Pixel 4 hands-on and Mark Zuckerberg's speech on free speech

The biggest announcements from Google’s 2019 Pixel event The Pixel 4 has a radar chip that lets you control music and wave at pokémon Google Pixel 4 and 4 XL hands-on: this time, it’s not about the camera The Pixel 4 lacks one of the best perks that came with Google’s previous flagship phones Google improves the Pixel 4 camera with Live HDR and more With no buds or adapter, Pixel 4 opens the door to rival headphone makers Pixel Buds 2 hands-on: Google takes on the AirPods Pixelbook Go: Google finally made a reasonably priced Chromebook Google’s new Nest Mini has better controls, similar sound, and the same price Nest Wifi first look: Google finally combined a smart speaker and a router Google’s Stadia wireless controller won’t be very wireless at launch Facebook’s decision to allow lies in political ads is coming back to haunt it Democrats are striking back against Facebook’s ads policies Mark Zuckerberg on lies in political ads: ‘I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians’ Mark Zuckerberg took on China in a speech defending free expression Facebook privacy abuse targeted by ‘Mind your own business’ bill Take our Vergecast survey! theverge.com/survey 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 all things Google, the Pixel 4, the new Nest stuff, Pixel Buds, new Nest hardware, Stadia. We also get into it about Mark Zuckerberg's big speech on Facebook and free speech. That's it on the Vergecast, coming up now.

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• 1:17Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of a growing empire of podcasts. Seriously, just look behind you. There's one again. I'm Neil, I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here. Hi. There's Paul. Hello. There's another Vox Media podcast. I know, but now you turned into like a spooky Halloween. That's what I'm doing. Boo. A big week in news. Casey Newton and Addy Robertson are going to join us for the second segment, literally on the day we're taping. Mark Zuckerberg delivered a speech about the future of free speech and internet platforms, the vergiest of Vergecast topics. So Casey and Addy are going to join us to talk about that. But there's also a huge Google event this week. And to be fair, many, many things were leaked.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  I don't think anyone is that surprised. Google's fall hardware event was here. We got the Pixel 4, we got sort of like a mysterious look at the forthcoming Pixel Buds, Pixelbook Go, a bunch of new Nest stuff, future of Assistant a little bit, a bunch of on-device stuff. Yep. Did I miss anything? Probably.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  It was such a strange event. I mean, can we just start there about what the way they ran this event? So, everything leaked completely, and I think that fundamentally, like, they may have also gotten like head faked by the weird backlash to Apple's keynote. I mean, there was like the Charlie Weasel thing, and a bunch of people saying, yes, he's right. We should stop being so celebratory. I don't know. And so, instead of doing the traditional keynote that you expect, where like, gets on stage, alright, first product, announcing this product, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Second product, announcing this product, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're like, just like, we're gonna talk about ambient computing for a while, and it's really important that everything worked together in your home, and that, you know, the computer gets distributed,

• 3:04Speaker 03

  so it's not all focused just on the thing in your pocket. And that's why I made the new Nest Mini, and it's also really important, because, you know, you also want the assistant to work really well, blah, blah, blah, blah. And also, the Pixelbook Go exists, and blah, blah, and there's a picture of it up there, blah, blah. Like, they didn't announce anything. They like casually mentioned it while they were talking about something else. And then only later in the hour that we're like, oh yeah, I know, like, this is what it is, sorry. That thing we brought up before, here it is. It was very odd.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  This is my, like, writing technique for essays. I'd make a bullet point, and then I'd hide my points inside of paragraphs, so that they're subtle.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Right. It was, that presentation style was very strange. It did provide, I think, an element of surprise to an event that would have otherwise lacked it. Like, you just didn't know what was gonna happen next. Like, Baratunde Thurston had made a lot of videos with Google, and it was like, he's walking in a room. What will he find in the room? Will it be the leaked Pixelbook Go, or the leaked Pixel 4? Who knows? So, that part was fine.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  And then at the end, Annie Leibowitz showed up and like had a little chat.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  The Annie Leibowitz part was very interesting and funny for two reasons. One was, it seemed clear that not a lot of scripting had gone into that conversation. So, you know, the Google person on stage was like, so why do you like using the phone? And she's like, cuz photos, hmm, stories. It was like, there's not, okay. But, right in front of us were some like very famous Instagram influencers, who were otherwise, I would say, somewhat disinterested in the goings-on of Google's Titan M security chip.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  Just the facts. They were not paying attention during that part. And Annie Leibowitz comes on and they all like sat straight up.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:54Nilay Patel?

  Because like, I mean, she's Annie Leibowitz. So that was very funny.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  So what's interesting is we got way more insight into what Annie Leibowitz actually meant later on in the day in the hands-on area because we got to talk to the person that was on ahead of Annie Leibowitz, which was actually the best part of the entire keynote.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Which was Mark Lavoie, who is Stanford professor, created a bunch of the ideas behind computational photography. They just had him go onstage and like just give a little mini lecture on how computational photography works and what his opinions on it are and how it got applied to the Pixel 4. And.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  By the way, the sum total of that was dunking on Apple.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I was getting there. Yeah. But it was completely, if you haven't watched at least that section of this keynote, I encourage you to go watch it because it's very cogent and the dunking on Apple was amazing. I think the harshest burn, the most direct burn was he's like, guys, this isn't mad science. This is just math.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  It's really simple math. And that was a direct quote of Phil Schiller.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  Calling diffusion computational photography mad science.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:01Nilay Patel?

  So let's go through them. So the event was, it was like, like Dieter's saying, it was very low-key. It was a little oddly structured. At least it was different. I like that. I will say that the sort of post-event Google method, far superior to the Apple method.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Uh, yes.

• 6:18Nilay Patel?

  So Google just like sets up a giant room with all the stuff in it and people like mill around and do their thing. There's like tons of devices. Apple is like, you're basically in an Apple Store with more pressure.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  It's an Apple Store with like four tables and twice as many people and a tenth as many devices. And a third as much time.

• 6:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Google's like, you can just live here. Do you want to live here now? There's a Nest-inspired sleeping area for you. Here's some jackets. Like, it's whatever. Anyhow. Pixel 4, let's start with the big guy.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, let me say this. I have been watching a lot of YouTube. I've been watching, I've been reading a bunch of Reddit. And just sort of, you know, looking at Twitter and just a whole bunch of the reactions and everyone's real mad at this phone or like disappointed in this phone.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Because I think everything got leaked. And so they just were hoping for something. And when you look at it on paper, the only thing that the Pixel 4 has that isn't, hasn't already been done on another phone is face unlock. And technically, if you want to say, having 90 Hz on a relatively small screen. And technically, if you're paying attention, that chip that allows the Google Assistant to work really quickly. And technically, if you want to say the radar on the phone, right, the radar thing, right? Like, so there's like, there's things that nobody else has ever done. But because it all leaked, everyone felt familiar with it. And so no one is bought in on them, that mattering. And everyone really wants like some kind of, you know, pound your fist spec war thing.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  So there's just, I, I need to, you know, review the phone. But based on the hands-on time I had with it ahead of the event and at the event, I think it's actually a very, very good Android phone. I think it's, it's a very interesting Android phone. And I think there's a lot of stuff in it that is really compelling. I think that more than any other Pixel before, the joke that people always make about Pixels is that it's like, it's, what if Google made an iPhone? What would it be? Like, this is it. And not just because it looks like it, because it has the big square camera bump on the back.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  But this is the most iPhone-like Android phone ever in, insofar as like, it is very clean, it knows exactly what it wants to be, and it has face unlock.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, there's that.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the gestures work exactly the same. Yeah.

• 8:29Nilay Patel?

  So the face unlock is interesting. Reports today, which Google confirmed, works with your eyes closed.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna add an attention detect feature to make sure your eyes are open.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  They're definitely gonna do that?

• 8:40Nilay Patel?

  That's what they told us.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  Like all things, promises about future software features are not to be relied on, but they say they're gonna. It worked with my sunglasses on, the sunglasses that block the iPhone. So I think it's, it's. There's just a que- I think there's an open question, particularly because of the eyes situation, about whether it is as secure as the iPhone. So that's like just beginning.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  It's really fast, right?

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it's really fast because solely the radar chip, when you reach for the phone, I mean, Dieter and I were at the event, like, Dieter's like, "Now you be the table," and I'd like, hold the phone and he would grab it, and he would be the table and I'd grab it. So we're like, testing it.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  So it sees you coming, it warms up.

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  It grabs you, yeah, it lights up the sensors.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  And then it does possibly a low-end face recognition because maybe there's gonna be false positives.

• 9:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, like, Dieter's reviewing it, we gotta talk to Google, I don't know. But, yes, the idea is that it's faster because it begins the process faster. Whereas with the iPhone, you have to like, tap it, it like, lights up, like, does a whole thing.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  One of the other things about that speed thing I want to mention, I brought this up in the hands-on, is I don't actually know if it is, like, if you had a stopwatch faster to unlock. It feels faster because it starts when you start reaching for it, and it also feels faster because Google has the default of it skipping the lock screen, just going into whatever screen was last opened on the phone. And so, with the iPhone, you have like, this extra cognitive load of like, swipe up the screen, or look at the lock screen, or whatever. With the Pixel, you don't touch anything, and it's just there. And I think that might be part of the perception of the speed.

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and the iPhone has that middle step where like, maybe it shows you your notifications if you have that setting going on, right? Like, yeah, I don't know. Dieter's gonna review the phone, we'll find out. Let's talk about Soli for a minute, because it doesn't do a lot. You know, if you're, if you're listening to this, you're presumably in a Verchass feed, you know that we spoke to Rick Osterloh under the interview episode at the event. There's clearly more it can do, or more it could do.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, Paul, did you get a chance to hear that it could detect your heartbeat if they wanted?

• 10:44Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. No, I loved this conversation. I thought it was really interesting when he, you asked him, like, is this a thing that is part of Google's ecosystem, you know? Like, for instance, the Pixel 4 also has squeezable sides, which is an indication that squeezable sides are just like, an important element of what makes a phone a pixel, you know? And so it's, at least he's talking like solely is an important element of what is going to be a pixel going forward, possibly.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  But it doesn't do much.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  There's a, there's a demo site. It seems like it does a lot. It can, it can see your, like, if you're, like, inclined towards the phone or inclined away. It can detect, like, two people are there or one person's there, which I think could be really interesting for, like, privacy. Like, you like, you could have your phone in a mode where, like, if somebody is around me, like, just switch to, I don't know, something innocuous. But otherwise, I'm gonna be doing crimes.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  I knew we'd get there.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  This is like, I feel like the story of my life with technology, because like, it seems like it is actually really cool technology. But at the same time, like, you know, a radar hemispherical sensor that's just detecting things around and you do the right math on it and you can discover intent and motion and, and, and objects around the phone. But we also live in a world that we've tried a lot of gesture interfaces and they've always been bad and horrible and awful. And for, for a number of reasons, not just the, the mechanics of the detection, but also the learnability of the gestures.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  And here, the phone, well, it's got three gestures. There's like skip music.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  There's three categories to think of in terms of what Motion Sense does. The first is presence. So it's, are you, are you by the phone or not? And if you're not by the phone, the screen turns off. It like, it knows you're there and they could potentially do more with that, but that's all they're doing right now. The second is, like, I guess it's called like reach. It knows if you're reaching for the phone and it turns the screen on, right? Like it, and it also knows if you're reaching for the phone to quiet down alarms and. And ringtones. So the demo there is like you let the alarm go off, you reach for the phone, you don't actually, you haven't actually touched it yet. And the thing immediately gets super quiet and then you can choose what to do with it. You can choose to answer it or not. So you're not listening to it the whole time. You have to hit a button. You're just like, you start to reach for it and then it gets quiet and then you can like wave your hand and dismiss the call or whatever.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  And then the third one is the gesture. So there's wave your hand to dismiss stuff. And then there's wave your hand left or right to skip songs. And then there's wave your hand to wave it to Pokemon. And then there's tickle a Pokemon.

• 13:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  And that's literally it.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  But the original solely demo is the tiny violin gesture.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they, there's no tiny violin gesture.

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  So this is not, I don't think this is indicative of much because everyone's got to like learn the phone and get used to it. But I definitely enjoyed, you know, they had the wall of phones at the event.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Did you just like run across them? Just like,

• 13:44Nilay Patel?

  I skipped so many tracks.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  Like you're, like you're doing high fives at the end of a soccer game.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  All those Pokemons got tickled today.

• 13:54Nilay Patel?

  No, I really enjoyed like watching people try to figure it out and like the hit rate was low.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:00Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like what's the thing you can do if you see a pixel out in the wild? It's like open YouTube music and like wave your hand over it. It doesn't quite work the way you expect. I don't think that's really fair, right? Like eventually you're going to expect how it works and then you'll be fine and be good at it. But like that first thing where like stick your hand in front of it and just like wave, it doesn't quite work the way you expect. You have to like start out over the side and come over it in a broader gesture than you think.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:24Nilay Patel?

  That's like, I just watched people kind of stumble into that over time. So I think there are some questions about how precise it actually is, how small of a movement it can actually detect, what else they're going to unlock with it over time. And then obviously the big question that we were asking Rick, like, are you going to build on this? Is this an interface paradigm for you that's going to get more and more complex and sophisticated and understood by a wide base over time? A good comparison to this, I think, is you said they built an iPhone. The gestures are exactly the same as the iPhone on the screen, right? Like the same Android 10, slightly refined, a little bit different, but like same, same sort of like library of gestures does the same stuff.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:04Nilay Patel?

  With Soli and the Pixel, they have the opportunity to like start from scratch and build the base of gestures that everyone understands. So if Apple ever does it, Apple has to copy them. But that's a big lift. You have to like sell enough phones. You have to get enough people to use the feature on all those phones that you sell. You have to make them expect that from all the other, like, that's a couple of steps out. Yep.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  One thing I'll say about Soli being like, are they, can they really get the fine detail that they, you know, claim they can? My understanding, I talked to, you know, people that developed it at ATAP, and they developed it on a chip that they had like basically duct taped to Pixel 2s. And then they're like, okay, now we got the final hardware, let's put it into, you know, the Jerry Pixel 4s. And they realized like, oh, wait, our machine learning models don't work for this slightly new tiny hardware. And they had to throw out all their machine learning models and start over again. So like, there's actually not as much training in this as there maybe could be because they had to start from scratch.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So let's talk about the camera.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:59Nilay Patel?

  It's like, Dieter, your headline was, it's not about the camera, but.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  It's kind of about the camera.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  It's always so good. I mean, it is the factor of competition right now that I think most people are interested in, which I think is great. It makes me very happy that, you know, we just spent a lot of time talking about the new iPhone, talking about against the Pixel. You see, Apple had to respond. They did a good job. I think we had some questions about how Google would respond. I loved talking to Mark Lavoie at this event. That dude is the best. I hope we can get him on the show soon. So interesting facts we learned from that conversation. Here are my two, we learned a lot. Talking to him is great. My two favorite. One, effectively an off the shelf sensor, right? But Google thinks they can get it done in software and they're getting it done in software. Two, Annie Leibowitz gave them feedback, which was mostly like, stop doing this contrast thing you're doing, make it softer and I'll

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  turn it up if I need to. And he connected that to the fact that they know Pixel phones have a look. We talk about this in all of our reviews. Pixel phones have a very distinct look. I can almost, I would say eight out of 10, identify the Pixel photo just straight out. They're more contrasty, they're punchier.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  They're HDR-y sometimes.

• 17:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, a little bit. I think less so than like the iPhone XS was like the most HDR-y phone I'd ever seen. I really disliked it. But Pixel phones are just really punchy. So they know they have a look, but the Pixel 4, they have changed the look of the photos. They have, they have backed down on that a little bit and made it a little less HDR-y in one sense, maybe a little less contrasty in another sense, depending on how you want to look at it. And it's funny that. We were like, did any of it give you any feedback? And he was like, did she? So that's great. And that's just like, cool. Like, I love that. But they're really doing the work in software. The live HDR, I thought this was really cool. They basically take a feed, the video feed, underexpose it to like, basically map where they are with their underexposed frames when you take a photo.

• 17:52Nilay Patel?

  And then they apply the same tone mapping to it. And he's like, because it's low res, it's a viewfinder and you're moving, you don't see the slightly lower resolution, but the tone mapping looks convincing. I think that's like, really smart. Like, I could nerd out about that stuff all day.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Why can't they do it with portrait mode?

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  Uh.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  He had an answer for this, I don't know if I believe it.

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  What was the answer? I don't remember.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  His answer, his answer was, it looks pretty bad. There's no way to get real time portrait mode that isn't actually true to the final result. And any phone that shows you real time portrait mode, if you actually like, I don't know, take a screenshot of what's in the viewfinder and like, look at what the picture that actually gets taken, they're very, very different.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So what's interesting is Apple does have effectively a lot, a real time viewfinder. Apple is very much into just giving you auto modes. Like, they don't, you can monkey with some settings on an iPhone, but like, you know, Apple will turn on night mode by itself and set its shutter time by itself. Pixel has way more controls. I think the most interesting controls are the new brightness and shadow controls in the viewfinder, where you can, you can actually adjust how much HDR effect you're getting out of the photo. You can actually adjust whether it boosts those shadows all the way up to make everything flat. You can adjust whether the brights are overexposed or pulled down. Like, that is really cool. That's, I think that is an amazing advance on this camera. Is it gonna do a lot in practice? Am I gonna use it?

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  Or is it just gonna be more sliders over the thing you're trying to shoot? Like, gotta see. But it, you know, one of the things when, when we review cameras and we, and we put out photo comparisons, I always hear is, well, I could just edit this photo to look like that phone. Right? And what I know, what every vendor tells us is, nobody edits these photos. Right? Like, they just like, shoot the photos.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, how are you gonna think about that with, I'm assuming most of your camera head-to-head comparisons are like, I'll take this picture on auto and I'll take this picture on.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's the only fair way to do it.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  So you're not gonna touch the sliders on the Pixel for comparison photos?

• 19:46Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, I think that the, the move is, like, you compare the auto because you need some kind of baseline. And then you sort of like, compare the, well, what can I do to like, make this thing more interesting or better?

• 19:58Speaker 03

  You know, we'll basically have to take like 10 photos of every single thing. Like, I'm not going to do all of that for this review.

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that sounds really difficult.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  The question isn't so much about like, what can produce a better photo if you adjust the sliders? It's like, what provides the better experience of taking a photo and like, gives you results that like, you feel happy about? And this thing about editing after the fact, I think, Neil, you're right. No one edits after the fact, but in some cases, you cannot do the thing after the fact that you think you can, because the phone isn't actually saving the data that you need to get the effect, right? So if you do HDR, it takes like, the stack of 10 frames that it's grabbing to create that image, and it creates that image. If you try and edit it later, it's just working off of the composited thing that it made, not off of like, let's grab these 10, you know, things that we're stacking together, right?

• 20:46Nilay Patel?

  So that's true. The, another thing Mark told us was that Pixel RAW is substantially different than iPhone RAW. So an iPhone RAW image is a single frame off the sensor. That's what you get. That's what Paley gives you, for example. They do something called Smart RAW, so they do it a little bit differently, but like, RAW is RAW on the iPhone. A Pixel RAW is actually like a merged image still. So they're generating a different kind of RAW, and you can actually, I think, do some of that tone mapping.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 21:11Nilay Patel?

  This is all way out there. Like, there's no way for, we're now quickly at a point where we have to constrain how we review the cameras, because they're getting so many features and there's so many ways to use them, that if we open up the full set, like, we won't do anything else. Like, that's how we'll spend our time. And we'll be showing people like, 6,000 photos at different settings, that have no bearing on reality, which is you just pull out the phone and take a photo.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  And some years, that is the move, because that is the only differentiating thing, right?

• 21:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  This year, at least with the Pixel, it's not the only differentiating thing. Compared to, especially other Android phones, but also the iPhone, has Motion Sense, it has the high frame rate screen, it has, you know, Face Unlock, like... Other Android phones don't have that in the same combination.

• 21:56Speaker 04

  It also has orange.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, does have orange.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  Dieter and I disagree about whether the orange, the white is the number one pixel to get. I say it's orange.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, the reason you're wrong is because I love orange phones more than you. And I think that the white phone is very slightly superior. I think it makes a clearer, cleaner artistic statement about what this phone is than the orange one does.

• 22:16Nilay Patel?

  Wait, wait, connect those dots for me. What now?

• 22:19Speaker 03

  So if you hold the phone, like the black one is stupid and should go away.

• 22:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the black one's crazy black.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  And it's not a matte black back. Everything else, it's got matte sides. The aluminum rails are on the edge. And on the iPhone, you look at the aluminum rail and it's like very shiny and it's like it's kind of minimized. They don't really want you to stare. Like, it's a pretty like thing, right? On the Pixel, that rail is like black and a different color and it says, "Look at me." I made the joke that they're like big, heavy, chunky glasses in the hands on, are you right? And I think that the contrast of that black to the white is more of a like clean statement of, "Pay attention to the way that this phone is built and like how it's sort of like humble as an object and not trying to be too fancy, but it's still very well made."

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Then the orange is just like, "Look at me, I'm orange with a little bit of peach inside."

• 23:13Speaker 04

  But, sorry, back to your comparison with other Android phones. It's interesting how much stuff is in this phone that couldn't be easily done by another manufacturer. Especially because a lot of it is either like solely enabled by very specific hardware or like stuff like the camera, the voice recording thing, which seems really cool. But that's accelerated by very specific hardware.

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Yeah, so the voice recording, they can now do transcription in a new app called Recorder. It's all local on the phone. It seems very good. There is a, they can now understand more voice commands for Google Assistant locally on the phone. That makes it much faster because they're not having to send it to the cloud first. That stuff is legitimately cool. There is always an open question about whether the Pixel team gets better access to Android than the other Android vendors. This is the most complicated thing for any. Company like Google to manage, Microsoft has to manage it too, obviously with Surface devices and Windows. I did not see Hiroshi Lockheimer at this event yesterday, did you?

• 24:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  I guess two days ago. I mean, I think a lot of this stuff is Pixel stuff that makes use of Google, not custom Android stuff. And I think they have to walk that line very, very carefully.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  I think the way they walk that line is they don't get special access to Android, but they do get special access to the Google Assistant.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  I think it's actually really telling that they gave this Google Assistant thing a brand name. They call it the new assistant. And to me, that means they might give it to other phones eventually. But like, they didn't give Face Unlock a brand name. They gave a brand name to Motion Sense, they gave a brand name to their little chip, and they gave a brand name to the assistant, which is fascinating.

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, they could give anybody else the assistant, but it's just Samsung that they need to worry about. Like, they got a Bixby problem.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  You guys asked Rick about backporting some of these features to Pixel 3, and I really liked his answer, which seemed very honest, is he's got to benchmark it, right? Like, they've got to port the software to make sure it runs on there, and then they have to benchmark it on those devices. And so hopefully, some of these features will, like, maybe in a year, run on, like, Qualcomm chipsets with, you know, enough work on the software to adapt it, and then, you know, the correct benchmarking and tweaking to make sure it is actual performant. But the other, the other version is, well, was solely, you said, like, they changed hardware, so they had to throw away a whole bunch of training.

• 25:41Speaker 04

  Like, there, there is this aspect, especially with some of these machine learning things, where the hardware becomes so integral to the feature that it is, it is the feature. It's not really, it's, you know, software becomes pretty secondary to what the actual functionality is.

• 25:56Nilay Patel?

  So, an interesting version of this is the astrophotography mode, the extremely long exposure mode. Mark told us they're going to try to bring it to Pixel 3, but the sensor is a little bit different, and so they won't be able to run the exposure times as long. So I think the Pixel 4 can do, like, 15-second exposures, and the Pixel 3 can only do, like, four or five-second exposures.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  Like, it gets hot?

• 26:17Nilay Patel?

  I think they're just different chips. I don't know if, like, how it's gated, I don't know, but it's definitely gated in some way. But I think that's great, right? And also, in stark contrast to Apple being like... Uh, yeah, no, that that feature is special for the new phone. And it's like, is it? Is that? I don't know. So here's the problem that we we're gonna run into for this review. I just want to call it out directly.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  Uh, cuz it it would. When you, when you see the review, if you notice, it feels tortured. In the camera section, it's because of this. We did the entire iPhone review. What is the shadow looming over the iPhone review? The Pixel 4 is coming, right? So I'm telling you, the iPhone has a better camera than the Pixel 3. Believe it. Other people disagree with me. What is art? What is a photo? Let's have, fine. But we know that there's another version coming out, right? Like, okay, the Pixel 4's coming out. Apple says, oh, by the way, the big feature of the iPhone camera is this thing called deep fusion. Which is gonna really improve medium light shots.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 27:13Nilay Patel?

  And and they put it out, that, you know, we wrote a whole story about how it works. I grilled them with questions. Deep fusion is gonna be active, actually quite a bit, on the iPhone.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:24Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's the telephoto lens of the iPhone is almost always gonna use it unless you're in really bright sunlight. If you're inside, you're gonna get it. It's it's it's almost certainly gonna be on because you're in a low enough light situation. Well, it's not out yet. It's in the beta of iOS 13.2.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  And we can't review, we can't compare to a beta. That's not fair to to Apple or Google or anyone, yeah.

• 27:46Nilay Patel?

  It's beta software. It could, it could work, they could yank it. I mean, it's not like iOS 13 is like some very smooth operating rollout. Like, for all we know, 13.2 will come out and be like, actually, deep fusion made the phones explode. Like, we don't know what's gonna happen. Uh, so it's very unfair to review against the beta. So the shadow over the iPhone review is Pixel 4. The shadow over the Pixel 4 review is gonna be deep fusion. The difference is that it is in the beta. So in theory, we can generate some deep fusion shots and compare them. But deep fusion might not be out forever.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  They could change significantly between now and launch?

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  They could, yeah, they could, they could change the sliders of how it works.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  They could, they could actually give you some indication, the XIF data, that it's been, that it's actually been activated?

• 28:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's the other thing, they don't tell you that it's on. Oh, so you just have to, like, examine with a magnifying glass? Uh, no, there's, there's, there's one specific way to make deep fusion go on and off. It is. It is tangential. So the iPhone 11 has the shoot outside the frame feature.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:45Nilay Patel?

  Where you see the main camera, the main viewfinder and the ultra wide or depending on what camera you're using. And you see it outside. That feature is off by default. Why is it off by default? Cause when you have it on, deep fusion isn't active.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, but even if you have it off, in bright light, you aren't necessarily getting it.

• 29:01Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  So you have to stare at file sizes. You have to like zoom in. You have to, you have to take the same shot with the outside the frame on and off and then compare. And then maybe you might've figured out that there's deep fusion there.

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  Right. So I can explain why capture outside the frame turns deep fusion on and off. So deep fusion is like a new HDR mode.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  It only turns it off. It doesn't necessarily turn it on. That's the infuriating part.

• 29:22Nilay Patel?

  Right. Okay. It only turns it off. So when you have capture outside the frame on, it's using both the main camera and the wide angle. Right. And then it will, it'll, it'll notice like, oh, the horizon is off level or like you cut off this person's face. We'll grab the shot from the wider angle lens and merge it with this one. But the ultra wide camera cannot do deep fusion. So if you want that feature to be available, you have to not activate deep fusion. You can only use standard Apple HDR. You turn capture outside the frame off. Now you don't got that problem. You can do deep fusion on the wide angle or the tally. So it's like this, it's not a setting to turn, as you just pointed out, it's not a setting to turn deep fusion on and off.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  It's a setting that when on prevents deep fusion from being activated.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:10Nilay Patel?

  So, but that, that means that we're kind of like using it to see what happens when deep fusion is on.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  I see this, I see this as a challenge and I don't really know what you should do upfront for this review, but I do. The opportunity here is a real double dip on traffic.

• 30:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  You got the first comparison and then you got the versus deep fusion comparison.

• 30:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's just, I think the thing that makes it really hard, and this is like extremely inside baseball, but. I suspect our audience cares. If you don't, let me know. But it was a very clear line for me to be like, the Pixel 4 is not available. I do not have this hardware in my hands. You cannot preorder it. It has been leaked and half announced, but I haven't gone to the Google party where they'd said it's, you know, like, I'm not comparing this to Pixel 4. It's coming, that'll be fun when it's here, but it's not here. With software that's in beta, it's here.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  And people yell at me if I don't like-

• 31:09Nilay Patel?

  People are using it. Everyone called it sweater mode because we keep calling it sweater mode. Like, I'm very proud that The Verge made a meme. You know, like, that's cool, but it's still not real until it ships. And I am so hesitant for us to actually review a beta product. Because how many times in our lives have we been burned by depending on a beta? Right? So, it's, I think it's just a little bit different. I think we'll end up, Dieter, correct me if I'm wrong. I think we'll end up showing like one or two deep fusion shots. We have to, but we can't review it. And then Paul, we'll double dip and do like the big deep fusion review when that thing hits.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  Whenever.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  We should talk about the telephoto.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the super res zoom.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Super res zoom. So, Google's contention is that telephoto is more important than an ultra wide because they have super res zoom. And so then they can use the extra data from the telephoto to make super res zoom even better. In addition, they can also use, it's easier to use the data from that thing for portrait mode than an ultra wide. Therefore, given the choice between either telephoto or an ultra wide, they believe that their users would much rather have a telephoto, that they will get much more utility out of it. Why not both?

• 32:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't get it. It makes no sense to me. I mean, I will say, in all fairness, the iPhone ultra wide camera is not any good. Right? Like, it is, it is a very much worse camera than the main camera.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Neelai, the iPhone ultra wide camera is the MP3 of cameras. I love it.

• 32:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it looks-

• 32:41Speaker 03

  It sounds terrible, but it looks cool.

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  The MP3 is looking cool. This metaphor fell apart.

• 32:48Speaker 04

  I am definitely in the camp where I find more often with a phone that I wish I could zoom in than I wish I could zoom out. Like, it's cool to zoom out, but more cases where I wish I could zoom in. But yeah, like, I mean, this is a flagship phone. They clearly went flagship on several features. You know, 90 Hz, that's flagship.

• 33:05Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  A sensor that can detect the motion of your finger in a small violin sort of motion, but not really do anything with that information. That's flagship.

• 33:16Nilay Patel?

  Wait, pause. Is this your new segment? That's flagship?

• 33:19Speaker 04

  The defining feature of a flagship is it can do a thing, but it won't.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Like sweater mode. Or, or what's the U1 chip, the location?

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. I've never gotten the U1 chip to work. I feel like I could do an entire hour of the U1 chip. The fact that it doesn't appear to do anything.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Now, could you tell, could you see the screen when you were scrolling at the hands-on area? Could you see the 90 Hz? Could you see it be smoother?

• 33:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I think that's only because I have an iPad Pro and a regular iPad, and I'm very attuned to the difference of pro motion versus standard, right?

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's nice. If you turn it off, am I gonna cry? Like, no.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  But it's nice. I think the big question is like whether it destroys the battery life.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  Well, they say it won't because it's dynamic. And they can make it dynamic because, you know, they know they maybe have special access to Android.

• 34:08Speaker 04

  I'm worried about battery life because they didn't upgrade the battery in the small Pixel, right?

• 34:13Speaker 03

  2,800 mAh in the small Pixel.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  And as a Pixel 3 owner, I can tell you that it has a horrible battery life.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. We've been at this for 45 minutes. We need to take a quick break. We'll be back with all the rest of the Google stuff.

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• 35:29Speaker 10

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• 36:00Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul, we're going to do your segment early because the third segment is Zuckerberg and free speech. And I'm going to be honest with everybody. I don't think we can go from Paul's recurring segment that will save democracy to Mark Zuckerberg and whatever he's going to do to democracy. Paul, every week you do a segment.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 36:15Nilay Patel?

  What's it called?

• 36:16Speaker 04

  It's called "The Real Crime Teens Is Flavor." Now, you'll notice that there's a comma in there. It's like a, you know, you know how commas work. Teens, the crime is flavor. And the verdict is that Juul has suspended sale of fruity flavor pods. And so I just saw it.

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  From running the Trump administration's ban of said pods. Yeah, which is coming for them any second.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  I just don't know if this is the, I mean, is this like a Tide Pods thing? Like if you tell, if you tell teens that the most dangerous but delicious thing in the world is a flavored Juul pod, you know?

• 36:55Nilay Patel?

  Are teens gonna flock to it? I feel like, once you're addicted to nicotine, you're not like, "Well, no more mango." Like, you gotta figure it out.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  As a current toothpick guy, former Juul user, I will just tell you that, as someone who might want to pick up vaping for the first time, the tobacco pods taste like shit.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  And the flavor pods taste really good. And so, you smoke, you vape tobacco pods despite it, and it takes way long... Like, you know how the first time you try coffee, you're like, "Yeah", and then all of a sudden you love it? Like, you have to pour a bunch of sugar in it, milk, and then eventually you enjoy the original taste of coffee? Like, you never quite enjoy the taste of a tobacco Juul pod. It's always like, a thing you do, despite the taste.

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  So, it's literally, you're creating a forbidden fruit.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  Okay. It is, it is literally a forbidden fruit.

• 37:46Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about the Pixelbook. Okay, I'm just letting you know about the teens and their crimes. I mean, look, the teens are gonna do crimes. It's just a fact. But are they gonna do crimes using the new $649 Pixelbook?

• 37:58Speaker 03

  Uh, wow, I can't, I don't know what to do with that.

• 38:02Nilay Patel?

  Just try it, Dieter.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  That transition doesn't work at all.

• 38:05Nilay Patel?

  I think this thing is, uh, it's actually very pretty. That's what I got.

• 38:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 38:08Nilay Patel?

  I don't like that it has a 16:9 screen.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  Hmm, it's very pretty. Uh, I do not like that it has a 16:9 screen either. Um, it's also, to me, personally, very confusing, because I just did, uh, the, you know, best Chromebook you can buy. This is my next Chromebook. And there are approximately 10, I mean, like, it's more like 6 Chromebooks, that all have the exact same specs and motherboard, like, down to like, the placement of like, the micro SD card slot. And this is like, one step up from all of those, but it also costs $100, you know, $150 more than those. So, do you spend the extra money to get something that, spec-wise, is like, comparable slash only slightly better? Uh, but you also get like, the Google name brand, and the, you know, very quiet keyboard? You guys, the keyboard is so good.

• 38:53Nilay Patel?

  I love that we are now in a zone where everyone is dunking on Apple for their keyboard, regardless of the price point of the laptop they're putting out. Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  So, so I've felt a the, the, the, the baddest Apple keyboard and then the, the new, the new Apple keyboard, which is slightly less bad, but still mostly as bad. And then there's like, you know, well, there's the Pixelbook, which is a great keyboard. I always enjoyed. I never, you know, gushed about it. And then there's like a ThinkPad keyboard. And, you know, there's different levels of key travel, but ThinkPad keyboards have, you know, are mostly thought of as, as very good. So where, where would you put it in all that?

• 39:32Speaker 03

  It's different. It's, they, they make it a quiet, it's an, it's an evolution of the Pixelbook, original Pixelbook keyboard. They just made it quieter. So it feels softer, but it's also springy. So you don't get a clack out of it. So if you like that satisfying mechanical keyboard clack, like this is, you're not going to love this. But if you don't care about that, you just want good key travel, quiet keys that like hit when you, when you tap them with your finger. You're going to love this keyboard. You know, I've only spent like an hour with it. So like, I could be, I could be completely wrong about this, but.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  I want my key to move so I know I've pressed the key, but I don't want to work too hard.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. This, this is like, this is like typing on a, a springy cloud.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  Oh. I mean, what I like about it is that I, I love the fact that in now the Google ecosystem, Google is making what appears to be all the default devices, right? They're making a play for the Pixel to be the default Android phone. They gotta actually sell them, but like, it's a phone of that quality. It's on all the carriers in the United States. Maybe that'll work out. The Pixelbook Go feels like, okay, this is a great 650 bucks. It's really well made, first party support. This is the default Chromebook. That's great. You can also spec it up to like $1,400, which seems. Chromebook and 4K display. That's where we live now. And then they're doing the thing that every company is doing now, uh, which is they've made ecosystem locked in headphones.

• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  It makes me sadder.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  They they made the headphones I want I've wanted somebody to make, assuming they're good.

• 40:56Nilay Patel?

  So the Pixel Buds Generation 2, that's not their actual name, but you gotta call them something. The new Pixel Buds. Uh, they're very small. They kinda look like hearing aids. Just putting it out there. They're like little circles, but they go in your ear. They have a little flange to clip in your ear. Circles in your ear are the new thing. That's like, Microsoft made big circles for your ear. Google made little circles for your ear. That's what we're that's what we're at.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Will I am was right.

• 41:18Nilay Patel?

  Sure. They I I got to wear the hardware. The hardware was not functional because they don't work yet. They're not coming out until spring 2020, which is a million years from now. Especially because there's a holiday season with AirPods to contend with in that time. Uh, and I I can't convince America that AirPods sound bad, so people are just gonna keep buying AirPods. Uh, that's fine. People love AirPods. I no, no disrespect if you're an AirPods person. I just think they sound bad. These potentially sound very good, right? I mean, Google.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Who knows?

• 41:53Nilay Patel?

  Who knows? But Google says they fit in your ear, they seal, they have some bass. They're like vented specially, so you don't get that outside, uh, that feeling of being insulated. You get a little outside sound. They have this feature called, uh, environmental audio where the like the earbuds sense when you're in a loud environment and adjust the volume of your phone. They work with the assistant. You can just say, hey, Google, they like, all of this sounds great in theory. Uh, but they they don't work yet. Rick Ostello's worked, he's told us.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  But he didn't prove it.

• 42:22Nilay Patel?

  I will say that. He waved him at us tauntingly in that interview, but he didn't actually let us listen to him.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  So look, it's a USB C case with wireless charging that is relatively small. These are all things that the Samsung Buds do.

• 42:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  It's in ear, but it's in ear with that little vent, so it doesn't feel too wacky. So that's good. It has some on bud controls, right? You can like do stuff on the bud, so that's good.

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, it says they do. I tapped them, but they weren't working, so they didn't do anything.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  So like, they just have to sound good and they have to have good microphones. That's where the Galaxy Buds just fail. If the Galaxy Buds had good microphones, I would just say that everyone should buy them.

• 42:59Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  But they don't, so no one should.

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  And then they have a special Bluetooth radio that lets them work at massive distances. And Google, historically not good at Bluetooth. And Rick told us, I don't know if this made it in the interview, but he said they'd worked really hard on the Pixel Bluetooth stack. And that compared with the new Pixel, the Pixel Buds actually go even farther than they claim. So, again, we will have to see.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  What does pair with a single tap mean? Like, there's some sort of easy pairing with Android?

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  So, yeah, I think Android N and up has an easy pair situation. And I think mostly the previous Pixel Buds use them and these Pixel Buds will use them. I don't know.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Some random third parties, like Jabra's might, or like Anchors might, there's like Jbirds. There's like, there's a couple others that use it. It's basically what you expect. It pops up a big like bubble that has a picture of the headphones and then you tap pair and you're done.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So that's cool. I mean, they're gonna come out, we'll see. I mean, like, it's a long time from now, so we'll see. Rick told us, like, "Look, we're not having another event, so we just announced them." Here they are. That's fine. There's a bunch of Nest stuff. I actually, I don't think it's that interesting. Like, the new Nest Mini, you can mount it to a wall because of the little keyhole slot. Cool. Sounds a little bit better.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  They do some local machine learning. It's not as, it doesn't go nearly as far as the phone does. But they will learn things that it could theoretically do locally over time and not need to ping the internet for them. So, the promise is that after the fifth time you turn on your lights, it won't need to ask the servers how to do that anymore.

• 44:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  They're re-architecting the works with Nest programs. That stuff is a little bit more local. That is so hard to explain what's going on there. But we were talking to Rishi Chandra and he's like, "Look, the current way the smart home works where you have a light bulb that talks to the hue base station that goes up to the cloud, that talks to our cloud. And then our cloud says, 'turn on,' and it goes back to their cloud, back to that base." He's like, "That is bad, very bad for a million reasons. We're gonna get away from that." So now they're doing this whole thing where they're gonna audit vendors who need to see data from your home. And everything else will be routines inside of the Assistant. And it's very smart. We are just gonna have to see how that plays out.

• 45:16Nilay Patel?

  That is a big shift, a big ask for that entire industry to move that way. And then there's obviously the new Nest Google Wi-Fi. Nest Wi-Fi?

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Nest Wi-Fi. Nest Wi-Fi router and Nest Wi-Fi points. The points are basically double-tall Google mini speakers. So they actually should theoretically sound... Nest mini speakers? God damn it. So they've got a little bit more air, so they sound better, who knows? And two is supposed to cover the same space as three of the Google Wi-Fi. It's 270 bucks for a two-pack. If you want to go buy the two-pack on Amazon, we don't know what it costs. And we also won't come at the point with the assistant in it because Amazon refuses to sell Google speakers. They're making a special two-router pack just for Amazon.

• 46:02Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 46:03Nilay Patel?

  I like... I mean, I don't love that Eero got bought. You know, everyone knows how I feel about this. Consolidation's bad, break 'em up, etc. I do like the idea that Amazon and Google are in a router fight. No Wi-Fi 6 in the Google routers, Rishit told us. It's just not ready yet. Eero famously also does not have Wi-Fi 6. So if you're trying to live on the bleeding edge...

• 46:20Speaker 03

  No set-aside channel for backhaul. But Google says they don't need it. They're like, "We figured out how to route massage traffic on the servers that run the internet, that run Google. So we think we can handle it with your Wi-Fi network." It's like, okay.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  The Netgear just came out with some new, like, very cheap Orbeez as well.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they look cute.

• 46:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, router fight is on. Dan Seifer does nothing but review routers lately. And lastly, they announced the launch date for Stadia, November. It's very exciting. It turns out, though, that Stadia controller needs to be plugged in an awful lot. It's like it's only wireless if you use a Chromecast? That seems strange to me.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  It's real bad. Like, I'm actually super bummed about this. It'll be in the newsletter this morning when you are listening to this tomorrow. Time is hard. I had expected, because this thing had been shown often in beta and just out there for so long, that they would just have this launch wrapped up. And they clearly don't. Wireless audio isn't working super well. Now that you gotta plug this thing in to work with your phone, like... There's like a bunch of like, oh yeah, this doesn't quite work as well as we promised, that have been leaking out over the past couple of weeks, and it's a huge bummer.

• 47:31Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think this is gonna be the story of all cloud gaming. I mean, we're in the...

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, Xcloud, Microsoft Xcloud. Tom tried to do a hands-on with the beta for that, and it also was like, huh.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're not, we're not quite ready for it. But it's, as they say, Dieter, early days.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  I hate you.

• 47:47Nilay Patel?

  That's the name of my podcast about features that are, don't ship. Early days, a flagship story. All right, I think that's all the Google stuff.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:55Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it was a lot. We have a lot to review. I'm sorry that I talked about the inner workings of our deep fusion conundrum for so long, but it's on my mind. Dieter's gonna have to figure it out. Sorry, buddy.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  All me I did was just basically speak the thing that I was like ranting at him in Slack earlier today. I was like, this is, blah, blah, blah.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  The best part of the Vergecast is when I just read Dieter's slacks as my own thoughts. Welcome to the Verge, everybody. All right, we're gonna take a break. We'll be back with Casey and Addy to talk about this Facebook situation.

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• 49:59Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. So, big news today. Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech about free speech at Georgetown in a hall that, like, heads of state have given speeches in, in DC. I didn't get to see the speech. I was in a meeting, but I read some transcripts. But Addie, you're here. Casey, you're here. You watched this thing. Casey, tell me what you thought of it.

• 50:23Speaker 13

  I thought the speech was more interesting for why Zuckerberg gave it than what it said. And I thought it was interesting in the way that it positions Facebook against some of the other tech companies in Silicon Valley, right? So, over the past few weeks, a big debate has broken out over, in particular, should Facebook permit lies in political ads? And Elizabeth Warren has led the charge in saying they absolutely should not. They are profiting from misinformation. And there is a moral case against this company profiting from misinformation. And Facebook just hasn't had that much to say about that so far. And so, this speech today from Zuckerberg was a way of saying, "Look, if a politician wants to lie, we think that there should be a record of that.

• 51:08Speaker 13

  And we think that the citizens of the democracy should discuss it, and it should not be incumbent on a private company to police that speech." So, he wanted to make essentially a counter-moral case for Facebook's decisions.

• 51:21Nilay Patel?

  So, give me just a sense of the speech itself. It's very long. I couldn't locate like a thesis, but tell me what you-

• 51:30Speaker 13

  It wasn't that, it was like 40 minutes. I mean, when you think about the kind of televised speeches that leaders give, it wasn't that long.

• 51:38Nilay Patel?

  I guess, I'm only reading the transcript, so I'm looking at it, I'm like, wow, that's a lot of scrolling. Okay, oh, it's only 40 minutes, but I couldn't really grasp the thesis. Tell me what it actually contained.

• 51:49Speaker 13

  So Zuckerberg is really staking this next iteration of Facebook's future on the idea that the company is about voice and inclusion and connection. And that the company is making the bet that the world will get better if people are connected and can share their voices. And so he wanted to make a case for that. And then, in what was definitely the worst part of the speech, he sort of retconned the origin of Facebook from being about the rating of hot people on campus, which is how it actually started, to being about a way to let people protest the Iraq war. Which, to be clear, that was not the reason why Facebook was started, and certainly the

• 52:31Speaker 13

  existence of Facebook didn't seem to have much effect on the unfolding of the Iraq war. It really did strike me, I was saying this to Dieter before we got started, there's almost something poignant about the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has no lived life experience, like in between college and starting Facebook. And so when he wants to talk about formative experiences in his life, there's like the two years of college and the stuff that happened to him while he was the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world. So, he's kind of like at a weird disadvantage there, just kind of coming across as a normal person.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's true, he can't be like, when Yahoo wanted to buy my company, something that we've all experienced. Which he's done in the past, that's an example he's used, it's like, I don't- Well, actually, can I just read? This is how the speech started.

• 53:13Speaker 14

  Yeah, the low point is at the beginning of the speech.

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  And Addy, I know you're digging into it, so I want to ask you about it. But let me just read, this is literally how it began, and I could not get past this when I was reading the transcript. So here's Zuckerberg. "When I was in college, our country had just gone to war in Iraq. The mood on campus was disbelief. It felt like we were acting without hearing a lot of important perspectives." I feel like I could put a big asterisk there, but I'll just move on. The total unsoldier families are nationalist like he was severe and most of us are powerless. Stop it. I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently. Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better. Back then, I was building an early version of Facebook for my community, another asterisk, and I got to see these beliefs play out at a smaller scale.

• 53:57Nilay Patel?

  I want to do the thing, you know, like Genius, where like you hit stop and it's just me screaming, like, "A lot of people protested the Iraq war. There was not some confusion in this country about whether that was a bad idea."

• 54:10Speaker 14

  But if they protested on Facebook...

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  But if they used Facebook, maybe it wouldn't have happened.

• 54:15Speaker 13

  Let me play devil's advocate, though, which is, um, the Me Too movement did not happen before social media. Black Lives Matter did not happen before social media. The Arab Spring did not happen before social media, right?

• 54:25Nilay Patel?

  Fair.

• 54:25Speaker 13

  So there have been these number of, of, uh, sort of groundswells of public opinion that do seem like they have benefited from the viral machinery of social networks. And I do think we have to keep that in mind as we're weighing it against the, you know, many obvious negative consequences.

• 54:38Speaker 14

  I think this is the problem with the speech, which is that he is making a lot of points that are good, but in ways that are extremely disingenuous. Like, the ridiculous thing is not that Facebook could have helped, like, that social media could help the Arab Spring or cases like this. It's that Mark Zuckerberg certainly did not start it with the intention of doing that.

• 54:55Nilay Patel?

  And that's how this opens. So, Addie, you're literally writing a piece about Facebook's inception in itself. Give us the, sort of, the actual thing that happened.

• 55:03Speaker 14

  Uh, so the timeline is, we invade Iraq in March of 2003, uh, after millions of people protest. In October, um, the chief weapons inspector says there were no weapons of mass destruction. Um, in early November, Mark Zuckerberg almost gets kicked out of Harvard for starting a Hot or Not clone using Facebook, uh, using photos on Facemash, which would later become Facebook, uh, through a series of not being Facebook.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:27Speaker 14

  It was the predecessor of Facebook.

• 55:29Nilay Patel?

  I imagine, I mean, I was in college at that time. Yep, people on campus were certainly talking about the war. But there's no correlation here. And I think that...

• 55:38Speaker 14

  Also, Facebook was explicitly, it was one of the less broadcast folk and, like, voice-focused things. Like, the point was that you could become friends with a person that you had met on campus. Like, it was explicitly touted as a thing where, oh, yeah, you're connecting just with people you already know. You are, you, this isn't like MySpace, you're not gonna try to put yourself out there as a star. It's to help people get to know each other. It's like a yearbook.

• 56:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 56:02Nilay Patel?

  And there was no news feed, there was no engine of virality.

• 56:05Speaker 14

  Oh god, we hated the news feed when it started.

• 56:07Speaker 13

  Yeah, like, these points are all so deeply true that we should just move on. Like, the opening of the speech was a, like, a calamity. I think the more interesting stuff is him positioning Facebook as a moral leader at a time when other companies are deeply compromised by their relations to China and are going to just have to do all kinds of horrible things that we Americans like. And Facebook, by virtue of the fact that it was never allowed in, in the first place, has this wide open lane to be a champion of American values. And like, that is actually what is interesting about this speech to me.

• 56:42Nilay Patel?

  I agree with that. It's funny, Josh Hawley, Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, who we talk about all the time. He's the conservative crusader against big tech. He just met with Zuckerberg, and so his response to the speech was a series of tweets being like, "When I met with Zuckerberg and asked about China, he said, well, if he was there, he'd have to censor to comply with the local laws. But now that he's not there, this is so convenient." Like, Josh Hawley is not buying this read. I do see this speech as Zuckerberg trying to rally the conservatives, who are always complaining about conservative bias, who are always complaining about censorship, around him. And for them to say, "He cares about free speech, here are the difficult trade-offs he has to make."

• 57:22Nilay Patel?

  To make it clear that he is not trying to censor if you believe that it is happening. But he is actually on their side. And that is, I think, very clever. But it conflates two very important things. One, Facebook is not all of social media. And the case he makes most broadly is for social media to exist, not necessarily for Facebook to exist. And then it conflates Facebook's ability to moderate in a difficult environment, with some difficult trade-offs, with its size. Right? Like, I think one of the more subtle claims here is that only by achieving its size and scale can Facebook even begin to handle the moderation challenge.

• 58:06Nilay Patel?

  Of the modern internet. And I that, I mean, I think everybody listening to this knows I don't believe that necessarily that Facebook needs that scale. But this is, you know, Casey, the audio you had, he pointed out the election safety team, they spend more on it than Twitter's entire revenue and then everyone laughed. And in this one, he points out that their moderation effort costs more than their revenue at launch, their revenue at IPO. So he's making this implicit case for Facebook to be huge.

• 58:31Speaker 13

  When the truth is like your problems scale with your size. Facebook had zero content moderators when it was at Harvard, right? But then they brought more people onto the platform and those people caused more problems. So then they had to hire people to like go clean up those messes. And then eventually the problems became far worse than their moderators could get a grip on and they've been playing catch up ever since. So yes, I agree. The size is the real issue. It's a thing that nobody ever wants to talk about because the unstated logic in all of this is please let us find an ideology that will let us maintain the status quo. Right? And like that is what this is. This is a way like, how can Facebook exist as it is today, but under some sort of unifying moral banner and rallying cry that will still entice college seniors who are smart to want to work there.

• 59:16Speaker 13

  Right? Like to me, that's, that's like the backdrop for all of this. But, uh, you know, as somebody who's been watching all of these companies just trip all over themselves with regard to China, I like, I am on Facebook's side here in, in that specific way. I do want to see a, a, a social network that allows a wide range of free speech on political subjects, including stuff that I don't agree with and makes me super uncomfortable. Right? And at the same time, you look at what, uh, Apple is about to go through, uh, you look at what Blizzard is already going through. There are so many, you know, American companies that, that have Chinese ownership interests. And there is like, like Zuckerberg is smart to see that he has an open lane when it comes

• 1:00:00Speaker 13

  to just championing a, what has historically been a very foundational American value. And he can kind of go wave that flag. And guess who can't? Tim Cook.

• 1:00:11Nilay Patel?

  But Tim Cook's gonna wave that flag when he wants to.

• 1:00:13Speaker 04

  Notably, the one true big competitor on the horizon is just actually a Chinese company, TikTok.

• 1:00:21Speaker 13

  Yes, like, there could be no better time for TikTok to have emerged. There, as I was walking into the studio, TechCrunch put up an article that says TikTok makes education push in India. And in my mind, like, the education pushes, have you heard about Chairman Xi and what a great guy he is? That's not what the story is about. But, like, but yeah, like, you have a very fast-growing social network that is explicitly banning political speech, including speech of the variety that I think, you know, us sitting in this podcast, we all agree, is super innocuous. And so, you know, like, again, and like, sort of on accident, Mark Zuckerberg gets to be a free speech champion.

• 1:01:02Speaker 13

  The other point that I wanted to make is, you know, when it comes to this fight over censorship, like, this whole thing is such a gift to Mark Zuckerberg, right? My entire Twitter timeline all morning has been media Twitter, just like, sort of like, dunking on the speech, being like, lol, Mark Zuckerberg, you need to be censored more, you know? And like, they're sort of creating a perfect bogeyman for him to be able to sort of walk through the middle of and say, well, now, I do agree, we need to take down the stuff that is inciting violence, but broadly speaking, we want to invite a maximum range of free speech. And then he gets to show that entire debate to every conservative who he sits down with and says, look, I'm the person you want in this fight. I'm the person standing up for you, right?

• 1:01:46Speaker 13

  Like, you should go take your complaint to TikTok if you want to be mad about censorship on social networks, right? So this entire debate has been a gift to Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:01:53Speaker 14

  Well, he also implied, basically, that Elizabeth Warren and everyone who criticizes Facebook for fake news ads is acting in bad faith because they don't like Trump.

• 1:02:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think that's like, it's just such a given for them now. It's such a, it's a winner of an argument, right? If you, if you had a Republican presidential candidate who was not prone to lying in the way that Trump lies, like, maybe the shape of this debate is different. I think one real problem Facebook has is if it enforces a policy against lies in political ads, it might have to refuse all of the ads from the Trump campaign in 2020. Because Trump is extremely prone to lying. That is a very hard position to be in after the 2016 election, after the Russian interference, without a hundred year history of being ABC News and vetting political ads against a set of standards. Like, they don't have this

• 1:02:45Nilay Patel?

  long-range policy, or this long-range institutional history of this is what we do and this is how we're, we're sticking to our guns, right? Like, we're important, we're the elites, we're gonna like, manage the flow. Like, Facebook doesn't have any of that. They're just under siege.

• 1:03:01Speaker 04

  I would like to push back on that a little bit in your tone, making it sound like Trump has somehow invented lying in politics.

• 1:03:09Nilay Patel?

  No, I, I mean, half of our show is us pointing out that politicians are lying. Like, sure, I agree with you. I think that the amount and tone and tenor of those lies is qualitatively different.

• 1:03:20Speaker 14

  Actually, Casey, I'm curious what you think about his explanation for why they don't just ban political ads. Which, as I remember, amounted to, A, we would have to ban a huge swath of things because a bunch of things are political, and B-

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  Or issue ads.

• 1:03:31Speaker 14

  Yeah, you'd have to ban issue ads, and B, if we don't allow these ads, then it will favor incumbents because people already know about them and smaller candidates won't be able to get their voices out.

• 1:03:40Speaker 13

  I think that the bigger concern, the more practical concern is that first one. And I know it, because after they rolled out these new requirements for political advertisers, like, you have to, you know, we're gonna send a postcard to a physical mailing address to make sure that you're not a fake account, there were so many stories about these advertisers that are like, "I just wanted to put up a sign that says, 'Hey, recycle at work,' and they're making me register as a political advertiser." And it turns out that determining what is political is a content moderation job like any other, where at the edges, it gets really, really tricky, and you enrage everybody on all sides. And so, yeah, the question of what counts as a political ad does get, you know, really tricky.

• 1:04:23Speaker 14

  I usually agree with that, but I feel like maybe you could ban campaign ads. Like, I feel like that is actually a thing that you could maybe draw a line at.

• 1:04:29Speaker 13

  Or-

• 1:04:30Speaker 14

  I don't know if you should, but that seems like-

• 1:04:32Speaker 13

  Or PSC ads, right?

• 1:04:32Speaker 14

  Yeah. That seems like a thing that if you wanted to do, you could do.

• 1:04:35Speaker 13

  Take a step back, though, like it, I find it honestly incredible that we're having a discussion over essentially whether the elected officials of this country and the politicians we elect to represent us can be trusted to take out ads on social networks. Like, we think, we do, we do not trust them to the degree we think we should take away their right to buy an ad lest some of them lie to us. And, and I really think you should drill down on like, what is the thing that you're afraid? Like, yes, Trump tells horrible, horrible lies, right? The lies themselves are not actually what worries me about Trump, though. It's the policies. It's when he builds cages and puts children in them, right? Like, that's what I would fricking like to ban.

• 1:05:19Speaker 13

  If he wants to take an ad that says that Elizabeth Warren is, you know, is like secretly a lizard person and like she's drinking the blood of children, like, it's stupid, it's horrible, it's offensive, you know, he's also used what is arguably a racial slur, right? Like, related to her heritage, and he's been doing that on Facebook ads. I think that's like really gross, but all of this goes to like, do, do we not want to know who our politicians are? Is it not helpful to us to know when they are liars? Is it not helpful to the democracy to have a robust debate that is enabled by, by, you know, the free press about who these people are, what they're lying about, what is the truth? Like, to me, this just all feels like it's actually part of a healthy democracy, and to take that away from politicians altogether seems possibly hysterical.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  That is naive. Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, the division of Facebook. Political ads on Facebook are of a different tenor than political ads on TV. They're much more convincing, they have a much higher opportunity to go viral. It's much less clear what their providence is. They come in a context where you might think it's like actually coming from your friend or your friend endorsed it in addition to being the thing that the thing that the politician made. And so, to, to say that, like, we should allow it because then we'll know if they're lying or not, well, them doing the lying is already like tilting the conversation in a toxic way. On, in a different way on Facebook than it happens in a newspaper or on TV or in a radio.

• 1:06:40Speaker 13

  Well, so one interesting proposal that gets bandied about as a potential solution to this problem is, what if you permit political ads on Facebook, but you ban microtargeting? So essentially, if Trump has something that he wants to say on Facebook, he has to say it to the whole country, right? He can't say one thing to the soccer moms and another thing to the NASCAR dads. And people sort of speculate that this would encourage candidates to maybe retreat to more centrist messages and would not try to sneak a bunch of really inflammatory stuff under the radar that's only going to affect the most vulnerable populations.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  So that, it's funny, I think it's really, we're at a point now where we're up against the First Amendment, right? Like, Facebook has its own set of First Amendment rights. They can, they can, they can show people what they want. It's very difficult. So now you're at a point where you're getting to that, again, the Josh Hawley zone of, what if I ban autoplay videos? Right? Like, what if I restrict the feature set of this software platform because it has some broader cultural impact that I don't like? Casey, I agree with you. We should know when politicians are lying. Like, they do it. It's weird to think that you're going to vote for somebody who's known for being a liar. At the same time, Facebook is like, it's a private platform, and I think the challenge

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  is that it's so big, right? If it was, like, we are not having this conversation about Reddit, right? Like, we are, we are just absolutely not having this conversation, right? It's still pretty big. We are not having this conversation about the comment section of the New York Times, right? Any other place where there is widespread political activity. We are not really having this conversation about Twitter. The president is like, we're having a conversation where the president should be allowed on Twitter, but that is not about his ads, right? Like, it's bizarre, it's Facebook's scale or its perceived ability, I think because of 2016. To drive an election outcome, that we are more, I think, concerned about its behavior and what it does and doesn't allow.

• 1:08:43Speaker 13

  You're right, and I just want to say one quick thing on that point, because this gets at the heart of my criticism of Zuckerberg's speech, was that it accepts as a given that the platform is neutral, and the platform is not neutral, for all of the reasons that you just mentioned, right? Like, Facebook is a medium, the medium shapes the debate, and because of its size, it affects the debate too. And so, we have to talk about the ways that the platform is not neutral, we have to talk about what it incentivizes, we have to talk about who benefits by its existence and who loses out, and all of that stuff is just as important as this sort of high-minded principle of free speech.

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  I don't like the conception of the issue that there are smart people, either at Facebook, or at government, or in some think-take, that could somehow better determine what is true than the rubes who, you know, just mindlessly click things on Facebook. Because there's this, I don't like that as a dichotomy, because there's nothing essentially or definitively certain about some person running a platform, or someone advising a platform, or someone legislating a platform, being definitively better at accessing the truth than a user of that platform.

• 1:09:57Nilay Patel?

  Sure, I mean, I think one of the problems with Facebook is that it's very easy to lie on that platform, right? And then Facebook has a context collapse problem, which is what Dieter was getting at before, which is, lies look like not, lies look like other content, ads look like real content, fake news, like, literally, that before that term turned into whatever it turned into now, was literally about websites that were fake, that were made to look like news websites. In Facebook context collapsed that, so it was very hard to tell the difference.

• 1:10:29Speaker 14

  I think you can also not, like, you can frame it as being very patronizing, and I think a lot of people do, and it's very annoying. I think you can also frame it as a service. Like, we shouldn't want, we shouldn't expect users to have to go through and factor absolutely everything they see on Facebook. Like, there's a way in which you can frame it, like, Facebook may not have better access to the truth, but it can make, like, put people toward this that actually have the time and want to put in the effort to try to sort this thing out, so that individual users are not supposed to be expected to, like, go through and definitively track down every lie on Facebook. I don't know if I agree with that, but I think it's a thing that is a better framing than whether people are too stupid to know whether something's true.

• 1:11:07Nilay Patel?

  Right, and if Facebook, for example, had a competitor that was better at it, it might compete on that axis, but it doesn't. So, Addie, you cover speech on the internet very broadly. I tend to think of a lot of your stories as asking a very fundamental question, which is like, what's allowed on the internet? Whether that's like, Cloudflare taking sites down, or Microsoft removing Gab, or like, whether ads can be bought on Facebook. Like, it's all of a piece. Like, what gets to go here? I read this speech, and it seems like that there's a straw man at the center of it, which is, free expression is under attack, right? And I don't know, like, there was an entire debate about Section 230 in Congress yesterday, and not one person was like, "We need to get rid of Section 230."

• 1:11:52Nilay Patel?

  Not one person really was like, "We need to step, we need to define more content moderation policies for platforms." I didn't hear that. You listened to it more carefully than I did. But is that central conceit that free expression is, like, under attack? Is that real, the way that Zuckerberg seems to be framing it, is real?

• 1:12:09Speaker 14

  I can't tell, because I'm, first of all, biased to think that it always is. I think you can fairly make the case that, like, it is under attack in China, and that whether or not he's being alarmist is kind of another question. But like, definitely within China, it is under attack, and that I think there are also, like- The New York Times is constantly publishing things that dance right up against should we outlaw hate speech. Like, they had to publish a correction that's like, actually, the First Amendment protects hate speech.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:12:36Speaker 14

  Like, I think that that might be overblown, like, that that doesn't necessarily mean we are anywhere near restricting that, but I think it's a part of the conversation.

• 1:12:43Nilay Patel?

  Do you think-

• 1:12:44Speaker 14

  I think the question is whether people have enough influence, like, whether that actually is a thing or just people talking on the internet.

• 1:12:48Speaker 13

  Yeah, and I mean, also, like, there's, like, it can both be true that there is not an actual legal assault on the First Amendment, and also, people are facing extraordinary consequences for free speech. You know, my favorite example of that is the NBA guy, Waiz, who had a show in China about, like, the NBA in China, and he liked the now infamous Daryl Morey tweet expressing support for the Hong Kong protesters, and his show was canceled. Like, that kind of thing is happening a lot these days, and to me, that is an assault on free speech, right? Because if you're gonna lose your job because you like a tweet, then we have entered new territory.

• 1:13:29Speaker 14

  I think also, internet infrastructure is, like, if you make it impossible to get online, even if you have the First Amendment, then to some extent, speech is being suppressed, like, just in a practical manner. Like, if there's no way to really get the thing that you want online, which, getting kicked off Facebook does not do that, getting kicked off every internet infrastructure provider kind of does.

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, this is the conflation I see between the government and, like, what the society has decided to do around speech, right? The United States government did not fire dude for criticizing China. The Chinese government certainly might have helped, but that is the huge difference in kind. The amount of consequences people face for what they post on social media in their private lives has really nothing to do with the government's approach to free speech, and it has nothing to do with Facebook's content moderation policy.

• 1:14:14Speaker 13

  I think it does, and here's why.

• 1:14:17Nilay Patel?

  How's that?

• 1:14:18Speaker 13

  Because all of us, we live in two states. We live in the country we live in, and then we live on the internet that we live in. And the debate that we're having right now is, are we gonna live on an American internet or a Chinese internet?

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  So that's, you think that's the actual underlying principle of this speech?

• 1:14:31Speaker 13

  Yes, like we, like we, we talk about Facebook as a private company because it is, but it is also a quasi-state that 2 billion people live on. And so, speech policy there does have these really dramatic consequences. And I think the question of, is it going to be a place that embodies these American values? Or is Chinese Softbauer just going to keep expanding until, you know, TikTok is the most popular social network in the world and it's, you know, it's the one that I want to interact with all my friends on. And hey, I want to express some support for those Hong Kong protesters. And boom, my account gets nuked, right? Like, that, like, that world is not too far off. Like, we are seeing it break out, like, this month in ways we never have before. So, that is, I think, like, super relevant context.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  So Casey, Addy, did, like, those stakes to me, sound like really dire. Like, that, that makes this whole conversation feel much more, like, relevant and much less, let's dunk on Mark Zuckerberg for spouting platitudes about free speech than before. Did he, in the speech that he gave, actually, like, effectively communicate those stakes? Or was it lost? Like, did he not have the guts to say it that, that directly?

• 1:15:37Speaker 14

  I mean, maybe Casey disagrees with me on that, but I feel this, but I think what Eli's saying is right. That the problem is just that he presented the American internet. It's not the American internet, it's Facebook. Like, it's weird that the framing that he has effectively given us, which we have accepted, is that the only option is TikTok versus Facebook. That there's no internet outside, that there's not a world where we don't have these companies.

• 1:15:59Speaker 13

  If you will forgive me, I wish to read a paragraph from Mark Zuckerberg's very long speech about free speech.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  Oh, now you say it's long. It's just 40 minutes, Casey.

• 1:16:07Speaker 13

  I've come around to your way of thinking. Here's what he says. "This raises a larger question about the future of the global internet. China is building its own internet focused on very different values and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries. Until recently, the internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by American platforms with strong free expression values. There's no guarantee these values will win out. A decade ago, almost all the major internet platforms were American. Today, six of the top 10 are Chinese." And, so, so yes, so he, he is bringing that context in. He is not just talking about Facebook. He is talking about which internet do you want to live on?

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  So, Facebook is in many countries that are not the United States, that are not China.

• 1:16:47Nilay Patel?

  Those countries have radically different speech regimes. They follow those laws. How do you, how do you square that? How do you square, I'm the champion of American values. I will export them around the world. I will stand up to Chinese platform censorship with, when we operate in Europe, we have to comply with European speech regulations. When we operate in Germany, we don't let people post about Nazis.

• 1:17:12Speaker 13

  I think the historical justification has been, get inside the country, adapt to their local laws, but then use your soft power over time to permit more speech in the hopes that more speech will lead to better outcomes. Like, that has been kind of the, the policy framework under which they've operated. It has required some compromises, like some of which are hypocritical. Something that I think is very worth pointing out is that had Chairman Xi allowed Zuckerberg into China, like, this speech would have read completely differently, right?

• 1:17:44Speaker 14

  Facebook was in China until 2009.

• 1:17:46Speaker 13

  Yeah, and, and was like, until very recently was like, setting up weird, like, little subsidiaries to work on like tiny little social apps, right? So like, yeah, and that's like very, very fresh.

• 1:17:55Nilay Patel?

  Mark Zuckerberg learned Mandarin. I'm just putting that there.

• 1:17:58Speaker 13

  He asked Chairman Xi what he should name his child. So, all of that is super relevant context, you know? But I think it is sometimes the case that even if they wind up there for sort of craven, personal, greedy, selfish reasons, they can wind up having a positive effect, or they can stand up for a, an important value. And I sort of think that's what Facebook has fallen into here.

• 1:18:24Nilay Patel?

  So what happens next?

• 1:18:25Speaker 13

  Well, okay, so here, so I kind of went through a journey last week as I was thinking through, do I think Facebook should permit lies in political ads or not? And where it ultimately came down was, regardless of whether or not you believe in the principle, here is what is probably going to happen. In the 2020 election, there are going to be multiple, and maybe very frequent, lies in political ads. Many of them are going to- ...go viral, and in every single case, you're going to get politicians and the press standing up saying, "Look at this disinformation for-profit machine that has been spun up,

• 1:19:09Speaker 13

  and look at it at how it is corroding the fabric of our democracy." And I think that drumbeat is going to get so loud, and I think it's going to dramatically hurt the morale of Facebook employees, and I think they will be forced to change the policy. I just think whatever you think of the, uh, the sort of principles involved here, I think practically the policy is untenable. So that is my prediction for what happens next.

• 1:19:32Nilay Patel?

  Addie, what do you think?

• 1:19:33Speaker 14

  I think that makes sense. I think it's also, back to, we were talking about whether it's weird to not let politicians speak on Facebook. Like, the issue is also that we're fundamentally talking about ads. We're fundamentally talking about, like, politicians can put what they want there, but like, Facebook is collecting money to like, let them, give them extra reach. Like, I think it is also plausible that they will cordon that off. I mean, they kind of did before.

• 1:19:55Nilay Patel?

  My much more spiral-out conspiracy theory, and I was thinking about this a lot because of the 230 hearing yesterday. Facebook is, as far as I can tell, nowhere on 230. They have no real loud public position about it. They're not advocating for it to stay, they're not advocating for it to go. I think Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are very happy to accept an outcome where we just treat Facebook as an inevitable giant, where we turn them into the national champion of United States values, we regulate them very tightly, and then they are cemented as an information distribution monopoly in this country, and they continue to collect those monopoly profits. You take 230 away, Facebook says, "Now we spend 3X Twitter's revenue on monitoring every post before it goes up," because there's that scary liability.

• 1:20:40Nilay Patel?

  No one else can afford that. So everyone just come on and use Facebook. We've got it. We are, we are gonna export American values around the globe. You have this fight about political advertising. They accept some massive political advertising regulation scheme, and you glue that onto Facebook, and now you've got 45 more lawyers looking at everything a campaign does, and Facebook accepts that cost, and no one else can pay that money. That is a very realistic outcome for Zuckerberg to like turn himself towards. To say, hey, Josh Hawley, you're my guy. I know you think we should break up, but what if I accept your regulatory scheme that you think is fair? Instead of letting Elizabeth Warren just break us up entirely. I can see them making that move. I think it's a clever move. It's something like I'm in love with, but it's a very clever move.

• 1:21:24Nilay Patel?

  And I just see them sort of inching towards it consistently.

• 1:21:27Speaker 13

  Yes, you're completely right. There is nothing about this that is not self-serving. Again, the whole idea is find the ideology that enables the status quo. And like, and that's what they've come up against here. It's just that they're doing it at a time when many of their rivals, like companies that maybe we even like a little bit more, are hugely compromised.

• 1:21:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, the Apple situation is completely.

• 1:21:50Speaker 13

  I mean, can we talk about that for five seconds? Because for years now, Tim Cook has been building a great big pedestal for him to stand on top of and talk about the fundamental dignity of all human beings, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And kicking Mark Zuckerberg in the jug every single chance he gets. He has never turned down an opportunity to dug on Facebook. And what's about to happen? Apple's about to be the company that won't stand up for free speech, the Bill of Rights, like you name it. And they're, they're going to be so compromised by their relationship with China. And Zuckerberg, I have to imagine, is just relishing all the speeches he can give about, well, you know, like, we actually believe in American values, unlike the company that made the phone in your pocket. It's gonna be amazing.

• 1:22:35Nilay Patel?

  But like, over the Quartz app? Like, if you work at Quartz right now, you're like Zuckerberg's got our back. Like, that's a weird outcome.

• 1:22:41Speaker 13

  Yes, it is. And it's all weird. This is why journalism is fun. You'd never see any of this coming.

• 1:22:47Speaker 14

  Does that parlay into like Facebook actually taking over any of the markets that it cannot currently enter China with? Because all of Facebook's stuff is speech? Like, Facebook doesn't start like making a phone because of this?

• 1:22:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or, I mean, you could, I mean, Google is trying to build a censored search engine for China.

• 1:23:03Speaker 13

  What if Facebook makes a Freedom phone and manufactures it in America?

• 1:23:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That'd be so great. It would cost $4,000.

• 1:23:12Speaker 13

  Maybe it will. Or maybe it'll be ad-supported and they'll give it away for free. Like a Kindle with special offers.

• 1:23:19Nilay Patel?

  The Android fork the world needs.

• 1:23:20Speaker 14

  No, just make the Air Headsets. They'll give us all the Air Headsets.

• 1:23:23Nilay Patel?

  That'd be great. If everyone was walking around in a Quest desperately being like, "There's no, there's no apps here that I want." That's great. But I support America. Okay. That's enough Facebook talking. Casey, Addie, thank you very much. I appreciate it. I'm sure we're gonna have you both back on very soon because this doesn't seem like it's going away.

• 1:23:40Speaker 14

  Oh, this never ends.

• 1:23:41Speaker 13

  Never ends.

• 1:23:42Nilay Patel?

  Vote Patel 2020. That's my only answer. I've been thinking very hard about the solution and it's for me to be the God Emperor of America. So if anyone can help me make that happen, I'm here for it.

• 1:23:51Speaker 13

  Is that a political ad? Also, subscribe to The Interface. Thank you.

• 1:23:55Nilay Patel?

  Subscribe to The Interface? Yes. The position of The Interface is that someone from The Verge, really anyone, should be the God Emperor of America.

• 1:24:04Speaker 13

  That's correct.

• 1:24:04Nilay Patel?

  All right. Thank you, everybody. My thanks to Casey and Addie for joining us. Please subscribe to The Interface. It's Casey's newsletter about all things platforms and democracy. Clearly, we're in a time when knowing about that stuff is more important than ever. It's theverge.com-interface. You can follow us on Twitter. I'm at Reckless, Paul's at FuturePaul, Dieter's Backlon, Addie is The Dextrarchy, Casey is at CaseyNewton. I want to plug a new show from the ever-growing Vox Podcast Empire. It's from former Verge science reporter Ariel DeHaem Ross. She's got a new show out three days a week, actually, called Reset with Recode and Vox. It's a tech news show, but it's about a very broad definition. It's very Vergy, actually. It's a tech news show about science, medicine, politics.

• 1:24:46Nilay Patel?

  Comes out Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. Go check that out. Ariel's like, literally, one of the best reporters I know. She was great on our team. She was great advice. And now she's doing this show. Check that out. It's in all your podcast apps. Also, Dieter, plug your newsletter.

• 1:25:01Speaker 03

  Verge.com/newsletter, command line. It's four to five days a week, depending on if I'm on a plane or not. Roundup of the day's news and sometimes an essay from yours truly.

• 1:25:12Nilay Patel?

  That's it. We'll be back next week. Got all kinds of interview shows. Got all kinds of chat shows. We got reviews galore coming. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:25:22Speaker 03

  Promo code.

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