Samsung shows off Galaxy Note 10, Disney announces streaming bundle, and Apple's Siri recordings controversy

Stories this week: Samsung Galaxy Note 10: two sizes, new S Pen, and DeX on your …Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Unpacked event: the biggest ... Samsung didn't mention Bixby once during its entire Galaxy Note 10 …Samsung confirms its long-delayed Galaxy Home smart speaker is still in the worksSamsung isn’t going it alone in the fight against Apple and GoogleSamsung's new Galaxy Book S is a Qualcomm-powered laptop with …Pixel 4 will reportedly feature a screen with a 90Hz 'Smooth Display …Google releases final beta for Android Q and changes the back …Android Q’s back gesture controversy, explained Samsung's Galaxy Watch Active 2 brings back the bezel controlDisney announces $12.99 bundle for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ Disney has made $8 billion at the box office, but its ambitions are …Disney is drastically changing Fox’s future after a number of flopsJuul launches a Bluetooth e-cigarette that tracks how much you vapeApple stops letting contractors listen to Siri voice recordingsDeleting your Siri voice recordings from Apple's servers is confusing …Microsoft contractors are listening to select Skype calls and Cortana recordingsThe Apple Card starts rolling out today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, we talk about the Galaxy Note 10. It's in two sizes. Talk about what's going on with Android's back gesture. Julia Alexander joins us to talk about Disney and the streaming wars. And we get into it with Siri listening to you. It's always listening to you. That's The Vergecast. It's coming up now.

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• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge podcasting ecosystem. An ecosystem that is now in partnership with Microsoft to combat.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai. I'm your friend. It's not actually, we'll get to it. I'll explain it to you. But I'm Neelai. Dieter Bohn is in New York with me. I'm in New York with you. Because of the Note 10 event. That's right. Which I couldn't personally attend to turn down, but I came for it anyway. At which Samsung and Microsoft announced a partnership. Paul Miller is here.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  How's it going, Paul?

• 1:51Speaker 03

  I'm very well, thank you.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  Do you, did you remove your headphone jack for an additional battery?

• 1:56Speaker 03

  No, but I would like to announce that I will never part with Microsoft. They can never pay me and they can never own me.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  It's the year of Linux on the desktop, everybody.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  There we go. All right, that's the big news, the Note 10.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  It's here, two sizes. It's a lot going on. Dieter, tell us about it.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  Uh, there's two sizes. Uh, there's a small Note. Uh, everyone says, don't call it small because it's big. 6.3 inches, that's big, but there's no bezels, so I don't know. It's about, it's like, not that much bigger than a Galaxy S10. I'm very excited about the small one.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:29Speaker 04

  I actually really like it. Uh, then there's like the full-on Note Note, the Note, Noty Note.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Notarama, the Note 10 Plus, which I think should just be the Note, but whatever. It's got a 6.8 inch screen. It's about the same size as last year's Note. So the thing about the Note is it comes in the back half of the year, just like the Pixel does. And that is off-cycle to when Qualcomm makes its newest Android chips available to Android manufacturers. That's the earlier in the year, and the S10 usually gets like right in that first rev of it, right? So the Note, historically in your head, is the phone that just has every feature and is the most powerful and the biggest and the, the, the most, the most Samsung. And they can't do that with the processor anymore.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  Huh.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  And increasingly, it's getting hard for them to do it with like the screen because this thing doesn't have a 90 Hz refresh rate like the OnePlus 7 Pro. It's not bigger than other Android phones, but it is a very, very, very nice screen. Like it looks like a Samsung quality screen.

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  And so I'm not really freaked out about the 90 Hz thing or whatever. But what, what do you buy a Note for? Like what is it that you want out of it?

• 3:40Speaker 03

  Iterations on the technology packed into the stylus.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  Well, you can now wave the stylus like a wand. It, uh, it's a unibody stylus now. It's a single piece of metal.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  Sorry.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  I'm just, I'm just stating facts, man.

• 3:56Nilay Patel?

  I know that you are. I mean, they, it's like you had to do something.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  If there was an IR sensor in this, it would have, it would exceed the functionality of the original.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  Here's my question. When does this stylus become a tiny little phone on its own?

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  That's what you gotta get to. Like what is the stylus? A little phone.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  And you just hold it up to your head and take calls with the stylus?

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  Could be awesome.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can wave it around. It's got an accelerometer and a gyroscope in it.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I mean, I saw a video of Dieter like flipping through a camera roll.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not good.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  65% accuracy rate.

• 4:28Speaker 04

  Well, I didn't realize that you have to hold the button down while you wave it.

• 4:32Nilay Patel?

  No, like a wand.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  Then I got up to like 65, 70% before it was zero.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Improvement. This is the big thing for me is Dex will run on a Mac or a PC. Dex is, you know, no one uses it, or maybe people do, like, there's like the four people that like bought a USB C monitor and a Bluetooth keyboard and like, I'm living that Dex life. But really, I mean, come on.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  But the ability to have an Android window on your computer that is just your phone is actually kind of compelling because it's a way easier way to get at your messaging, for example. You can do some of this with like the your phone stuff on Microsoft, but getting WhatsApp or Signal on your computer, you gotta like scan the QR code and make sure blah, and then it's just there. It's just there.

• 5:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:19Speaker 04

  Open it up at the window and go to town. Try to move files from Android to a PC is always sort of been terrible.

• 5:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Wait, so to use Dex, I just want to be clear on this.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  So Dex with the Note 9, for example, or the S10, you plug in a monitor, you plug in a keyboard.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  You get like a windowed operating system that's like a riff on Android. It's running Android apps, so it like made Windows out of them.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  It has worked iteratively better over the years.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  Yep. It used to have to have a dock and then they made it, you just need a cable. And now they've made it, you just need a USB C cable to plug into a computer.

• 5:50Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So you have to plug it into your computer.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. So you don't have to. You can still plug it into a monitor if you want.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  No, but I'm saying to run it on a Mac.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  You get a USB C cable.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 6:00Nilay Patel?

  You plug one end into your Mac and the other end into your Note 10.

• 6:03Speaker 04

  Yep. By the way, same plug on both ends of that cable.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  Promise of USB C is alive.

• 6:10Nilay Patel?

  Then, just to be clear, phone starts charging up your laptop.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  Presumably. And then an app on your laptop opens up and then you see.

• 6:20Speaker 04

  One assumes it can just open up. You might have to click a button. I don't know.

• 6:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, something happens. You do some application stuff.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  The Dex app opens.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 6:27Nilay Patel?

  And then you see a windowed operating system that is Dex.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Inside that window. Yep.

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  You don't see like a Note 10.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  Right. That's correct. You see a windowed operating system inside a window like you're VNCing into your Note.

• 6:37Nilay Patel?

  That's super weird.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:39Nilay Patel?

  It's all, it's so close and so far, right?

• 6:42Speaker 04

  It's super weird.

• 6:43Nilay Patel?

  Does it feel like a VNC? Like, what is the, the, I'm guessing it doesn't feel perfectly native, or does it?

• 6:48Speaker 04

  No, it feels like a VNC. It totally does. Like, there's a little bit, there's like, it's a little bit slower.

• 6:53Nilay Patel?

  You remember when? It's a little bit slower. It's plugged into the phone directly. Then, like, you know. You can run a monitor over USB C without, uh, it's so weird.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's slower because it's also like, you know, Android, like Dex, you know?

• 7:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm not touching that one. It's slower because it's Android. Dieter Bone, he's head back on everybody.

• 7:18Nilay Patel?

  Wow, that's a deep cut.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  It's almost like, it's, I'm guessing it's probably kind of like running a capture card.

• 7:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Right? Except you're just not recording it to your hard drive. But you're taking basically a video signal over USB C and then showing it in a window and then also sending mouse events.

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  And also apparently drag and drop events.

• 7:35Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. That's exactly what's happening.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  Okay. And that's why, that's why I think there's like, it feels like there's a little bit of lag. I've only used it for about like five minutes. So it, it could just be, I remember badly.

• 7:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I love this idea.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  That you're going to sit down and then you can like, kind of operate your phone on your computer.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  It's a great idea. This sounds what, like nuts.

• 7:56Speaker 04

  You just, you want, you want the, like, the, the vertical, like, phone.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  Especially on a Windows computer, I think, having it so that you can just see your phone and like, use your phone on that same screen.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:05Nilay Patel?

  Makes perfect sense. Why don't we just do that? That could be version, version two, you like narrow the window and switch. Yeah. It's like, it's responsive design and it's like, a phone, a phone, a phone. Oh my God, it's a weird VNC.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  You remember, uh, Parallels for Mac? You could, um, you could like, set the thing where it doesn't put all the Windows stuff inside a desktop.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  Inside a window. You can just like, break it out and have Windows windows in your Mac. They should do that.

• 8:31Nilay Patel?

  I think Parallels for Mac still exists because it just does some weird.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  Hardware compartmentalization stuff.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  Okay, do that. That's what I want. I want random floating Android Windows across. Mix and match operating systems.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  This doesn't seem exactly like the future, but it has like, it rhymes with the future. There's just something that it just feels right about it. Like, if I had this phone, I think I would use this more than I would have used Dex before. Like, like, I'm working on a software project. I want to test the Linux build of something, right?

• 9:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  So I just like, open up this, then I open up the Linux app inside of Dex. And then I run the Linux app to test it out, and then I, you know, unplug it when I'm done. And it's, it's, instead of having to like, like, boot, you know, plug a whole monitor and keyboard in just to get this experience.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  Feel the raw power of virtualized Linux inside of Dex running on VNC over a cable on a Mac.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Well, and then also, it's gonna be the dream machine for an Android developer.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Why? Because you can test your Android app on the same computer that you're develop, you, you can test your Android app on an Android phone on your computer that you're developing the Android.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  Without having to use an emulator or whatever.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Inside of Dex.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  That's the, that's the maybe.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  That's the, that's the one part where it's like, uh, my app works great on Dex.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  I didn't, uh, test it anywhere else. But that's a virtuous cycle.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  I was talking to Becca YouTube star, Becca Versace. Uh, she is interested in it, uh, for video because they did a bunch of video stuff for the Note 10. Uh, it has like, it's paying the accelerometer and the gyroscope more for steady shooting.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  And it, it could do bokeh in the background, whatever. And it's doing that zoom mic thing. So in theory, you might be shooting more video on this thing. And so getting files off through Dex might like be nicer because you could just like, plug it in and then use the big file browser inside Dex to go find the stuff that you want, instead of poking at it in the gallery and then hitting the share button.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  That's cool.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  And then praying that somehow you'll get it to your computer.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  That could be.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  That's a thing.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Maybe.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  What else? It's got three cameras. It's got a little InfinitiO display.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  It's got three cameras. The big one has a time of flight camera, which they are using for AR stuff, which, uh, I didn't see, but they showed it on stage and it actually looks like really cool. Nobody will ever use it, but you can do the thing where you like draw in space, you know?

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  And you can like, draw a mustache on somebody's face and it stays on their face when they move around.

• 11:03Nilay Patel?

  Truly the best use of this technology.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  The coolest thing that it can do, though, is it, you can do a 3D scan of a thing. You can just like walk around the thing in a circle and then it creates a 3D version of that object. And, you know, it looks pretty bad, but it's close. And then you can take that thing and like use it as like an AR sticker in some other scene. Or hell, you could like throw it to a 3D printer if you want. Great for intellectual property theft.

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  I, I feel like this will be, once that sort of 3D scanning stuff becomes more ubiquitous, like this will be a great, like, user-generated content video game.

• 11:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Like, if I had a skateboard game, but then I could ollie over Dieter's head that I scanned with my phone, you know, and then I make a YouTube video of it, and now I'm famous.

• 11:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 11:46Nilay Patel?

  Truly living the Samsung life. What's my full life, like Samsung lifestyle? It's like I use this weird Samsung feature to make a weird game on Android, and I put it on YouTube, and I'm sponsored by Samsung.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  It's like just complete that loop.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  I'm saying there needs to be a game that is a good video game. Like, you ever watch people like Maude Grand Theft Auto?

• 12:06Nilay Patel?

  I see what you're saying.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Like, a good, actual game that people actually play that accepts weird

• 12:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  proprietary Samsung 3D scanning product.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  I'm so into it.

• 12:17Speaker 04

  There's a bunch of other stuff we could talk about. Like, it's got the, the beamforming for the Zoom mic, which is cool. The thing that I keep coming back to, though, is it's just nice.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  It's 950, the Plus, it starts at 1100, and then it's 200 bucks more, or 100 bucks more to get the 512 storage. But the OnePlus 7 Pro costs $450 less or something, $350 less, depending on which model you're looking at. And it has, in theory, like comparable screen, perhaps even better to some people if they really care about refresh rate. Cameras are like, close. It's like, it's really close in like every category, but it's just not as nice of an object. It's like, one of the things you're paying for when you get this thing is like, I'm gonna take notes, and now it'll do OCR, and I'm gonna, the dream of using the stylus. But you're also just buying like a really nice phone.

• 13:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  How's they, uh, that Infinity O situation? Like, looking good?

• 13:13Speaker 04

  It's just a little bit smaller than, uh, it is on the, uh, S10.

• 13:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  Uh, and you know, it's a hole in the middle of your screen. They centered it instead of putting it off to the side. I, I, I'm done having angst and feelings about bezels and, uh, notches and stuff.

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 04

  Super done. It's, it's amazing that there's literally no bezel on this. Like, you can, you could see it. It's there, but like, it is miniscule. Um, and that's why they can have these giant screens. So like, again, like the regular Note 10 is 6.3 inches, but it's more square-ish than most phones because it's a Note. And it, since it goes edge to edge and there's virtually no bezel, it could, it feel, does not feel like a 6.3 inch phone used to feel. It feels like a much smaller phone.

• 13:53Nilay Patel?

  And so you, that's the one you're really into?

• 13:55Speaker 04

  I, I'm trading my S10 in for it.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  I'm sad about the headphone jack. We should talk about that for a minute.

• 14:00Nilay Patel?

  That's where I was going.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Uh, but Samsung, uh, is offering a $600 rebate for the S10, which is like, pretty good. So.

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  It's like, still a pretty new phone.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  It's still a pretty new phone, but yeah. And then they're giving you 150 bucks to like, a store credit to buy like, cases.

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Which I didn't.

• 14:17Nilay Patel?

  It's all, it's pure margin. That's how you know, like, Samsung cases and wireless chargers. Or like, cost four cents to make and they sell them for $70. Like, yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Speaking of dongles, uh, the USB-C headphone dongle, not in the box. $9.99, separate.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  I think is actually technically a crime.

• 14:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, so I wanna, um, I will.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  It comes with headphones.

• 14:37Nilay Patel?

  I would like to say that I was extremely wrong about something. And I kind of disappointed wrong about something. So we, I think last week, week four, we were talking, they're 10 coming out. I said they're gonna take out the headphone jack. We're just minutes away from proprietary Bixby buds. Right? Cause that's, that's the thing that you do. You take out the headphone jack and you're like, but you still need to listen to stuff. Have you tried our, our $120 headphones? Right?

• 15:00Speaker 04

  You know that, but I was gonna go on a rant about Galaxy buds and have Bixby integration, but I let it go.

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  Because they didn't mention Bixby once.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:10Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, Samsung, this is your moment. Right? We took out the headphone jack. We know you're sad. Have you thought about Galaxy buds? They've got Bixby integration. Bixby is, nope. Bixby is, there's not the Bixby button anymore. It's integrated into the power button.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  Which is amazing. Like, how far are you demoted? The button that activates you is also the button that turns the phone off.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Well, Siri's on the sleep-wake button.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, yeah.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay.

• 15:40Nilay Patel?

  Siri is also just like constantly activating out of the blue all the time.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then it gets recorded and listened to by contractors. We'll get to that later.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Do you guys think Cortana and Bixby hang out?

• 15:50Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  No.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  I think Cortana, like they're doing that, the Alexa thing. Bixby has just been alone this whole time. And now Samsung, when it's launching the phone that literally has all the features in the Samsung way it does.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:04Nilay Patel?

  Like every, Samsung is the only company that still does this, as far as I can tell. Every little feature has like a wacky brand name.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  Right? They're like, wave force limiter. And it's like, that's the volume button. Like, I don't, that's all that is, right? The volume button? Just a flurry of these features and names and you can wave the pen around, like, and Bixby nowhere. I think that's a sign. Do I feel like a sign to you?

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Well, but also if you hold the button down, it's Bixby and it's not Google Assistant and apparently you can't change it.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you can't.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  So that's a sign, whatever that means.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can, you can, you can set the long press to Bixby and then you can set the double press to camera or like swap them, I think. Uh, but you can't set up any of those presses to Google Assistant. If they had, if they had just natively let you choose Google Assistant, that would be a huge sign, but they're not quite there.

• 16:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  I think they should probably go there, but they're not quite there.

• 17:02Nilay Patel?

  Can I say this? The first ever Bixby capsule of value was released recently.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Oh my god. This is your time. You made the promise.

• 17:08Nilay Patel?

  I did. So I, I, I said, if anybody makes a Bixby, they're called capsules for some ridiculous reason. There's the skills, it's the app, the Bixby or whatever, that shows you a robot or a butler, dog, a dog butler with shoes.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  The dog with shoes.

• 17:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, uh, that I would mention your name for a month as like the, the catch, the word that would say at the end of the show. And it is, it has happened. You can go, it's not called Bixby because they probably wouldn't have allowed that, but it's called Dog Butler.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  It's incredible.

• 17:39Nilay Patel?

  By, uh, Kessni and, uh, you, in order to like get the skill to work, you know how like Amazon will like guess that you're trying to talk to Philips or whatever? Google does the same thing. Bixby is still the place where you have to specifically invoke the capsule.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  And then you have to give the capsule a command. You can't just like run a thing. You have to invoke the thing and then tell the thing what to do.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Wait, can you explain invoke the capsule like?

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  I think you should.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  The invoke capsule.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  So, yeah, it's right here.

• 18:08Nilay Patel?

  So you do.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  You have to like say like.

• 18:11Nilay Patel?

  Just do it. Everyone will understand what you're trying to say as soon as you do it.

• 18:15Speaker 04

  In Dog Butler, show me a dog butler.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  And I'm looking at a picture of a dog butler.

• 18:23Nilay Patel?

  It's really good.

• 18:23Speaker 04

  And it says, what a good boy.

• 18:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, I just want everyone to know that for the past two days, Dieter's been wandering in the office saying, Dog Butler, show me Dog Butler.

• 18:33Nilay Patel?

  And like, it's not that he won't explain to you what's happening. It's just that it keeps happening.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:37Nilay Patel?

  It's great. It's the one true great use of Bixby. If you have a Samsung phone with Bixby.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:43Nilay Patel?

  And you haven't explored the capsule store, please, please make this the most popular capsule.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  If you can find the Bixby capsule store without Googling it, you deserve a lot of money. It is impossible. It's so confusing.

• 18:57Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I think it'd be great if the Vergecast audience, the people with Samsung phones, made Dog Butler by far the most popular, highest rated.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  Bixby capsule.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  I think that's a power that we have.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:08Nilay Patel?

  Pull over in your car.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:10Nilay Patel?

  Get your Samsung phone out.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:12Nilay Patel?

  Figure out where the capsule store is. Make this happen for us.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Last thing about Bixby.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  We had to publish a story today whose headline was basically, yeah, Samsung Hasn't Canceled The Bixby Home.

• 19:24Nilay Patel?

  Now, actually, I have it in front of me. Samsung, I read this headline, it's for a crack up. Samsung Confirms Its Long-Delayed Galaxy Home Smart Speaker Is Still In The Works. What a confirmation.

• 19:36Nilay Patel?

  What an amazing confirmation. Yes, we have not given up on our barbecue grill of a smart speaker.

• 19:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  Uh, uh, I wasn't going to mention this, but Altice, which is a cable company, has announced a smart speaker in the time that Samsung has announced the Galaxy Home to now.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  It's a $500 smart speaker with Alexa integration that can control your cable box. If that thing beats the Galaxy Home to market, the, the cable company, then there's a real problem.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  All right. So there's this picture that I saw that I think speaks volumes about what's going on with Android and Windows and Samsung and Microsoft.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm not sure where you're going with this, but I'm, I'm, I'm staying with you.

• 20:13Nilay Patel?

  So Samsung had like a billion partners on stage. Under Armour is doing a watch. Microsoft is doing a, LinkedIn is preloaded on the Note 10. All right. That's what you want. The Note 10's for business.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  Discord's on the Note 10.

• 20:27Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  No, it's all of Microsoft is loaded on the Note 10. You've got Outlook pre-installed, you got LinkedIn, you got the your phone thing compatibility with Windows 10 built into the quick settings.

• 20:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so that's what I'm getting at. So there's a photo where they're showing this off. The photo is someone holding a Note 10 with the Messages app open. And then someone with a Windows, that certain person has a Windows laptop in front of them. It's got your phone and it's showing them the messages in that app.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:52Nilay Patel?

  The reason you make that photo and put it out in the world as a press image is to be like, this can do the thing iMessage can do.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  Which is like a thing people love, right? iMessage syncs to your computer, it syncs to your phone. Okay, now with your phone, we've brought them together. I think Microsoft's game is, well, we can't go partner with Google directly. But Samsung makes the most phones.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  Samsung will sign literally any deal. Let's buddy up with Samsung. We'll make, we'll make it so that if you have a Windows laptop, the thing that you want is a Samsung phone.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  And that will be full of Microsoft services.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:28Nilay Patel?

  That's, it seems like that is.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  Samsung is Microsoft's phone.

• 21:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  That's what they're going for. They, they, Windows phone failed.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  So now they're going for Samsung Windows.

• 21:37Nilay Patel?

  And we're gonna, we're gonna preload a bunch of stuff on Samsung.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  I will tell you, Bill Gates was on the show, Bill Gates has a Samsung phone. Is that, is that, is that what you see? Was that kind of the vibe?

• 21:45Speaker 04

  That's completely reasonable to me. The, the thing that I thought of when I saw all these partnerships is, the holiday season is coming. Samsung traditionally has a huge marketing budget. No one's buying phones as fast as, often as it used to. Phones are more expensive. Samsung needs every ounce of like marketing support that it can get. Promotional support that it can get. And so hugging Microsoft in real close, uh, like, will convince Microsoft that it should promote Samsung. Uh, and it's good for both of them to sell some stuff. I think you're right that it makes a lot more sense that, uh, Microsoft wants to push people to Android. Cause the thing about Android is, it's open and you could do shit to it.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  And sometimes that's a problem, but it means that Microsoft can get its hooks in in a way it never will be able to on the iPhone. And so it's better for Microsoft to have Android users than it is to have iPhone users.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, absolutely. And, and if they ever do a Surface phone, right? They've got like a lot of experience with this integration.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:44Nilay Patel?

  And then poor Samsung, once again, will be like, but we'll do Tizen.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  Like it's ever the ever moving threat of Apple Samsung shipping that ties.

• 22:52Nilay Patel?

  Do you think a Surface Fold is really probable? Uh. Really far fetched to me.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  It is a thing that Tom talks about a lot. Like, we hear about it a lot. Like, there's a, I think, when I've asked like Panos about it, he's always like, he does that, Panos is like a lot of energy. So he like says no with like a lot of energy. But he's like, you know, we gotta like, we gotta like, look at stuff.

• 23:17Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 23:19Speaker 04

  Right. Like, that's like, I, that's sort of like the vibe is like, it's always on the back burner. Someone at Microsoft is always like, what about a Surface Phone?

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, every, every other month, somebody delivers a clay prototype to his desk.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  Just, yeah, he's like, this took you a month? It's just a rectangle. It's like, what would a clay prototype?

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  USB C, we're not ready for USB C.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  I will tell you that Microsoft, better than any other company, at making hinges.

• 23:46Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 23:47Speaker 04

  Ah. You know who's not so good at making hinges is Samsung.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 23:51Speaker 04

  Do they talk about the fold at all in this? No, they, they pre-announced that it was, that they were actually gonna ship it ahead of this so it wouldn't come up at the event.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  Ah.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:59Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, they did announce some other stuff. There's a Galaxy Book S, which has a Qualcomm chip in it?

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's the Qualcomm 8CX, which is the most promising of the ARM chips for Windows devices. Um, and Qualcomm, Qualcomm Windows, an ARM Windows device, you know, you're supposed to get 23 hours of video playback and, you know, LTE is built in and that's not complicated and like, stuff, you know? But you know it'll be like, pokey. Um, Heim tried it. Uh, he said that it like, felt okay.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  Uh, we gotta review it, of course. It actually doesn't look so much like a, it's like a hybrid between like a Surface Book and a MacBook. It's like a weird middle zone between those in terms of it's like, industrial feel and look.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 24:43Speaker 04

  I'm excited to see it. I think it's a thousand bucks, which is pretty expensive for it to take a risk on the ARM processor being enough for you.

• 24:50Nilay Patel?

  Where's the webcam located?

• 24:52Speaker 04

  Uh, that I, I don't know. It's, it's on the top. It's on the top. I'm looking at it.

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I took a, I took a Zoom call on an XPS 15 today with a, with a nose cam and I was like, literally embarrassed the whole time.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  Like, I apologized to the other person.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:04Nilay Patel?

  Okay. That's like, that's my new check-in.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  The new XPS 13 has the tiny little cam at the top that puts Apple's webcam to shame because it's like a tenth of the size and three times the quality. Yeah.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  Is there gonna be a Chrome? Obviously, it's hoping too much for one of these mainstream companies to come out with a Linux 8CX laptop. But when are we gonna get a Chromebook 8CX?

• 25:26Speaker 04

  I have no idea. I actually don't know if that's viable, if they are even bothering to try.

• 25:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh, really? Because they're so dependent on Intel for their high-end stuff.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  You can get a bunch of, you can get a bunch of ARM-based Chromebooks. They're still out there, but like, most of them are like media tech.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  Not the premium.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know if the ATX is specifically tuned for Windows. Like, we're gonna get a bunch of email telling me I'm dumb and wrong, so just send it in. Yeah. I don't know the answer.

• 25:52Nilay Patel?

  You might remember that earlier in the show, Dieter said Android was slow. So go ahead and get all those ideas out at Dieter. That would be great.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  I'm gonna make the Android people even angrier later.

• 26:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, we should get into it. So that's the Note 10. You're gonna have a review, presumably. It's gonna happen. I'm excited about the small one, too. I just, you know, I like a compact big phone. It's a thing.

• 26:12Speaker 04

  No, you don't. You only like surfboards.

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I've got the big phone.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay.

• 26:16Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I like a big screen. I mean, phones are just getting bigger. That's what's happening. The dream of the small phone is over. Okay. But there's like other Android controversy in the world.

• 26:27Speaker 04

  So, first thing-

• 26:28Nilay Patel?

  By the way, you are driving.

• 26:31Nilay Patel?

  That's your fault.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay, so the last public, you know, developer beta for Android Q came out, beta 6. And like they have for the past several betas, Google tweaked the way that the back gesture works. Or like, added some stuff. And it was super confusing, and no one knew what it meant. Like, people that run Android sites full-time for their job didn't know what the heck Google was doing. So here's like the fundamental problem. There's this app drawer on the left, and the back gesture means that the app drawer thing doesn't work, because you can't slide it in. And Google had two choices at this moment. Choice number one, well, they had three choices.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Choice number one, all right, figure out another way for the back gesture. Save the app drawer. Just only do it on the right hand side or something. Uh, choice number two. Yeah, sorry, the, the app drawer, you can't slide in for the app drawer anymore. That's like, that's just the way it goes. Tap the hamburger button. Turns out that, uh, that's what 90, 96%. It was, I think it was like three to 7% of people have ever used that slide to like open. Yeah, cause it's not like particularly discoverable. Right, so like they, they could have just said, yep, sorry. And we all would have went, ah, okay, right? But instead what they did is like, what if we, what if we give you some, we hear you, we're gonna fix it. We'll figure it out. And they're trying to figure out a way to have swiping in from the left side of the screen do two completely different things.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  And their solution is you like, hold your finger down and then the, the drawer kind of peaks out. And then, then you can slide in and it'll, they'll slide the drawer in, right? And this is all a problem because everybody that made an Android app, made an Android app with a drawer. Because Matias Duarte said, that's the way to make Android apps. You tell Matias this and he's, he retcons it and says, no, no, no, I just said that you should like blah, blah, blah, blah. And do your own thing and everyone was too. Just said, do your own thing. No have designer anywhere has ever said, do your own thing. It was like complicated. Okay.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  So this is like a, to get this drawer, which I will be honest, I'm one of that like 93 ish percent of people who did not know how to open drawers before now.

• 28:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Is, is it like a hesitant swipe?

• 28:42Speaker 04

  No, it's that you hold your finger down and then the drawer kind of peaks out and then you can slide it in.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  So it's a press then swipe?

• 28:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a long press then swipe. Yeah, totally intuitive. Yeah, who doesn't? I mean, no one's ever not discovered a long press action. So here's the, here's the, the problem that actually compounds all of this is Google is introducing a setting to change the sensitivity of the back gesture. And what the hell does that even mean? It means how far in, how many, you know, pixels in from the edge of the screen will it detect your finger swiping? And I'm like, oh, you did that because your people are mad about the thing and blah, blah, blah. And that's what everybody assumed and they're like, no, that back gesture thing is there because there's so. So many different kinds of Android phones. A lot of them just aren't good at detecting the edge touches at the edge of the screen. They all have different like, you know, sensitivities there.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  And so sometimes you're gonna need to crank it up. And I said, well, why don't you, why are you giving the user a setting? You shouldn't do that. You should just figure out what the sensitivity is in the phone ahead of time and set it to that. And they're like, yeah, except have you ever seen anybody with a phone? They put cases on them.

• 29:48Nilay Patel?

  Uh.

• 29:48Speaker 04

  And so if you're gonna make the entire side of the screen, like the core navigation feature of the phone, which by the way, the back button is the core navigation feature of Android.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  People hit the back button 50% more than they hit the home button.

• 30:02Nilay Patel?

  That's nuts.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  Because the back button has never been beloved. It was always like.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  I've always loved it.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Except that it's broken because it takes you out of the app instead of just going up in the hierarchy. But still.

• 30:14Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  I deeply love it.

• 30:16Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  Uh, so yeah, so they, they need to put that little sensitivity thing on in case you put a big ass case on it. And then you can't like hit the edge just right.

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  I, that, that is the most Android thing I've ever heard.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  Can I? In all of the best and worst ways, like there's a part of me that loves it. Because only Google and only Android comes up with this, that solution.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 30:36Nilay Patel?

  And there's a part of me that's like, this is, this is, this is the whole problem with Android.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  In a weird way, Android is more consistent than the iPhone when it comes to swiping in from the left side of the screen, even with that weird peak thing, which, which they should get rid of. Because on an iPhone, sometimes swiping in goes back and sometimes it opens up a drawer. You never know.

• 30:55Nilay Patel?

  When does it open up a drawer?

• 30:57Speaker 04

  Slack or a bunch of apps that have drawers, Gmail, like a bunch of apps. If you swipe in from the left, sometimes you go up in the hierarchy and sometimes you open up a drawer over on the left hand side. You never know. And Google just, it, it swiping in goes back, the end.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so on Twitter, you get it?

• 31:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, see, whole bunch of apps.

• 31:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh no, this is like all over the place.

• 31:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is what I'm saying.

• 31:15Nilay Patel?

  Even in the Twitter app, it's like, alright.

• 31:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, you never really know.

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  No, I know, I figured it out.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm not gonna tell you.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  It's a secret.

• 31:24Nilay Patel?

  No, it goes back in the hierarchy until you get to home and then it opens the drawer.

• 31:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 31:29Nilay Patel?

  Which is, sure.

• 31:30Speaker 04

  It does something different depending on the context, which is exactly what you want in a user design, user interface design.

• 31:36Nilay Patel?

  Especially for an undiscoverable gesture.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Also, Dieter, I haven't seen as much about this. I just got the beta on my phone just before the Vergecast, so I'm now an expert. The corners, if you swipe back on the bottom left or bottom right corner, if you swipe back, that's not a back, that's Google Assistant.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  The Google Assistant is a diagonal swipe in from either of the bottom corners. That is correct. And they are constantly changing the animation to try and figure out how to make it visible and understandable and not annoying as hell.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel like I'm being tricked.

• 32:12Speaker 04

  And, little tidbit there, I think they can change it without having to push an entire Android update. Like, they could be like, no one's using this, let's tweak a setting on the server, and it'll like...

• 32:22Speaker 03

  So they're like A/B testing?

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Because I've seen it changed through the betas without the betas updating.

• 32:25Nilay Patel?

  Wow. All right. When is Q coming out for real?

• 32:30Speaker 04

  A few weeks, quote unquote.

• 32:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wow.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this is it. This is like, this is what we're getting. And everyone's very mad, and I think they're very mad because Google, like, negotiated with terrorists. They tried to, like, give everybody what they wanted, and they should have just said no. This is how it is now.

• 32:48Nilay Patel?

  We're taking over and we're doing it. But that's like the least Google way to do it.

• 32:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  The most Google way to do it is like, now we made a setting that changes the number of pixels that are active for a back gesture.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  But that doesn't even affect the thing that people are unhappy about.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But that's why it's the most Google thing. It's like, all of you are mad about Google Reader going away, but here's a number of options in YouTube. It's like, I don't...

• 33:10Speaker 04

  None of that is the same. Yeah. Also, 9 to 5 Mac got a huge pixel scoop. They've got like, a whole bunch of specs, and most of which are like, basically what you would expect them to be. The two interesting things are, it sounds like they're gonna go for a 90 Hz refresh rate screen, so it'll be way smoother, and there is a quote unquote DSLR-like attachment for the cameras on the back.

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 33:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Like a lens?

• 33:36Speaker 04

  It's hard to say.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  DSLR like is like lenses.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Also, the guy in charge of Pixel, Mario Carras, just got like ascended up like a deity to Sundar's office. And Rick Osterloh is taking over, taking charge of Pixel directly for the time being.

• 33:53Nilay Patel?

  Huh.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:54Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  Right before, like weeks before the Pixel 4 is gonna launch.

• 33:58Nilay Patel?

  Like Sundar's like, look, Rick, you've been tweeting about it nonstop for weeks. You might as well just like run it. Like, what are we doing here?

• 34:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, we gotta take a break. Julia Alexander is gonna join us, talk about the streaming wars. We'll be right back.

• 34:15Speaker 05

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• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  Julia Alexander is here. Welcome, Julia. Thank you. I'd like to begin this discussion.

• 35:21Speaker 04

  Why is your voice so deep?

• 35:22Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 35:26Nilay Patel?

  I was trying to do like a, "The stream wars have begun."

• 35:28Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:29Nilay Patel?

  "War has never changed."

• 35:32Speaker 07

  It's like your Chancellor Palpatine voice.

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Speaker 07

  To lean into.

• 35:35Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't know what, all right, Julia.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  It just hit me that Disney owns the IP for Palpatine.

• 35:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  Okay. I knew that, like, in my, if you would ask me, I would have told you that was true, but it wasn't emotionally real until just now.

• 35:48Nilay Patel?

  I, I'm, you know, like, we, we do a lot of disclosures on this show, and I feel very strongly that I should just start, like, pre-disclosing a Disney disclosure, like, "Disclosure, Disney will soon own us." As you, as you, as you know, soon there will be one company, Disney, we'd like to welcome our new overlords. Disclosure, we will be good subjects. Anyway, it was Disney earnings this week.

• 36:11Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 36:11Nilay Patel?

  Julie, you covered the hell out of them. I think it is wild that Disney has gone from a company whose earnings, like The Verge, did not really pay attention to, to now, like, "We gotta be on it."

• 36:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  And you wrote, like, three or four pieces about them, because they implicate so much of what's going on in the streaming wars and

• 36:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  and consumer stuff, so give us the rundown.

• 36:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, so there's so much to talk about with Disney, but there's two stories, right? So there's the story that Disney missed their earnings guess, like, that they thought they were gonna do way better than they did, and they blamed Fox for that. Specifically, they blamed Dark Phoenix, which was an X-Men movie, which CEO Bob Iger was like, "It just didn't do what we thought it was gonna do."

• 36:52Speaker 07

  Which, like, everyone could have told them that. But they basically said, you know, "We bought this company, and this was our first quarter where we've really owned them, and so what we're seeing is kind of what we assumed was gonna happen, because it costs so much, and they weren't producing it as much as we thought they were gonna do." That's one story. That's like the financial story. But on the other side of it, you've got the really, the more interesting one, which is that Disney crossed $8 billion at the box office already this year, which is insane, based off of, like, six movies. And Disney is ramping up entirely stock to do streaming, and just streaming. Like, that is their number one focus.

• 37:30Nilay Patel?

  Can you put the $8 billion box office in context? Because, like, we have, like, tech Earnings and like Apple just sneezes and eight billion dollars in cash.

• 37:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 37:38Nilay Patel?

  So like, how big a deal is it for eight billion in the box office?

• 37:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, it's huge because it's not even, we're eight months in, not even eight months into the year. They did seven billion last year total.

• 37:49Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 37:49Speaker 07

  And so they've done April in already, and they still have two major movies, which is Frozen two and Star Wars, The Rise of Skywalker come out, which will both cross a billion. Um, so they're going to make more than 10 billion dollars this year, which is the biggest record year, biggest year on record for any studio in the history of cinema.

• 38:06Nilay Patel?

  But I just, it's not fair.

• 38:10Nilay Patel?

  Because they bought all the other studios.

• 38:12Speaker 07

  They bought, yeah.

• 38:13Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I don't know, if Ford and, and GM like merged and then they bought Nissan and they're like, we sold more cars than anyone. It's like, you didn't.

• 38:22Nilay Patel?

  It's just like inherently a bad comparison.

• 38:25Speaker 07

  Well, the interesting thing is if you look back far enough, what they did with movies, they're doing with streaming, which is extremely smart, right? So when you look back, Disney realized crap, we're not making any good, we're not making movies people want to see. Uh, there was a period after the nineties, um, up until about two thousand and six, two thousand and seven, when Disney was making a lot of garbage. So.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  What was the, the bear movie?

• 38:48Nilay Patel?

  The Country Bears. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:50Speaker 07

  I don't even remember. See, I don't even remember that.

• 38:52Nilay Patel?

  It fell off the radar.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I remember Country Bears.

• 38:54Speaker 07

  But then, um, Bob Iger comes in as CEO and he decides to do a bunch of things. He buys a bunch of companies where he thinks he can make tiny networks out of. So he buys Lucasfilm, he buys Marvel, he buys Pixar, um, and he buys someone else. I can't remember. Oh, Fox.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  Fox.

• 39:11Speaker 07

  Fox. And his whole thing is like, we can make networks that create franchises that will then power us through. So what we've seen happen is Marvel Studios become one of the biggest, um, properties in the world, uh, in terms of IP. Then you've got the same thing with Pixar and their sequels. Um, and then Disney was just like, screw it. Let's just make live action remakes of all of our ninety movie. All of our popular nineties movies, which have all crossed like a billion dollars to the box office. So what Disney is doing now with streaming is the exact same thing. They're just, they bought Fox. So that they could have a huge back catalog to propel Disney Plus and Hulu. And then they bundled that with ESPN Plus and now suddenly they have all these little micro networks that they can sell at a very good price for. Uh, and.

• 39:55Speaker 07

  Basically beat out the competition.

• 39:57Nilay Patel?

  So that was the other big kind of announcement.

• 39:59Speaker 07

  Right.

• 39:59Nilay Patel?

  Was that you can get Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus for $12.99 a month.

• 40:05Speaker 07

  Right, and so it's Hulu's ad-supported version, so it's not ad-free.

• 40:10Nilay Patel?

  The number one thing people asked me on Twitter was, "Why can't I pay $20 a month and not have ads?"

• 40:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, I also got, "Can I pay $12 and just get Hulu without ads and Disney Plus and no ESPN Plus?"

• 40:21Speaker 04

  Because ESPN Plus, to be clear, doesn't have SportsCenter.

• 40:24Speaker 07

  No.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  So it might as well be the Ocho.

• 40:27Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 40:27Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 40:28Speaker 07

  There's not a lot of, like, live major league sports.

• 40:30Nilay Patel?

  But Disney genetically has to prop up ESPN. Like, they don't, for so long, every, the thing that Disney made money on was, like, forcing you to have ESPN.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  They can't not. Like, they don't know how.

• 40:42Speaker 07

  The other thing about ESPN is, like, once they go international, which is the whole game plan, they can just start working with international sports teams to sell that to international markets, or towards leagues, and that's a huge, like, market, uh, growth market for them.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  So, wait, just, just to be clear, about, the answers to those, both of those questions is no, correct?

• 41:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, so no.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  You can't get what you want.

• 41:06Speaker 07

  At least not right now. I, uh, my guess is that there eventually will be different options, because streaming is gonna become cable, uh, which means, uh, you're gonna have tiers that you can subscribe to and choose.

• 41:15Nilay Patel?

  Also, there's just nothing smarter than putting out the thing, having everyone ask for something slightly different, and then delivering slightly different.

• 41:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:22Nilay Patel?

  That's like a great place to be.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  We've been listening to you carefully.

• 41:27Speaker 07

  Well, exactly. I mean, I said this on Twitter, like, right now, it's super, super smart, because they have three revenue options for, like, one product, which is insane. Like, no matter what you wanna go in on, they're going to make revenue off of it. Um, so it works out to their benefit really well right now.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  Could you go back and connect the dot on Disney buying all the other studios, uh, for streaming?

• 41:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  And it's not just about the back catalog, right? It's, it's about, they, they wanna be able to make new shows based on that old IP, because they know they'll be hits, right?

• 41:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, so there's two, so in order for a streaming network to work, a streaming service, there's a formula, right? So you have to have tent pole features, which bring people in, but they need snackable content, which snackable content is Friends, it's the, it's The Office, it's like, "I'm gonna pay $8 a month," or whatever Netflix is now, $12 a month, "I'm gonna pay $12 a month..." Because I want to watch Stranger Things, but then I'm going to keep paying because I just want to fall asleep to Futurama or The Office. Disney has that better than anyone else going forward. Maybe, maybe HBO Max from Warner Media, which I know you, I know you like.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  I can't, I can't.

• 42:32Speaker 07

  But in terms of IP, Disney is well situated. So Disney goes, okay, come to our streaming service and you're going to get a new Star Wars show, a new Captain America show, kind of. You're gonna, you're gonna get, you're gonna get this, plus you're gonna get 7,000 hours of all of our old TV shows and all of our old movies, almost all of our old movies. That's something that Netflix can't offer. Netflix is losing all of their important licensed content. So they're going, come for Stranger Things and stay for...

• 43:05Speaker 03

  Stranger Things.

• 43:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, stay for Stranger Things. Which is essentially why Netflix is kind of facing this moment of like, you know, collar pulling, like, ah geez, we are now in a corner.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  I just remembered, Adam Sandler's murder mystery.

• 43:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:20Speaker 07

  Which did very well for Netflix, according to Netflix.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  That movie, which is like, not good, was exactly perfect for having my in-laws over. I was like, you know what we're gonna do? Extremely safe Adam Sandler rom-com. Did it end up being extremely safe? Yeah. I mean, it is exactly the thing that you think it is. Like, are there pratfalls? There are pratfalls.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  I've had this, this thinking lately that Netflix seems to be heavily investing in stuff that's sort of like store brand content. Like, around here, my local grocery store has Flavortite. And Flavortite peanut butter is almost exactly like Jif peanut butter, but it isn't Jif peanut butter, and it's $2 cheaper.

• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  No, so that, Julie's been writing about this for a long time. Like, Netflix just makes a bunch of stuff, right? And like, that's the snackable stuff. Like, the algorithm is like, you sort of like, shows, you like HGTV, like, here's some Australian HGTV nonsense that we license, and like, maybe you'll just like, watch it for a while.

• 44:19Speaker 07

  Well, and that's the issue that, that's the biggest issue right now that people are facing. So there is the beginnings of a backlash on, that we're seeing on Twitter and Instagram of all these creators, all these showrunners, being like, Netflix screwed us over. And they're continuously screwing us over. And it's because the algorithm. So, there's a show called Tuca and Bertie, which is like, a great, a great show, similar to BoJack Horseman.

• 44:44Speaker 07

  It was recommended to like no one. It wasn't on the front, it was never on the homepage. It wasn't recommended to anyone. I'm someone who watches BoJack religiously because it's a sad show. That's my friend. And it was not recommended to me and like I'm the ideal target for it. So when the show got canceled after one season and Netflix basically said, the way Netflix weighs whether to renew something is whether or not you can bring in new subscribers or retain subscribers who are likely to cancel. Like those are two major metrics. When it couldn't do that, the showrunner, Lisa Hanawalt, went on Twitter and basically said, we can't beat the algorithm. And then all these other showrunners were like, yep, this is an issue we bring up with Netflix all the time. We don't know how your platform works.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  No matter what you do, there's always an opaque algorithm that makes you sad.

• 45:30Speaker 07

  Well, and that's the thing-

• 45:31Speaker 04

  That's like the story of the internet.

• 45:33Speaker 07

  Well, it's like I tweeted about it. I was like, I've been covering YouTube for so long that for people to see showrunners who once had to just deal with Nielsen ratings and having a bad time slot on like Friday at 8:00 PM. Now they're doing, they have the exact same complaints that YouTube creators have, which is like, we don't know how to do this and we're gonna have to start creating shows, forgetting about content, actually figuring out how to game an algorithm that we don't understand.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:57Speaker 07

  Which is like fascinating.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  So I knew that this like, oh no, there was another show that they canceled after like two years.

• 46:03Speaker 07

  The OA.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  Well, I was getting to that.

• 46:04Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Because I had heard the OA was good and I knew that there was like this ambient fear that Netflix would cancel shows and I needed something to watch when I came to New York this week and I needed something I could download. So I'm like, oh, you know, people like the OA. There's somebody who, I won't say who in case anybody loves it, who told me that it was a huge mistake and it was a terrible show, but whatever. And so I watched it for the first time. I like went through three episodes and then the very next day canceled. And now what do I do? Because I'm like into the show. You watch the rest of it. I know it ends after two seasons and they don't finish the narrative. What do I do?

• 46:35Speaker 07

  Well, the other thing about, so the Netflix cancellation, right? So the whole, there was a report that was like Netflix canceled shows after two seasons if they don't do what they needed to do. And a big part of that, which I'm writing about right now, is that Netflix doesn't have a big thing that cable relies on a lot, which is one, ads, but two, syndication. And if they can't, they can't keep a show going for seven seasons, then hopefully TBS picks it up and they're like, cool, we'll just make money off Friends for the rest of our lives. Netflix doesn't have that. So Netflix, like HBO, really needs you to be invested in there. Like, they really need you to be turning in. And whereas HBO can look at, okay, well, this many people tuned in linearly, this many people tuned in on HBO now afterwards, this many people watch HBO Go.

• 47:17Speaker 07

  We can, we know there's an audience. Netflix is reliant on an algorithm to like, hopefully, maybe people saw it. But if they didn't, then we're not going to give it a chance to be discovered.

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  So I want to just back up to Disney for one second.

• 47:29Speaker 07

  Oh, right.

• 47:30Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's impossible to not talk about Netflix in this conference because it is the only product that exists.

• 47:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:36Nilay Patel?

  Like Disney Plus is this looming specter that's coming. I believe it is a five on the Go90 scale of Doom streaming services.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  Not like 50, but five.

• 47:46Nilay Patel?

  Five.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:47Nilay Patel?

  Like.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Going to succeed.

• 47:48Nilay Patel?

  It, yeah, the only reason it's a five is because it hasn't launched and thus by definition could fail.

• 47:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like they could light it up and they'd be like, oh my God, we forgot to write a user interface. Like, who knows what's going to happen between now and it launching, but it feels very much like it will succeed. Right? It's Disney. They've got the, they've got their library. They've got their commitment to never having a new idea.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:11Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like what are new characters? No, heavens no.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  Have you heard of The Lion King?

• 48:17Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  But like, that's very safe. Literally, I mean, Bob Iger seems to know what he's doing.

• 48:23Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  Which is like the most dangerous thing you can say to Julia. Like now, now two hours of Bob Iger definitely know. Like, but they're gonna win. Like that's the specter over the industry. Then there is all the stuff that's leaving Netflix, which you were talking about.

• 48:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:39Nilay Patel?

  Some stuff is going back to HBO Max. AT&T TV Now TV Now, please AT&T Max Go TV Plus 5G. Like that's happening over there.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  That's not a joke, by the way. That's the actual name of the service.

• 48:52Nilay Patel?

  That's what it is. A bunch of stuff is going to revert to Disney. Like right now Netflix is like really promoting a lot of Marvel movies, which is wild because they're all going away. It's like, get them while you can.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  Netflix just changed their movies tab. They just added it back to their like Apple TV app and they're like, oh, they finally added movies. Hooray. Now they only give you like three rows and then it's back to TV shows in the movies tab.

• 49:15Nilay Patel?

  That's hilarious.

• 49:17Nilay Patel?

  But again, you want to watch a Pixar movie on Netflix? Like now's your chance. It's never going to happen for you again. But none of it's here yet.

• 49:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. So like the wars, there's a term that we've used, like Neil has used a lot right now, is like the streaming wars. The wars don't really kick off for another two years because all the, and because of digital rights. Like, all the rights are still tied up in various things. So, for example, when Disney Plus launches, it will only have four Marvel movies. And then by the first year, it will have eight Marvel movies. There are currently 23 Marvel movies, but because of-

• 49:48Nilay Patel?

  Which is the best one?

• 49:49Speaker 07

  Iron Man 2.

• 49:53Speaker 07

  So, Iron Man 2's rights are tied up in, are so tied up with a company called Epix because of a deal made in 2010. And what that shows is that all these companies didn't realize streaming was going to be a thing. Netflix did, very early on. And now they're all scrambling to get their stuff back. So, that's why NBC paid a lot of money for The Office and will probably pay a lot of money for Seinfeld. Warner Media paid a lot of money for Friends. So, there's, there's all these things happening. So, streaming wars, we don't really know what's going to happen until the rights go back. And then when Warner Media can say, "We have the Harry Potter collection, we have Friends, we have all this stuff that we used to own." That's when we'll start seeing, like, will people want to pay $16 a month for HBO Max?

• 50:35Nilay Patel?

  So, what, what I'm confused about, what I'd love to, like, figure out, is Netflix, before it has lost all the content, before it is facing the competitors, is losing subscribers.

• 50:48Speaker 07

  In the United States.

• 50:49Nilay Patel?

  In the United States. And they're, like, focused on international expansion, which is crazy. Like, for a variety of reasons, like, you can only unlock so many more people.

• 50:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  Like, a good, I think, comparison of this is Apple, which every year, for years and years, like, every quarter's a record quarter. Why? Because the iPhone launched in, like, two more countries.

• 51:07Speaker 07

  Right.

• 51:08Nilay Patel?

  And then they, they literally ran out of countries. Like, now iPhone sales are plateaued down because there's nowhere else to go. They're like, Elon- And now they're launching a streaming service. I guess you gotta do that. It's like, I hope Elon gets to Mars soon because Apple's sales are flat. Like, that's where they're at with that cycle. That's the same path Netflix is on.

• 51:27Speaker 07

  And Disney. Disney is also betting huge. Iger said in the last earnings call that they want to scale extremely quick. He called like Disney Plus the most important product he's launched in his tenure at Disney. He's stepping down in 2021. And so that's a huge proclamation to make. Like, Disney's betting super on streaming and they're betting super hard on international. And they're also betting hard, everyone kind of forgets, Disney owns Hulu. So they're also betting really hard on making Hulu their HBO. They want FX to be HBO, FX wants to be HBO, and they're like, cool, that's what you guys will be. We're gonna have our own HBO that we are going to sell to people.

• 52:07Nilay Patel?

  What is having your own HBO? Because I would remind you that AT&T is aggressively diluting the idea of HBO right now.

• 52:13Speaker 07

  It's actually very funny. So there is an event that's going on right now called the Television Critics Association Conference, and John Lenggraf, who is the chief of FX, who is a brilliant man, does an annual State of the Union address. And he basically said, the issue facing streaming platforms is that none of it is curated. There's no identity to any of these streaming services, which is true. Disney comes the closest because they have recognizable IPs. So what they want to do with FX is basically say, we're gonna increase your staff, we're gonna increase your oversight, and then we're gonna increase your output. And the difference that I can see from AT&T HBO, based on what I'm reading, I don't actually, based on what I've read, AT&T wants to amp up production on HBO but doesn't want to give them the oversight. So which means you're gonna get a lot of garbage.

• 52:58Speaker 07

  Because it's like, oh no, we're just greenlighting things. Versus FX wants to take over what HBO has, and if they have the right staff, if they have, if they have the right people to amp up production and actually look over and make sure it's good, they could do that. And that makes Hulu very, very exciting for Disney.

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  So, why is Netflix losing subscribers in the United States now before they're even facing this competition, or they've lost the content?

• 53:22Speaker 07

  They don't, because they don't have anything. They have, so that when they spoke about, when they spoke about the loss of subscribers, they said that the big issue was, one, price increase. They had a price increase. And, two, they had no spectacular content. Like, they called that out. They were like, mm, we don't really, we don't have anything. Literally, they were like, "Next quarter will be great because we have stranger things." Uh, but they very explicitly were like, "Hmm, there was nothing super exciting." Which is 100% true, and that's the issue that Netflix is running into. That's why they've become a lot more somber. If you read a lot of like trade reports, they, the meetings they're having, people have gone from being like the arrogant kids, like arrogant Wall Street kids, to being like, "Oh, we, uh,

• 54:05Speaker 07

  we are now a cable network, and that means that we have to figure out our rising debt. We have to figure out how to bring in new shows that people are actually interested in, uh, which is why they're signing massive deals, right? That's why they just gave the Game of Thrones creators $200 million for a total exclusivity.

• 54:19Nilay Patel?

  I think that deal is gonna backfire spectacularly. I'm just getting to the point that like, they, they're not any good without the books.

• 54:24Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 54:25Nilay Patel?

  Proven again and again and again, like, yeah, okay.

• 54:29Speaker 07

  Um, so-

• 54:29Nilay Patel?

  You wonder why HBO let them go. Like, I saw a lot of tweets like, "Why would you let them go?" And it's like, "HBO watched the fucking show." That's what, that's what they were like, "Bye."

• 54:37Speaker 07

  It's super interesting because like Netflix, uh, is basically facing what Disney is about to face, which Disney has told investors, "2020 is gonna be bad. It's not gonna be a 2019, and you should be prepared for this because we don't have anything really, uh, and, and we don't have any major Marvel movies, we don't have any major really Disney movies." So it's like, but, the focus of that, I think I wrote this, was Disney wants you, you're gonna go to the movie theaters no matter what because it's Disney, but they would much rather you spend eight doll, uh, eight dollars a month, seven dollars a month at home. Like, they want to grow, they wanna grow, uh, to 12 million subscribers by December, which, to put that in context, is 20% of Netflix's current US market. Like, that's a, that's fast. That's like, we're going to scale very quickly and hopefully-

• 55:22Nilay Patel?

  I think they could totally do it.

• 55:23Speaker 07

  I think so too.

• 55:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, because they're gonna have at least their own Disney movies, right?

• 55:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, and they're also really, they've also changed a bunch of theatrical releases to make them exclusive Disney Plus releases. Fox is now making exclusive Disney Plus things. Um, they're rebooting a bunch of stuff for Disney Plus. So they, like, they've basically said streaming to us is just as important, uh, as film. I mean, Bob Iger's Prodigy is now overseeing streaming, like, it's like-

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  The wistful note there was, "I wish I was Bob Iger's Prodigy." Like, it's very clear what you're trying to say here. Like Bob Iger, do you need a new prodigy? The old one is busy. Like, give me a call.

• 56:02Speaker 07

  Um, but yeah, so it's, it's exciting, but it's interesting because we're about to see a drought. And then in two or three years, we're about to see more television than anyone has seen in a very long time.

• 56:12Nilay Patel?

  So, we only got you for a few more minutes. Where does HBO Max, plus Max, HBO, AT&T go?

• 56:18Speaker 07

  So Neil and I have this conversation. I think HBO Max is, well, you have a go 90 scale. I think it's at like a 10.

• 56:25Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 56:25Speaker 07

  Because I think what is gonna happen, all the HBO Now subscribers will get looped into HBO Max. Uh, so they start off pretty strong. But I think what HBO has going for it is that it, it is HBO, so they're bringing in people on that. But plus, they have the exclusive rights to a lot of CW series, which is a huge thing that Netflix lost. Cause the CW shows are some of the most watched shows on Netflix. Uh, so you have people tuning in for that. They also want to do family content. So you have people who are like, oh, I would like to watch HBO with my kids around and I would like to give them shows. There's two net, like, there's two things. But I think there's enough with HBO Max going into it on both the movie side and the TV side that people...

• 57:06Nilay Patel?

  What's on the movie side?

• 57:07Speaker 07

  Anything Warner Brothers.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  Ah, makes sense.

• 57:08Speaker 07

  Anything Warner Brothers. Uh, so hopefully...

• 57:11Nilay Patel?

  Right, cause it's Warner Media. Yeah.

• 57:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 57:13Nilay Patel?

  The, the ever-popular DCU will be available to you on HBO Max.

• 57:18Speaker 07

  This is where they're releasing the Snyder Cut.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna say.

• 57:20Speaker 07

  It's coming out. This is how they get people on board.

• 57:23Nilay Patel?

  If you sign up for HBO Max, Zack Snyder will personally come to your house and depress you. Well, he's got nothing else to do.

• 57:28Speaker 07

  He'll message you on Vero and tell you about how great he's doing.

• 57:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, he'll message you on like AT&T's proprietary, not encrypted chat app that's pre-installed on your phone.

• 57:38Speaker 07

  I don't think it's going to be as successful as Netflix or successful as Disney. Uh, it's also not going international, but I think it will be way better than NBC Unis streaming service, which their whole, their whole strategy is we have the office, which is a bad strategy.

• 57:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and like they, it's, it's, if you don't have cable, it's like definitely still worse.

• 57:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's, it's not great.

• 58:00Nilay Patel?

  I got a disclosure. Comcast is an investor in Vox Media. Which owns The Verge. Sooner or later, we'll just be owned by Disney. We welcome our insect overlords.

• 58:10Speaker 04

  It's hard to imagine people getting bored of watching amazing TV. But do you think there will be a tail off in people watching okay television?

• 58:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, so there's a really great quote by John Landgraf, which is that there's never been more television than there is right now. And all that means is that great TV is being overlooked and more mediocre TV is being produced. And his whole thing is like, there are, the last count is 530 scripted series, so, right now. And that doesn't account for reality. And so it's interesting to think about, like, the amount, it doesn't account for Quibi, which...

• 58:45Speaker 07

  My...

• 58:46Speaker 04

  It's a gross oversight.

• 58:47Speaker 07

  ...passion project that I love watching, uh, but I think people will, they'll, they'll watch.

• 58:53Nilay Patel?

  Sorry. You didn't even have, like, the self-respect to finish the thought. You're like, Quibi, my passion project, I...

• 59:02Speaker 07

  I, I lost it.

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm pretty sure Julia has adopted the position that Quibi will be successful just to troll me.

• 59:09Speaker 07

  Jeffrey Katzenberg is a very interesting man.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  Eli, Quibi is the Iron Man 2 of streaming services.

• 59:16Nilay Patel?

  Quibi remains at 85 on the Good 90 Scale of streaming services.

• 59:18Speaker 07

  Uh, but it's also interesting to think about the fact that both Disney and Netflix didn't call out each other on recent calls. They didn't call out HBO Max. Uh, they called out YouTube. They said, "We want YouTube. That's what we want." Which is an insane thing to want because it's free, uh, and it's user-generated content, so it's not anything comparable. But that's what they're thinking size-wise. Like, that's what they want.

• 59:38Nilay Patel?

  They want to be the size of YouTube.

• 59:39Speaker 07

  They want to be the size of YouTube, which is...

• 59:41Nilay Patel?

  Are they aware that YouTube's scale has caused YouTube enormous problems?

• 59:45Speaker 07

  I mean, clearly they haven't learned from algorithm issues, so I don't think they're paying attention.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Well, I think you should write this story, uh, Netflix creators have the same problems as YouTube creators.

• 59:54Speaker 07

  I think I tweeted it.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's the problem.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's the issue.

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  She tweeted it. I got on Slack, DM'd her and said, "You should put that on the site." And she said, "Yeah, but something, something." And I said, "I referred you to my previous statement." She said, "You're making a good argument."

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  She's busy.

• 1:00:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11Nilay Patel?

  She is very busy.

• 1:00:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, I, I just think it's fascinating that it appears as though there's already this, like, collateral damage from the streaming wars.

• 1:00:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  To these companies. Like, they're, they're rethinking how they work, their subscribers are moving around, their earnings aren't where they think they should be. Like, they're, Disney's missing its own guidance because of dark feelings. Dark Phoenix is the, like, even watching the trailer, I was like, the only time I'm gonna watch this movie is on an airplane.

• 1:00:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a good airplane movie.

• 1:00:41Nilay Patel?

  Like, I've always thought, and no one agrees with me, this is a bad idea, that we should have a movie rating scale, and the movie rating scale should just be, where will you watch this?

• 1:00:49Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:00:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, is this a theater movie? Is this a pay-for-it in the first window? Is it wait the extra annoying week for it to be a rental? Is it sooner or later it'll be, like, syndicated somewhere? Or is it, like, just wait for it to hit the seat back?

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  Somewhere in there, you need to put, like, like, playing non-stop on, like, TNT.

• 1:01:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you will, you will always watch the middle third of this movie.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Nilay Patel?

  You will never really know what happened in the first half an hour of this movie.

• 1:01:15Speaker 07

  I wrote a whole opinion piece, and to date, it is probably one of the, the pieces that made people the angriest. Uh, it was just that The Boss Baby is the best airplane movie. Cause it's a great movie.

• 1:01:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, Julia, it's great having you on the Vergecast.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  I watched The Boss Baby on an airplane, it's not wrong.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  So did I.

• 1:01:33Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:01:34Nilay Patel?

  What, what happens next? What should people be looking out for on the stream wars? Cause there's like a flood of news, but what are the, what's the key thing you should watch?

• 1:01:41Speaker 07

  Look out between November and April, cause we've got one, two, three, four services launching, so.

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  Including Quibi.

• 1:01:46Speaker 07

  Including Quibi, and April, April 6th. I have the date in my head.

• 1:01:51Nilay Patel?

  Julia, you, you remain a zero on the Go90 scales of Doom streaming services.

• 1:01:58Speaker 07

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  A clear success.

• 1:02:00Speaker 07

  Aww.

• 1:02:01Nilay Patel?

  Where's your money going?

• 1:02:02Speaker 07

  Disney Plus.

• 1:02:03Nilay Patel?

  See?

• 1:02:04Speaker 07

  Once they get Iron Man 2.

• 1:02:06Nilay Patel?

  Alright, that's enough, Julia, goodbye.

• 1:02:44Speaker 08

  The action's on the court and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents 21+ Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details.

• 1:03:13Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:15Nilay Patel?

  Every week, my man.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:03:17Nilay Patel?

  Consistency embodied, personified. What's it called?

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  It's called, "Sorry, I can't pass the Juul because of cybersecurity."

• 1:03:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good. I wanted to talk about this.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so obviously because I talked about this concept on The Vergecast a year ago or so, Juul is launching a Bluetooth e-cigarette that tracks how much you vape.

• 1:03:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  And I think this is really important and good for these vaping products to tell you how much nicotine you're getting in, especially if you want to taper off. But even if you don't, you're not increasing your addiction. So that's cool. I'm very excited about that. That's wild. Also, it has some security features that you can basically lock your vape, right?

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  That's really cool. And that got me thinking. So from watching TikTok, I have discovered that all of the teens, all of the teens are vaping. And they're vaping because it's really easy to pass a Juul around. So even if you don't own the Juul, and this is the meme on TikTok is, "Can you pass the Juul?" And so what I'm saying is add biometric security or just a fingerprint sensor so that you have to actively have your fingerprint on the Juul, right? And so when your friend, who was high school, by the way, neither of you should be vaping. I'm just saying this. I'm just, I'm just trying to solve the problem that we are faced with right now.

• 1:04:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  Your friend wants the Juul and you say, "Sorry, I can't because of cybersecurity." And because you, you'd have to like hold it up to their mouth with the fingerprint.

• 1:04:54Nilay Patel?

  I assure you, this will not stop nicotine-addled teens.

• 1:04:57Speaker 04

  No, that's a, that's a great idea because it'll be, you know, like you can't have the sweet moment where you like share earbuds with, with somebody anymore. Now you can have the sweet moment where you hold the Juul for them.

• 1:05:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is bad.

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  Look, the nicotine's are the greatest threat to American democracy.

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  Your, your SO might get, this might, yes, you're right.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  This might be romantic.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  Are you saying SO on my show right now?

• 1:05:19Nilay Patel?

  You're watching too much TikTok, homie.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  This might be romantic, but for any of your friends who are asking you to pass the jewel, and they're not even your best friends, you might have a good excuse now to not pass the jewel.

• 1:05:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You're like, this complicated technology stack is keeping me away. When, here's.

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  It's like, it's like, sorry, I have a blue bubble. You're green out.

• 1:05:42Nilay Patel?

  Smart vapes are here. The thing about the smart jewel in particular is the problem they are trying to solve is kids are addicted to nicotine. Yeah. Right? And they keep denying that like a major part of their business is selling jewels to teenagers. Right. They're like, we would never do that. Never. And then they've released this product that's like, it's a Bluetooth vape that parents can lock from their teens, it'll show you all this stuff. And it's like, all of that is to get you to buy another jewel so that your kids will stop using the jewel. And the way they could really solve it is by stop selling the jewels to teenagers. I love it. I, it's like the perfect evil corporation move.

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  Where they're like, oh, this car might hurt you. The solution is to buy a new car. Yeah. Not, we should have never designed the bad car in the first place.

• 1:06:36Speaker 04

  The thing that I love is they need to solve the kid problem. And so they've created a connected Bluetooth app that collects a bunch of data. Uh, and that's what I want is a, a company that's funded primarily by big tobacco. It is big tobacco at this point.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  No, here's what I'm saying.

• 1:06:48Speaker 04

  Getting a bunch of data.

• 1:06:48Nilay Patel?

  We were just talking about the stream wars. I would pay 12.99 a month for a real time map of teens vaping. Just like, and you know, like, you know, those, those videos of like the sun over the earth? Yeah. And you can see what parts of earth are, are its day and night. It's moving, it's beautiful. Just imagine that, but it's like vape clouds spreading over America. Like I would pay 12.99 a month for that, that screensaver. Okay. I mean, that's like the purest dystopian screensaver. Okay. Speaking of dystopia, Apple's listening to you.

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  Everybody is listening to you. You know what? It occurs to me, I haven't asked Samsung about Bixby yet.

• 1:07:23Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no one's talking to Bixby. There's nothing to listen to. It's like one guy in a warehouse being like, I don't know, he's asking for the dog butler.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  They record everything and then they give it to contractors, but the contractors are dogs.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  Uh, did we learn anything from the Bixby grading data? Well, there's, there's the one dude who's been asking for the dog butler picture for like two days straight and now the rest of the room is like woof.

• 1:07:57Nilay Patel?

  What's going on in Siri? This isn't a thing. This is a real thing.

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  All of the, uh, all of the digital assistants are recording your voice, storing recorded versions of your voice on their servers and allowing human contractors to occasionally listen to those recordings so that they can tell whether or not the thing worked.

• 1:08:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Speaker 04

  So, Amazon got caught first and Amazon's deal was like a bunch of people inside Amazon who shouldn't have had access had access and they heard some stuff that seemed bad. So, Amazon, what's, ah, they created a whole new portal for seeing what all the stuff is that you've said and like deleting it and you can even now ask Alexa to stop recording you or delete your last day's recordings or whatever. Then it happened to Google. Google also has a portal where you can go and just delete stuff and it also happened to then Apple. Apple does not have such a thing.

• 1:08:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Speaker 04

  Apple is, has a blind spot in my opinion because they, they, they think everything happens on device and it's totally secure and so it doesn't occur to them that you, they would need to provide you like a privacy dashboard. Cause like, why would we need to give you a privacy dashboard? We don't know shit.

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  There's nothing to manage.

• 1:09:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. Except there is because they're saving recordings of your voice.

• 1:09:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  Now, you can now go and like say, I don't want it, like, Amazon has the option, don't be graded by humans. Google, I believe, has that option now. Yes, it does. And Siri is just, they just stopped doing it. They just put it on pause, probably because they don't know how to make a button to give you the option to turn it off. In order to turn off Siri, what you have to do is like turn off the way you turn on Siri. So you have to turn off the button and turn off the, uh, hey Siri. And then you need to go into the keyboard settings and turn off dictation. And then as you do that, it pops up a warning saying, hey, you're going to lose a bunch of stuff now. And then it deletes your data in there. Now, when you upload, your stuff gets uploaded to Apple's cloud. It's anonymized from you. So I think it keeps like voice recognition data to maybe get connected to

• 1:09:51Speaker 04

  you. I don't fully know the whole story here, but my understanding is, you know, with hashes or something, my hands are waving. You can see that if, if you delete all the Siri stuff, it can get rid of the stuff that's on the server, even though it was anonymized from you in the first place. Somehow that could happen.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  So I just want to be clear. The reason they're doing this is well intentioned.

• 1:10:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, they want to make sure their shit works.

• 1:10:14Nilay Patel?

  Right, so you say Alexa, and Alexa makes some guess. And you got it wrong, you say it again. And at some point, some human reviewer gets a random assortment of Alexa commands.

• 1:10:26Speaker 04

  That didn't work.

• 1:10:27Nilay Patel?

  That didn't work.

• 1:10:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Nilay Patel?

  And it tries to figure out it, he, she, they, try to figure out what went wrong and fix Alexa.

• 1:10:34Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:10:35Nilay Patel?

  Right, and that training process is important to how the model works, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  And that training process, you know, it's like, it's not the best job, so it ends up going to contractors. And then you start having like, levels of remove, of control and oversight over who's listening to your voices.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  And by the way, the way that this got discovered is literally a contractor leaking the stuff.

• 1:10:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Nilay Patel?

  To, I believe it was a Dutch newspaper.

• 1:10:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:10:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Nilay Patel?

  So like, that's the nightmare scenario.

• 1:11:02Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  Is the contractor took the voice recordings away.

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:11:05Nilay Patel?

  And showed them to somebody else.

• 1:11:06Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  But contrary to Amazon and Google's position is that, yes, we love spying on you. And we are working on being better at not spying on you as much. Therefore, we're offering you some controls. Apple seems to not want anybody to know that. Like, this feels like a big betrayal to me because Apple has positioned itself as the privacy company. They're advertising as the privacy company. And if they don't put a button, like Dieter said, like, maybe they're just waiting until they have the software. But if they just say, uh, we'll just never tell our customers that this happened. Like, because what the button says is, if you don't uncheck this, then we will listen to recordings of you.

• 1:11:47Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  So that would involve admitting to their customers.

• 1:11:50Speaker 04

  They all have very fuzzy ways of defining what this human grading is. Because there's two levels of it. There's the, do you, will you allow humans to listen to it or not? In order to improve our services and whatever. Amazon actually played some word games initially where they're like, uh, it will be, do you want to, do you want to use your voice to help us improve new services? And you're like, no, don't. And they're like, cool, then it'll be done. But did you, did you hear what I said? Do you want to use your voice to help us improve new services? Unchecking the button only turned off human review to optimize for new things they made. It didn't turn off human review for other stuff.

• 1:12:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:12:26Speaker 04

  So, that's the human review side of it, the human grading side. The second part is, is your voice being stored on their servers, full stop? Can you delete it? Or can you tell it never to get uploaded in the first place? Between Apple, Amazon, and Google, only one of those companies gives you the option to never have your voice saved on its servers. Which one do you think it is?

• 1:12:49Nilay Patel?

  Google.

• 1:12:50Speaker 04

  Google.

• 1:12:50Nilay Patel?

  I picked the one that seemed the least likely.

• 1:12:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Speaker 04

  The other two, you can delete your stuff, but if, once you turn on the assistant, it records.

• 1:13:00Nilay Patel?

  So, I'm gonna just take this in a different direction. Okay, all this stuff leaked, every company's doing it. It all got found out because journalists asked. I think Apple rushed out its announcement because a bunch of journalists, including us, were asking over and over and over again, and these policies didn't really add up. But here's my thing, and I'm just gonna keep coming back to this. Nobody knows. Right? We're doing this is buried in a terms of service agreement that you bang through when you set up a phone, or you buy a Google Home. No one reads the terms of service agreement. Even if you do, they're worded in such a way that they collect consent. I'm air quoting here, they collect consent from you, and they say, "Everyone's consenting to this practice." But it's impossible to understand what the practice actually is.

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  "Don't play my voice to strangers." It just seems like if you phrased it that way, maybe more people would say no, but they'd need some people to say yes to make it better. This is all buried. There's no way that people are actually consenting to this.

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  And the concept that it's anonymous is obviously pseudonymous, really.

• 1:14:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's your voice. It's people's voices.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  It clearly can be correlated with your device ID because there's a way to delete it.

• 1:14:10Nilay Patel?

  So, to me, the issue is less, are they all doing it? What are the granular... That's important, we're gonna keep covering the story. Obviously, they're feeling some pressure to get better. But if they are feeling that pressure, if the reveal of the thing makes them stop doing it... Right? Like, that's the pattern that we're in. Revealing that it's happening makes them like, stop. Then they should know, like, then it should be obvious that you should ask way more directly and make it way more obvious. If simply saying, hey, this thing you're doing is happening. And they're like, no, we'll stop it.

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, Apple asks if, or I think all these companies asked, you want to send this crash report, right?

• 1:14:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. How is that any less sensitive than a recording of like a transcription of a text message I'm sending?

• 1:14:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that the honest, well, because with a computer and a crash report, like, there's a UI, right?

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a UI, but there's also like, what's in the log? Am I going to read the log? Like, what if?

• 1:15:11Nilay Patel?

  The crash report is actually recording your voice screaming, ah, crashed again. I just think there's something about these in particular where the surveillance potential is so high.

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Nilay Patel?

  The user fear of that surveillance is high.

• 1:15:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Nilay Patel?

  It's not yet out, it doesn't yet outweigh the convenience of having a smart speaker, right? Because that's pretty fun. Um, but the sort of like, underlying, the FBI is listening to me meme is like there.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Nilay Patel?

  Facebook is listening to me all the time, right? Like, everyone believes it, whether or not it's true.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:41Nilay Patel?

  If you can accidentally back into it with a contractor leaking to a newspaper, a bunch of recordings of people, like, you should maybe rethink that. And maybe ask, I mean, this is like the Steve Jobs go about privacy. What is privacy? You ask, and you ask again, and you ask again. And you just keep asking because you cannot collect that consent once. Right? Like, people change their lives, like, it's a fluid idea of what privacy is.

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:08Nilay Patel?

  And none of them are good at asking. And all of them rely on extremely opaque terms of service agreements that I'm going to tell you right now, I think should be illegal.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:16:16Nilay Patel?

  I think they should be illegal.

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  What's the, what's the alternative to a terms of service?

• 1:16:20Nilay Patel?

  Uh, uh, uh, privacy regulations? Right, I mean, it's just like, and I don't mean to say that because I think my answer to everything is the government.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  Sure, sure.

• 1:16:29Nilay Patel?

  I don't think our government is like that great. Like, do I want to turn that power over to this government? I do not.

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:34Nilay Patel?

  But I just mean, in a very abstract way, an individual user does not have a meaningful way to differentiate between different products' terms of service at the point of purchase. You're in a Best Buy, there's no, like, information in front of an Alexa in a Google Home that's like, here are the settings for Amazon not storing your voice. And like, you don't have the information. You don't even see the thing until you get the thing home and plug it in.

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  What about instead of?

• 1:16:59Nilay Patel?

  So you don't have like the market information to make that decision. And then no one's a lawyer and no one reads a shit anyway.

• 1:17:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Nilay Patel?

  So like, who, how do you, how do you express the like, the, the will of the people? It's like, well, we're just going to negotiate as a group with these companies. And like, that looks like, here's what we will accept and here's what we won't accept. And we've just codified in law, and here's what you can do and what you can't do.

• 1:17:22Speaker 04

  What if, uh, like?

• 1:17:23Nilay Patel?

  So I mean that in a very abstract way. I, I do not think like Donald Trump should write a privacy regulation.

• 1:17:29Speaker 04

  Why do you think that ULAs in terms of service exist?

• 1:17:32Nilay Patel?

  Cause they need to collect those consents.

• 1:17:34Speaker 04

  Why do they need to collect those consents?

• 1:17:36Nilay Patel?

  Cause they want to do stuff.

• 1:17:37Speaker 04

  Uh, cause they don't want to get sued. It's like fundamentally, they don't want to get sued.

• 1:17:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, like there's a very, there's like, mostly the internet cannot exist without some amount of copyright licensing.

• 1:17:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:17:48Nilay Patel?

  Right? So if you take a photo on your phone and you want iCloud to back it up inherently, and you haven't even published it, you haven't even put it in the world.

• 1:17:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:17:56Nilay Patel?

  Inherently, Apple's got to make a copy. It's got to go to an iCloud server. Then they've got to make another copy of that photo to like back it up redundantly. Then if they want to ship it to your, if they want to put it on iMessage, they want to ship it to somebody else in your iMessage chain. They've inherently made yet another 50 copies of the thing.

• 1:18:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:18:13Nilay Patel?

  So like, just to operate that, I'm going to take a photo, it's going to get automatically backed up to my iCloud and I'm going to text it to someone. Apple needs like 55 copyright licenses from you or a blanket copyright license. So is that like normal, like every service? And then consider Instagram, which has to like, take far more permissions from you. So like, okay, like I kind of buy it. Like, in order to do that, like, should we have started with a government copyright law and licensing scheme? Or should these services have developed, right?

• 1:18:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:18:44Nilay Patel?

  But I think now they're like, exist, we understand them. It's one thing to say, hey, you're putting your personal information into LinkedIn. LinkedIn might share it or re-promote it. And you can be like, I don't, screw it, I don't want to use LinkedIn. And like, the features are somewhat apparent to you.

• 1:18:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:59Nilay Patel?

  So there's a relationship there. With privacy, like, it is just absolutely opaque. And you have no idea what's going on.

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Nilay Patel?

  And their motivation is to hide it and it doesn't turn into a feature. Like, privacy isn't a feature. That's why Apple has to market it all the time. Right, it's well, the phones operate the same whether or not Google is watching everything you do on Android.

• 1:19:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:19Nilay Patel?

  Or whether Apple is like making its claims.

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  I mean, there's, there's also like the, they're, they're the tough edge cases are like, I was listening to an interview with a developer who interviewed Facebook and so it's like, okay, well, play around with their APIs and see what I can do before I get this interview. And he realized that Facebook Messenger showed nearby and that that information, while not saying specifically where people are, could be correlated with other information relatively easy to say exactly where people are when and create a map of where all your friends are, which is obviously like, and so Facebook got mad at him and they didn't give him the job and they, they fixed that, but that was a, that was a flaw, right?

• 1:20:03Speaker 03

  And so that's the sort of thing that maybe the Yula indemnifies, is that the right word?

• 1:20:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, yeah.

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  Protects Facebook from me suing them for being bad at their job.

• 1:20:16Nilay Patel?

  When Facebook was like in front of Congress, the many times they've been in front of Congress, one of the things that they got asked was like, how many times have you changed your terms of service agreement, right? And it's like hundreds, if not thousands of times, they make little tweaks that and then you just click yes. Like the iTunes Terms of Service became a meme, like late night comedians are talking about it because Apple is constantly tweaking it around the edges. Now, do any of those specific tweets mean anything to you? Like, no. Are you effectively signing a new contract every time you do that? Absolutely you are. That's like the, to me, like, we're just at a point, particularly when we're talking about things like they retain the right to take recordings of your voice and let other people listen to them.

• 1:20:57Nilay Patel?

  Even if the intention is good and the outcome makes the service better, you shouldn't be able to just like hide that in one of these agreements.

• 1:21:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:21:06Nilay Patel?

  Like absolutely, that should just be illegal, right? Like that, the market cannot speak to that enough.

• 1:21:14Nilay Patel?

  Because next month, Apple might change its agreement back and like we like it's on us. And it's our job. I'm happy to do it. It's on us to like scan the agreement and write the headline and generate the outrage cycle and they like that's a I think that's just a bad cycle. That's a bad process for protecting people's privacy versus hey, we've made some rules and we understand it.

• 1:21:35Speaker 03

  Do you think there could be something like the Creative Commons license where like I have like an alternative Ula like if if a company presents me with a Ula like actually I would prefer this Ula. And it's like a, you know.

• 1:21:48Nilay Patel?

  So what are you what are you fundamentally describing? You're describing a negotiation.

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:52Nilay Patel?

  And like, you are not allowed to negotiate. Like, who who signs a contract? Like, everyone does it and they shouldn't. But like, you're not supposed to sign a contract without a lawyer reading it and like making sure it's appropriate. You know what I mean? Like, you're supposed to negotiate. You're not supposed to take the first offer. You're supposed to like fight for yourself.

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  That's how I feel with these cookies. If they say, do you want cookies? I want to say absolutely no unless I am deep into the process of logging in or buying something from you.

• 1:22:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, I mean, like, that's what I mean. Like, I think we can argue a lot about the GDPR. Like, it is an open question about how effective it's been and like whether it's actually stopping some of the stuff, whether it's benefiting incumbents or whether it's opening up some markets, like good arguments on both sides there. But at least it's there, right? Like, there's now a framework in the European Union for like how they should talk about your privacy, what they should offer you. To your point, websites in the European Union, when they say, do you want cookies or not? If you say no, they are required to still provide you a service, right? They can't they can't block you because you don't want their cookies. That's great, right? Like, you can't get that from like a collective action market solution, right? Like, you have to just say it's the law. So like, I think that stuff is coming. We talk about it a lot.

• 1:23:09Nilay Patel?

  I just every time I hear this stuff about Siri and Alexa, all I think about is there's no way anybody knew this was happening. And the second they found out, the second it was revealed, all these companies scrambled to change it.

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:23:23Nilay Patel?

  That's an indication they knew they were doing something stupid, right? It wasn't we were going to write 50 blog posts justifying it and there's more and more hype and eventually like. You know, a celebrity tweets about how they hate it and like now Taylor Swift is mad and like then you know what I mean like there's that version of this story but then there's the what actually happened which is the second anyone found out about they're like whoop yeah yeah we are bad.

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Nilay Patel?

  That these are the biggest companies in the world like they shouldn't get off that easy anyhow.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  Have you turned off Siri?

• 1:23:52Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:23:52Speaker 04

  Google Assistant?

• 1:23:53Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  Alexa?

• 1:23:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't have Alexa anymore, I have Google Assistant.

• 1:23:56Speaker 04

  Okay, me neither.

• 1:23:57Nilay Patel?

  I I will say that I I have set all of my Google stuff to their auto delete settings.

• 1:24:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh whatever the strictest one is like three months, I feel zero guilt about that.

• 1:24:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I turned everything I could off on Google except I guess I haven't turned off Assistant.

• 1:24:12Nilay Patel?

  But so like. I never use Siri so there's no danger in them listening to me.

• 1:24:16Speaker 04

  The weird thing is like the the companies that probably are the worst at doing stuff with our data have the best controls for.

• 1:24:23Nilay Patel?

  Cause they keep getting caught.

• 1:24:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly right, yeah.

• 1:24:25Nilay Patel?

  No, maybe that's the solution, we'll just keep catching them and eventually they'll be respectful.

• 1:24:29Speaker 03

  No, the the solution is to abandon them and allow them to to to wither away.

• 1:24:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the market solution, the problem is that they're giant monopolies that control like 80% of all advertising dollars in America.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  Like open open source software, open hardware, stuff that you can audit, stuff that it doesn't send telemetry back to a centralized server, decentralized services as much as possible, like I think it it's it's one of those things like no matter what laws are added to this situation, I think it's something that it's gonna ultimately be on us to try to protect ourselves from.

• 1:25:02Nilay Patel?

  It's true, you should also build your own car and churn your own butter, but the problem is like people are busy.

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  The most.

• 1:25:09Nilay Patel?

  It's true, I mean, I agree with you, I absolutely agree with you, I'm a computer nerd, I've done, I did all those things for a long time. That's not why they got popular, like I I I wish there was some market dynamic that made this better, obviously, right? What do I want? I want competition, but there is competition, there are three biggest companies in the world are like four, Cortana got caught doing this stuff too.

• 1:25:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:32Nilay Patel?

  Like the four biggest companies in the world are competing.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  Cortana got caught doing this stuff on Skype Translate, which is like direct actual conversations people are having, which is like a whole other thing.

• 1:25:42Nilay Patel?

  They're competing on every metric except privacy and that's wild to me, anyhow, I don't mean to keep ranting about it, it's just after we got through the things that were actually happening, to me, the the bigger issues, no one is giving meaningful consent to this kind of crap. Okay, I'm gonna say it cuz it's true. I have the Apple Card. It's a credit card. It's a nice app. Apple really wants it to be the default.

• 1:26:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:04Nilay Patel?

  That's it. Like, I don't, I'm gonna try to review it.

• 1:26:07Speaker 04

  Does it make you feel richer?

• 1:26:09Nilay Patel?

  It makes me feel like I have another credit card. Like, I was definitely raised like not have very many credit cards to like always pay that on time, like to never.

• 1:26:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Nilay Patel?

  Right, like that, I hear my dad's voice in my head. So, I know there are people out there who love their credit card shuffle, who like do all the point stuff. It's not me. Although, like, I wish I did. Like, it feels like I don't know how to do a scam, you know?

• 1:26:31Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 1:26:32Nilay Patel?

  I kinda wish I did. I also wish I knew how to juggle. Like, there's a lot of stuff I wish I knew how to do. Um, just fact, like.

• 1:26:40Speaker 04

  Does it keep you up at night?

• 1:26:41Nilay Patel?

  Every now and again, I try to juggle. It doesn't, I'm like, yep, still don't know how to do this.

• 1:26:45Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:26:45Speaker 03

  You know how to, how to learn to juggle is you do it with the racket balls cuz they bounce, so you don't have to bend over and pick up all the juggling balls.

• 1:26:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm gonna get some racket balls. Uh, Max and I are gonna learn how to juggle. That's a good thing you do with a kid, right? She's only one and a half. She's not gonna be any good at it. Uh, but one day. That's, that's my new parenting goal. It's right up there with good at math. Juggling ability.

• 1:27:07Speaker 04

  I will say the one thing that, that makes me sad about the Apple Card is, there's more than one thing. The two, the main thing is that it like, it definitely ties you to an iPhone. Like, you would, now, yeah, you're an iPhone customer forever and ever, uh, until you get rid of the credit card.

• 1:27:22Nilay Patel?

  Or iMessage.

• 1:27:23Speaker 04

  Or iMessage. Uh, the card in particular is like, but like, all the stuff that they do to make it easy to pay and like the app and the budgeting is so much better than Mint.

• 1:27:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, it's like a beautiful thing.

• 1:27:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I, like, the fact that that's only limited to Apple Card purchases is like, oh, well, maybe someday they'll just, uh, Apple should just take over all of finance.

• 1:27:42Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't, I disagree. Uh, absolutely disagree. Here's what I want. Uh, I'm mentioning it, I wrote about it, you can read the post. We have to figure out how to review it. I'm, I, I don't think there verges in the business of reviewing credit cards. Like, we're not gonna review like an Amex card next, you know, like. But it's interesting, it is fundamentally a technology product. Just tweet at me and let me know what you wanna know about the Apple Card, so I can figure out what to do with it next. Besides like my stuff. Gazing at it. Like, I don't know. Yeah, it could get too just.

• 1:28:11Speaker 04

  You should, you should buy the thing and then like reverse the charges. You know, like, like MX is really good. Like, I didn't buy this. And like, okay, sure.

• 1:28:17Nilay Patel?

  Fraud. I should do credit card fraud.

• 1:28:19Speaker 04

  The company, the star will let me return this. And they're like, yeah, that sucks. We'll handle it. And then, you know.

• 1:28:26Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:28:27Speaker 04

  Don't fraud. Don't do fraud. Don't do crimes.

• 1:28:29Nilay Patel?

  All right. I'll, I'll, I'll be, okay, please suggest what you want me to do, except for crimes, like Dieter. I'm interested in what you want to know from, from like the Verge perspective. I'm sure the credit card. We know a bunch of people work at the Points Guy. I'm sure they're gonna do a great job reviewing the card as a credit card. Uh, I'm much more interested in what you want to know about the tech side of it. Okay, we're way over time.

• 1:28:50Speaker 04

  Wouldn't be a Verge cast if you didn't say it.

• 1:28:52Nilay Patel?

  We, it's just like, I really wanted to be short this week, and we weren't. Season Valley, why'd you push that button is here. It's great. You should go listen to it. Ashley and Caitlin did a great job. Their producer, Andrew, is our producer. He did a great job, too. Recode Media is also great this week with Peter. He's got Taylor Lorenz on the show. Taylor is like a friend of the Verge cast, friend of the Verge. Excited about that. Go listen to it. It's really fun. You can tweet at me. I'm reckless Dieter.

• 1:29:15Speaker 04

  It's back lawn.

• 1:29:16Nilay Patel?

  He thinks Android is slow.

• 1:29:16Speaker 04

  No, God.

• 1:29:17Nilay Patel?

  Paul, future Paul, tweet at us. We love your feedback. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:29:22Speaker 04

  Paul Kesney.

• 1:29:43Speaker 09

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