now it's gone. Like they, there's nothing left to burn. So that's, that's Libra. Like I don't want to overdo it because we, we don't know what they're going to do. And it seems like the, the right answer from our government at least is like, don't do anything.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  But they've promised that they're not going to do it until everyone's happy. And we'll just have to see where that goes.

• 12:32Speaker 04

  And Maxine Waters wants to bring Mark Zuckerberg in to talk about Libra. That's like the next step. It hasn't been, no letters have been sent or anything. So we'll have to see if anything comes of that.

• 12:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then, and there's like a proposed bill to prevent Facebook from doing this at all. Like we're just going to write a law that makes them stop. That bill seems kinda touchy, cuz it's like, any company over this size can't do financial services.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:56Nilay Patel?

  And there are lots of financial service companies, like Square. Like, are they just gonna stop Square from existing? That seems very difficult.

• 13:03Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so that was the Lieber hearing. If you're sensing a theme of chaos, I promise you, that theme will be carried into the next hearing we cover, which is, Addie, you watched the, sort of, I, I, I, explain what this hearing was.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  So, over the last year or two, there's been a series of hearings across the House and Senate about, basically, political bias in big tech platforms. And some of them have been utter disasters. There was one with Diamond and Silk, basically yelling at Senator, or at Representatives. But this one was Ted Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz, talking to Google and people who study Google about, essentially, bias in search engines, and the way that search engines can shape the way that people think, which is like-

• 13:51Nilay Patel?

  And so, Cruz, Cruz called this hearing, right? He's on the Senate Judiciary, this was his hearing?

• 13:55Speaker 05

  Yes, it was called "Google and Censorship Through Search Engines."

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  And this, this whole hearing was called, remember, because Google didn't show up to the last censorship hearing, because they just didn't, I guess.

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  Right, this is one where they had the, at the, the previous hearing, there was an empty chair, and we yelled, "An empty chair," for a while.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  You know, I gotta say, if, if, if I were a member of Congress, and also continued to, to work at The Verge, and I got mad that I wasn't ranking highly enough on, you know, reviews or whatever, I would definitely just call hearings, for the heck of it. Like, that's, that's a flex, why not?

• 14:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we Googled Prime Day, we weren't number one.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  He also spends a surprising amount of time in the hearings, talking about how they don't donate money to him.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Really?

• 14:39Speaker 05

  Which is, the implication is, you donate a bunch of money to Democrats, therefore you're biased, but as several people have pointed out, it kind of also comes off like you're shaking them down.

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  So there was a first hearing, Google didn't show up. Everyone yelled at it. Literally, there was an empty chair. They placed empty chair to theatrically denote that Google wasn't there. Now, Google shows up. Tell us what happened at this hearing.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  So, the first panel is all, uh, Google VP, who was a former Bush administration official, was conservative bona fides, uh, had an op-ed in Fox News, and there are basically two lines of questioning. There are all of the Republicans who just ask over and over, "You all have a lot of Democrats, aren't you secretly trying to rig the elections?" And then you have Democrats who are asking, "Why are you failing to regulate pedophilia and keep horrible videos of shootings off of Google and YouTube, and why can't you moderate anything at all?"

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Those seem not necessarily compatible ideas.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  That's basically how all of the tech bias hearings go, because one side really, really doesn't want to be there and is just trying to salvage something. Because the other running theme here, especially with anything with Ted Cruz, is that half of the questions just proceed from completely wrong premises, mostly because Ted Cruz insists on making stuff up about what Section 230 does. And so, he spends all this time trying to, so, just to catch everybody up, Ted Cruz keeps talking about how there is a divide between publishers and platforms, and if you're a platform, then you're, you have to be politically neutral, but you get some kind of shield against being sued. Um, this is not right at all, but it means that he spends a bunch of questions, talk, trying to like, get Google into a gotcha of saying it's not neutral.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I see. So, he's, he's like, created this thing where if Google accidentally admits it's a publisher, then, like, he can like, shoot him with a water gun or something, like, right? Like, if, he's like, "If I get you to admit you're a publisher, your house of cards will come crumbling down."

• 16:39Speaker 05

  Right. Not even if they're a publisher, like, if they admit that they are not neutral.

• 16:43Nilay Patel?

  Right. But none of that actually matters.

• 16:45Speaker 05

  Not at all. I mean, it, it certainly would be bad for Google politically, but it does not in any way matter legally.

• 16:52Nilay Patel?

  And it just, uh, I'm, I'm sure, at this point, every Vergecast listener knows, Section 230 does not actually make a distinction between platforms and publishers. You know, loyal listener Jackson Hayes wrote us a song about it.

• 17:13Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna keep making references. Poor Jackson. Thank you. I really appreciate. But, and Dieter, you own a domain name, correct?

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, that's correct. That's not 230.com.

• 17:24Nilay Patel?

  It just points to an explainer of what 230 is. So this is a pet issue for us, knowing what the law says, which for a tech site is an odd pet issue, but it's the one we've chosen. It's our brand. But so you're saying like Ted Cruz just keeps making up more, ever more complex things that aren't real.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  Right. So we started off basically sort of vaguely alluding to a, well, you know, there's this law that means that you are supposed to be a neutral public forum, Mark Zuckerberg. Are you a neutral public forum? And then he moved on to saying, well, that's what section 230 means. And now he's moved on to saying, well, in the 1990s, they passed section 230 because they were like, the internet shouldn't be biased, which is not remotely true and has nothing to do with what the actual bill was about, which was basically about making sure that you can moderate stuff on the internet without getting sued for like hosting porn or defamatory content.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  What I don't understand is, as like tactically, if Ted Cruz were out there banging his fist and saying there ought to be a law, then he would be accurate. He could, he could get momentum behind that. Instead, he's getting up there saying, there is a law, but he's wrong about what that law is. And it's just like a very strange thing to do.

• 18:39Speaker 05

  Except that it kind of seems to be working because it just puts Google on the defensive and they will never actually say, look, you're just making stuff up. We don't care what you say. Like they have to keep playing this game of saying, oh yeah, we don't do anything biased. We don't have a search engine that ranks things. Our search engine does not rank things whatsoever. That's not what a search engine does.

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  Wait, really?

• 18:59Speaker 05

  It doesn't actually, they don't actually say that, but they, they'll go in and ask questions like, so when you, someone searches something, will you promote Breitbart as much as the Huffington Post? Which is just not how a search engine works. Because search engines are so dependent on very specific queries that people are making.

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the whole point of a search engine is to deliver results. Right? Like, if you type a word in a search engine and it delivers unranked results, then you haven't, then you're not making a good, then you've like got like Yahoo from the early 90s, right? Like, here's a human directory of things that might be relevant to you.

• 19:37Speaker 05

  And there was a second-

• 19:38Nilay Patel?

  That seems very confusing.

• 19:40Speaker 05

  It is. And there was a whole second panel that was not, that was just people who talk about Google, including researcher Francesca Torpodi, who does really cool work. And part of her whole point and the stuff that she studies is that the actual search queries you make make just a massive difference in the results that you'll get. Like, if you use a, an abbreviation to refer to something, and it's an abbreviation that is like a pet buzzword on like Democratic or Republican-leaning sites, then you'll get a bunch of those. Or if you search for like a scandal and the scandal has a dollar amount that a bunch of people on one side of the political spectrum want to emphasize, then you'll get those sites. If you refer to something more neutral, you'll get sites

• 20:25Speaker 05

  from somewhere else. Like, that, everything in Google Search is really, really complicated and interdependent. And so, questions about whether you promote one specific source more than another are really hard to ask. And then it's all complicated by the fact that you're also trying to play this giant war with SEO spammers. And so, Google is very clearly constantly down-ranking and like trying to stop things from appearing in search. But it can't say that, because then that sounds like political bias.

• 20:56Nilay Patel?

  But that, that information is like readily available, right? Like, Google like famously issued updates that tanked some sites' traffic, because they were obviously gaming the algorithm. But no one was complaining that like clickbait stopped appearing in Google Search.

• 21:10Speaker 05

  I mean, there have been cases where people argued that Google was being anti-competitive. They're very complicated. And they're sometimes completely legitimate. But those cases tend to not have anything to do with politics.

• 21:21Nilay Patel?

  So what, what does Ted Cruz want? I mean, like, I will just, Ted Cruz went, he's like a Harvard Law graduate. Like, he should be able to, and he's an originalist, right? He's like a strict, strict, uh, constructionist, like, legal advocate, like-

• 21:36Nilay Patel?

  Also, Ron Wyden, who co-wrote 230 is still in Congress. Like, you can just, like, ask him. Right? Like, if you want to go beyond that to, like, legislative intent, you can just, like, "Ron, uh, what was your idea here?" And he, he's told us. Like, Colin interviewed him on our pages. He told us what he meant when he wrote 230. It seems utterly bizarre that he's starting from this, like, very deeply flawed premise. But what does he want?

• 22:02Speaker 05

  So, a little big theme of this hearing was that everybody wants Google to open their books, metaphorically speaking, like, they want to understand how all of these algorithms work, which is actually really interesting. And the lack of transparency has been one of the things that everyone has pretty much correctly dinged tech platforms for. The problem with Google is that with search, as somebody pointed out in the hearing, they're also trying to hide stuff from SEO spammers. And so there's an extent to which they want to keep this secret. But I would actually really love them to work with someone in Congress and try to do some kind of outside report.

• 22:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't think the argument here is that Google is necessarily doing a good job. Right? I don't, I don't know that the argument that Google, any of the social platforms, Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, what have you, are like excellently run companies that are transparent and clear to their users. Like, no one's making that argument. So that seems like a winner from both sides, right? Like, just tell us how it works. If the collateral damages, spammers might get a little bit smarter, that doesn't, they're already out there. They're already motivated. You're not going to help them that much more, are you?

• 23:13Speaker 05

  It seems like probably, and also, they wouldn't have to release a lot of this stuff to the public. It seems like the biggest danger would be something that's already happened a bit with Project Veritas, which is that they find some, like, somebody finds something that they can take out of context, like, one of the millions of sites that Google has some kind of ranking system with seems slightly political. And so therefore, they will put it up and say, "Look, Google bans this." Like, a Project Veritas leak included... The idea that Google was banning, like, had a blacklist around the, like, pro-life groups when it seemed pretty clear from context that, basically, they had printed a list of controversial topics that Google didn't want to, like, run ads against or something. And so it seems

• 23:58Speaker 05

  like they're giving them ammo there, potentially.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  The other thing I'd say, Neelai, is, like, Google's algorithms aren't magic, and they can get gamed by spammers. And if, I would, I don't know that they should keep all this stuff secret, but if they're much more open about how their algorithms work, they are not going to be able to stop people from, like, impinging on the front page of Google searches and, like, getting crap up there. Having used Google since AltaVista, basically, like, those days, like, there have been periods where Google got worse and spammers got higher ranking than they should have. And so, just trusting that Google will figure it out, they're not that smart. They're the smartest people in the room, maybe, but they're, they're, they're not magic, you know?

• 24:44Speaker 05

  It is actually absolutely wild to watch hearings where nobody talks about how, like, Google bombing used to be a tactic that everybody understood, that it used to basically just be common knowledge, that you could make Google show a thing that was embarrassing, like, that there's a picture of Trump if you search idiot, like?

• 25:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, people did that for years.

• 25:03Nilay Patel?

  Addy, you were pointing out that, like, the Google search cards are, like, a notorious place where Google routinely gets it wrong, and they always get dinged for, and it seems like maybe this is more trouble than it's worth.

• 25:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, and they're the thing that provides the impression that Google is editorializing a lot. And in some cases, it is. Among other things, it has search cards that are just specifically its services, which Yelp has argued for several years has been, is basically anti-competitive. And it means that when you put something up there, it's like, oh, Google approved this 4chan, like, thread as a top story. That's ridiculous. Whereas if you get that in the, sort of, main page, you're like, oh, okay, so it was a weird search term, so something weird's coming up.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  So, I want to transition away from this, because, I mean, I think that it would be great if Google was more transparent. If that's the outcome, that's great. If the outcome is, you know, this, like, Senator Josh Hawley plan where we're going to make 230 contingent on some submission of... Of not being biased, McKenna, which you've covered.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  That seems much more dangerous, but that this fundamental like first misreading of 230 seems, it seems like you have to convince everybody that this is true so that you can change it in some serious way.

• 26:13Speaker 04

  Well, and it's a great campaign strategy, right, for the youth vote. Everybody, you know, the Daily Caller readers, people who hang out in like more right wing circles online, all hate these companies and have been hating them ever since Vice first wrote that article last summer about shadow banning and basically legitimizing the idea that Twitter was shadow banning conservatives. Right? So, I mean, it's a great campaign strategy. If you look at the tweets from Ted Cruz's Twitter about this stuff, it's like coming from his campaign Twitter account. They know what they're doing, right?

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  So, one of the things, and this is transitions to the next hearings on antitrust, is this is only a problem because Google is the monopoly provider. If there are like 50 search engines and Google was just like openly promoting Democrats, like what could you complain about? You would presumably have some other search engine that was openly promoting Republicans. But because Google is seen as having all this power and all this influence.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  And it does. It has like a 90% market share of search. There was that graph that like showed up the other day during the antitrust hearing and it was like Google at the very top and there was like DuckDuckGo at the very bottom, just like trailing, barely even visible. And Google's like, these are our competitors.

• 27:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's my favorite part of every, every sort of like tech monopoly, like when Comcast, which disclosure is an investor in Vox Media, Shuns Verge, but whatever, they hate me.

• 27:46Nilay Patel?

  When they were buying NBC, they were like, we have so many competitors for broadband internet that this will be fine. And they were just like listing just like random fake companies, like one edge cell provider in like Montana. It was crazy. But it's always my favorite part of these hearings when big companies have to pretend they're terrified of tiny competitors like DuckDuckGo. But this is like the thing. Go ahead.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that was the entirety of this antitrust hearing was Facebook and all these companies being like, we compete against Snapchat.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  And it's like, okay, cool. But even when, okay, so let me just kind of describe like the setup for this hearing before we get into like the craziness of it. The House Judiciary in June, the antitrust subcommittee headed by David Cicilline, Democrat from Rhode Island, said, you know what? Maybe Elizabeth Warren has something right here. We should look into these tech companies and see if maybe they're just too big and maybe we have to break them up or have some kind of new antitrust law that addresses tech companies, right? So they put out this big announcement, they were going to do all these hearings, talk to all these experts and all these members from companies. First hearing, they looked at the news media business because it's bad.

• 28:59Speaker 04

  I think it's like the least you could say, right? But this week, they finally got the companies in to question them about anti-competitive behavior. So the first hearing- Who's there? Right. So there were two panels. The first panel was representatives from Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple. All the companies that Elizabeth Warren basically outlined and said, yikes, these are too big. We should do something. And then the second panel was like a handful of experts. It was a really stacked panel. There was Tim Wu, who we are familiar with, right? He wrote The Curse of Bigness, has been a really big critic of tech largeness for some

• 29:44Speaker 04

  time.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  You might say he even has a monopoly on being an academic on that.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  No, Dieter. No.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  Please keep going, McKenna.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Okay, so there were also a handful of other people, right? So Carl Zaba, who I've talked to a lot from NetChoice, was also there. He was kind of like on the conservative wing. And then also Stacy Mitchell, who has been a fantastic source on Amazon bigness. I'm just going to refer to it as that for like the entirety of this talk.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  Company bigness.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  These are the experts on bigness. So yeah, basically, there were these hearings. And a lot of the arguments that we heard were like the arguments that we've heard time and time again, right? We didn't hear a lot about China, which was great. Not that we need to be big to compete against China, but there was a lot of comparing like Facebook being like, "We are scared of TikTok." And it's like, "Why?" Of course, they're big, right? But like, I mean, they serve entirely different purposes, kind of. So yeah, that was basically the gist of the hearing. I think one of the most standout moments was probably when Representative Noguza asked

• 31:04Speaker 04

  Facebook to name like any of their competitors and the representative from Facebook was just kind of like, "Uh," and like blanked out. And Noguza was like, "Oh, yeah, because all the, four of the top six companies, social media companies, are you now." So I think a lot of the hearing was really just kind of like cementing the point in public record on video, so they could have all these clips on Twitter and everything, being like, "We get it, we understand it." A lot of the members did. Cicilline pulled out a lot of fantastic points, especially having to do with competition, targeting Amazon, especially for the same reasons that Elizabeth Warren has, you know?

• 31:46Speaker 04

  You can't have a platform and then sell your own products on the same thing with all that data you have. And then, of course, the Republicans kind of were like the whole time being like, "Innovation, innovation." That's been like the whole like word that they use, innovation. If you do anything, well, so long to innovation. So that was basically that. And then also, there were some crazy questions like, "Why does my son watch YouTube Fortnite Let's Plays?" And then the Google rep is like, "Sir, I have no idea."

• 32:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that was great. I love that exchange because it's, it is true that no one can adequately answer that question.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  Why is watching video games as fun as playing video games is like an extended metaphysical, like, I don't know, like, what is the nature of entertainment, sir? I shall not answer it in this hearing.

• 32:35Speaker 04

  After I tweeted that, I got like so many replies from people who were like, "Um, soccer? People like to play it and watch it." And I'm like, "Okay, I get it, I get it, I get it." So there are a lot of strong feelings out there about Let's Plays versus actually playing. I don't really understand it myself, but... And happy other people seem to have very strong opinions.

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  There and I would say the Cicilline had this moment where he's talking to the Amazon rep. And they were arguing about like Amazon's privately well brands and whether Amazon uses data from the marketplace to determine what products to make and compete with sellers. And he like reminded he had to like stop and like you're under oath. Like, I feel like you're lying to me. I'm just gonna take this moment to remind. That's crazy. Like, that is about as much heat as you get in a hearing like this, right?

• 33:22Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, Cicilline, obviously, he is the person heading this. He has Lena Kahn, who I think we've you've spoken to on this podcast, right?

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  She's been on this show, yep.

• 33:31Speaker 04

  Yep. So Lena Kahn actually works for him now. So he has like all the resources necessary to really ask targeted questions. And I think that was like really visible, especially from him. And folks like Nogusa, who I know focus a lot on tech and spend a lot of time investigating it. So I mean, I guess we'll see what comes next. This is a whole series of hearings, right? There was the news media one. Now we have this one with all the tech companies. And I guess we have to wait and see what the next one is and see. Since this is a whole investigation, what they determine at the end of it, right? Like, what kind of legislation they plan on putting forth.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  But right now, it's still kind of unclear.

• 34:17Speaker 05

  Honestly, we spent so much time talking on the site about how Fortnite is the new social space for kids. And like, Facebook has made noise about how it's cutting into people's time. I really, really can't wait until we start inviting like Tim Sweeney and people to like from Epic to talk at these hearings and like try to explain Fortnite to people.

• 34:36Nilay Patel?

  Tim, if his Twitter presence is anything to go by, he will be delightfully spiky at a congressional hearing. What did Apple have to say here? We said they were there. They asked one question was like, why do I have to have iCloud? Um, which about right?

• 34:51Speaker 04

  There was one member who was like, I think he had a second with the Apple rep. And what was he saying? He was like, why do I sometimes get a pop up asking me to pay for iCloud? I've heard a lot from my constituents that we hate this.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So first of all, I want to say that is one, a totally valid complaint.

• 35:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  I was gonna say like, yes, please answer that question.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  Like if I want to like, what is the point of representative democracy in 2019? It's it's for someone elected official to be like, yeah, what is up with these iCloud?

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, that's the whole, okay, that's the whole thing. We haven't done telecom policy in so long and it took everybody being pissed off about robo calls to get any of that passed through this year. Right? It's always things like that. So, yeah, I think most of the hearing, Apple spent a lot of time trying to differentiate themselves from like Amazon, Facebook and Google. Right? They're like, we aren't those guys.

• 35:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  And they spent a lot of time talking about, um, we're the privacy guys. And it's like, we're not talking about privacy here, guys. Like, cool. But they spent a lot of time differentiating themselves. And really, a lot of the members didn't have a lot of questions for Apple. They didn't have a lot of questions for Google. A lot of the members were more focused on Facebook and Amazon, which I guess is kind of more in their wheelhouse. It's kind of who they've been critiquing more for so long, but they really didn't face as much heat as the other people.

• 36:16Speaker 05

  I mean, that makes sense to me. Like, these, these are the ones that do have really clear, giant financial implications. Like, Apple has lawsuits against it for having a monopoly on app stores. But like, if you're, the number of app developers in the world is much smaller than the number of people who are affected by only having like one social network.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  I mean, the economy is always one of the most important issues in every single election. And it's way easier to draw a line from Amazon to a local economy, uh, or even Facebook to, you know, just democracy falling apart than it is with, uh, Google or Apple.

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but my prediction is that the only concrete legislation that comes out of this is about iCloud pop-ups. Like, that's just a home run. Who's gonna get mad at that?

• 36:57Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, one of the things that really like this, like a lot of the hearing from like the Republican side was a little, maybe not a little, but it was misguided. Like, Sensenbrenner, who's the ranking member, basically said, you know, when Facebook took over MySpace, um...

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  Did MySpace complain?

• 37:17Speaker 04

  He's basically saying MySpace didn't complain. So I think you guys are just being wusses. Like, that was like, basically what he said. It was like, if MySpace didn't complain, there was no anti-competitive behavior at all. I was like, okay, cool.

• 37:31Nilay Patel?

  That's not how it works.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  Right? No, it's not.

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's not a form you fill out and submit to Congress and your business is being destroyed.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  Okay, fine. I wish there was. That'd be great. I would read those forms all day and night. Be like, we're MySpace. We really bet heavily on our website looking like garbage. That was the wrong bet.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh.

• 37:57Nilay Patel?

  That would be great. I would be super into that. Okay, so McKenna, what was the takeaway from this? Because the one thing I will say, you know, we had Casey on for the first set of hearings. Casey's position, and he's on vacation, so he's not here to defend himself. So I will both speak for him and attack him in one go. Sorry, Casey. Casey's position is that these hearings are worthless theater, right? Congress will never understand anything. The companies are prone to hiding the ball, to exaggerating, to getting away with it. This is all just pointless theater, whatever, right? And to a certain extent, that has been our experience of these hearings. I would say even with the amount of mess and chaos that we have just described,

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  these hearings were much better than any we've seen in the past. Like, Congress is starting to like, get its bearings on how to ask questions. They're not like, how does Facebook make money, right? Like, that, that situation isn't happening anymore.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  We sell ads, Senator.

• 38:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg is like, we sell ads. Like, they're not, they're not able to like, bat away things. There are moments when the representatives of these companies seem uncomfortable or they're not able to answer. They are getting better at engineering, what you're saying. These moments on video that get to travel on Twitter that seem like harsh questioning.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 39:16Nilay Patel?

  So there's an improvement. But what's the next thing that happens?

• 39:20Speaker 04

  See, okay, here's the problem. I have problems, many of them. And the main one is whatever happened to privacy legislation?

• 39:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Speaker 04

  So we have all the, everybody's talking about antitrust. Everybody is talking about censorship, platform bias, all of these things. And for some reason, all of this has coalesced into members wanting to put together one massive piece of legislation that addresses all of these things somehow.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  And it all started with privacy legislation. So it's gotten to the point where I think members are a lot more educated than they were last year when Cambridge Analytica happened. And then we had Mark Zuckerberg in and a lot of questions were asked that made zero sense and made everyone look kind of silly. But I think if anything, the hearings have forced members to be like, okay, it's time to learn and figure this out. Now, they've gotten, Congress is slow. We all know that. Everything moves at like a very slow pace. So of course, we're still going to get Fortnite questions and iCloud questions for a while, until we have members as young as AOC throughout the entire two bodies, right?

• 40:36Speaker 04

  So they're not entirely worthless because they know if you make a Brad Sherman Libra's 9/11 quote, you're going to get a lot of lashback from your constituency. A lot of people are going to be really upset.

• 40:48Speaker 05

  I feel like this is a lot of people in kind of relative terms. I feel like, I don't know how much people outside tech are actually paying attention to a lot of these.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  Right. Well, the thing is, is that who is actually paying attention? And I don't know if it's really the Democratic constituencies. If anybody is paying attention, then I think it is the right wing constituencies who are all really concerned about Facebook, Twitter and Google, right? So when Ted Cruz has his hearings, I mean, look at his Twitter feed. It's like all that he posts the clips of. They're very much convinced. I mean, you even see it now with like Trump having his weird little Thing for you to complain about being censored, right? It's made its way up to the highest level. He's mentioning it at rallies. It's become like a really big campaign message for Republicans in a way that it hasn't been for Democrats who, for some reason, it's really crazy because Democrats have focused

• 41:39Speaker 04

  on Wall Street for so long and big corporate power, but now with tech companies, it hasn't been that way.

• 41:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  So I don't know. I think for Republicans, it's more of a campaign issue and something that with recognizable home names like Google, Facebook and everything, to be angry at those people who are censoring your views, allegedly, right? It's become more of a campaign issue in a way that it hasn't been for Democrats. So for them, it's like, that's just the way it is unfortunately, where Democrats are like unfortunately trying to, oh, I don't know, run these hearings and all of a sudden Ted Cruz is like, um, but actually I'm being censored. So I mean, I don't know. The main takeaway is that people are learning. I think we can say that. People are starting to learn.

• 42:22Nilay Patel?

  That's like what you say at the beginning of a sci-fi movie before the robot kills everyone. It's like, it's learning.

• 42:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I mean, there are some concrete things, right? There is, should we have a privacy law?

• 42:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:34Nilay Patel?

  It seems obvious. Is there enough competition, particularly for Facebook and Amazon? That seems like it's moving along. Addie pointed out, there are antitrust lawsuits against Apple. So it seems like on sort of parallel tracks, these things are moving, but the real problem is we keep mashing them all together. That's what you're kind of saying before the show. And I think that we should just mention it. A good example is like this ever spiraling FaceApp controversy. Where Chuck Schumer this morning, last night. Last night. We should shut it down. Like the FBI should investigate FaceApp. And it's like, why? But it all just seems like the same sort of paranoia around tech.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, you get to push the Russia message a little bit further, too.

• 43:20Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, the Russia thing hasn't even like come up and like it's come up in a bunch of hearings, but it was

• 43:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:25Speaker 05

  sort of more absent than usual, in mine at least.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, Russia hasn't been mentioned at all. There's only and like no bill addressing Russian interference at all is is not going to be passed anytime soon with Mitch McConnell leading the Senate, unfortunately. So I mean, we have one of the most sensible bills like the Honest Ads Act that is like, hey, maybe we should have ads databases and make sure Russia isn't buying ads. And for some reason, that bipartisan piece of legislation isn't moving anywhere at all.

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  Wild. Facebook, by the way, supports the Honest

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Right. Twitter does, too.

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  There isn't even an industry put background it. Yeah.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  Right. It's just a chaotic mess and we all just get to watch it and try not to scream.

• 44:03Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I think it's a good place to end our hearings coverage. They're they're learning. We're we're torturing McKenna.

• 44:12Speaker 04

  That's good.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  I'm glad you joined the verge. Please endure this torture. But it really, I will say this, and I compared to the last set, they really are learning. They're they're asking better questions and they're being much more pointed. And it seems like these companies are in a much more defensive position than they were before when they would just come in and be like, you don't understand technology.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 44:32Nilay Patel?

  You don't even understand what we do. And now it's there's a clear level of understanding that is leading to more pointed questions, which I think is a good thing. So there's going to be more hearings, particularly the antitrust hearings are going to keep going. Addy, I assume Ted Cruz is gonna at some point just like stand outside Google headquarters, scream like holding up placards of search results and being like, why are you censoring me? That's where he's going, very obviously.

• 44:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, I I really wish they would just start asking like other companies to come in here. I want to get TikTok in like a Fortnite. I don't know.

• 45:04Speaker 04

  I mean, they had Snapchat today. There's a new judiciary tech task force led by Marsha Blackburn. So we'll see what comes of that.

• 45:12Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, our government is paying attention to the tech industry, and that means we have to pay attention to it. Great. Okay, let's take a break. McKenna, thank you so much for joining us.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  It was great.

• 45:20Nilay Patel?

  Always a pleasure. We'll have you back when there's more hearings. Sorry.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  It's okay. I'll be

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna take a break. Liz is gonna join us, and then we're gonna talk about Elon Musk putting threads in your brain. It's it's gonna be a time. We'll be right back.

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• 46:38Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Liz Lopatto has joined us. Hello, Liz.

• 46:41Speaker 08

  Hey, how's it going?

• 46:42Nilay Patel?

  It's going. I think you have had a wilder few days than anyone, because you went to the Neuralink event, where Elon Musk, correct me if I'm wrong, his plan is to put a USB-C port in everyone's brains.

• 46:57Speaker 08

  Okay. A of all, it is eventually going to be wireless technology.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  It's USB-C now.

• 47:05Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 47:06Nilay Patel?

  Eventually, hopefully.

• 47:08Speaker 08

  Let's just be clear. B, he was very clear at the event that this is optional, so it doesn't have to go in your brain if you don't want it.

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I see.

• 47:18Nilay Patel?

  Where does it, is it, but it's like binary, like either you have an implant or you don't, right?

• 47:24Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 47:25Nilay Patel?

  So your choice of not having it in your brain is not having it at all?

• 47:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, I, like, to be honest, like, I know that there are folks on staff, Dieter, who might really want a USB-C port in their brain, but like, most of the rest of us.

• 47:38Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I just, okay.

• 47:41Nilay Patel?

  Let's just start from the start. I think we can all concede Dieter wants a USB C port in his brain.

• 47:45Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 47:46Nilay Patel?

  No further discussion necessary. Uh, great. What is Neuralink? What is going on? Where were you?

• 47:52Speaker 08

  Okay, so, uh, Tuesday, I was at the California Academy of Sciences where we were in the planetarium when Elon Musk told us the first sort of details of what's going on at Neuralink. Which is important because it's been pretty quiet for the last couple of years after it was announced in a long, boring, and poorly-written blog post on Wait But Why. And, uh, the thing about it is that brain-machine interfaces aren't that new. Like, I keep hearing people describe it as like science fiction technology, but actually, um, the first person who had spinal cord paralysis who received one of these, that was like 2006. The short-term goal and probably the best use for them are restoring some kind of functionality to folks who are paralyzed, right? Because, um, the problem is that like you still have your body,

• 48:38Speaker 08

  uh, but it's not really connecting with your brain. And so, one of the things that you can potentially do is, uh, allow folks a greater degree of autonomy by reading the signals from the brain and then translating that, whether that's into like movement of a cursor, which is, it sounds like where Neuralink is going right now, or movement of something like a robotic arm, which also could potentially be really interesting for prostheses. One of the neuroscientists I talked to this week, uh, told me he was using the metaphor of Luke's hand, Luke Skywalker's hand, where like, you know, his, his, his hand gets cut off, but then the prosthetic is so good, it's just like having a hand, it's just a robot hand. Um, and so, you know, that might be a potentially an avenue as well.

• 49:20Speaker 08

  But in order for that to happen, you basically have to insert something into the brain so that the signals that are happening there can be read. And then they, they go back to a computer, which then interprets them, and that creates the movement of the cursor on the screen.

• 49:32Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 49:34Speaker 08

  Are you all still with me? Is this too much? Did I just nerd too far?

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  Nah, I think we, we, right, like you, the brain has to be able to control something directly, so you need some sort of interface with the brain. There have been some of these in the past, right?

• 49:46Speaker 08

  Yes. What's exciting about this is different materials, basically. Um, they figured out something called threads, which are flexible and less likely to damage the brain than the, um, the materials currently being used, which not only means that, uh, you can keep the implant in the brain longer and it'll still be more functional, uh, but also, you know, not damaging the brain is good, I feel. Just a general rule.

• 50:10Speaker 08

  Right, step one, don't do more damage. So that's a big thing, but because they're so flexible, they're harder to implant than the older technology, which means that they developed a robot surgeon to do it. And it looks kind of like a microscope that has a sewing machine attached to it.

• 50:27Nilay Patel?

  Pretty much, yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 08

  And that's what inserts the thing. So it's a very thin, stiff needle that inserts the thread, but then the flexible thread stays in your brain.

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  So where does it go in your brain?

• 50:38Speaker 08

  Great question. Typically, it's inserted around the motor cortex, in part because that's like an area that we know pretty well, and also because, again, what you're trying to do is move something, so that's helpful. But there might actually be other potential locations in the brain that could be useful, and that's still TBD. So right now, it's like they're looking pretty hard at the motor cortex.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  I saw a photo of a rat with like a, I don't know what you would call it, like a motherboard sticking out of its head. Is that work, or is that just a mock-up? Are they actually doing this right now?

• 51:10Speaker 08

  That's from their white paper. So they, at the same time that this announcement was happening, they uploaded a white paper to Bio Archive, which is a place where you put your pre-prints of scientific papers so that the community can give feedback. And so they really have been putting this really in rats, thank you, rats, in order to like work with the technology and figure out like, what kind of signals are they getting? How do they interpret the signals? Like, what needs tweaking? Are these materials working? All of those things. They're hoping to get into humans next year. I think that timeline is a little ambitious. I mean, you can never really predict what the FDA is going to do, because the FDA is

• 51:49Speaker 08

  fundamentally unknowable, but it's just my feeling regarding the FDA.

• 51:56Nilay Patel?

  It's important for me to explain to everyone Liz has a background as like a health reporter at Bloomberg.

• 52:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, I covered pharma and biotech for many years and just like, nobody can predict the FDA, including the FDA, just so you know. So, you know, it might be, it might be a relatively quick path, but I think it's likelier that the FDA is going to ask for more safety data. The thing that I really liked about it is that none of this is like a huge advance on stuff that already exists, which makes it plausible. The thing that is interesting is that they're like incremental advances, but they've been combined in a way that I haven't seen before in academia. And that's like what the neuroscientists I've been talking to have also been most excited about is like, oh, they took all the smart things and put them together.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I'm watching the livestream. They're like, well, so you want to read the signals from the neurons as close as possible. And so you just have to get a thing there. And like, how do you solve the problem? If you make it a tiny little thread, you can get a thing there. Okay, fine. Well, we've only been able to read a few neurons at a time and we really, you really want to be able to read hundreds or thousands of them. Well, how do we do that? Well, you figure out how to put multiple, like you just, they just solved like problems that like step by step by step. But when you get to the end of those steps, you have a microscope sewing machine inserting threads into your brain, dodging around the blood vessels in your brain so that it can directly read and write, you know, electrical firings to and from neurons. And then it transmits wirelessly via a little

• 53:17Speaker 03

  chip inside your skull that's hermetically sealed to the chip outside your skull that receives a signal so that it can maximize bandwidth so that you can, you know, have a Luke Skywalker hand. Like the every, like the first step of like, oh, that's a really interesting scientific problem you solved. They, they claim to have like solved like eight of those in sequence and the end of it is very sci fi.

• 53:36Speaker 08

  Right. Well, so the thing is like, again, in academia, they've been working on different parts of that. So the sewing machine thing like has its roots in DARPA.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:44Speaker 08

  And like the, the transmission stuff is also, I think, I think it's DARPA. It might not be DARPA. I'm, I hope, if you are a scientist who's listening to this and you're like, hey, that's my work, email me and I will come on the Vergecast next week and apologize. So there's like, you know, there's like all of these incremental things that have been happening in academia throughout this time. And what like they did was like, they were like, cool, these are great incremental things. Let's put them all together in one thing and presto. And like, that's, that's again, what the neuroscientists are excited about. They're like, well, we, we can't combine things in that way. Like in academia, it's just not a thing that we're good at. So let's see if this works.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I guess that's like my big, this is an Elon Musk production. You were saying the FDA is a noble in the timeline mind shift, like.

• 54:27Nilay Patel?

  Every Elon timeline might shift.

• 54:30Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  But I point out that in addition to putting USB C ports in people's brains, next year, he also wants a fleet of 1 million robo taxis. Like, we're not thinking small with Elon. This seems, just based on what you and Dieter are saying, much more realistic than other Elon projects we've heard about, which is a crazy thing to say about a brain machine.

• 54:52Speaker 05

  Well, but Elon's actual version of it is really insane, and I'm curious how that affects the actual, some, like, much more practical work that the scientists are doing.

• 55:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the thing that, like, I think is very funny about this is, like, Elon's like, "I want to interact with an AI, and so that's why we're gonna do all of this stuff." And, like, the near-term goals, to me, seem eminently achievable and really, really interesting and worth discussing in and of themselves, which is why I have been discussing them instead of the long-term goals.

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  This is, I was trying to just get us there.

• 55:22Speaker 08

  Yeah, I, man, you guys. I, so, here's the thing. I'm just gonna say a bunch of things that I think are probably true that may be wrong. But first of all, if you're talking about having an interaction with an AI, and like, "Well, we wanna, you know, be cooperative with an AI, I wanna have access to this, this computer and, like, be able to talk to it." My, my first question is, why? And, like, just why? Um, and, you know, we already have computers, like, they're, they're cool, they're good, I like them most of the time. And one of the things that Elon was talking about was how nice it might be to just, like, sit and interact with a computer, but I, I do that all the time, I just use my hands. And, like, I don't actually have a problem with that, because, um, as a writer, I don't

• 56:07Speaker 08

  feel like when I'm writing, I'm composing in my brain, I feel like I'm thinking with my hands. So, like, removing motion for me, uh, is potentially problematic, because it's an important part of how I think. Um, but the other part of it is, like, why do you, why do you need this cognitive processing? Like, what is this for? Like, let's say I can speed up my brain so that I can read a page every five seconds. Does that, in, does that in any way change my enjoyment of the literature? Does that make me enjoy it more? I doubt it. Does that, is that useful? I still have to think about it, like, which is a cognitive process that you really probably can't speed up with AI, and, because we don't know, really, how conscious thinking works, turns out.

• 56:48Nilay Patel?

  I feel like, uh, well, I'm interested in, sort of, the, in, in Addie's read on this, because it feels like the, the dream is the sequence from The Matrix. Where Keanu Reeves is like, "I know Kung-Fu."

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Oh, they definitely made a Kung-Fu reference.

• 57:00Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah, they did.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:01Speaker 08

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  And, you know, other people have compared it to the Microsofts from Neuromancer, where it's like, "Oh, you want to learn a language? You'll just plug this thing into your brain, and then you know French, the hardest language."

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  Is that...

• 57:16Nilay Patel?

  So, Addie, you were like, the Elon version of this is really out there. Explain what you mean by that.

• 57:22Speaker 05

  So, maybe I'm not up on the latest Elon version of it, but his impression that he has given over the last some time is that, A, yeah, you will be able to learn stuff by just plugging stuff into your brain. You will also kind of make noise about being able to simulate experiences. So, it's like, oh, yeah, you'll be able to eat things and taste them without actually eating them, all of this input stuff. I guess the AI thing, the idea is that you will maybe be able to just have this thing that talks to you inside your brain and automatically helps you with things. The problem is, like, it's not clear to me why any of this is worth the really tremendous risk of surgery.

• 57:59Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 57:59Speaker 05

  Like, laser eye surgery is the thing that people are comparing it to, and laser eye surgery is actually risky? And, like, the risk of it is underplayed? And it also solves a specific problem everyone agrees is a problem.

• 58:11Speaker 08

  Yes, yes. And on top of that, it's still going to be more dangerous than laser eye surgery, even if they use a laser to do the drilling, because every time you open a hole to your brain, you potentially create an infection risk. And, like, a brain infection is way more serious than an eye infection for a very obvious reason. Like, the location matters, guys. And so, like, you know, again, the wireless technology is very, very exciting and is a substantial improvement over other brain-machine interfaces, because what used to have to happen is you had a port in your head and a wire coming out, and that is an infection site, like, potentially. So, you know, like, but, like, elective surgery is always dangerous.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  So, there's two wireless things to talk about. One is the exciting part, which is wirelessly, you know, very short from a battery-less transmitter inside the skull that can be powered by the thing outside it. So, that's great. That's really cool. The second wireless connection is to your phone, which is how you control this thing, via Bluetooth.

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  That seems not great. I'm sorry. Like, that seems like a mistake, like, just a flat mistake. Like, don't make Bluetooth part of your brain.

• 59:25Speaker 08

  Be careful, guys. If Elon listens to this, he's going to invent a Bluetooth competitor in order to solve the problem.

• 59:30Nilay Patel?

  Maybe it'll be good.

• 59:33Nilay Patel?

  Like, what are the things Elon Musk can accomplish? Like, the dude's, like, really successfully privatized a chunk of the space industry. Falcon Heavy seems good, it's working. We've landed two rockets at the same time. Electric cars are popular. And competitor to Bluetooth. Like, all challenges of the same scale.

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  Liz, we've been talking about the USB-C port for a while. Why is there a USB-C port?

• 1:00:00Speaker 08

  Well, the wireless connection isn't up and running yet. So, right now, it's transmitting data via a wired connection, which is the USB-C port.

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Speaker 08

  That's where it comes from.

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  I like that he picked a standard. He could have gone proprietary. So, in the photo of the rat with the board in the USB-C, does that doing anything right now? Are they reading or writing data to the rat's brain?

• 1:00:23Speaker 08

  So, right now, they're only reading data. They say they have capacity to write data, but closing that feedback loop back to the brain is actually really, really hard. It's a tough problem that the scientific community has been working on. With some results, you know, okay, so here's the example. And I'm going to use the example of my own hand, because it's right here. If I go and I pick up, like, a can of Diet Coke, I know when I'm touching the can of Diet Coke and no longer need to apply any more pressure, because I am getting feedback into my brain that is telling me, hey, that feels like cool aluminum. But if you only go one way, you don't get that feedback. And so, it's hard to, like, temper your actions. So, especially for any kind of prosthetic use, you're going to want to be able to do

• 1:01:08Speaker 08

  the full connection to the brain, where you can not only do stuff with your brain, but get signals from the world back. Because that is a big part of how we all operate in the world, is that there's just, like, this entire thing the entire time. And I am about to go full galaxy brain, I apologize to everybody. But, like... The brain is an organ, is a human construction, and we do it because, we refer to it because it's useful. Like, it's not, like, nature doesn't know what a brain is. Nature doesn't care. The whole thing is wired together. You could, conceptually, if you really wanted, call your eyes a part of your brain, because they are wired directly into your brain. You could just be like, "Oh yeah, eyes are, eyes are my external brain. That's the external part that sees things." You could similarly refer to the rest of your, like, neural system as, like, the extended brain.

• 1:01:52Speaker 08

  There is a company that does that also. Yes! Called Control Labs. So they're really cool. But you could, you could just be like, "The whole thing's my brain," and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong.

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Speaker 08

  Because it's all communicating with itself the entire time.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  Whereas onstage, Elon said, "There's this thing where people talk about that, you know, just a, a brain is just a thing inside of a, uh, sending and receiving electrical signals." And then he said, "And the brain is just a, just a, in a jar, getting and sending electrical signals." Like, he...

• 1:02:21Speaker 08

  You are a brain in a vat. And it's like, no, you're not, actually. Like, the brain might not be the, uh, the unit. The body might be the unit. The whole thing might be the unit. So, um, it's one of the things that, like, does, like, surprise me a little, is like, that sort of conception. It's not that that, like, conception isn't useful in terms of, like, data, in terms of study, all of those things. Like, of course, we slice things into component parts in order to, like, think about them. But the things that you can measure and the things that are, are not necessarily the same thing. So, like, black holes existed before we could detect them. Well, that's like, the most obvious example I could think of. But like, just because we don't necessarily know how the brain and body interact, doesn't mean that that interaction isn't important. And like, you know, if you've read, um, Oliver Sacks's A Leg to Stand On, you know that,

• 1:03:06Speaker 08

  like, if there is an injury to your body, that often really changes your entire way of thinking, and like, your mindset, and it changes how you interact with the world, because you start to think of things of like, oh, like, in his case, he had broken a leg skiing. So there was only so far he could walk, so his world shrank. His understanding of the world shrank. Um, and so, this, this physical extensive part of yourself is not like, a mecca suit your brain wears. That's you. Your body's you.

• 1:03:32Nilay Patel?

  Addie, do you remember an argument we had, I would, it's probably like, seven years ago now, where I was like, "The end state of every internet troll is the desire to be a brain in a vat." I just had serious flashbacks. We were like in a bar. It was very late at night, but this is, it's funny.

• 1:03:44Speaker 05

  I'm just trying to remember why we would have argued and disagreed over that.

• 1:03:48Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I think we might have been like a heated agreement.

• 1:03:51Speaker 05

  Okay, that makes sense to me.

• 1:03:53Nilay Patel?

  It was like a very excitable, uh, we both discovered this extremely, at the time, obscure thesis. I mean, Elon is like the most extremely online CEO of all time, in my opinion. Right? Like, he's like tweeting memes, he's doing, is he just like, I want to be a brain connected to Twitter? Like, is that where he's going? Because that's what this feels like.

• 1:04:16Speaker 05

  It feels like he also has a huge love-hate relationship with it, though. Like, a lot of it, he seems way more scared than a lot of these people.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, he, in, in the space of two minutes, will talk about how, uh, we're gonna get surpassed by AI, and, uh, it's very, very scary, and, uh, you know, 45 seconds later, say, well, it's necessary for us to have a symbiotic relationship with AI, so we don't just become pets. And there is a way to, like, build that narrative that actually works. It's like, well, rather than be defeated by AI, we should integrate AI, therefore, instead of, um, losing, we'll just become part of whatever the next thing is. It's a very, I don't know, transhumanist way to think about it.

• 1:04:56Nilay Patel?

  The resolution of the plot of The Matrix. I just want to point that out.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00Nilay Patel?

  That is, they weren't good movies at the end, because they were like, we're gonna remove the conflict, and worked in harmony with the machines.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  I would also point out Elon is very interested in shipping our bodies to Mars.

• 1:05:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's the other thing he's working on.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  Thing about brains is they weigh le- weigh less than bodies, and so it's easier to ship more of them in a payload into space.

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  Oh, my God. No, no, you scan the brains, and then they weigh even less.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a good point.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  This is like the Neuralink thing, and I'm sure many listeners are like, you don't understand Elon, and that is true, because...

• 1:05:34Speaker 05

  Much like the FDA, Elon is fundamentally unknowable.

• 1:05:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe, I mean, Grimes could be getting close, you never know. Who truly knows anyone, is really what I want you to get out of this episode.

• 1:05:46Nilay Patel?

  But you, we have this, this is very Elon, right? The goal is to eliminate all combustion engines and save the earth. And that is expressed as a Model 3, right? Which is a car and it's like the, the constraints on building a car are still constraints to building a car and we gotta build them in a tent to build enough. And the problems there are the problems of I need to sell $35,000 on electric car. But the goal is we're going to save the earth. I want to move humanity beyond earth because earth is doomed. We need to colonize the stars. What are we doing? We're doing very, I mean, it's complicated.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  Don't get me wrong, but we're, we've built a private space cargo system for NASA. This seems like the same thing, like we're a brain in a vat. I gotta communicate with AI. That's the future. What's the first thing we're doing? We're taking a bunch of existing good ideas and packaging them into can we build a superior, like prosthetic interface? Does that seem about right? Liz, like that's, that's the Elon pattern.

• 1:06:50Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's right. And like, actually it goes back farther. Because one of the things that you might remember about PayPal is that one of the reasons he got ejected was because his ambitions for PayPal were too big. Everybody thought and we're not going to be sustainable. So I don't feel like Elon Musk has really ever had small achievable goals, except as like a way to get to enormous goals.

• 1:07:12Nilay Patel?

  And I think the real question is like, is this a business? Right? Like, I mean, that is a question, honestly, with Tesla at this point is less of a question, I think with SpaceX, they seem to be doing well. Liz, literally you host a segment for us regularly called This Week in Elon, where, where it's basically like, is Tesla a business or not? Like, can we, can we survive the rigors of running a public company at this scale in this market?

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  And the question is like, is this a business? Is SolarCity a business? Definitively answered, no, we're just going to roll it into Tesla, right?

• 1:07:44Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  Is Neuralink a business?

• 1:07:46Speaker 08

  It's, that's actually a really hard question to answer because the biotech space is incredibly expensive. Like, the thing to know about developing drugs and devices, for those of you who don't necessarily know it already, is that there is a pretty rigorous testing system in place, and it varies whether it's drugs or devices. But the average drug takes like 10 years to get to market, and that's 10 years of extensive testing, and there's like special stuff that's done around the patents, so you get extra patent life to make up for the fact that you've done all the safety testing. So, potentially, yes, in the sense that like, medical device companies definitely exist, and definitely serve the needs of people who, you know, perhaps have to go to the hospital,

• 1:08:28Speaker 08

  or maybe are undergoing surgery, or any of a number of other things like that. Like, medicine exists, and there are businesses, so maybe, yes. But it is a really, really tricky space. In part because like, you have a limited number of patients, and they may be limited in what they can potentially pay to achieve this technology. You know, and you also maybe are limited, depending on how durable these threads are, by how many times people can have brain surgery, right? Because like, durability is tough. The human body is a very corrosive environment, and even something like an artificial hip, your body doesn't want it there, and will try to eject it. It'll try to wear it away, and then like, the other thing to know is that blood is corrosive.

• 1:09:13Speaker 08

  So, it is right now an open question of how long these things will last in a body. That is a, that's a hard question to answer. So, it is maybe a business, but the real answer is we probably aren't going to know until we've had larger scale human testing.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  They want to get to human testing by the end of next year, by the end of 2020. The other thing, towards the end in the Q and A section, they were asking about, you know, the ethics of testing on animals, and then it's very unfortunate we need to test on animals, and Elon said, yeah, well, you know, like, well, we got a, we got a, we got a monkey running a computer now. The president of Neuralink was like, I guess we're announcing that now, too.

• 1:09:50Speaker 08

  Yes. It was, it was actually a little bit funny, because I would watch the scientists tense up every time Elon was going to answer a question, and then like, the thing that they were afraid of happened, and they were like, well...

• 1:10:05Nilay Patel?

  What is the monkey doing on the computer? I don't know.

• 1:10:09Speaker 08

  Well, I have an informed guess based on previous monkey trials of this technology. To be clear, this is a guess. I don't have sourcing information, but if you work at Neuralink and you want to talk to me about this, or at UC Davis, which is their partner, and you want to talk to me about this, like, eh?

• 1:10:24Nilay Patel?

  It's Quake. He's playing Quake.

• 1:10:26Speaker 08

  So, you can teach a monkey to move a cursor on a screen because monkeys love juice. Juice is the best thing that has ever happened to monkeys, and if you reward them for a behavior with juice, they will do the behavior again to get more juice. So you can get them to move cursors around, they've moved artificial arms, they do all sorts of things for juice because it turns out if you want to motivate a monkey, that's how you do it.

• 1:10:46Nilay Patel?

  So, the monkey's moving a cursor through a maze to get juice?

• 1:10:50Speaker 08

  That's my guess.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  I mean, to be fair, I've seen people do dumber things for juice.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  All right. Liz, thank you so much for joining us. You know, like, this week in Elon, it comes and goes.

• 1:11:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, it does.

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  It feels like we're in for another ride.

• 1:11:05Speaker 08

  I mean, look, we go through periods where Elon is very active and periods where Elon is quiet, and I get to do other things, and it looks like we're going through another Elon activity period, so you might be seeing more of me.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  Elon activity periods definitely sounds like something astronomers would say.

• 1:11:19Speaker 05

  Do we have a unit of measurement for Elon activity yet?

• 1:11:25Nilay Patel?

  The problem is that it's like tweets per hour. Like, you don't want that.

• 1:11:29Nilay Patel?

  That's bad. The tweets per minute are high during this Elon activity period. We should chart it. You know, like a Joy Division teacher?

• 1:11:38Nilay Patel?

  But like, it's a pulsar.

• 1:11:39Speaker 08

  I'm into it. Let's get some data scientists on this.

• 1:11:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, absolutely. That's a good use of data scientists. Okay, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back with Paul. Thank you, Liz.

• 1:11:50Speaker 08

  Well, thank you. It's nice being here.

• 1:11:52Nilay Patel?

  Addie, thank you as well. It's been great having you.

• 1:11:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:11:55Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're taking a break. We'll be back. We're gonna talk about these MacBooks.

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• 1:13:02Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Paul Miller has joined us. Hello, friend.

• 1:13:06Speaker 10

  Hello.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  Paul, every week.

• 1:13:08Speaker 10

  Uh huh.

• 1:13:08Nilay Patel?

  You know, stunning display of consistency. You do a segment renowned for its repeatability, its understandability, its coherence. What's it called?

• 1:13:18Speaker 10

  It's called You've Been a Good Boy. And it's about, it's about Boston Dynamics, the robotics company that has never made a product for anybody ever, has decided to dip its toes into commercial robotics.

• 1:13:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Speaker 10

  It's going to sell Spot, the robot dog, which is in a sense like a great grandchild of, when Boston Dynamics hit the scene, it was with Big Dog. You remember Big Dog? It's like, and it had like a lawnmower engine in it. And it's like, it was so much fun. Took the world by storm and now we have Spot, which is cute and nobody knows what they'll actually. I actually came up with a list.

• 1:14:01Nilay Patel?

  I would buy one of these. How much is it going to cost?

• 1:14:03Speaker 10

  A million dollars. I don't know. There's still like not a lot of details, like what? I mean, they kind of, they say this is a classic phrase in robotics, because commercial robotics are not a solved problem. And just because Boston Dynamics is doing it has no bearing on whether or not this will be successful. Cause they're calling it the, they want it to be the Android of robotics. Like, you know, the Android operating system, like the open platform everybody can build on.

• 1:14:30Nilay Patel?

  Which is, that's, that'll go great.

• 1:14:32Speaker 10

  That's great, except guess who else has said that? Every single other company that's ever built a robot and tried to sell it to people. So I wish them the best. I think this would be great for, like, you could have racing, horse racing tracks. I would like to have one of these at a petting zoo.

• 1:14:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:51Speaker 10

  I could imagine it for like, uh, home deliveries where you live on a walk up and so it could go up the stairs.

• 1:14:57Nilay Patel?

  I can imagine it as a hallway sentry, just mount a gun on that head.

• 1:15:01Speaker 10

  That's a great idea.

• 1:15:03Nilay Patel?

  Lurking in abandoned homes, waiting to terrify children. Important.

• 1:15:06Speaker 10

  I think a large, a large version with a saddle could be an alternative to scooters in large cities.

• 1:15:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. So I'm, uh, I don't think we've told the listeners that. I'm not in New York this week. I'm in Dallas. Dallas, uh, has scooters in it and everyone has talked to me about how much they either love or hate scooters.

• 1:15:24Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Nilay Patel?

  And so, uh, cause New York doesn't have them. So every time I'm in a city with them, I always talk to people. I, I'm just gonna tell you right now, if you dropped saddle laden spot robots on the streets of Dallas, people will just hit them with their trucks. Like that would be the end of it. Like I was walking on the streets today, I saw a guy in a full suit walk by a park scooter and he scoffed with disgust and knocked it over with the back of his hand.

• 1:15:51Speaker 10

  The back of his hand.

• 1:15:54Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Dallas is not play. The Boston Dynamics story is really interesting to me, right? Like, they were a robotics company. Andy Rubin, when he like left the Android project, he and Eric Schmidt, I think, were like, we're gonna, robots are the next big thing that Google's gonna do. He bought a lot of robotics companies. Boston Dynamics was the highest profile one that they bought at Google. Then for a while, they're like, wait, that was a mistake and Rubin's gone. We're done with this robot nonsense that we're doing. They tried to sell it and they couldn't.

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:16:28Nilay Patel?

  And now they're like, the whole time, you know, they're like Boston Dynamics crew is like, this one can like run up five boards, right? Like they keep releasing the videos of the robots, even while all this turmoil is going on. And now they're like, sure, we're just going to sell SPOT. That's a pretty wild trajectory for this.

• 1:16:46Speaker 03

  One extra step there, they were eventually actually bought by SoftBank.

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I didn't realize that.

• 1:16:52Speaker 03

  And SoftBank is, uh, I mean, I don't know. I don't know what to think about SoftBank. Sometimes it seems completely random what they invest in, but they also have some wins. So it seemed like a successful venture, like SoftBank, for instance, is a successful.

• 1:17:09Speaker 03

  But also Sprint.

• 1:17:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's that.

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:17:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, that's, that Sprint investment at the time looked like a very obvious, clear debt ahead by the company, turn it around, let it merge with somebody and make some cash. Like, that was very obviously what they were trying to do.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  I think it was going to be a whole like home broadband play, at least what they were talking about.

• 1:17:31Nilay Patel?

  And now, now it's just in limbo. They wait for Dish Network to pick up the pieces.

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36Nilay Patel?

  So not good at that, but good at SoftBank and also invest. I mean, they run the Vision Fund. We cannot possibly get in the Vision Fund, but so much tech investment is secretly SoftBank.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  I just want to point out that we went from like Boston Dynamic Robot Dogs being sold to factories to almost getting to like Sprint YMAX in the space of about three minutes. So Vergecast.

• 1:17:58Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's talk about these MacBooks. That's, that's the thing we're going long this week, but we can't ignore the fact that we reviewed the two new MacBooks from Apple. So Dieter, you reviewed the Air. Dan reviewed the Pro.

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:18:10Nilay Patel?

  It seems both extremely dead ahead and extremely complicated.

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, like super complicated, actually. So everyone wants me to answer the question about keyboards. I just can't, just super don't know. They're still really shallow. They feel fine to me. I like the shallow keyboards, yada, yada, yada. But who knows? Like, we've only had these quote unquote new material keyboards since whatever the last MacBook Pro rev was a couple of months ago. So we just haven't had enough time to see if these end up being reliable. And then the, the complicated part is. They reduced the price on the MacBook Air by a hundred bucks. So it starts at $10.99 now. But every single upsell from there, either from the Air to the Pro,

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  or to add more storage, because it's $128 at $10.99, which isn't much, or to add more RAM, like, they're all like 200 bucks and they're all like completely reasonable upgrades to want to make. And if you just follow the path like, oh yeah, that's a reasonable upgrade. Everybody should want that. You end up at like an $1,800 laptop. And it's like, well, what the hell just happened to us here? Like that, that was a mistake. So we landed, Dan and I, like, there's like an upgrade. Like, if we want to keep this thing relatively cheap, like, get the upgrade to the base Pro if you can. Or if you really need the storage, you could keep the Air. Like, you just, you end up like making this entire like matrix of what should you get? If you don't want to spend too much money on a Mac laptop?

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  And the fact that that happens is why I said that the new MacBook Air doesn't get to be called like the new default Mac that everybody should just go buy. We don't have to discuss this anymore. Goodbye. Like, that's what they need that computer to be. They need that computer to be the thing that when my aunt or, you know, my cousin Joe or whoever is like, what computer should I buy? You know, I want to tell them whatever computer will make them go away and not ask me again. Right? That will, like, I trust it will work and that used to be the MacBook Air.

• 1:20:13Nilay Patel?

  I feel like based on the voice you used for cousin Joe and the fact that you want him to go away, there's some like trouble in the bone family.

• 1:20:22Speaker 10

  What did Joe ever do to you? If, if the MacBook Air, and, and this isn't helpful because this is a dream, but if the MacBook Air $1,100 had 256GB of SSD and 16GB of RAM.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  Oh, that'd be amazing.

• 1:20:38Speaker 10

  Then it would be the default.

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, there's, there's any number of things where it's like, they would just, there's, what are the things that are holding you back from saying, oh yeah, just go get this one? Well, it's, 8 gigs of RAM, it feels a little anemic, but it's fine. 128 gigs of storage, a little anemic, but maybe. The keyboard, can you really trust it? I don't know. And the processor is, you know, last year's Core i5 Y series. And I think normal people can get it to chug in a way that doesn't happen on modern U-series Intel chips. Now, the vast majority of people looking at this laptop are probably hanging on to their classic MacBook Airs for dear life. And from that perspective, it's basically like, it's a one-to-one performance swap, and you get a beautiful screen, and it's thinner and lighter.

• 1:21:22Speaker 03

  So yeah, it's like, pretty good upgrade. For everybody else, you know, someone's like, "I want to go buy a computer right now." I want to tell them to wait to see if Apple fixes one of those four things, right? Especially the keyboard and the processor. But if you need a computer now, like, me telling you to wait till next year is not helpful. So like, I have to judge this thing as it is right now in 2019. And as it is right now in 2019, it's a seven. It's good. Like, you will be very happy if you get this, for the most part. But it's not good enough for me to just be able to tell Cousin Joe to get it, and then he'll leave me alone. I'll tell Cousin Joe to get it, and then he'll ask me about the keyboard in a month, or he'll ask me about why it's slowing down, because he didn't open too many tabs in a month. And I don't want that.

• 1:22:03Nilay Patel?

  Get out of here, Joe. Here's $200.

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  For the record, I don't actually have any relations named Joe, and this is not like a cipher for like, an actual cousin of mine. If you're a cousin and you're listening, this isn't about you.

• 1:22:15Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I know about Dieter. If you're in his family, you can roll up to him and say, "I've been thinking about buying a MacBook Air." And he'll get so frustrated, he'll Venmo you $200 so that you will buy the MacBook Pro.

• 1:22:27Nilay Patel?

  Is that the move, to spend the extra $200? It's amazing.

• 1:22:32Speaker 03

  Like, that's like a family legend, right? Like, you need $200. Just go to Dieter.

• 1:22:37Nilay Patel?

  Say these magic words to Dieter. Is the answer to spend the $200 on the Pro?

• 1:22:41Speaker 03

  Yes. I mean, I think so. I prefer the Mac. I prefer the MacBook Air, rather. I prefer carrying it around. I prefer the wedge shape. I prefer the thinness of the weight. I prefer having a function keyrow instead of a touchbar. If I had to go and buy one tomorrow... I personally would probably pick a MacBook Air, but unless I thought I was ever going to need to do video editing, in which case I'd get the Pro. But I would stress about it. So I prefer the physicality of the Air much more to the Pro, even though it's a relatively minor difference. But it really is minor. So you can you can talk yourself into the Pro relatively easily. And the problem with saying, just go get it, is like, I can, I can, I feel comfortable recommending one $200 upgrade, but then there's like another

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  $200 after that, and then maybe another $200 after that. And then it's like, well, why aren't you just buying a nicer Pro?

• 1:23:30Nilay Patel?

  I feel like the argument for the Air, I only try to make the argument for the Air is the default laptop, because I largely agree with you, and I feel like it's instructed to try to make the argument.

• 1:23:38Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:23:39Nilay Patel?

  The argument is, Apple knows that you're doing most of your computing on your phone. So you've got one of their new phones, they're very powerful, you're doing most of the stuff that you're gonna do on a phone. What you're gonna do on your Mac, you're gonna browse the web a bunch, you're gonna run one of their great new Marsa pen apps, and you're gonna run it, if you're a student, you're gonna run it, and maybe Microsoft Word.

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:24:05Nilay Patel?

  Right? You're not gaming, and if you are, you should subscribe to Apple Games Plus, or whatever it is, Apple Arcade. You're probably not consuming a bunch of video, and if you are, it's Netflix, and that screen is great for it. And you're probably not making a bunch of video, like, they want you to do that on the phone, right? They make clips. It's not like they're revving iMovie on the Mac or whatever. It just seems like they know what the MacBook Air is for a student. For $1,100, you get a good web browser, it'll run Microsoft Word just great, and if you need to scroll through your photos collection, it'll sync your photos collection. But most of your life happens on a phone. And, you know, maybe, maybe you're like really into it, you buy an iPad, too. It feels like it's part of that matrix, and not the like, this is my computer, this is where all the action happens,

• 1:24:48Nilay Patel?

  in a way that the Pro might be that thing. And certainly, the Windows laptops, and it's important that we talk about them, because there are lots of Windows laptops that just outclass the Air, but they happen around Windows.

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when I say it's not the default, I don't know if I was clear enough about this, especially in the review, like it hasn't earned the title of the default laptop, but the MacBook Air is going to be the default choice for a lot of people. So it's good that it's good enough to like become that default choice. But in terms of like it like earning that like the crown or like I like try to distinguish between like lowercase default laptop and uppercase like whatever like in terms of people's actual like behavior, it's the default laptop. In terms of whether or not it should be the default laptop, the one that I feel comfortable recommending to cousin Joe, poor cousin Joe that we've been ragging on, I don't think it's there yet.

• 1:25:40Speaker 10

  I am far away from a verge reviews closet. So to get a vibe for the laptop market, I just have to go to Best Buy. And so recently I went to Best Buy. They have the new MacBooks there. The new keyboards, I don't know if it's just placebo or whatever. They feel 10% better to me.

• 1:25:59Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:25:59Speaker 10

  Which take that for what it's worth. Because I hate the clackety clack of the anyways. But I went and touched every single laptop in the store and I hate to say it, but I still kind of like the MacBooks, except for maybe the Surface Book, the Surface Laptop.

• 1:26:19Speaker 03

  Surface Laptop is probably the closest. Yeah. But like, like the Dell's XPS 13, I think is an amazing laptop. It has a much better webcam and a much smaller space than they pulled off on the MacBook Air. It's faster. It has a better keyboard. It's got, you know, you can log in, like it's got everything you want. It's very, very good. But the thing that like I wanted to like pick up and hold and like chuck in my bag and not worry about and like, you know, carry around in one hand like Kanye or whatever, like I will do that with a MacBook. I would never do that with the Dell XPS 13.

• 1:26:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, is it, is this time to promote the conspiracy theory that Apple's slow rolling good MacBooks that everyone just buys an iPad Pro and uses iPadOS and is happy and shuts up?

• 1:27:01Speaker 03

  They did kill the MacBook, the one port MacBook.

• 1:27:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Again, I, I think we talked about this last week, that it seems like, okay, that's the sign that they're rebooting this entire strategy, that if they ever bring it back, it'll have the ARM processor and it'll be like the future Mac. But right now they're like, we gotta get this thing right. What's interesting, I just don't understand why they didn't rev the processor in the air.

• 1:27:23Speaker 03

  I don't think that there was one to rev too. There's like, you know, coffee leg or like, there's like little bits above it. But in order to make that Y series work, they're really specific about the binning and a whole bunch of other stuff. That's like around just like the raw of like, you know, spec of the chip. And I just, I don't think that Intel's doing it for them. I don't think they've got the next one ready to go in, in the parameters that Apple needs it to be in.

• 1:27:51Speaker 10

  I think there's a chip that's coming to this sort of form factor, but I think it's for the fall, the 10th gen chip, which we've, has been shown off in laptops, but they aren't shipping yet.

• 1:28:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:28:03Speaker 10

  I, and so I think that's for the fall. So I guess for whatever reason, Apple felt like they needed to refresh right now.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, for back to school.

• 1:28:11Nilay Patel?

  It makes sense. I, I think it's like a reasonable like upgrade for a bunch of people going next to, especially if you had one of these older MacBook Airs.

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Nilay Patel?

  I, I agree with you, Dieter, like that. That was such a comfortable laptop. I mean, I'm sure if you've been with us for a while, you know that Joanna Stern like famously ended every laptop review with like, for $200 more, you can get a MacBook Air. If you read Dieter's MacBook Air review, you will note that it ends with for $200 more, you can get a MacBook Pro.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:28:37Nilay Patel?

  The only thing that's killing me is the touch bar.

• 1:28:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 1:28:41Nilay Patel?

  I don't want that thing. And I mean, Dieter, I've listened to you complain about the touch bar on your computer. Like it's a little bit buggy. It's not actually rock solid.

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  Yep, that's true.

• 1:28:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe I, it's, I gotta do something. Really all of this has been personal therapy for me because my, my 2015 15 inch Pro is a disaster. Uh, and this 13 inch MacBook Escape review unit that I've been like taking on the road with me is A belongs to Apple, so I have to stop and B, um, the keyboard broke.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. So here's the thing about these refreshes. It makes it pretty clear that you should stop holding out hope for that storied 16-inch MacBook Pro coming out this year. It seems very unlikely they're going to do that, which means that that's a 2020 product. And who knows when they're going to release that? And that's my other hobby horse with Macs is they still don't feel predictable in their upgrade cycles. And they'll never be as predictable as the iPhone, but you still want to have a sense of like, is Apple about to do a big, major rev on this? If I can wait, I should wait. Or no, this is good. I should buy this now. You know, just like a car, you don't want to buy the first of a new generation. You want to buy the second one. Like, that's the sweet spot. It seems like we're at the tail end of the generation of these. We want to be at the tail end of the generation of these.

• 1:29:57Speaker 03

  We don't actually know that. And so you're just in a super weird limbo. And so if you need a computer, buy a computer. If you don't, don't. And that's like standard advice, but it applies very hard right now when it comes to Macs.

• 1:30:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm buying a $400 Chromebook. That's what I'm going to do.

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:30:13Nilay Patel?

  When is Google revving the Pixelbook?

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, dude. It's very complicated.

• 1:30:19Speaker 10

  I will say, hmm. Part of this is Intel. I really blame Intel for a lot of this because I seriously want a new laptop right now to put Linux on, which could be a MacBook, it could be a ThinkPad, it could be anything. And it's not like there aren't good choices. It's just that there's no slam dunks. There's no big wins over the past three months, which had no big wins over the past three months. Like, there hasn't been a big win in laptops for, it seems like, two years.

• 1:30:47Nilay Patel?

  Paul, have you considered entering the Ryzen zone?

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:30:52Speaker 10

  There was a Ryzen laptop at Best Buy. I clicked it.

• 1:30:56Nilay Patel?

  There was one. It was like super cheap.

• 1:30:59Speaker 10

  It is. It's like $400. They haven't come out with the new gen Ryzen for laptops yet, so we don't really know. So it's kind of still TBD.

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

  What's going on with the Chromebook Pixel is there's a product that's codenamed Atlas that everyone assumes is it, and we're getting details trickling out about it. There have been photos of it that look like they're basically Samsung Chromebook 2s, which I do not think is the design language that Google would go with, but chances are it's actually just a mule. It's like a dummy device of what they're actually making. And

• 1:31:35Speaker 03

  I'm real mad and I don't know what the answer is.

• 1:31:37Nilay Patel?

  Hey, I'm Googling. What are they doing?

• 1:31:40Speaker 03

  We're expecting a 4K screen, but beyond that, it's like kind of a mess. And these are all, these are all, this is all like reading the tea leaves from, you know, weird chromium commits, right? So there's that.

• 1:31:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, instead of watching this Chromebook Atlas leak, I'm gonna go and watch the new trailer for Top Gun Maverick, which I'm gonna be honest with everybody, I could have talked about this entire show.

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  Same.

• 1:32:05Nilay Patel?

  Been the thing distracting me this whole time. I encourage everyone to watch it. It looks ridiculous. We're all, we should probably have some sort of party in the August Top Gun Maverick together.

• 1:32:17Nilay Patel?

  All right, we've gone way over. We gotta wrap this up. You can listen to Why Did You Push That Button? That season is going amazingly. This week, Ashley and Caitlin talked about sliding into DMs. A classic button. You should, it's funny. It's really good. Go listen to that one. You can listen to Paris Wisher on Rico Decode. You can listen to Kara and Scott Galloway on Pivot. You can listen to Peter Kaufman, Rico Media. All excellent shows available on the Vox Media Podcast Network, of which I will tell you that we are the flagship. A note I especially want to underline on this today, Friday, because today is the day that an episode of The Weeds with me on it is out. We're gonna be running that on the Vergecast feed next Tuesday. But yeah, it's right. I want on The Weeds and I feel like that's a flagship. That's a thing that happened. Enjoy that, everyone.

• 1:33:02Nilay Patel?

  We'll be back next week on the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  Paul.

• 1:33:05Nilay Patel?

  All right. Send tweet. Oh shit, wait, there's a typo.

• 1:33:25Speaker 07

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