The lives of YouTube moderators, a new smart home standard, and the Xbox Series X announced

Stories discussed this week: Google and YouTube moderators speak out on the work that’s … Big tech is finally working together to fix the smart home Z-Wave is making a huge change so it doesn’t get left behind in the smart home wars Ikea 2.0: inside the furniture giant’s big bet on the smart home ... This Apple Watch charger plugs directly into a USB-C port so you can carry fewer cords Xbox Series X: all the news about Microsoft’s next-gen game console Microsoft’s next Xbox is Xbox Series X, coming holiday 2020 The Xbox Series X is basically a PC The Xbox One Series X: bad name, good design Google Stadia should have stayed in beta 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, Casey Newton joins us to talk about the lives of YouTube moderators. We go deep on the new plan to combine smart home standards and why the Z-Wave Alliance was left out. And we talk about the Xbox Series X that's coming up now on The Vergecast.

• 0:13Speaker 01

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• 0:36Speaker 02

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• 1:10Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media empire. Can I tell you a story? Let's start with a story. I saw Kara Swisher at a party, a company aside, a little party. I saw Kara and someone was like, hey Kara, do you know that Neel I says The Vergecast is the flagship podcast of Vox Media? And she was like, what? And I was like, oh, God. And she's like, that's okay. I have the podcast of the year. Whoa. It was great. It was like a perfect Kara moment. She's like, you can have that. I don't need it. Because I read her Z code. It was that week's podcast here. Anyway, I'm your friend Neel I. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter Bohn is here. Howdy. And we have a special guest, Casey Newton is here.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Hello, my friends.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  How's it going?

• 1:46Speaker 03

  It's great. And I want to thank everyone who reached out to me after my controversial opinions about Cybertruck on the episode where Neel I was not with us, asking me to return to share more spicy thoughts. So thank you for having me.

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  Colin Luttrell and I interviewed Anne Milgram. That episode will come out, but we interviewed her. She's a former attorney general of New York. We interviewed her about data and policing. And she came in and sat down and said, I love The Vergecast. I just want to talk about the Cybertruck. I don't think we should, but I kind of want to do an hour of Cybertruck conversation. The former Attorney General of New Jersey.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  I have a lot of Cybertruck podcast related ideas for 2020 that we should talk about offline.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Is it a podcast called Cybertruck?

• 2:27Speaker 03

  I said we'll talk about it offline.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  All right, fine, let's not give it away. Anyway, this is a special episode in the sense that it is our last episode of 2019. We're taking a break for the holidays. I hope you get some rest, spend some time with your loved ones, stop thinking about USB-C connectors or whatever it is you do when we're on the air. You're going to think about USB-C connectors because you're going to get a present for the holidays from someone you love. You're going to open the thing and it's going to be micro USB and you're going to, you're going to have to swear. And when that happens, don't take it out on your loved ones. Just tweet it.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Go out to your car.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  Scream in your car. And then tweet it to Dieter. Just send Dieter a photo of every micro USB gadget you get. He's at back.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 3:04Nilay Patel?

  It's going to be good.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Actually, please do this. This would be great.

• 3:06Nilay Patel?

  So Casey, I would say that you have had quite a run this year in 2019. So it's fitting that you're with us to cap off the show for the year.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  You have been reporting on the lives of content moderators at various companies. A lot of them talk to you. This week, you published a huge feature on the lives of Google and YouTube moderators. Want to talk about it a little bit?

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I wrote two stories earlier this year that were about the lives of Facebook moderators. One was about a group of folks in Phoenix, Arizona, and then the second one was about folks in Tampa, Florida. And after I wrote those stories, people contacted me who were moderators for YouTube and Google and they said, you know, we've experienced some similar issues and we'd like to talk about them. And so I spent five months, talked to 18 people, traveled to DC, traveled to Austin, Texas a couple of times, and we published a story on Monday that examines one key aspect of this issue, which is that at Google, there is a different standard of care based on whether you are a full-time employee or a contractor. And the full-time employee that we talked to is this incredible woman named

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Daisy Soderbergh Rivkin, who was a content moderator for Google from 2015 to 2017, working on what they call their legal removals team. Job was to remove stuff from Google search that didn't belong there. She wound up seeing a lot of terrorism and child exploitation. And at the end of that process, she was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, which is something that she continues to struggle with to this day, two years after she left the company. We also talked to this group of moderators in Austin, Texas, who are mostly low paid immigrants, who are also suffering from severe mental health issues in some cases. But they don't have access to the same level of care. Daisy was able to take six months of paid leave. And the folks I spoke with in Austin don't get anything like that.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  And so it's kind of a story about how on one hand, no matter how much you're paid, you're going to have significant mental health consequences, or at least some portion of Google's content moderators will suffer. But it's also about how there's a caste system inside these companies. And based on these rather arbitrary distinctions of whether you're a full time or a contractor, your life is going to be very, very different. And so my hope with this story was that we would illuminate that a little bit and kind of start a conversation about it.

• 5:19Nilay Patel?

  So the first story you did, the trauma floor, we had you on, we talked about it. And I remember very clearly so much of our conversation was, these are basically the cops and firefighters, the internet. And we valorize cops and firefighters in real society. And we have parades and there's like days of service. Like we pay a lot of attention to these folks and we honor them all the time. And the people who do it on the internet are horribly mistreated. Facebook was employing a company called Cognizant at that time. They were their contractors. And I remember one very clear takeaway from that first conversation was, you were like, just pay them more, pay them more money, treat them like employees. And so now we come to this story and we have an employee who did make quite a bit of money,

• 6:03Nilay Patel?

  was an employee of Google, had all the benefits. And it still didn't like help. And I'm wondering if you, if your kind of thought process there has changed at all.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  It really did. You know, after I wrote the first two stories, the whole time I was reporting them, one of the questions in my mind was, how do we make this work better, easier, more just? And the obvious thing to do was just to pay folks better, right? Like, in Arizona, they were making $28,000 a year, and it just seemed so obvious that that wasn't enough, given the risks that they were taking with their mental health. But then I talked to somebody who was making good money. People on the legal removals team were making $75,000 when Daisy started. She was able to afford a private psychiatrist, right? So she had all these benefits. And at the same time, like, it didn't save her. And so I think we need to start talking about some other potential solutions. One of the

• 6:55Speaker 03

  things that has been brought to my attention, actually, since we published a story Monday, is that there's this quasi-governmental agency called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and they run a hotline. And so if you see, like, child abuse imagery anywhere on the web, you can report it to NICMC, as it's called, and they will investigate it and sort of work with law enforcement to bring the perpetrators to justice. Someone told me this week that the folks who staff that tip line are limited to a year on the job, because they do not want to expose those people to abuse for more than a year. And then someone else brought to my attention that Google, in its early days of hiring content moderators, also limited moderators who are working on these issues to a year

• 7:37Speaker 03

  on the job. So there actually was a time at Google itself where there were essentially lifetime caps on the amount of disturbing content you could be exposed to, and those disappeared over time. And I think we need to move back to that place, you know, as sort of one of many strategies that I think would be more effective than my initial idea, which had, you know, just been a raise. Although, to be clear, I still think all these people deserve a raise.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think there's just the sense that they were just not getting paid very much money. So what's the first thing you can do? And then you find the people who have the benefits and who are getting paid significantly more, and it's still not enough. And maybe it's limiting the amount of total exposure you can have. It's some of these tools that Google is building that you wrote about, where you look at the videos in grayscale, that seems like the most Google approach to it.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  100%.

• 8:24Nilay Patel?

  The most technological approach to it. Like, it's 41 Shades of Blue for the search box button, and it's like grayscale horrific videos for the moderators. But there's got to be other solutions. Like, the reason that they couldn't... Just do a year is because of their scale, right? I mean, the scale is like driving much of the problem, as far as I can tell.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Right, there are also not really career paths for content moderators. Like, this is something that I keep thinking about. You know, another, you know, in journalism, for example, your first job probably isn't going to be your best job. Maybe you're writing about a subject that's not that interesting to you because that's what you got assigned. But, you know, you prove yourself, eventually you get a better assignment. In content moderation, there's not really anything like that. And I'm told so often by these contractors at every single company that their workplaces are rife with favoritism, nepotism, the managers sort of only promote their friends, it feels like it's impossible to get ahead. Of course, you know, the Googles and Facebooks of the world are not really paying a lot of attention to issues like, you know, workplace favoritism among their vendors. And so you just get a lot of people who feel stuck.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  And I think that if you put a one-year cap on maybe moderating child abuse content, but then you were able to transfer that person to moderating spam, or something that was a little bit less hard on the eyes and on the psyche, and then maybe provide them a pathway up into management or policy roles, this could start to feel like an okay career. And even if your first year on the job was really, really rough, there would be sort of a brighter future ahead.

• 9:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I've heard so many people respond to your work by saying, "Every executive should do this." And I can't help but like connect that dot to, if everyone at Google spent their first year looking at the most horrific stuff that was uploaded to Google, like, maybe the tools would be different, maybe the system would be different. Because it doesn't, it still doesn't seem like those, like YouTube is still not architected to stop it before it happens. This is still a reactive process that's occurring.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really true. And yet, like, if you believe, as I do, that some percentage of people who do content moderation will develop PTSD, nightmares, a lot of really serious issues as a result of doing this work, do we actually want to encourage every Googler to have to do this? Like, I don't, I don't think we do. I like, I don't want the executives of Google to all go out and get PTSD, right? I want them to find solutions so that none of them have to do it. Now, I do think that they would be well-served to... To to spend more time with those folks and to listen to their concerns. And yes, like, a lot of them should be taking shifts in there and really understanding that issue. But, you know, if you're if you're talking about, I don't know, like, lead paint or asbestos in the walls or something, like, I wouldn't say, like, oh, well, like, you know, the landlord

• 11:02Speaker 03

  ought to, you know, sleep there for a week. It's like, no, fix the lead paint in the walls. Like, that's the solution.

• 11:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, have you come up, in the course of this reporting, have you come up with any anyone who has an idea for a broader solution than sort of individual management tweaks for these folks?

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Um, it, no, it's going to have to be a basket of solutions, right? I do think that machine learning will help over time. Ultimately, there's only so many ways to murder someone, there's only, you know, so many sex acts, and I think we're going to be able to develop machine learning tools that detects those better over time and and removes more of them without having them to hit moderators' eyeballs. But, you know, the moderators I speak with say that, you know, they think that that is many years away, given the very difficult judgment calls, you know, that they need to make. In the meantime, what else can they do? You know, honestly, just spending more time with these moderators and asking them directly. Every person I've ever talked to has a lot of really good ideas.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  You know, for many of them, the issues have as much to do with the workplace itself as it does with the content, right? It's like, as we wrote about in Florida and in Arizona, it's like, there's only one bathroom. I don't have enough break time to use the restroom. Or in Austin, it was, I have all these two-factor logins that I have to do, but I have to keep my phone in a locker, so I have to run from my locker or back to my desk, like, multiple times a day, entering codes, right? Just like, these sort of ridiculous things that you know no Google engineer would ever put up with for more than a minute, but is the daily life for the people who are, in many ways, enabling their jobs. So, that's where I'd like to see them pay some attention, and I think that there are

• 12:44Speaker 03

  ways that they can improve the workplace conditions that would, you know, make life easier on them.

• 12:48Nilay Patel?

  So, I want to ask what two very specific parts of the story, one's a little more inside-based, well, the other, but the first one is, and I had not really considered this, Daisy worked on search, not on YouTube.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  What is the, and I don't think people think of search as having a moderation problem. How did that, how did that go?

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, you, you may not realize that links are removed from Google search, right? We sort of think of, you know, you know, Google has everything. It has the entire web, but there are a lot of countries, particularly outside the United States, that have banned certain forms of content, right? So like Europe has a right to be forgotten law where, you know, you can commit a crime and eventually, you know, you can have your, your web results scraped from Google. So somebody has to go in there and remove that, and that is a legal requirement. There are also laws around terrorism, and if someone has posted terrorist propaganda, you know, France has decreed that that has to be removed within 24 hours of it being reported. And so that was Daisy's actual job. If, if, if the French, French law enforcement reported something saying this needs to be

• 13:44Speaker 03

  taken down, she had to get in there, evaluate it, look at it, compare it to policies, and then decide, you know, is this maybe newsworthy content? Is this a news report? In which case, we're going to try to leave it up, you know? Or is it just, you know, an ISIS propaganda video, in which case it would come down?

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  And where were those videos hosted? That's the, I-

• 14:01Speaker 03

  On webpages.

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  On webpages. So the French government would like find an embedded video on a custom player hosted on some French website, and Daisy would remove it from search.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  But she wasn't deleting it from the web.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  That is such a nuanced problem, right? I don't think people think about search in that way. I think probably most people listening to this are familiar with like the DMCA notice on the bottom of some search pages. But the idea that the French government is reporting webpages that have terrorist content, and then someone has to like watch it and make a call, seems so far out of how Google even promotes itself.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Right. And, and, you know, the way that Google promoted the job to Daisy was, you're here as a defender of free speech. Like, you're actually here to fight back against these requests. Because remember, before 2016, the, most of the conversations that we were having about content moderation on the web was about times where platforms took something down that we thought should stay up, right? It was, you know, footage of the Arab Spring where people died, and, you know, YouTube took it down, and we got outraged. Because it was newsworthy or Facebook took down a photo of the melee massacre in Vietnam and we got outraged because it's a newsworthy photo. So they all built up these legal apparatuses that were designed to keep stuff up on the web and that was still how Daisy was sold her job in 2015.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  And what we've seen since 2016 is that the pendulum has swung and we are now firmly in the take it down era of content moderation where people just want stuff to be taken down from the web.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  What do you think besides the obvious election of Donald Trump that happened in 2016 like and the Cambridge Analytica you bear some responsibility news cycle that has consumed in particular like your life since then, what has changed? Is there, is there something that has really changed to drive that?

• 15:48Speaker 03

  I think that the press finally woke up to the unintended consequences of, of social networks, but that was also in response to the rise of right wing authoritarianism and fascism around the world. These companies no longer could credibly say that they had enabled, you know, the, the sort of progressive world that they told us that they were building for us. And every time a journalist would run a keyword search in a box, they would find something that wasn't supposed to belong there. Right? So a lot of it was just kind of, once we realized that we could start calling tech companies out on this, that they weren't going to have any good answers and they were going to have to go back to the drawing board and, and figure out what to do.

• 16:27Nilay Patel?

  So the other thing I wanted to ask about very specifically is your first few stories about Facebook. Facebook employed a contractor named Cognizant, which after your stories exited the business of content moderation, just couldn't take the heat of Casey Newton. But Facebook engaged with you. They let you talk to their executives. They brought you into the facilities. They surprisingly let us take photos of the facilities. They were like in it, right? And the story was still critical of their efforts and what was it was doing to people. But Facebook, to their credit, let you in the door. Google did not, as far as I can tell. I mean, I read the piece before it published and I asked you, so I know. But Google did not engage in that same way. Why do you think that is?

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, the sense that I got from them was they couldn't see the upside in it, you know, like they had read the Facebook stories and I think they thought, well, what did Facebook get out of that? Now, you know, I would say that Facebook got a lot out of that. We. Really did hear their perspective and added, you know, like more than a thousand words to the story where they just kind of explained their point of view. And, you know, I would have loved to have done that with with Google. But for whatever reason, they decided that wasn't a risk they wanted to take. You know, and I think that's a shame. You know, I think that, you know, these people are working in quasi-public service jobs. And, you know, arguably, people have a right to maybe not know the the names and addresses because we know that people on the Internet will, you know, harass and threaten them.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  But there needs to be some way of us having a better understanding of, you know, who it is that's cleaning up the Internet for us.

• 18:01Nilay Patel?

  Google has a different contract, right? It's Accenture?

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Google has multiple contracts with lots of, you know, big, it's like, this industry is called BPO, Business Process Outsourcing.

• 18:11Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  So Accenture is, I know. Well, I know. I didn't put it in the story, but I know some people like lingo. So I'm just, you know, sharing a little lingo with you. So Accenture and Cognizant are two of the big BPO firms, and there's, you know, probably like a half dozen more really big ones. And, you know, they, it seems like they have contracts with most of them.

• 18:27Nilay Patel?

  So the thing about the BPO industry, which I'm now very familiar with, the reason that you hire consultants is because they're better at something than you, right? That's that's why these companies, that's why, I'm not saying it's true. I'm saying that's like usually the business logic, right? Like, you're a small company, you're not going to hire the world's best accountants. You presume that Accenture has a lot of great accounts. You're going to hire Accenture to come in and to audit you. That's the logic of the consulting industry. They don't seem to be good at this when it comes to content moderation.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  No, they're not.

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  And that seems surprising as hell to me.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, my strong sense is that what happened is in is in 2016, Facebook and Google and others started going around and said, hey, here's a $200 million contract to come clean up their Internet. And companies like Accenture and Cognizant said, you know what? For $200 million, I bet we could figure it out, right? We've done customer service before. We know how to manage a queue of tickets. Like, we'll do it. You know, Facebook in particular would also say, look, they could find moderators in places where We weren't, right? Like, we didn't have, like, you know, 300 speakers of the Sri Lankan language, right? But, but one of these BPO firms could find those for us.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  But I talked to another Facebook executive who just called these BPO firms "body shops", and like, their, their core competency is really just finding bodies to put in seats, which, you know, the, the title of our second story wound up just being "bodies in seats", after one person described themselves to me that way. It's like, that's all we are to them, is bodies in seats.

• 20:00Nilay Patel?

  I mean, isn't one of the other motivations here that these companies hadn't been hiring up the appropriate number of moderators directly from the jump? And so when they suddenly realized they needed it, they just had to get as many humans as possible, as quickly as possible, and it was way faster to just outsource that problem.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, faster and of course way cheaper, right? Like, a big theme of my stories has been how little these people are paid, and it's usually a fraction of what the, the tech company employees are paid.

• 20:27Nilay Patel?

  Right, and if they actually did employ all these people at those rates, they would bring down their, like, recruiting statistics of, like, the average salary of a Facebook employee.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  By hiring lots of bodies, you're sort of admitting defeat that you don't have technological improvements to this process, right?

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I mean, you know, every time one of the executives has been asked about it, there's a reason why the first thing they go to is like, "Well, you know, we're working on AI", right? Like, this is just like another case where the, it's the, the sort of magic AI wand gets waved, as if that will solve everything, but we're, we're just not that close.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  They're not, they're not dog fooding their AI.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, they're, they're working on it, it's, you know, like, Google Photos can pick out a lot of things if you search it, you know, if you do keyword search, but it's just not perfect yet.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  But does it even need to be perfect? I mean, I, the Google Photos example is a pretty good one. Google Photos will try. As a consumer, I see Google Photos try to do a lot of things every time I open the app. They're like, "Did you want this photo to be black and white, except for this face?" Like, "I don't know, it's an idea I had, I'm a robot, don't blame me."

• 21:32Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, we made this movie that makes no sense.

• 21:37Nilay Patel?

  I think that stuff is, as a consumer, it's great, it's fun, like, I always look at it. It doesn't seem like they're willing to just try the same way they are with the consumer product or a consumer AI product. We see it across the industry. We've deployed machine learning, it's like, a little half-assed, but maybe you'll like it. It doesn't, but like, they're iterating, they're obviously building a bigger data set. There's certainly revenue potential, cost-cutting potential when they do it on the consumer side or even particularly the enterprise side. There isn't any of that benefit on the content moderation side, right? That it doesn't make it better or even necessarily cheaper because it doesn't work well. Are they iterating enough there?

• 22:16Speaker 03

  I think so. I mean, like, you know, one of the people I talked to this year who had the most, what he described to me, it's like, the most boring job that he'd ever had and could ever imagine having, was he would just look at thousands of ads every day and he would just have to say, "Is this political or not?" The whole point of the exercise was to train AI to do that so that eventually, like, the AI could just flag, "Is this politics or not?" And they have probably dozens of those projects around the world that are training what they call classifiers. And the classifier will eventually, you know, be able to do more of this work. One of the things that companies have started reporting now is how much of the bad stuff that they catch was caught automatically.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  And it's good, I think, that they are reporting that. It's like, it's actually like a, sort of a measurable demonstration of progress that they're now releasing. I can't remember if it's quarterly or twice a year. You know, but they are making progress. And again, it's like, where it gets tricky, and I think it's trickier at Facebook than at YouTube. At YouTube, like, one thing that I found was, the policies don't change that much. Like, they tend to have a very kind of slowly evolving policy. At Facebook, every single day, something was different. You could say this, you can't say this, you can do, you can post this, you can put, right? It was just constant confusion at Facebook over what you could do. And that's why the people I talked to at Facebook were actually really pessimistic about AI there because it involves so many judgment calls. I'll give you one, like, example, this is like my-

• 23:41Speaker 03

  My favorite example, girls at some point in the last year started using hoe as a term of affection. And so they would go onto a friend's page and they would say, I frickin' love this hoe. And so these comments got reported and the moderators who were doing their jobs started removing them all. As because it was bullying that you can't go on there and call a girl a hoe. And then at some point, there was outrage from all these girls. It was like, I was just trying to get my friend a compliment. And so they had to reverse the decision. And so now you're allowed to say, I love this frickin' hoe. A machine is never going to figure that out.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  Well, and what you said with the guy training, yes, this is political and no, this isn't political. Like that definition is going to change over time too. Like any, like thankfully, the definition of a dog and a cat is not dramatically rapidly changing. And our classifiers are really good at picking them out.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  I would say they're 85% at cat versus dog.

• 24:43Nilay Patel?

  Some website every week runs a photo of like this, this photo of a cat destroyed an AI again today.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  I can do you one better. When Google Photos was very early, I like slurped up all the photos I'd ever taken, which included some photos of Mark Zuckerberg I had taken when I'd been in the same room with him. And they were like, they moved several of the Mark Zuckerberg photos and they associated them with my face.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Like I am Mark Zuckerberg, according to like launch era Google Photos.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  I accidentally once imported a bunch of live blog photos into my Google Photos, just by, I should not have done it. It was an accident because I, I spray and pray during live blogs. I take a million photos and post like 1% of them because I'm a bad photographer. Anyway, Google Photos just thought that Tim Cook was my best friend.

• 25:26Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing. That's great. Did it make you a little video of like you and Tim through the years? That's perfect. So Casey, what happens next? Both in sort of where you're thinking about where the reporting needs to go? Because I think we all want you to keep doing it. And then what happens next for these companies?

• 25:43Speaker 03

  I don't know, man. Like, real talk, I sort of feel like I have told the story. It's not to say that there aren't more stories to tell, but I do think that we now understand what this industry looks like and what the lives of these folks are like. And there are a couple more kind of turns of this room I'm looking for. One is, I don't think Cognizant's going to be the last BPO company to get out of this business. I've heard whispers that another large one is looking to get out. So that's kind of something that I'm trying to chase down. We've got a class action lawsuit. We have multiple class action lawsuits that are now developing. There are some worker organizing that's been taking place, particularly abroad. All those things combined, I think, are also why Cognizant got out of the business.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  So as all of those things swirl, I do think this story is going to continue to be in the news. But I think with that kind of collective group of forces, we are maybe finally going to see some really positive changes. So fingers crossed for 2020.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  Is this a, do you think this is a change around the edges problem? Or is it a, wow, we should not have done the call center model? We need to structurally rethink this whole thing?

• 26:53Speaker 03

  I think there's a lot of debate about that inside companies. What I find is that the employees who are closest to this work thinks it needs the most amount of change. Which I think is really telling, right? It's like, it's usually the CFO that's like, you want to do what? You want to pay these people like we pay, you know, our PR execs? Like, no way, right? But if you're really down talking to these people, you're like, oh, wow. Like, you're basically a police officer and we're paying you $15 an hour. So that's why I hope those are the voices that get really elevated and that companies pay more attention to them.

• 27:29Nilay Patel?

  We had Alex Stamos on the show earlier this year. Alex Stamos is a former chief security officer of Facebook and Yahoo. He's now a professor at Stanford. And he was talking about there's like a market demand for this, for the big platforms now, for companies to come in, actually develop the tools, use the economics of the software industry to have multiple customers at zero marginal cost, the whole thing. Are you seeing any of those companies starting to form?

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Um, I have been pitched by a handful of them. Frankly, I haven't had the time to dig in very deeply. It seems like, as with most AI projects, it seems like the companies that have the most data are in the best position to win. And so that is like a Google and Facebook because they already have millions and billions of images that they can process to kind of get a head start. But, you know, look, I think a world where Facebook figures this out and, uh, you know, really innovates with its AI and then is just able to release that as a commercial product, like, that's good. Um, you know, so in a way, I'm rooting for these companies to develop those products

• 28:34Speaker 03

  and maybe take some of the burden of the very worst stuff off of human beings.

• 28:38Nilay Patel?

  I'm of extremely mixed minds on this idea. Like, I do, I think it's, that's what should happen, right? Like, there's yawning demand for a better way to do this in the market at every level now. Someone should fill it. Great. Happy about that. Facebook commercializing its censorship engine is like, eh, maybe not you. Right? And then it's like, okay, and then once you hire the vendor to come and do it for you, you're still a little removed from the decision. And when you screw up at scale, you just have to blame the vendor and fire the vendor. And it's not your response. And like, I, that's just, it's a different set of trade-offs, like everything. And maybe it's a superior set of trade-offs, but I don't think that has been particularly evaluated yet either.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't, I don't know that it has. Like, that's definitely more in the realm of speculation.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  But yeah, I mean, the reason that I've been able to stay interested in it all year is because there are just so many tensions and trade offs involved here. There's not a simple answer. You know, I had a guy write in to me this week to say, hey, Casey, has anybody ever proposed just banning YouTube? And then he's like, I know how crazy that sounds, but hear me out. And then there was like 40 paragraphs underneath, you know, where he like laid out his case. And the thing is like, I am not a ban the social networks person. Like, I like section 230. I don't think the internet would be better off if platforms had to moderate every post before they were published, right? It would get rid of so much of what we all sitting around

• 30:12Speaker 03

  this table would love the internet. But the point that I've been trying to drive home all year is you can think that and also want to pay, take better care of the people who enable the internet that we love, you know, and, and start there as opposed to from this place of like, well, you know, let's ban YouTube.

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  I feel there's, there's like a hunger for the reinstallation of gatekeepers. And maybe it's because like our literally our institutions are crumbling around us every day. Like, there's the constitutional crisis unfolding as we speak. This is a fact. And it seems like, well, what if we just had like Walter Cronkite again? And there's like one person and he was going to say all the news. And if you wanted some news, someone had to convince that guy who we all trusted together that this was the news. And I understand that nostalgia, I hear it from a lot of people. And I'm like, but the world was like, like objectively more boring back then?

• 31:06Speaker 04

  The kind of opposite of that is the, it's sort of like the whitelist. Like, I don't have to have somebody, you know, go to, to my library and burn all of the books that, that would offend me. I just check out the ones I'm interested in. And like, Casey, I think you wrote a little bit about this as sort of a trend of, of the past year of, of the group being the social network.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  The group chat.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, the group chat. So like Discord, like I trust my friends that, and I'm in different Discord group chats and I trust different ones, different amounts. But I, you know, the ones I'm in, I trust those people to not put something that I would find objectionable in front of me.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think like part of the solution to the internet is just don't put everyone in the same room.

• 31:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Right, like, and like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter are places where everyone is in the same room. And context has collapsed and everyone's miserable. And that's why Facebook is running as fast as it can to get us to all be in groups. That's why it's making, doing a Super Bowl ad, I learned today. That's all about having Chris Rock tell you to join groups. That's where they want to move it. You know, I will say, my favorite, like, I don't know, official is not the right word, but like, maybe classic social network of 2019 has really been Reddit. And it's been because each subreddit sets its own rules. Like, there's a floor where Reddit says, alright, well, you can't do these things. But like, after that, you can set any rules you want for your subreddit.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  And what do you know, those individual subreddits, they feel more cohesive. It feels like, like, context has not collapsed. People get along a little bit better. And I just think that there's a lot that we can learn from that. And like, you know, by the way, if you went back seven years and we said, well, at the end of the decade, we'll be talking about what a great Reddit's doing at content moderation, that would sound crazy. But they sort of got there. And, so anyway, I think there's just like lessons that we can draw from that.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you my favorite Reddit? My favorite subreddit?

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:05Nilay Patel?

  It's Wolves with Watermelons. It's just photos of wolves eating watermelons, because apparently wolves love watermelons. It is like a vibrant community. I don't even know how I found it. I just like spent like an entire night being like, there's a lot of people here.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  My favorite part of Reddit is that it seems like every major subreddit that I enjoy has a spinoff subreddit that's a little too edgy for the main subreddit, where it's like inside jokes and memes about the, I don't know, it's just.

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  Alright, well, good job Reddit.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  Casey will be pointing his expose gun at you next.

• 33:40Nilay Patel?

  But good job, Casey as well. Thank you for being with us, man.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Thank y'all.

• 33:43Nilay Patel?

  Alright, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back, we're gonna shadow the Z-Wave Alliance.

• 33:52Speaker 06

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• 34:52Speaker 04

  We're back. I want to talk about smart home standards with you.

• 34:55Speaker 05

  It's just nonstop.

• 34:57Speaker 04

  I've been waiting for you to ask.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  It's a lot. I mean, look, it's it's.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  It all seems so boring.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  We're going to make it exciting.

• 35:07Speaker 05

  No, but it is exciting. Five years ago, we would we would write this article once every six months. The smart home is the smart home is impossible to figure out. Nobody knows what's going on. Zigbee versus Z-Wave. It's all a mess. Cats and dogs. And we just got tired of writing it. We just stopped writing it because we just figured it would never get better. But now it's back.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Can you guys give me just a little bit? Because I don't own a smart home devices right now. I actually I found an Echo. I have an Echo that is not it's not plugged into it. That's the current status of most Echo Dots. Like I cleaned my room, but I actually just put everything to a duffel bag.

• 35:48Speaker 04

  And the echo was in the duffel bag.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  I will say that I have Google Home minis, just like, still new in box, just strewn about my apartment. Because if you literally just sneeze in the vicinity of a premium Google product, they will send you a mini.

• 36:04Nilay Patel?

  Yes, you got one because I subscribed to Fie, I got one because I have YouTube. Like, it's just like, here you go. If you signed up for the New York Times last year, they just like, forgotten, like, sent you four.

• 36:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, right now, you're basically a HomeKit person through Apple products. Like, Apple is your gateway to communicate with HomeKit compliant smart home stuff. Of which there are three. Okay, or you're an Alexa person, that's probably the biggest one right now. Yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 05

  Or, I guess you could be like, an app person and control your Philip Hu lights directly through the app. Yeah, that's the most chaotic way to live, right? Is like, I have a screen of apps on my phone, each for every individual smart light bulb that I bought from a slightly different company. Yeah, you're a monster. The news here is that Apple and Google and Amazon and Samsung Smart Things and Zigbee, which also includes things like IKEA and apparently Z-Wave, all agreed. No Z-Wave, Z-Wave's still out in the cold. No, Z-Wave's parent company is part of the Zigbee Alliance. That can't be true, I refuse to believe it. Anyway, whatever.

• 37:12Speaker 05

  They all got together and they agreed, you know, we should figure out this whole way that smart home devices talk to each other. The networking should be standardized and it should use IP, the Internet Protocol. And so, every gadget should have an IP address and that is how you can address it, because we know how to secure that thing. And in principle, a year from now, in late 2020, we're going to propose a spec for how smart home gadgets should, you know, work at a base networking level. That is the news. Super exciting. They've announced a plan to propose a specification.

• 37:49Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you what, Paul, to connect it to what you were saying, these companies all think of smart home stuff wildly different ways, which led them to build their individual standards wildly differently. So for Amazon, Alexa is effectively its operating system, its Windows. So Alexa is the most capable, it can connect to things the most ways. So Alexa devices, like the Echo Plus has a Zigbee radio in it, right? But there's also Alexa Cast, so it can like directly control a speaker. You can also do the, the bad insecure way, which most things work, which is you talk to an Alexa, Amazon's cloud talks to iHome's cloud and your light turns on.

• 38:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, the smart device connects over 2.4 gigahertz to your home network. And then it talks to the internet, which talks to your device.

• 38:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would, I would characterize Amazon as working with the most things in part because it, of the, the three big platforms we're going to talk about, and we're going to completely ignore smart things, because that's what everybody else does. Of the, of the three big platforms we're going to talk about, Alexa is by far, I guess I could say like, the most willing to work with the most things and the least concerned about privacy or locking things down. Echo devices can also control things locally, which is sort of like under remarked upon. But you can pair like smart switches and lights and stuff on your local network, and it will control them locally in a variety of different ways. And again, I think this is because Amazon sees Alexa as the operating system. So they, they just want it in your house. They just want it to be the most capable thing,

• 39:24Nilay Patel?

  that the most things support, and they will just open the door to anyone in any way. Amazon. Apple, which yesterday Dan yelled at me when I said Apple was ahead of Google in this space. But there's a reason I make this claim. Apple has all the phones, right? Like that, that, that control center, they don't have all the devices, but they, it is true that they have like, all of the phones of the people who might blow money on smart home stuff.

• 39:48Speaker 05

  In America.

• 39:49Nilay Patel?

  In America, fine.

• 39:51Speaker 05

  Maybe, but I think you're, you're, mm, I, I.

• 39:54Nilay Patel?

  Just go, just go with me on it. I'm not saying the HomeKit is a success. I'm not saying whatever. I'm saying, Apple has the phones.

• 40:00Speaker 05

  And I'm going, mm, at that.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  But I, I think if you're the person who's gonna buy 800 smart light switches, it is very likely that you have an iPhone.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, but if you're the person that's gonna buy one, it's just as likely you're gonna have an Android phone. Like, the, the, the point of this entire alliance is that the smart home is now here. The success of Alexa has meant that it's no longer a niche thing of a person who knows what Crestron is. Everybody is gonna have some random smart gadget in their house. And so, it's, it's no longer just an iPhone, rich person iPhone thing.

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  Sure, but I think Apple, this is more about mindsets of these companies. I think Apple, which had HomeKit and thought it was gonna be a thing, and it has, the HomeKit Control Center interface is important. They think of this stuff as iPhone accessories. Because Apple's entire mindset is that everything in the world is fundamentally an iPhone accessory.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 40:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, that's just how they believe things are. So they're gonna certify HomeKit devices with custom hardware, and if you wanna talk to an iPhone, you gotta pay the Apple tax. Get an MFI badge, "HomeKit, HomeKit, HomeKit", this is not a success for them. That's all I meant, is like, they've got a lot of phones, and their whole world is, "What if we've removed another port from this phone?" And charged you to, to connect to the phone. Google's like, solidly in the middle. They have a clear point of view on how they want things to connect to Google Assistant. They've reset, like, works with Nest to be more secure. More things support Google Assistant. Obviously, the Google Assistant is more capable than Siri.

• 41:31Speaker 05

  That's, yeah.

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  This feels funny, just even saying it out loud, like, I have to convince you of that. In many ways, it's more capable than Alexa, in terms of retrieving information. It's like, caste integration with TVs, I think is really good. But it doesn't have all the devices, and it certainly can't do all the things. My favorite one that I, I just drives me bonkers is like, you can't set a Sono speaker as the default speaker. You can just easily do that with Alexa, because Amazon doesn't give a shit.

• 41:56Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 41:57Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so Alexa made the smart home happen. They want everything to connect to it. I'm confident that lots of iPhone customers want to have an Alexa device that works with their phone. And like have an ecosystem of things that works. I think Amazon hears that they care about their customers. Apple's like, nothing works with our dumb phone. That's what, that's how Tim Cook talks about the iPhone.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  We might as well join this, this like alliance because it'll let more things talk to us. And Google, I swear, Google is just along for the ride because they're like, well, we have like four to, four to five extra standards we invented that we can just like throw in the pot.

• 42:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:32Nilay Patel?

  Like see what happens.

• 42:33Speaker 05

  So the motivation for each of these companies is really fascinating because I've heard, so hmm, there's lots of things I've heard. Just because these companies have agreed in principle that the plumbing at a network level should be compatible, doesn't mean that they believe anything above that layer of abstraction, that level of abstraction should be compatible. So the thing that you just said, Eli, is that iPhone owners want Alexa to work with their iPhone, is nowhere near close to like being a kumbaya moment right now. The only kumbaya moment right now is I don't want my customers to have to worry about whether or not they need to buy a bridge for their light bulb, right? I don't want my customers to have to know whether or not there is a particular ZigBee chip inside their Echo Plus.

• 43:15Speaker 05

  I don't want my customers to have to know the difference between ZigBee and Z-Wave and Sidewalk and, you know, whatever else you want to throw in there. We just want everything at a very basic, do I see, does, do I see this device in the network? Can I connect to it and make a button appear in an app somewhere? Or make a voice command appear in an assistant somewhere happen? So it's about setup and like basic networking. I think it's very likely that these companies are going to continue to fight tooth and nail at those higher levels of abstraction. So I don't think that we're getting anywhere close to a world where Alexa and Siri are going to like talk to each other. In fact, Amazon tried to create that world and nobody signed on.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  I've read this connected home IP.com website. That's really beautiful. I, I can't tell what it is. They talk about IP, right?

• 44:02Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 44:02Speaker 04

  Obviously, they have picked IP, the Internet Protocol, like the IP address as a, a fundamental aspect of their protocol. Like, that is the build, the, the key building block, the cornerstone of this.

• 44:18Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  I don't know what this is, though. Like, I don't know what they're building on top of it, other than to say, because it sounds like we've got, we got all this code across all these repositories. We're going to contribute it. It's going to be open source and stuff.

• 44:30Speaker 05

  Dieter's gonna try, and then I'm gonna try, and then where you can judge who is, who is, who made more sense. Yeah. So, uh, basically, right now, if you want to make a smart home thing, you end up having to make a choice of like, not just like what the communication product, software will be, but also like what the specific hardware and radio and chip will be, because they're tied tightly together. Uh, and so they want to disaggregate those things. And one of the reasons I think Google's involved is because they basically picked something that looks and smells a lot like Thread, which is their standard. But Thread was a colossal failure in the space. Uh, no, like, no one cares about it except for the, the, the folks over at Eero. And even there, like, they haven't been able to convince anybody to use it.

• 45:11Speaker 05

  Um, and so the idea is to separate out the, the networking software from the networking hardware. And just like getting everybody to agree to that in principle was like, that took a minute. And that's why this thing, you know, I, in some ways, I think it was rushed out the door. Like, if you go to that connected home over IP website and you hit escape, you get the square space login.

• 45:33Nilay Patel?

  That's great. So secure. Everyone is super ready for these people to secure your homes.

• 45:39Speaker 04

  Just to clarify, what you, what you say, the physical versus the software layer, like, IP works over Ethernet, works over Wi-Fi, it works over the backbone of the Internet. I can address something on my local network and never leave my home over IP. And I can also, you know, hack into Dieter's computer.

• 45:57Speaker 05

  Right. But so IP, we also know how to secure IP, right? We, like, we're, we've gotten better at that. I talked to Charlie Kendall, who used to be over at Alexa. Now he's over at SnapAV, which merged with Control4. You probably know Control4 better. They're like a smart home integrator, right? They, they like, they create another abstraction layer that makes it easier to like, build a really like, Sophisticated smart home. And his take was, I actually didn't put this in the article. His take was like, look, this was basically all of the companies agreeing that like 15.4, which is one of these wireless standards, is like here to stay. It's like gonna be one of the main ways that these devices communicate with each other, 802.15.4. And so that needed to get standardized. Everyone needed to stop fighting over that. And then they're also no longer fighting over how they're going to address and also

• 46:40Speaker 05

  secure all the devices that are on these networks.

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  Sure. And so, okay, here's my riff on this. And I was texting with someone at one of these companies. And this was basically the argument is the reason ZigBee, which is something we literally never talk about on the show unless we're gonna make fun of the Z-Wave Alliance, which I promise we're gonna do shortly.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  Coming.

• 47:00Nilay Patel?

  It's super coming. ZigBee is like one of these classic smart home control protocols. It's been around for a long time. It runs over low-power radios. If you're gonna put devices all over your house, they can't draw a lot of power. They might have to run on batteries. You need like low-power radio to happen in your house. ZigBee is a low-power radio standard, but its network layer and its like control/command layer are intertwined. So you take ZigBee and you split out the network layer and you make that IP. And then you take like the ZigBee control/command layer and you make that like the communication protocol. And then you extend it with all the other stuff everyone else is talking about. And then like the dream is that HomeKit goes from being this like integrated iPhone

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  control system to like Apple's certification program. Now, is Apple gonna let that happen? Like, who the hell knows, right?

• 47:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. That's so confusing about this website. Here's a paragraph. Who knows which hyper-optimistic member of this group wrote this paragraph and put it on Squarespace? The project aims to improve the consumer experience, yada, yada, yada. We believe the protocol has the potential to be widely adopted. Amazon, Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, yada, yada.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  If the working group succeeds with this goal, customers can be confident that their device of choice will work in their home and that they will be able to set up and control it with their preferred system. That sounds like a lot more than just, we're all gonna do IP, right, guys?

• 48:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it's the, it's that command layer. It's a ZigBee layer. So like, right now, you send a ZigBee command that's like, turn on the light. And that is the command and that like, literally the network addressing part of it are like, wrapped up in the same packet.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  Uh, so I could just assume if I have hardware that can control one of these smart devices, it can control all of them, but I might need a different app to do it. Is that what you're thinking?

• 48:55Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, I'm thinking that, like, there's Wi-Fi in your house, right? And so you buy a Wi-Fi router and it can, can, what's Wi-Fi 25 or whatever we're on now, but it speaks the same flavor of Wi-Fi and it's on your local network and you buy a laptop and it speaks the same flavor of Wi-Fi. And if you wanna like, send a file to another laptop, the Wi-Fi network will just have it and you can send different kinds of commands across your network. So they're all in the same network. They're sending the same kinds of networking packets in the same standard and then the command layers standardized.

• 49:26Speaker 05

  So it's, if you wanna talk to, if I want my laptop to talk to your laptop, I ask the network, hey, Paul's laptop over there? And the network says, yep, I see it. And then I say, send it this file. It says, yep, okay. And that's two separate commands. Right now, in the smart home space with a lot of stuff, it's like, hey, Paul's laptop over there, send the command. It's like all one single thing. And so you need to separate those two things out to make it simpler for everything to work together. And you're right, in theory, the, the, both of the control and the networking layer will be relatively standardized across all of these companies. But I don't know that I fully believe that's gonna happen.

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  The dream is that you have an Alexa house, you go out and you buy any smart socket you want and you plug it in and it works.

• 50:06Speaker 04

  Obviously, we have, in the real world, we have IP networks and there's HTTP and there's Gopher, you know?

• 50:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sure. So this, they're, they're trying it. And I think they're trying it because, A, Amazon is driving it and B, if you're Apple and you need ecosystem size to work with your phones, this is a good choice. Standards are good in that sense. If you're Google, you can, you can like, contribute a lot of tech and, you know? The CFO of Google can be like, yep, the Thread team contributed to our success today.

• 50:37Speaker 05

  They get their bonus for that quarter.

• 50:38Nilay Patel?

  They're fine. And then, you know, if you're Samsung and you make smart things, like you remember that you've made smart things, that's a big win for you.

• 50:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  And you're already selling hubs and that strategy didn't pay off, but like, maybe it'll integrate everything anyway.

• 50:51Speaker 05

  And if you're like, if you're IKEA, you don't have to worry about this shit anymore because it's finally standardized and you can just hire any bog standard developer who knows how to do this shit and then go make a thing instead of having to reinvent the whole damn wheel again. Like, that's actually the thing here. This is nice for consumers like, see the sticker on the box that guarantees that it works, but what this is actually for is any developer that wants to make a thing will have an easier time making the thing and, most importantly, have an easier time making that thing that will stay secure. Because right now, if you're a developer, you need to support at a very, very, like, almost to the metal level, a bunch of different standards. And you're not, there's no, nobody can be an expert in all of them. And so, one of them is gonna get a little shoddy and then you're gonna make an insecure device.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  The best way to think about it is Wi-Fi for, like, not Wi-Fi specifically, but a standard that lives along Wi-Fi as a local network device that uses lower power radios. And they're just gonna standardize it there. And then, like, there's like, you're still gonna need custom apps, right? Like, if you buy a Hue Light system and it can do 45 different colors.

• 51:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's not gonna get built into the Amazon voice command system at like, a native level. You're still gonna need to, like, put the stuff on the top next to it in an app somewhere.

• 52:04Speaker 05

  Right. Now, the good news, bad news, before we get to Z-Wave, and this is gonna lead us there, is this protocol, this whole proposal, is meant to be agnostic to the, like, the communication system. So, it can work over Bluetooth, it can work over Bluetooth LE, it can work over Wi-Fi, it can work over the, you know, the Zigbee band thing, the 802.15 thing, the 15.4 thing. You know, but that's all that they're saying they'll support right now. Like, basically those four or five things. They've said nothing about working over longer range things, like Amazon's wackadoo sidewalk thing that they proposed, or, bada, Z-Wave.

• 52:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you got there. Okay. Here's what we've learned about the Z-Wave Alliance in the past 24 hours. Here's the latest intel on this. So, they announced this thing, it's like, literally, everybody in the world is part of it. I didn't realize Z-Wave's parent company was part of it.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  Whatever.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  Where's Z-Wave? Like, it's the other smart home standard. It's out. I, our buddy Chris Grant has a house full of Z-Wave shit.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  Oh, is he really?

• 53:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sure does.

• 53:01Speaker 04

  That's amazing.

• 53:01Nilay Patel?

  Just not, not involved in it. Where are you guys? Why did you hear it? When Amazon put out the Echo Plus, they're like, we support Zigbee. It's like, what'd you do to piss off the Z-Wave alliance? Turns out, Z-Wave Alliance, a lie.

• 53:16Speaker 04

  Alliance?

• 53:17Nilay Patel?

  It's, that's, that's very good, Dieter. He did it. It's a monopoly story.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  So like, the Z-Wave Alliance is like, if I said, I'm an alliance, like the Paul Alliance?

• 53:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Paul Alliance. Their, their entire business model is that they have this spec, and you can use it, but you can only use it if you buy the chips from them. So it's not a standard. It's a totally integrated, like, monopoly wireless standard, and they flooded the market with a bunch of stuff that people bought, so you have to support it, and the only way you can support it is by buying their weird radio chips.

• 53:50Speaker 04

  This is exactly how I operate in my personal life.

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're like, you wanna, you wanna, you want a little bit of Paul? $20, you get the whole Paul or nothing at all?

• 53:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  So yesterday, Choip, is Dieter.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  It's definitely just chip, but I just, I think calling it Choip is so much more fun.

• 54:07Nilay Patel?

  Connected home over IP, Choip.

• 54:09Speaker 04

  Yep. It's actually, it's, it's Project Choip.

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, Project Choip, uh, an actual alliance announces itself in this rushed fashion, presumably to cut the Z-Wave Alliance off at the pass.

• 54:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:22Nilay Patel?

  This is the rush, because, you know, CS is around the corner.

• 54:26Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 54:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So you gotta, you gotta get Choip out the door. I'm sure that Jeff Bezos called up Tim Cook and was like, look, I don't know where Sundar is right now, but Choip is happening. That's how they'll talk to each other.

• 54:38Speaker 04

  I don't wanna muddy the waters, but the Zigbee Alliance is a member of this new alliance.

• 54:45Nilay Patel?

  Yes, Zigbee, Zigbee is the core of the new, of the Choip.

• 54:48Speaker 04

  Zigbee's actually running Choip. They're like, they're the ones that are administrating this whole project.

• 54:53Nilay Patel?

  Zigbee, the administrator of Choip, that's a sentence you can say now as somebody who gives a shit about technology. Obviously. Okay, so then today, Z-Wave calls up Jake Kastranakis.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  Jake was like, who the fuck are you?

• 55:11Nilay Patel?

  No, Z-Wave is abandoning its business model today.

• 55:15Speaker 05

  Yup.

• 55:15Nilay Patel?

  Competition driving us forward. They're no longer going to bundle the standard with the chips. They're going to make the Z-Wave standard an actual quote unquote open standard. Now, anybody can buy the chips because they're running scared.

• 55:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, so they're going to let anybody make a chip. Here's the best part about this article from Jake is if you, once you've gotten through all of this understanding of the lie that is the Z-Wave Alliance and everything else, you can read the quotes from the executives, particularly a guy named Mitchell Klein, who's the executive director of the Z-Wave Alliance.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  It's a Commandant Klein of the Z-Wave Alliance.

• 55:49Speaker 05

  With regard to like not letting other companies make Z-Wave radios, he said, quote, "I would acknowledge that that, that, that seemed to have been the only objection I was always confronted with."

• 56:05Speaker 05

  And then later, when it comes time to like recognizing that this connected home over IP project exists and that its parent, Z-Wave's parent company Silicon Labs is part of the board of the Zigbee Alliance, Klein said, "I think it's important to note that at Silicon Labs, we see the big picture."

• 56:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, which is a choip is coming. You're going to get choiped.

• 56:31Speaker 04

  Z-Wave for choip.

• 56:33Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I am dying to speak to anyone from the Z-Wave Alliance, if you've been listening. Just ignore everything we just said. Send me one of your executives. We're going to keep an eye on choip.

• 56:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, actually, inside baseball, typically, you know, these big companies, some of them will reply to your emails, some of them won't. Some of them will reply to your emails and then call you and then want to get an executive on the phone and talk to you right now. Oh, my God. This time, they're all like, "Please go see our press release."

• 57:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  Like to a company, which is very interesting.

• 57:05Nilay Patel?

  I think they know that their plan is to have a plan.

• 57:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  And that, like, there's gonna be a meeting. Don't you want to be at that meeting? I guess no one ever really wants to be at a standard spotty meeting, but like, don't you want to be at a meeting where like the Apple engineer rolls in and the Google engineer rolls in and the Amazon engineer? And then like, they're a clique and everyone knows that they're like the power center.

• 57:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:26Nilay Patel?

  The Zigbee guys are like, trying to have a calm, cool discussion. And then someone starts screaming about 802 dot 15 dot 4. I gotta get in that room. And then the, the smart things, uh, person is like, no, we can't do this. We're, I'm, I'm canceling this whole thing. And then the Amazon guy pounds the table and says, no.

• 57:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:42Nilay Patel?

  We don't have a choip. We have to. The Samsung guy's like, yo, you want a Bixby demo? And everyone's like, no, at the same time. Actually, speaking of Bixby, I just want to point out, our, our friend Marques Brownlee tweeted today, it's been 497 days since the Samsung Galaxy Home was announced.

• 57:58Speaker 05

  Oh my god.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  Which is incredible.

• 58:05Speaker 05

  They even announced like a mini version of it before they released the regular one.

• 58:08Nilay Patel?

  CS is coming. I'm really hoping they have them on display again.

• 58:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:12Nilay Patel?

  Samsung will literally release anything.

• 58:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, anything. They're like, I don't know, here's a nuclear submarine, here's a washing machine, here's a folding phone that doesn't work.

• 58:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 05

  We would be remiss if we didn't talk, if, in all the smart home talk, we didn't talk about Thomas Ricker's great feature on IKEA, I call it IKEA 2.0. And their giant shift towards, uh, serving the smart home as like, with as much rigor as they make flat pack furniture. And they, they have done like important things in smart home. They're like, one of the companies that actually made LED bulbs cheap. And they're, they're going in and they, they're making these shortcut buttons that are really great. They've, they've already had this partnership with Sonos. And because they're IKEA and they're the first place you go to when you have an empty home, uh, they have a good shot at being really powerful here because while you're buying your smart furniture,

• 59:07Speaker 05

  you can also buy, you know, a smart light bulb.

• 59:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think it's smart. I think it's, Ricker pointed out, they like, they had like an early attempt with a TV that was a total failure.

• 59:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:17Nilay Patel?

  And like they've like learned from it. I don't know that I buy the thesis that because the first set of smart things you buy are IKEA things, it will be an ecosystem. But I do buy the thesis that if you actually get to a place where there's a standard and then like cheap IKEA things just like fit into the standard in a secure way, that that will actually drive like really fast adoption of smart home tech everywhere. Like if your IKEA blinds work really well with your voice assistant and your phone, like a lot of people are gonna buy IKEA blinds because they're so much cheaper than any other smart blinds I've ever seen. Like, I think it's that kind of turn that IKEA can do.

• 59:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, you should go watch this video. It's really fun. It's also, I think, Ricker's first big video with us, and it is just a delight. Ricker's one of our founders, so it's wild that he has never made a video this kind of before, but you just go watch it. It's great. All right, we're gonna take a break. I'm honestly, I'm just like emotionally exhausted from the Z-Wave Alliance. So we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back and someone's gonna tell you about this extremely large Xbox.

• 1:00:21Speaker 06

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• 1:01:21Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Paul, every week,

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  You, you personally have been holding America together. I want to just point out the obvious, which is that America has not actually held itself together despite your valiant efforts.

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:01:37Nilay Patel?

  I respect it. So let's close out the year strong. Let's bring this nation some unity.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  Every week, America, I do a segment called, "To Charge the Time, Do a Dongle Crime." And it's about this really cool, but possibly criminal, Apple Watch charger.

• 1:01:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh yes, I love this thing so much.

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  Alright, so, okay, you know how you charge the Apple pencil? It's, or you used to charge the Apple pencil? And you still do if you have a Lightning iPad, where it just sticks straight out. And that's what I mean by a dongle crime. The best dongles, which are all fairly bad, are, you know, flexible, you know, anyways. So this is a charger that sticks straight out, but it's a wireless charger for your, for your, for your Apple Watch. So it wouldn't work if your iPad was laying down and you plug the charger in. I guess it could, you'd have to undo the latch. I don't know, it would look really silly. But it looks really silly like this, where it's, if you have it propped up and the iPad's in keyboard

• 1:02:42Speaker 04

  mode, then the charger's sticking out the side. But mentally, this is very bad. But if you look at it, it's kind of cool, because you've got your iPad and then a tidy little screen. It's kind of like, you know, when you have your Big Mac and you put your iPad next to it as like a side display? This is the iPad version of that. And anyways.

• 1:03:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited for this thing because I'm gonna, I'm gonna plug it into Android phones and I'm gonna charge my Apple Watch off of Android phones. It's gonna be super fun. Yeah.

• 1:03:10Speaker 04

  I mean, why do you think it's a crime? If you have a dongle that is, is rigid, you know, like charging your Apple pencil or putting a wireless charging pad straight into your iPad, you're just begging for it to get snapped off.

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I think, I thought it was a crime because it's unlicensed from Apple.

• 1:03:30Speaker 04

  Oh, oh, I don't know. I don't know. No, I just think you're losing, when you lose this much of the ergonomics of your device. I mean, this is really one of the big things I hate, like headphone dongles make it slightly harder to use your phone in your pocket because there's like a kind of a... A distance of of unflexible material now in there anyways, you know what I mean?

• 1:03:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's not Phil Schiller showing up to arrest you because you're charging your watch. What she does personally now, I don't know if you've heard of this. All right. There's a chunky new Xbox from what I've gathered.

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  It is huge. It's a tower and it has the name Xbox Series X.

• 1:04:14Speaker 05

  Actually, it's just Xbox. This one is the Series X, though.

• 1:04:19Nilay Patel?

  Are you kidding me?

• 1:04:20Speaker 05

  No, it's it's we're only calling it Xbox, but this one is the Series X. That's that's like the full.

• 1:04:25Speaker 04

  So there will also be like a a lower end Xbox that will just be called Xbox.

• 1:04:30Speaker 05

  Well, it might be called Xbox Series something else.

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  Series.

• 1:04:34Speaker 05

  Because there's the Xbox One X, but there's also the Xbox.

• 1:04:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're going to talk about its internals and what it can do and its size, quite frankly. But I just want to go through the name real quick. So there there, once upon a time, there was the Xbox.

• 1:04:49Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 1:04:50Nilay Patel?

  And that was an executive at Microsoft called Jay Allard made it is a Skunk Works project. It was like custom silicon Xbox.

• 1:04:58Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:04:59Nilay Patel?

  Then there was the Xbox 360.

• 1:05:01Speaker 05

  The original Sin.

• 1:05:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the original Sin, not the Xbox 2.

• 1:05:05Speaker 05

  Greatest Xbox console of all time.

• 1:05:07Nilay Patel?

  And they and they they named it that because there was a PS2 and they wanted to be one more, bigger than before, right?

• 1:05:14Speaker 04

  Well, wait, the the Xbox competed against the PS2. So the Xbox 360 was going to be competing against a PlayStation 3.

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

  Right. And so they couldn't have the two against the three. Yeah.

• 1:05:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that was an Xbox that was all around you, from what I gather.

• 1:05:28Speaker 05

  It was it was the 360 was for the red ring of death.

• 1:05:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's so bad. Also, Jay Allard, Skunk Works, outside of Microsoft, custom silicon project. Then there was the Xbox One, where Jay Allard Jay Allard then made the Microsoft Can, which Joanna Stern reminded us of this week. The worst phone ever made. Canceled before it was launched, the Microsoft can, uh, then he left Microsoft. Then the Xbox became part of Microsoft proper. They released the Xbox One. The original Xbox One was literally-

• 1:06:02Speaker 05

  Was a VCR.

• 1:06:03Nilay Patel?

  Was a VCR, uh, literally contained every dream Microsoft had ever had about the living room in one.

• 1:06:09Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  Heavily focused on the Kinect, had an entire TV experience next to it. Uh, I forgot to talk about video games, I would say at the launch event. Just kinda left that out. Mostly about how you're gonna navigate Netflix with your voice with your Xbox. It was very confusing. We wrote a long feature about it. None of that worked. All those executives are gone. That's a true story.

• 1:06:28Speaker 05

  And Xbox has never recovered from that mistake.

• 1:06:30Nilay Patel?

  Has not recovered. But the Xbox One, importantly, left all the weird custom architecture, PC architecture. Just like the PS4, right? Yeah, that's all AMD stuff now. It's all AMD PC architecture now. PS4, Xbox One, PC architecture, very similar. And then there was the Xbox One S, the Xbox One X.

• 1:06:54Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  The Xbox One smaller guy. Like, the, uh, the one without the disc drive that I can't remember what it's called.

• 1:07:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I forget what the Xbox One S disc list, maybe? I forget what they call it.

• 1:07:04Nilay Patel?

  Great names, uh, for Microsoft. Xbox One Professional Edition for workplaces. Uh, alright, so like, the names just like spiraled into oblivion.

• 1:07:14Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:07:15Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:07:16Speaker 05

  And now their solution.

• 1:07:17Nilay Patel?

  Now their solution should just call it Xbox again. But have a Series X. And potentially in the future, a Series less than X.

• 1:07:25Speaker 05

  My, my main concern is, I mean, I am very concerned about this naming scheme for the console. But I also do not know what X denotes, or even connotes.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  Extreme. There's only one thing it connotes, extreme.

• 1:07:41Speaker 05

  What about Windows 10x? What about the Surface Pro X? There's like other X's in the world.

• 1:07:46Nilay Patel?

  X is Microsoft's Pro. It just means the more expensive one that you wish you'd bought.

• 1:07:51Speaker 05

  But there's a Surface Pro X that's- Like that's it's a pro pro?

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  Yes, duh.

• 1:07:57Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:07:58Nilay Patel?

  It's a Surface Pro X. Is the Surface Pro X is that the that's not the ARM one? That's a split screen one. That's the ARM one?

• 1:08:05Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:05Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  I'm sure there's a fancy term for this, but if if we try to figure out what X stands for by looking at this device, we might learn something because it is not a console. It is a it's a PC tower that is not as long as a typical PC tower.

• 1:08:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, it looks like nothing so much as a Macintosh Quadra 700. Um, for my OGs out there, that's exactly what it looks like minus the little lines that Apple put on everything.

• 1:08:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, there have been nonstop photo shops of it. My favorite one is just, uh, it is the size and shape of a fridge in a kitchen. And like, you don't even see that it's a Photoshop. It's just a fridge in a kitchen. Oh.

• 1:08:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, that tweet, by the way, got written up by like the IB Times slash Newsweek is real. Uh, incredible. They had to issue a correction. This is a real thing that happened.

• 1:08:56Nilay Patel?

  Okay. By the way, my other favorite thing about the the size of it, and then we will talk about it, can you?

• 1:09:01Speaker 05

  Um, yeah.

• 1:09:02Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft in their PR pointed out that you could use it vertically and horizontally. And I was like, no one knows this. We should write a post and Hyam very quickly wrote a post. You can use the Xbox Series X horizontally. And that was like our top post next to the launch post because this is so confusing.

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  Yep. If you if you put it horizontally, it's it's still it's like

• 1:09:23Nilay Patel?

  It's still very tall.

• 1:09:24Speaker 04

  It's like two VCRs tall. Like I I think it looks absolutely gorgeous. I really like the aesthetic. I have no idea. I, you know, I have a lot of large-ish devices in my home entertainment system. I don't know where to put this.

• 1:09:39Nilay Patel?

  Have you thought about adding a Drobo? Because that is the choice you can make with Microsoft.

• 1:09:44Speaker 04

  It's like it's like two Game Cubes on top of each other, but bigger.

• 1:09:47Speaker 05

  I love it. I love how unapologetic it is. I wrote an article that was titled, "The Xbox Series X is the Cybertruck of game consoles." And I will stand by that.

• 1:09:57Nilay Patel?

  Strong.

• 1:09:58Speaker 05

  Yep. They're just not they're not sorry. It's great.

• 1:10:01Nilay Patel?

  So Paul, when it comes to questions of architecture and what chips can do, I turn to you, my friend. What can this thing do?

• 1:10:08Speaker 04

  This can do about two Xbox One Xs of graphical flops. Terrible, terrible flops.

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  So this is kind of a confusion that we all knew that Sony and Microsoft were kind of setting themselves up for by creating the Pro or X versions of their consoles in the mid, the middle of the lifecycle to get, you know, some 4K upscaling on their, on their, for games, that they were going to steal a little bit of the thunder of these new consoles. And that is true. So this, this system is about, yeah, so about double the speed at like 12 teraflops. Now, the CPU is going to be way faster. And so the, the big change with the, with the Xbox One X was mostly was GPU related. And then obviously the, there was a new cycle a few months back, you know, both the PS4, well, by the

• 1:11:01Speaker 04

  way, the new, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox, like they're talking about the Series X, this is going to be the most powerful console. But in some sense, it, it's all about like, Sony and Microsoft are using, as far as I know, pretty much the same AMD parts. So they're just going to, it's going to depend on how well they could cool and overclock, and if they splurge for like a slightly, you know, better run of the chips and stuff. But, you know, the, the technological generation and the general provenance of the technology is pretty much the same. Really fast NVMe SSDs and fast, modern RAM and Zen 2 AMD

• 1:11:44Speaker 04

  architecture for the CPU and, and a lot more GPU than we've had before in, in a console.

• 1:11:52Nilay Patel?

  So why do you need this all locally is I think one of my big questions, right? Like Dieter's been playing Stadia.

• 1:11:58Speaker 04

  I have.

• 1:11:59Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft has X-Cloud. Like, it seems like the answer to, oh crap, this all might move to the cloud is what if you had a PC tower next to your computer?

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  I mean, wasn't Borderlands 3 is coming to Stadia at 30 FPS? Like, like, Google can't even run these games fast in the cloud. And then it streams, and then, so then you have to have a perfect internet connection to get a high bitrate, and you have the latency. Like, there are just so, and there are the, there's problems, it is not, I think it's at least as much of a lift to port to Stadia as it is to port to one of these consoles, especially given the fact that these consoles are so similar hardware-wise.

• 1:12:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, here's, here's what I'll say. I think Stadia, like I have, I have a perfect internet connection at home and like it still chops. And I'm, that's actually not the thing that makes me mad about Stadia. Uh, it's like all the other execution problems that they have. They can't ship a hunk of plastic and a spring to hold your phone on a controller. Like, what are you, what are you guys doing? Um, but the reason, even if you trust that all of those cloud gaming latency bandwidth issues get solved, and I kind of do weirdly. What a console sitting in your living room does is, is a thing that you own that does what it says it's going to do in your home, the end. There's no questions about, uh, you know, what will the framerate be on the server?

• 1:13:24Speaker 05

  There's no questions about the bandwidth or the latency. It is, I bought this thing, I bought this disc, I put this disc in this thing, and then it does what it says it's gonna do. That's great. And that also is its advantage over PC gaming, in my opinion. Because it's like, it, here is the thing, and its job is to make games good. And that, I don't have to think about anything else with it.

• 1:13:43Nilay Patel?

  Right, it's an appliance.

• 1:13:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  It's just an appliance, it is mostly a PC.

• 1:13:47Speaker 04

  I have an original Xbox One and it's got like the, the fan and the power supply is loud.

• 1:13:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Speaker 04

  And the disk drive is failing, and it's always been big and ugly, and it's, you know, and it, and the hard drive feels so slow. And so there are tons of problems with it. But like, in general, if you have an old console, they keep working. You know, if you have an Xbox 360, you put a game in the Xbox 360 and it has-

• 1:14:12Nilay Patel?

  There's no chance that if you have an original Xbox 360, it still works.

• 1:14:15Speaker 05

  There's a bit better chance that you have an original Xbox One, I'll tell you that.

• 1:14:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Speaker 05

  Ew, I've had so many Xbox Ones die on me, sorry.

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, so maybe Xbox should have brought, you have got, you got a PS2 and, and Final Fantasy 12. You can have a great time. Um, and, and I do think it's gotten tougher like now, like if you buy- I think we're we're in a weird spot with this transition like we're mostly digital distribution, but there still are game discs and obviously the you know, the new Series X has a slot, it has a disk drive. So they are going to apparently be distributing games on a disk. But what you do nowadays is you distribute a game on a Blu-ray disk and then you have like a 40 gigabyte download.

• 1:15:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Speaker 04

  Day one patch and it's really awful. And if you if you even if you did do that patch, if you don't play the game for a month, there's like a mega download and the fast SSD really solves a lot of like the load time stuff, which is going to be awesome, but it doesn't solve that like the day one patch and ongoing patches problem.

• 1:15:22Nilay Patel?

  How much of that disk drive is just culturally, a bunch of console gamers want the comfort of having a disk? And how much of it is somebody from GameSpot is bribing somebody at Microsoft?

• 1:15:33Speaker 04

  I don't know, but like you, if you don't care about modern rosters, you can get Madden 2017 for like $3 at GameStop, you know?

• 1:15:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Speaker 04

  And what is it on the Xbox? I don't even know, but on the Xbox.

• 1:15:45Nilay Patel?

  It's still like $60. Even Madden is like a that has a whole grinder cards mode thing that you have to do. Yeah, I get what you're saying.

• 1:15:53Speaker 04

  Well, and and that on the PC, there's a big sort of sales culture on Steam where people wish list stuff on Steam. But you have this feeling like if I get something into my Steam library, that is going to be useful to me for a really long time. Whereas, yeah, if I keep on buying Xboxes, there's a chance that my library will be forward compatible, but it's not like a guarantee. So it feels a lot more like throwing money down the hole to buy a digital copy on a console than it does, for me at least, on a PC.

• 1:16:26Nilay Patel?

  That's interesting because Microsoft has made some like promises about backwards compatibility with this thing, right? Mm hmm. I think so.

• 1:16:33Speaker 04

  As far as I know, they should both Sony and and Microsoft should have no problems with backwards compatibility because the because the last generation was PC architecture and this is a PC architecture. So I'm sure there will be little things with the with software. And I mean, that's kind of again, it's interesting like these are more like a PC and that this is a an upgraded way to play like just like the Xbox One X could play a lot of existing Xbox One games, but in new four 4K mode, you know, I'm sure that it's going to be a similar, you know, selling point for the Series X or even for the whatchamacallit. Because there there's also going to be kind of a lower res version that's not even as powerful

• 1:17:15Speaker 04

  as the Xbox One X for the new X. It's real frustrating not having good words to refer to things by.

• 1:17:24Nilay Patel?

  We should just name them our own things like we should pick like, I don't know, like classic Chevy cars and just like this is the Chevelle. Yeah, this is the Nova. And this is the weird one that was a pickup truck, but a car. This is the Al Camino.

• 1:17:37Speaker 04

  There's going to be a a 4K newest Xbox and there's going to be a 1080p newest Xbox is what it seems like to me.

• 1:17:45Nilay Patel?

  All right, do we know when this Xbox Series X is coming out and what it might cost? Next year, who knows? Right? The answer is going for.

• 1:17:53Speaker 04

  I'm pretty sure it's next year. It's weird like does he I don't even know if E3 matters anymore. I would typically this is the sort of thing you would announce at E3, but that would be. Yeah, so it's probably holiday next year, right? $5,000.

• 1:18:10Speaker 04

  I mean, that was a big Microsoft. It was a big issue for them that they came out of the gate $100 more expensive than the PS4. And and so I am certain, well, I can't be certain. I would bet that they won't make that mistake again. That's probably with this cheaper SKU. But the cheaper SKU could be the sort of thing was like for, you know, I the $400 PS5 is more powerful than the, you know, the $350 newest Xbox 1080p.

• 1:18:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's almost certainly going to happen, especially like as the generations change and those old devices go on sale. And then you're going to be really stuck playing Madden 17 for $3. All right. That's it. That's our last Vergecast for the year. Thank you for listening to us all year. It has been a remarkable year of Verge stuff, and I appreciate it. We'll be back next year at CES. That's how we're starting this thing. It's gonna just keep happening to us. Year after year, we begin the year in Las Vegas, looking at humidifiers with Wi-Fi chips in them. I'm excited. Yeah. You can believe that. Super sincere. Thank you to Casey for being on the show. There was a time when I used to be really excited about going to CES. That time has

• 1:19:24Nilay Patel?

  passed. Thank you for Casey for being on the show. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Dieter's at Backaln. Paul's at FuturePaul. Happy holidays. Enjoy your families. We'll see you next year. Rock and roll. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:19:55Speaker 09

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