Recapping Code Conference, Youtube’s CEO apologizes, and the Pixel 4 leaks

Fresh off of Code Conference, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s apology and difficult week, and consider whether there’s any viable alternative to Youtube. They also discuss the leaked photo of the upcoming Pixel 4. And later, a recap of what happened at E3 includes video game and hardware updates. Subscribe to the Vergecast here for free in your favorite podcast app Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  On this episode of The Vergecast, Dieter, Paul and I talk about everything that happened at Code Conference, including YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki's performance on stage. We go through the Pixel 4 leaks that Google just tweeted out, and Megan Farokh-Mesh runs down E3 and we get into what's going on with the new Xbox. That's The Vergecast coming up now.

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• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Empire. I have to say, this week was the Code Conference and the third day of the Code Conference was like a bunch of Vox Media podcasts on stage doing their thing live. They didn't ask us because they wanted good shows.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  But I sat there thinking, these people don't know the flagship is here.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, I'm Eli. I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Howdy.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller is here. Hello. I would say we had a rip-roaring week in news. And it's really funny, because last week we did two episodes on Friday, because I couldn't figure out how to slam together the YouTube drama with Apple drama.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  But this week, we're just slamming them together. This week was the Code Conference. A bunch of platform executives from YouTube, from Facebook, from Twitter were on stage talking about their content moderation policies, how they're running their platforms. We gotta, we gotta talk about that. It was huge. Dieter and I were there. Casey Newton was there. Casey Newton actually interviewed the executives from Instagram and Facebook onstage. So you'll hear that next week as part of the interview episode. We gotta talk about that stuff. It was a big deal. Code's always a big deal. Lots to talk about there. And then it was also E3. And we're gonna actually have Megan Frohmanesh do a little E3 news rundown for us later on in the show. There was a new Xbox stuff announced, more stadium news, so there's like a lot of that going on. And then Google just yesterday decided that it would just tweet a picture of Pixel.

• 2:50Nilay Patel?

  I think it felt left out. I got, so the Pixel 4 was announced yesterday in a tweet. Rick Ostelow, the head of hardware at Google, just randomly tweeted, "Without a period at the end, yes, there's a Pixel 4."

• 3:05Nilay Patel?

  The most casual of all phone launches. That's just amazing. So we definitely have to talk about that. But the reason we're, you know, last week we pulled them apart, there was definitely an hour's worth of stuff, if not more, you know, with all of WWDC and all of the YouTube stuff, to, to fill that, that space and, you know, tensions are at high. I think this is just a much more normal week of tech news. We're trying them together again this week. If you think it is too jarring and you want me to start splitting these things apart, let me know. Last week was obviously an experiment and I'd love your feedback on, on how sort of diffuse you want the show to be versus mashed together. You're saying that we should break them up? We should break them up. If you think we should break up the Vergecast, let me know. You know, I'm, I'm always ready

• 3:49Nilay Patel?

  between to, for our episodes to compete amongst themselves in the market of Vergecast.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, let's start with code. The Code Conference, obviously, one of the premier tech conferences in the industry. It is indeed run by our company, Vox Media, but it was Walton Kara's conference. Now it is, obviously, Walt retired. Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka now run it. This was a big year. We moved it to Phoenix. It was extraordinarily hot in Phoenix. So it was fun because everybody had to stay in the hotel to not be in the oppressive heat. So we just ran into a lot of people. It was a lot of fun. But previous years, the Code Conference and before that, the D Conference, lots of products got launched there.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like Siri, before Apple bought it, launched it code.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 4:40Nilay Patel?

  Someone pointed out that Bing launched it code.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Really?

• 4:43Nilay Patel?

  It sure did.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  My favorite code launch of all time was a feature for, wait for it, the Palm Pre. It was the event where they revealed that they were going to hijack iTunes and make it the sync product to get music onto a Palm Pre. Because they made it pretend like it was an iPod. Immediately got shut down. They found a workaround. That got shut down again. It was incredible.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  What's the context? What's the question? What did Kara ask? And then, well, let me tell you about...

• 5:17Nilay Patel?

  So this was before, so when I say Bing launched it code, I mean Bing launched the D Conference. When I say code, I mean code and the previous D Conference.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:24Nilay Patel?

  So during the D Conference, during that time, there was not live video streaming, which is a remarkable thing to think about. There was not, like Samsung couldn't just hold a press event and be like, "Yep, it's a speaker that looks like a grill." Like, it was like the time before that. So you would get all these fancy reporters in a room, and this was your moment outside of the press conference event world to launch a product. So they would come there knowing they were going to launch a product, have this interview, and then Walter Kara would be like, "But you want to announce something here today." And they would go into it.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  So in fact, I mean, I just Googled Bing launches at D Conference. And there's like, you know how we write preview articles about like an Apple event? Like, "What to expect from an Apple event?" There's all these articles that's like, "Microsoft CEO Bill Bommer is expected to take the stage and debut Redmond's new search brand." It's like amazing. Just think about being in that moment. They're really gonna take on Google. Anyhow, that was like, and that has happened in the past. There were some last year. This year, though, very little emphasis on that side of the tech industry. A massive emphasis on particularly the big platform companies. And their, basically their responsibility for what is on their platforms. And what people do with all the technology they've built.

• 6:42Nilay Patel?

  Stephen Sinofsky, who, friend of the show and a frequent rival of ours on Twitter. I guess I think it's fair to say. He wrote a good piece about code. And he's like, the thing that is really remarkable is most of these companies have grown up on this stage. Yeah. Right? Like, Google was a startup and Walton Care brought them onto the stage. Facebook was a startup. One of Mark Zuckerberg's first high-pressure interviews on the code stage. In his hoodie, and Care put him under such pressure that he had to take his hoodie off because he was like sweating so much. So it was really remarkable to have been to as many of these conferences and see these companies go from pipsqueak upstarts, startups, to now these like dominant players where the

• 7:27Nilay Patel?

  every single one of them got asked about content moderation policies, about breakups, about regulation. The CEO of Delta Airlines was on that stage. He got very mad at me. Because I was like, you're living this life in reverse. Like, we're talking about doing breakups and regulation on the tech industry. The airline industry is all about deregulation and consolidation. He was like, the premise of your question is totally wrong. So that was like entertaining. But so that was, that's the context, right? I just want to set that up. Like, this was a very serious edition of the code conference. Because it was about the responsibilities dominant firms have in our life. And so that's all to wind up to. The first person to take the stage was the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki.

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  A lot of pressure on her. Obviously, huge controversy last week around YouTube. They rolled out, and this is all separate. I think this is all getting conflated, so it bears repeating. A bunch of individual things happened last week that people are conflating. YouTube itself rolled out a new hate speech policy, all by itself. They'd been working on it for a long time. They briefed Casey on it weeks before because they were like rolling it out. That led to some channels being turned off. There was the Steven Crowder, Carlos Maza harassment just situation.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 8:44Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what word you would, uh, disaster, catastrophe.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  Um, they handled that as poorly as any company can handle anything.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 8:53Nilay Patel?

  And then there was a, you know, just a small pedophilia crisis. Um, it's happened.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:59Nilay Patel?

  And then Kevin Roos, uh, wrote an article in the Times about how the algorithm just leads to some radicalization, which is something that people have been talking about with YouTube in particular for a very long time. So she was on stage. She, she, I'm gonna just say this, Dieter, I'm curious for your, your take on it.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 9:16Nilay Patel?

  But she did a bad job.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, yeah.

• 9:22Nilay Patel?

  So she, look, she, and all credit to Susan. First of all, she's the CEO of YouTube. She's been at Google for 20 years. She's successful, right? Like,

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:30Nilay Patel?

  She, she runs a thing that is the dominant company in its space. Right? So like, all credit to her. She, she accomplished that. She showed up, which she did not have to do in the midst of all these crises, and she answered the questions.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  So like, that's a lot of credit. And I, I think she was extremely genuine. I think she was extremely sincere. Uh, I don't doubt any of that, but I think she did a bad job. And I, walking around the conference, talking to folks afterwards, universal, uh, assessment of that performance was,

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:03Nilay Patel?

  she kind of blew it.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  But so the, the thing to realize, and you can go watch this interview on YouTube right now. Uh, Recode has put up all this stuff pretty much right away. Just because it was like a bad performance doesn't mean it was a bad interview or that it's not worth your time to watch. Uh, because her, um,

• 10:21Speaker 03

  For whatever reason, her inability to like directly answer questions, you know, typically, you know, executives from companies are very, very rehearsed and very prepped and have like answers in their pockets for all the stuff that they expect. And she either didn't have the answer in her pocket or didn't like the answer that was in her pocket. And instead, she, um, she was like very clearly having a hard time articulating what was actually going on in response to a bunch of questions. One of the, one of the last questions was just a straight up yes or no, does YouTube like radicalize people? And instead of saying, you know, there's radicalization in content everywhere or, you know, something,

• 11:02Speaker 03

  she just said, "Our view is we're offering a diverse set of content to our users," uh, which is a straight up refusal to even address the, the premise of the question. And there was just sort of a lot of that. But I will say that the thing that struck me was she's getting asked incredibly hard questions about incredibly difficult issues. And if I were in that position, I would probably be flailing just as much because it may have been like not a great performance, but it was sincerely like she was being sincere and honest in her inability to articulate answers to the questions is what it seemed like to me.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  So I, I, I disagree.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 11:44Nilay Patel?

  Um, and I don't disagree sort of with what like your assessment, right? I'm trying to be careful here because I do think she was being sincere and I do think it is very hard. What I disagree with is I don't think she saw the problem.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 11:58Nilay Patel?

  Um, and so I just, I live tweeted all this. Hold on a second, let me find the right quote.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  What is the quote you're looking for?

• 12:04Nilay Patel?

  So there's a couple of quotes that I just made me think she doesn't see the problem. So Peter said, "Can you get to the point," Peter Kafka interviewed her. So Peter said, "Can you get to the point where there isn't a bad story about YouTube almost weekly?" And Susan said, "At the point, at the scale we're at, there's always people who want to write negative stories." And this isn't that, right?

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  By the way, Peter's response to this was great. He said, "If I ran a business where people were dumping that much sludge on my platform, I'd seriously rethink what I'm doing." But that's, you know, that's like the point of code is to like have this back and forth.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:37Nilay Patel?

  But if you're, if you look, if you're looking at this and you're saying, "People are selectively choosing only negative stories because we're so big, you can always find one," then you're missing, I think, the core of the problem, which is you're being constantly hijacked.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? There are bad faith actors on your platform who have gamed your algorithm, who know how to play the game better than you, who are extraordinarily good at walking up right to the bleeding edge of your rules and forcing you to be in a position where you have to apologize for being consistent and getting to the wrong outcome over and over and over again because they're in bad faith hijacking your rules. You are constantly wandering into a debate about free speech that you shouldn't be having because you're a private company. And you're, you're basically putting your gigantic dominant company in a position where it is reacting, right? If you don't see the problem, you are always reactive to the problems other people are creating.

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  And then you're saying, "Well, people are always going to write negative stories." That's not the issue.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  So the possibility exists that she sees the problem exactly the way that you described it, but has no solution. And it's better to not acknowledge the problem if you don't have a solution than to just flat out admit, "I have no idea how to fix this because fundamentally we want, you know, people to be able to upload videos without us, you know, looking at every single one because of course they do," right?

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then, so she had another answer. She said, "Anytime you have a bunch of creators and people who are upset, it's difficult. This week we managed to upset everybody. It's not an easy job. It's a tough job, but I'm encouraged by the stories I hear about people using YouTube for good things."

• 14:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:15Nilay Patel?

  I think what people are looking for from the leader of YouTube is not this admission of how hard it is, not this half apology for offending LGBTQ people, or seeming like they're sorry, they're sorry that they're upset, but we've got to be consistent. They're looking for this company to have values, right? And to be able to, to declare what those values are and to say, if you're going to participate in our platform, here are the rules that we're making. And we're not, this isn't necessarily about political speech. It's about being good to each other, and we're going to enforce those rules. And instead, we're lost in this like legal morass of how do we write the rule so it can, it can

• 14:56Nilay Patel?

  cover beauty influencers and how to people and, and comedians and real political actor? Like, you cannot write that rule.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 15:04Nilay Patel?

  And if, if you, and if you want, like, that rule, the way that rule really looks is like the First Amendment of the United States, right? Like, that's the, you're a country. You're trying to write a country that can cover everything. But then inside of the country, you have lots of other places that make their own rules.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  In our workplace, there are rules about what you can or cannot say. In your, people listening to this, in your workplace, there are probably some code of conduct guidelines, or some employee guidelines about what you can say in your workplace. If you want to go on broadcast television, I assure you, ABC and CBS and NBC have guidelines about what you can, can or cannot say on their platform. Anywhere you go. So, that's how we usually do. We cut it into discrete pieces and say, this is what you're allowed to do in these spaces. YouTube is trying to create one rule for everybody without any acknowledgement of the spaces people are in.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  For YouTube to be the dominant, like, the video platform, just the only place where you put video basically on the internet, other than like a walled garden of like Netflix or something, how big of a percentage of people who want to make videos can they ostracize before they are no longer YouTube anymore? They're something different.

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  I think that's an amazing question. I wish I'd, the question I wish I'd asked was, I'm mad at you and I want to go somewhere else. Where do I go that scares you? Right, it's not Vimeo. We got a very nice note from someone that said Vox Media should go to Vimeo.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's a, that's a huge number of people, and I think the network effect of YouTube, the reach it can provide you if you're on their platform is so big. And I honestly, I just honestly think, again, to her credit, I do not want to like disparage the obvious accomplishment. YouTube is the thing that it is. She has managed it to this place.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  That is an enormous accomplishment. Great. She's been there for 20 years. Right? Like, do you see the problem from the, do you have the distance from the problem to identify it at this point in time? Isn't, to me, what this interview reflected. And I think everybody should go watch it and you can decide for themselves, but it felt like she didn't, she had, she didn't have a handle on it.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  The, the way I see it is that there's a, a set of videos that's on YouTube that I didn't have a problem that, with the, the large percentage of them being on YouTube, right? And there is a large group of people who are loudly advocating for a lot fewer videos to be on YouTube. And so, it seems natural that YouTube's position is like, well, the current set of videos is what we think is appropriate because we allowed them in the first place, so of course they abide by our guidelines. So, it seems like a, a change in policy is being advocated for, from, from people like Vox.

• 17:49Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I'm gonna quote this, I'm gonna quote the CEO of Delta and say that I reject the premise of your question.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  Okay, i- is YouTube being asked to change dramatically, is what I'm, I'm saying.

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  So, I, I, again, I learned this from the CEO of Delta, I can just angrily say I reject the premise of your question to avoid answering.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  That's great, that's good.

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  No, but I, I will actually answer your question. I, the thing that I, I disagree with fundamentally is that there is any such thing as the current set of YouTube videos. Right? YouTube, it's like a billion hours a, an hour, or whatever gets uploaded to YouTube.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, the ever-changing nature of that content library is impossible to manage. It is even impossible to understand what's on YouTube. Right? Like, there, the first thing it is, she even said this, is like, this is a, this is a search engine. Like, we're an information service. So like, they're pulling in all this stuff and they have to index it. And so like, there isn't some fixed set of the things that were okay yesterday and today. Between now and tomorrow and the next day, YouTube will like double in size. Right? That curve is accelerating. So, right, like, I get what you're saying. I just, I think the first problem is just managing the inflow of content.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  You can't hold them to that standard. You can't say, they've already looked at everything and said it was okay. And now we're changing the rule. They have definitely not looked at everything. And with every day that passes, their ability to look at everything falls even farther.

• 19:16Speaker 04

  Right. So as a user of YouTube, I use YouTube to find videos that I've never seen before. Or I have seen before. And, and some of the videos that I've never seen before are new videos. But there, there's a large set of old videos. Some of them I've seen, some of them I haven't seen. As a user of YouTube, I expect that library to continue to exist. Because I want to go back to those videos. If I was worried that those videos would stop existing, like my favorite ones. Um, then I would like download like backups or something like that. And then as for new videos, those new videos will exist if people think that they can build a career on YouTube. But if people are uncertain of whether either YouTube is willing to monetize individual creators.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  Or whether YouTube is a moving target and therefore what might be okay today is not okay tomorrow. Then that's disincentivizing creators, therefore I as a viewer, might have fewer reasons to tune into YouTube. Because fewer creators are drawn to YouTube.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  And what I would say to you is yes, in a functional market with many competitors. Uh, some of these people would go other places, but we don't have that thing. We have YouTube.

• 20:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  We just, we have this monopoly on user-generated video. This is where they are. All those people could go to IGTV tomorrow. They're not doing it. I don't know why. All those people go to Vimeo tomorrow. They're not doing it. I don't know why. They could all start posting their videos to Twitter. They're not doing it. I don't know why. YouTube is the place where they are and there's they could all go to Facebook watch. Enjoy that problem.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  But YouTube still, if YouTube stopped running, right? Imagine a weird world where all of Google services go down for like a day or something like that, right?

• 20:57Nilay Patel?

  China.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  People would at some point actually do something else, right? If YouTube completely failed to be YouTube.

• 21:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  There would eventually an alternative would emerge.

• 21:09Nilay Patel?

  Presumably. And right, and I think what you're saying is there's enough people who are upset that such an alternative, it seems natural that such an alternative would exist.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  Or is YouTube such a loss leader that they're just basically hosting everybody's videos at an incredible loss?

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  Actually, when Google tweeted out the pixel last night, Mark Bergen, who's the great Google reporter at Bloomberg, responded with, now do YouTube revenue. Cause they don't know, like I, I don't know the answer to that question. It's so, like I get what you're saying, like the, it did very directly answer your question about what Vox is advocating for. And our publisher, full transparency, Carlos Mazzola works here. He's our colleague, we're not like hanging out every day, but he certainly works here. Our publisher has written a letter to YouTube. The vox.com team wrote an open letter to other YouTube creators. What they are asking for very directly is for YouTube to just enforce the policies it has. Right? There are policies against attacking other people. There are policies against inciting harassment.

• 22:06Nilay Patel?

  There are policies against using hurtful language and they didn't do it this time. And then Susan's answer was, we feel very sorry about that, but we have to be consistent because, you know, if we start taking this down, the next thing we'll do is we'll take down rap music videos. Right? Or the next thing we'll take, we'll, we'll find some other thing to take down. That answer is troublesome, right? It, it speaks to, I think, a very foolish kind of consistency. Like, yes, that's true. Like many songs contain difficult language, like sure, but they're not, I don't think they're the same thing. Right? And this is what I, what I just keep coming back to is the rules for what you get to play on MTV and what you get to put on CNN are, are different.

• 22:50Nilay Patel?

  Like we instinctively understand that they're different. We instinctively understand that different spaces in our society have different rules inside of the umbrella of the First Amendment. And by the way, the First Amendment does not even apply to private corporations and YouTube is obviously a private corporation.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  Can I, can I just, I know I say this like a hundred times. There, there's a free speech as a concept and ideal and there's free speech as a law in the First Amendment, right?

• 23:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, sure, but like.

• 23:20Speaker 04

  Okay, I just want to make sure that that's clear. People, people, people hear the term free speech and they're like, oh, well, you're talking about the First Amendment, that just applies to limit to what the federal government can do.

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because that's what it, but that's.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  But that's not what free speech as a concept is.

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  Okay, what is free speech as a concept?

• 23:37Speaker 04

  It's an ethic, it's an idea that, that you have freedom to speak.

• 23:42Nilay Patel?

  Right, and I, I just like, that is true.

• 23:45Speaker 04

  And so, and, and so, so someone was like, ah, free speech, that sounds like a good idea, let's make a law that enshrines that in the constitution of this specific government. But it doesn't mean it stops also still being ethic.

• 23:59Nilay Patel?

  It absolutely means it stops there, right? Like, it doesn't stop being ethic, but like, the law is very clear on who it relates to. The first word is Congress.

• 24:06Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, it's clear what, what the limits of the law are. I'm saying that, that, that ethic does not cease to exist just because it has one concrete implementation. Let's say I started another country and I'm like, what, what ethic should I base my speech policies on?

• 24:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  You know what I mean?

• 24:23Nilay Patel?

  I could.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  What you're saying here is like, murder is bad, we made, so we made a law against it. If the law went away, murder would still be bad.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes, thank you. I'm sorry, that was poor of explaining, I'm really glad you are here.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  It's true, I, I think we can all agree for once on a policy principle at the Verchats, which is that murder is bad.

• 24:48Nilay Patel?

  Um.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Unless it's unless it's your thirst and you need a can of water.

• 24:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's true. This is horrible. I'm not plugging that. I mean, I had a good time drinking Liquid Death, but I'm not plugging it. Anyway, Paul, I think the disagreement I have with you is that the prohibition against murder is like you're prevented from doing it and the ethic of free speech is something that you are required to provide. And like we I'm not as an employer like I'm a bunch of people's boss. I don't have to provide them free speech in my office. I we actually actively constrain like people into being kind to each other in our workplace. That's a thing that we ask employees of OxiMe to do. Google can do that as much as it wants. Right, that's in fact, their ability to moderate their platform is another expression of free speech. They get to choose what they distribute. So it's very thorny, right?

• 25:37Nilay Patel?

  But the the law applies to government because it is more dangerous for the government to constrain your speech than a private company because presumably you can go to a competitor. If you don't like it, you can leave, right?

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  And so we can't tell the difference between Google and the government. It just keep coming back to it. We're confused. We feel like we can't leave them, so we should apply the law to the government because we can't leave the government. Right, like it's not something you're gonna do. Like you can threaten to move to Canada, but then you live in Canada.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Canada's nice.

• 26:09Nilay Patel?

  But you know what I mean? Like you you feel like you can't leave, so you're trapped, so you should be held to this higher standard.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  And I feel like, OK, if you're gonna be in that position, if you're gonna be the CEO of the thing that feels like the government, your job is to be forceful. Your job is to be the leader. And I I just I do not think that Susan Wojcicki demonstrated those. I think fundamentally the substance of what she said. And you should go watch this interview and tell me if you disagree because I'm I'm curious. The substance of what she was saying was exactly the same as the substance as Adam Mosseri. And Boz from Facebook, right? We have policies, we enforce them, we change them, we try to be consistent, it's so hard. They were just more confident. So people were like, they did a good job. Vijay Gata, who's Twitter's general counsel, was on stage being interviewed. Same questions, same incredibly hard questions, same answers.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  How do you enforce? Vijay came off incredible, like she did a great job being like, this is hard, we make rules, we get it wrong. Here's how we're gonna deal with the president, like, those are hard questions. People walked away being like, Twitter's got it sorted. They know what they're doing.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  One of the reasons she came off so well, one of the reasons she came off so well is because her CEO, Jack Dorsey, has been doing a terrible job of explaining.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  Finally, somebody.

• 27:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But everyone, like, when this conference ends, everyone goes out, they're like, eating lunch or whatever, we're talking about it. And everyone's like, she did great. I'm like, but Twitter is bad.

• 27:33Nilay Patel?

  It's incredible to say, like, this executive did a better job articulating how content moderation should work. Twitter has exactly the same problems. Facebook has exactly the same problems.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  I watched that Joe Rogan episode she was on. I disagreed with probably 95% of the words that came out of her mouth, but I still thought she did an amazing job.

• 27:50Nilay Patel?

  Right. And that's just, it's literally like a leadership thing. I don't wanna, and again, like, can you look at YouTube and make this is a massively successful business? It dominates the category it's in. She obviously has done a good job of managing it. But in this moment, the job, the ground has shifted to no longer manage a tech product or a revenue product or whatever the thing is, a publishing platform, a video hosting service. The responsibility is like, I'm now the arbiter of speech and video form for the world. Right? Like, that's the job. And I just think some people see that problem and some people don't.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  Hmm. What did you guys think of, this is a little bit of a tangent, but the new Twitter rules?

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so if you look, Twitter tweeted out the rules, they rewrote them to make them simpler. There's like links to more, basically same rules. The thing that got me always, always, always, always makes me laugh is that Kay Von was on stage. He's the head of products Twitter. He's like, we're doing a good job, we've made our rules human readable. Right. And this just implies to me like lawyers are not humans.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  It's true. I have, I have a longstanding theory that if you, if you ran, I don't think you'd get elected, but were you to be elected on the, the platform of word count, like my only job in, in the, the, the Congress will be to shorten laws. Like they could all have the exact same content, but I want them shorter, more concise. I'm a big proponent.

• 29:24Nilay Patel?

  Maybe. I mean, our country's been around for a long time. There's a great Twitter account called The Crime a Day. It just lists all the things that you can become a federal felon for. Yeah. He actually just turned into a book called How to Be a Felon and it's like the most insane stuff. I think we all forget that like a bunch of stuff happened between like the constitution and now. And we've actually like, right, like we actually created a lot of stuff along the way.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  Doesn't mean every bill has to be like a hundred thousand words. But I guess, I guess, and I guess part of it is that I read those Twitter rules and I felt like these are very straightforward. These are, are, are very easy to understand. And I also feel like, let, you know, let's say this, this, they included a rule that said, and no Paul Millers. Like I, I follow another Paul Miller on Twitter. I know there's multiple of us, right? No Paul Millers. It would feel capricious, but at the same time it's like, I understand. I get it. It's right there in the rules. They said upfront, I can't, I can't be on Twitter.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  That's like if you, what was it? There's some service from back in the day, like Slashdot or Fark or whatever. And the rule, the first rule is like, don't be a jerk.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:35Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, that's like it. It just gets to cover everything else and we're going to make decisions on that. Right? And like, I just think what the thing that is dangerous here, and it is a real danger, is that every user of the internet is becoming a lawyer. Right? It is like, has these like grand thoughts about how the law intersects with their ethics, with the dominance of the platforms. I don't think that's what you want like a functional society to look like, that we're constantly having legal debates about the services we use, that we're constantly flooded with terms of service agreements that no one can read, with privacy policies that are insanely complicated. There's a great New York Times

• 31:19Nilay Patel?

  data visualization this week, where they just like ran a bunch of privacy policies through like a readability scanner that plotted them at like grade level and sentence length. Yeah. And like, like literally, I think it's only Kant was like more complicated than an average privacy policy. And like Ulysses is like less complicated than many private, like, that's crazy. That's like, it's a, that situation I think is untenable. And yes, I think it is extremely bad that this apology from Susan Wojcicki to the gay community on her platform didn't feel sincere, even though she, she wanted it to. Yeah. It is a problem that employees at Google, in that community, are super upset and feel

• 32:03Nilay Patel?

  like their company doesn't take them seriously. That's all real. And I, we should not discount it or set it aside. But I think the bigger, the biggest problem is that everyone feels powerless with these companies. And they, we are beginning to treat them like the government. We are beginning to treat their rules with the same sort of standards and scrutiny as we would apply to like, how should the government write laws? Like, oh, should all the laws in America be tweet length? Is like a ridiculous place to have arrived. Right? Yes, they should. Sure. And like, that's great, but that's, that's not our podcast where we usually talk about like SSD cards.

• 32:42Nilay Patel?

  And like, that's just where we are. And I, I think that's, that was a lot of code, right?

• 32:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  And we can go to, we will run the full Casey interview with, um, Messari and Boz, because it was really interesting. And Boz said, people love the Facebook portal and they're putting out new form factors and all that happened. And we'll run that whole thing on Tuesday. But you know, you, you go through it and we listen to them and we listen to Twitter. Ev Williams from Medium was on stage. I asked him, what are your content moderation policies? It is true. They all have different policies. They all have different ideas about how they should function as platforms open to the public. That should be real, right? Like, you should be able to start a, a company that does user-generated content and decide what you're gonna, what you're gonna distribute. It's weird for us to start to demand that everybody lives up to the exact same rule.

• 33:29Nilay Patel?

  Like, that is actually not a great market principle. That's not even a great ethical principle. So it's, it's just a weird moment where it feels like there's so little competition that we're, we're starting to make unhealthy demands of the market. Susan, actually, people really criticized her for this answer. I thought it was super genuine. Peter was like, well, what happens if they break up YouTube from Google? And she goes, well, it's been a really long week. I've been really focused on other things. We'll deal with it if it happens.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, yes, like, the criticism I heard at Code was like, you're the CEO of YouTube, you're a billionaire. You gotta be prepared for that question.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  But I thought it was just like, very genuine. Like, there's so, like, the world is on fire right now. Like, I will deal with that crash when it occurs to me. Like, I get it. But I think that amount of pressure, you can, you could just see it. That amount of pressure to be the arbiter of speech in the world that is distributed in video form is maybe not appropriate. And so all the other companies had to answer the breakup question, right? So Facebook's answer, which is their answer, I think, I think it was Boz who gave it. No, it was Messari. So Facebook's answer to should we break up Facebook, you know, Adam Messari was like, look, there are more people working on privacy and security and election interference at Facebook than work at Instagram.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:43Nilay Patel?

  So if you break us up, like, I don't get that benefit of scale anymore. He said the first promise he made when he took over Instagram was, he wouldn't like, screw with it. And he immediately broke the promise when it came to like, election interference and like, security. And he said, they're upset with me, but that's a huge resource that I need to use. So it's like one argument for scale. Like you shouldn't break us up because we have the scale. Nobody asked Twitter about breaking them up because what would you break them up into like more tweets?

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Moments. Oh, wait, no. Break them up and like they break off Vine, which doesn't exist. Then they're forced to, you know, fund it, bring it back. Think about it.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Andy Jassy, who runs AWS, was asked about breakups. He also said sort of a non-answer. I mean, it's just like, that's the moment we were in. And I think that moment is not so much a reflection of just anger. It's a reflection of like helplessness. Like we don't, we can't go somewhere else. So like we might, we have to like take some action. I, I feel it on both. I really do feel it on both sides of the political spectrum.

• 35:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. But my personal goal is increasingly becoming like trying to, to not feel as helpless with these platforms. Like I want to host my own podcast and not use SoundCloud. Or I want to host my own blog and not even use WordPress. Like I'll, I'll make it myself. Like it's almost like using technology to make like hand tools to make my own like mini platform. And I can, I can succeed at that because I don't have all the complexity of scale. So maybe I can create my own stuff and publish my own stuff. I can't quite host my own stuff yet, but I could get pretty close to, to recreating most of what I need these other services for.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  But nobody's actually, nobody's gonna follow me because RSS is dead.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's that. I mean, there's two, there's two things. One, yes, you can, you can do that and you should. That's pretty complicated for most people, right? So you're like, you lose this democracy of access and like little D democracy. Like you lose this democracy of access.

• 36:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:46Nilay Patel?

  Like if you're a musician, do you have to learn how to host an audio file in order to publish your work? Like there's some value to the platform existing, right?

• 36:55Speaker 04

  Right. Not if it like. If you're a musician, like 10 years ago, do you have to learn how to burn CDs and like apply like stickers or?

• 37:05Nilay Patel?

  I think a lot of musicians 10 years ago didn't know how to burn CDs. You think Bono knows how to burn a CD?

• 37:10Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 37:10Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I would pay money to watch Bono burn a CD.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  If you've got a big swanky, big, big city publisher, you know, that, that like puts your music out on the, on the, on the big, in the big times.

• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  I just love that.

• 37:23Speaker 04

  That's friends with Billboard, you know, then go ahead, do that. But if you don't have access to a platform, right, you're burning CDs yourself, you know, or I like, I, I had a band and like, I called somebody on the phone, like, we're gonna make a hundred CDs and here's, here's like the JPEG, you know, and.

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  And how many times did your band reach the success of Old Time Red? Right? I mean, that's just like a kid. He like bought a sample. He, he really did just like buy a sample, buy a beat and then like made that song. And now he's a worldwide phenomenon because of two different platforms. So there's like, there's just a democracy of access that comes with the existence of these platforms. They simplify. I mean, this is technology, right? Like in order to take a photo, when I was a kid, you had to like know how to operate a camera and develop it. I mean, I didn't grow up in the 1800s, but you understand what I'm saying. Yeah. Right? And if you wanted to be a good photographer, you had to increasingly raise your skill set. Now you're just like, it's like part of your

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  phone. Like you just like get it for free, right? And Instagram exists and like the world can see your photos and you can build a business selling crystals. And honestly, we should stop it. But the point I'm trying to make is there's an enormous amount of value to these platforms that are a democracy of access, are a democracy of creation, are a democracy of distribution. What obligations do they have when their network effects turn them into monopolies is I don't think anyone is doing a great job of answering that question well, because there's not competition.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:53Nilay Patel?

  If there was, if there was one great competitor to YouTube, that was like, our rules are a little bit more relaxed and we're gonna compete on that front, like maybe this would look different. But right now there isn't. There isn't a great competitor to Facebook, there was, but they bought them.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, twice.

• 39:06Nilay Patel?

  And they bought the other one.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  Friendster?

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyhow, we should, we've been going for way long on this. Um, yeah, we are. We're gonna play some ads, we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about the Pixel Phone. We're just gonna do that in this episode. It's gonna happen. Here we go.

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• 40:57Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Dieter.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:00Nilay Patel?

  Hard, hard shift. Hard left turn. In the, in the phone leaks land.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Let's say you had a collection of sensors and you're trying to figure out an optimal way to arrange them to fit inside of a, of a shape.

• 41:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  What, what, what shape do you choose?

• 41:20Speaker 03

  Uh, I would, I would choose a square.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  Or maybe a rectangle.

• 41:25Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Walk us through the chronology.

• 41:26Nilay Patel?

  Here's the chronology.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  What about a squircle?

• 41:30Speaker 03

  We knew that they're like, they're gonna, Google's gonna release Pixel 4 in October. And so every year, like you like, start to see that, you know, the cadence of rumors begin. This year started a little bit differently than usual because we got this like, Unbox Therapy got this metal slug that was like the shape of the phone for that case manufacturers use to design their cases. You usually see cases first, you usually start to see some features. So all this stuff started just ramping up a little bit this week. Uh, you know, I wrote the story that like, all this stuff is ramping up this week. And here's this rumor about Project Soli, which is amazing that they might include a radar in a phone so that you can do gesture controls in space. Um, which I don't know if anybody wants because

• 42:12Speaker 03

  we've tried it before and it sucks. Anyway, like I just, I was just ready for that to be what, you know, the next three to six months look like, just rumors piling up and you're building a picture. And then Made by Google just tweeted a picture of it. It's just like, here it is. Yep. There's a square camera module. There's no fingerprint sensor on the back. It's no longer, you know, matte glossy two-tone. Uh, just, we can't wait to see, we can't wait till you see what it can do, I think was their line. And then we're, you just all sort of went, huh. They confirmed it was a Pixel 4. Uh, it's me an email and then Rick Osterloh tweeted, yes, we're making a Pixel 4. Yeah, there was a

• 42:52Nilay Patel?

  The silliest confirmation of all time. Like, are you, were you gonna stop?

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Um, the thing today, the day we're recording, um, Evan Blast tweeted Verizon's planned roadmap for the rest of the year. And it looks like they're planning on the Pixel 4 happening in October again, after the iPhone 11, which means that, you know, it does, just because we saw the leak doesn't mean they're gonna surprise us by releasing the thing next week. And there's just a lot to like, think through. Google just tweeted a photo of the phone that they're gonna release, you know, in five months or three months or however long October is from now. Time has no meaning.

• 43:27Nilay Patel?

  So I think we can assume that fingerprint sensor will be under the display.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  I do not think we can assume that because there have been many, many rumors that Android Q has code for a improved, uh, face unlock, uh, not the junk that Google's had since like the, the Galaxy Nexus. In addition to getting the metal slug, Lou over at Unbox Therapy says he has heard that the top of the, the Pixel 4 Uh, will not have a notch. Instead, they need that entire forehead area because they're gonna have like five different sensors up there. They're gonna have a couple of cameras and then they're gonna have maybe a depth sensor and then maybe that's where the project solely is gonna go and you know, they'll have some other random crap up there. And you don't need that many sensors unless you're gonna do face unlock.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:16Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I like face ID on my iPhone. There's nothing about, the only time I like this is better than a fingerprint sensor.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  Is when it does the password auto fill for me.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 44:26Nilay Patel?

  Which feels like that it's just like so extremely seamless and magic.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  For me, it's the ability to set my notifications to be private by default and they only unlock when I look at it. They only appear when I look at it. On the, on an Android, like if you set your notifications to not be, you know, visible on your lock screen or, you know, be private on your lock screen, you have to unlock the phone. By the time you've unlocked your phone, you're in like a different space.

• 44:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  And that's annoying. So I would prefer some sort of face unlock solution myself.

• 44:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe it's there. So, okay, can assume fingerprint sensor removal means fingerprint sensor under the glass.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  The four little things in the camera square. Is that, is that what we're gonna call it? The camera?

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, the camera square.

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  What's a name for a raised square?

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Uh, Mesa? The camera Mesa. Although Mases are usually round.

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  Cube?

• 45:18Speaker 03

  The camera cube.

• 45:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  That's it. Uh, so there's two lenses, a two-tone flash, uh, another hole which could be microphone and another hole which uh, is either, uh, you know, a spectral sensor, which is what's on the Pixel 3, or they could do time of flight, or it could be something we haven't thought of.

• 45:35Nilay Patel?

  So they can do portrait mode, probably better if they do time of flight. They can probably get a new night sight a lot better. Doesn't a Huawei phone use its time of flight to like help with its low light in some way?

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, possibly. I'm not, I'm not super sure. But the other question is like, is the second lens going to be ultra wide or telephoto? Which, like, which way do they go there? Cause companies have been experimenting with both.

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  I think you go ultra wide on the, on the front and telephoto on the back.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  So there's not enough room in here to do like a periscope?

• 46:01Speaker 03

  There could be. Who knows?

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  The Huawei style?

• 46:04Speaker 03

  It's totally possible. This could, they could be doing, I mean, it is, maybe they'll do like a, like a spiral periscope because that's, that's why the, the Mesa, the cube is so big.

• 46:12Nilay Patel?

  The Mesa.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  The cue has to be, the camera cue with a cube, I think is important.

• 46:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, there you go.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  So, Dieter, you wrote a piece being like, this is a reboot of leak culture. They really raised the stakes for themselves. Explain that theories.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  So, I, you know, I just gave the timeline of how leaks go. Google decided to disrupt that. And I think it raises the stakes for them because like they're directly participating in the hype cycle. It does some clever things like, next time I want to write about a Pixel 4 leak, I get to use a good image that Google made instead of, you know, whatever crap render was the last leak. So that's clever. But if they're gonna participate in the hype cycle this early in this way, then they need to live up to that. And I think this is a year for them to actually do that and actually try and sell pixels in volume because they're selling the Pixel 3A, so that creates space to let them make the Pixel 4 more expensive. They are selling across every major carrier in the US.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  Right now, minus AT&T, I think AT&T will probably come on board for the Pixel 4. So they're gonna be on every carrier. They're gonna be on every carrier the month after the iPhone 11 comes out. So if they want actual support from every carrier, they need it to be comparable to the iPhone 11 in terms of its hardware quality. So I think that they have set themselves up to hit higher expectations than we've typically had for Pixel phones.

• 47:30Speaker 04

  It sounds like that you think they're going more flagship-y than the 3.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  I think they have to. I think if they don't after this tease, there's just, everyone will be very mad at them.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  Can you name a scenario, other than I'm cooking and I have like chicken on my hands? Where are you solely?

• 47:53Speaker 04

  Why do I use a phone radar?

• 47:55Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't know.

• 47:55Speaker 04

  What gesture do I need?

• 47:57Speaker 03

  You, your screen isn't on and you want to go next track and you wave your hand over it real quick? I don't know. Again, I'm very skeptical that there's a lot of particularly interesting use cases for this, but I don't know what Google is thinking. I do know that when I tried solely four years ago, it worked super well. Like, I was just like, like rub your thumb and your forefinger together like you're like rolling up a, like a wrapper or something into a little tube. Like just little tiny movements and it's able to detect those movements. So it can do really fine-grained control. What they're gonna use that for, I have no idea. The rumor, again, from XDA found some stuff in the code, is there were media controls. They found, I think, skip and pause.

• 48:39Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I, I mean, I buy your explanation. Like, it's great to get out ahead of the hype cycle. It's great to make people... Right, like, every article about the iPhone now also is like, "Google has confirmed the Pixel 4 is coming."

• 48:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  We, we see it's square camera bump too, right?

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  Great. They've accomplished that. I think this is also just like a quiet admission that they don't sell enough Pixel 3s for drastically diminished Pixel 3 sales to fall.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  Like, they're gonna go from like 5 a week to, to 4. Yeah.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  You know, like, whatever.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  Well, the Osborne effect is traditionally why people don't announce, don't pre-announce stuff too far ahead. They don't wanna kill sales of the current product. "No one is buying Pixel 3s," is the answer.

• 49:18Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's why you do it. You're like, "Okay, well, how about the next one?" You into that one? Like, I do think this is the first one, right? They, they, basically, Apple hired the entire HTC phone team.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 49:29Nilay Patel?

  This is very much the first one that that team is making, where the Pixel 3 was sort of a, a holdover.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:34Nilay Patel?

  So I, I have some excitement there. You, you kinda see why there'd be some pride there.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Google tells me that the Pixel 3A was the first one that was basically soup to nuts, made by the Taiwan team, as they call them. And that the, this Pixel 4 will be the first flagship made by that team. Uh, but they have contributed to previous phones. Where the line is between like, who made the phone and who like, didn't make the phone, is so much fuzzier with Pixel phones and Nexus phones before them than it is with iPhones, right? Um, or even, you know, other Android phones. It's like, "Yeah, who made it? Google made it." "Well, Google made it, but Foxconn kinda made it, right?" "Or Google made it, but HTC kinda made it, right?" So, I don't know, man. They do need to justify that purchase, though. They, they should make something good.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  They should make something good. I do think you're right that they're gonna price it high and make it premium.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:20Nilay Patel?

  That's what they need to, that's what they need to play in the US market. By the way, can I offer a quick Foxconn update?

• 50:25Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 50:25Nilay Patel?

  Just as you said Foxconn.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:26Nilay Patel?

  Uh, just in case you're wondering, Foxconn has still not issued a statement or correction about its empty buildings in Wisconsin to us. Uh, it's been, I believe, over 60 days at this point. But, uh, they did announce that they will now be making, uh, computer servers, automotive equipment, and something else, uh, in their factory, which doesn't exist. Just in case you're tracking, they went from really big LCDs, AI AK 5G to different LCDs to computer servers. Yeah. That's where we're at, is what are some other words we can say about things we can build, so we'll see what happens. Anyway, sorry, you just said it, I forgot, I forgot to put it in our rundown. It's on my mind. I think about the Wisconsin Foxconn factory every day.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  They really, they really got, they got your number. I mean, it's like, my mom's complaining about traffic every time I talk to her. It's like, hard to forget.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  Neil, what do you think they're actually going to build in that factory?

• 51:19Nilay Patel?

  We just ran a big report last week, Josh Cheza, a reporter on the beat. Wisconsin like needs that deal to work.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  It's a Democrat or Republican, whoever, they've already spent so much money on like roads and pipes and like water diversions and they've kicked people out of their houses. Like, they gotta do something. They've already put forth a lot of money, but they're now at the point where Foxconn is so far behind its own hiring curve that the contract doesn't make sense for Wisconsin either. So like Foxconn, in order to get, I'm gonna get these numbers wrong, but in order to get their first set of tax credits last year, they needed to employ like 500 people. And they proudly announced that they employed like 200 some people and then they filed their actual documents with the Economic Development Corporation there and it was only 150. So they, they lied, but they didn't even lie enough.

• 52:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, they didn't even like tell the right lie. So they're like way behind this hiring curve that gets them the tax benefits. You should just read that piece, it's very complicated, but basically it seems like they're gonna cruise towards renegotiating the deal so that it actually pays off for Wisconsin. And I think both sides of the table are, are interested in such a thing because Foxconn is, they don't, they can't employ 13,000 people making AI AK 5G things. Like, they just like can't. Like, first of all, that isn't a thing, right? Yeah. They have to define what the thing is. So they're gonna make like, you know, automotive connector components. They have to redefine the deal to actually support such a thing in that state.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  Did you see the, the clip of Joe Biden trying to talk, to stoke some, some fears about China and he's like, "They're gonna have the G5s before we do."

• 52:58Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  This is like another thing the CEO of Delta said at CodeCon. He was like, 5G is going to be a game changer at the terminal. And Kara was like, why? And he's like, once you get that wifi bandwidth. And I was like, no one, literally no one knows what this means. Like, everyone is so deeply confused.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  So Neelai, the thing that's going to happen is 5G is going to enable a complete and perfect understanding of Section 230.

• 53:29Nilay Patel?

  It's, Section 230 is my personal nightmare. Look, I set this goal on Twitter. This is going on on Friday. You still have time. Your goal for the week is to find one friend and explain to them that platforms versus publishers was the old law from Stratton Oakmont versus Prodigy. This is true. Stratton Oakmont, the firm in Wolf of Wall Street sued Prodigy because users on Prodigy were making fun of them. And the court found that since Prodigy did any moderation, that they were the publisher of the content and could be held liable for it, which is insane. So then Section 230 was passed to overrule that decision and give platforms freedom to moderate.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  Just go tell someone that story. Be like, do you remember Wolf of Wall Street? That firm is involved in a massively consequential internet law decision that was superseded by Section 230, which explicitly gives platforms the freedom to moderate without being called a publisher. Just say that phrase. And then maybe you can watch Wolf of Wall Street again. That's a great movie. Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, right? Like, you just go watch that movie together and you've learned something about internet law and you've watched a great movie. Just do that for me. That's your goal for the week. All right. We're going to have, we're going to take a break. Megan Frogmanesh is going to give us a little scene report of all the biggest game news from E3. We're going to come back and dig into some of it. Let's take a break.

• 54:52Speaker 07

  Hello, I'm Megan Frogmanesh and let's talk about E3. So first off, we were missing one of the big three this year. Sony decided to not come. That meant no presence at the press conferences, no presence on the show floor. I'm like pretty sure they put a bar where their booth usually would be, which actually was kinda nice. Overall, I'd say the year was kind of weird too, because as somebody who's been going for the last five years, there was actually a lot of space on the floor. It felt like a very empty E3. Lot fewer people, I would say. But in terms of the big announcements, so there are a couple of things that I think are pretty interesting. At the Xbox conference, we finally had the announcement of George R.R. Martin's collaboration with Dark Souls Creator From Software. So the game is called Elden Ring, which is not the catchiest title.

• 55:36Speaker 07

  But I think it seems pretty promising. So far, it's like a fantasy epic kinda thing. We got a trailer and that's about it. More exciting though, so Keanu Reeves is going to be in Cyberpunk 2077, which if you don't know what that is, it's the latest project from CD Projekt Red. They made The Witcher 3 and a bunch of other good games. So they actually had Keanu Reeves come onstage during the Xbox conference to talk about this, which was pretty fucking good and wild. If you haven't caught the video yet, or the clips of it, you should totally watch it. Alongside that though, alongside our beautiful Keanu Reeves, we also got a release date, so the game is coming out in April 2020. Up next, we had Bethesda. I would say probably the biggest thing that you should take away from Bethesda's conference is that Arkane has a new game coming out called Deathloop. Remember that Arkane made the Dishonored series?

• 56:20Speaker 07

  Deathloop is sort of about two assassins struggling to kill each other. Honestly, it just looks like a really rad game about time travel. Not usually my jam, but I'm into the idea of just, you know, murder, I guess. So Ubisoft also announced that they have a new Watch Dogs game coming out. It's called Watch Dogs Legion, and the whole thing is that you can be NPCs, basically anybody you want in the game. The big hit from that presentation was that you could play as an old lady. I guess she's a retired assassin and beats people with her purse, and I'm sure, you know, more serious things. Moving on to Square Enix, some really cool stuff here. So the Final Fantasy VII Remake has been absent from E3 for probably four or five years now, I wanna say. But they've come back in a pretty big way. They've announced a ton of news in the last like month and a half or so.

• 57:05Speaker 07

  Not at the show, but at a concert before their actual press conference. Granix announced that the first game in Final Fantasy VII Remake is coming next year. Yes, you heard that right, there's gonna be more than one. Uh, the wild thing about this series, because it's now a series, is that we don't actually know how many games are going to be in it. Also, the first game is only going to focus on Midgar, which if for anybody who's played the Final Fantasy games, or at least Final Fantasy VII, you know that that's like maybe the first like couple hours of the game. But they're really blowing this up and this whole experience. I actually got the chance to play it at E3. Uh, Andrew Webster was kind enough to give it to me after I threatened his life. And it's pretty fucking good, I'd say. You know, there's something really special, I think, about seeing a game you grew up with as a kid,

• 57:48Speaker 07

  especially one that was like so low poly when it first came out, like just blown up into this very dynamic, cool experience. So far, the gameplay feels really good. That being said, how are they gonna turn two hours of gameplay into a 40-hour or so game? I have no idea, but they promised it's gonna be a standalone release. Other than that, so let's talk about Nintendo. So, uh, saved the best for almost last. They are making a sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. We don't know anything about it, other than the fact that, uh, it looks good. You know, it looks like the first one, and obviously Breath of the Wild was an excellent game. But also, just like a lot of exciting stuff. Um, Luigi's Mansion 3 is coming. Weirdly enough, uh, it inspired a kind of star of its own. So, there's a whole thing where Luigi has like a goofer.

• 58:33Speaker 07

  I don't, to be honest, I don't know what the deal is. It's, it's called Goo-igi. Andrew Webster actually wrote about this and got Nintendo to comment on what he tastes like, which is a weird thing that I just said. They say coffee, to be honest, my guess would have been Lysol for the way he looks. But whatever, it's Nintendo, they have to be very family-friendly for everything. Other than that, uh, Link's Awakening is coming out this year. Uh, The Witcher 3 is coming to the Switch, which is honestly wild, because I can't imagine how that huge game is going to fit on that tiny console. It took up so much room on my Playstation. So, other than that, Nintendo has announced a bunch of smaller titles. We actually have a pretty good roundup post that pushes everything into one post, because I don't have the patience to sit here and read it all off. Overall, though, a good E3, I would say.

• 59:17Speaker 07

  Um, a little quieter than most, but I feel like the lineup we saw was pretty solid. So, that's it for me. Uh, be good. I love you guys. Bye.

• 59:28Speaker 08

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• 1:00:13Speaker 09

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• 1:01:00Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Paul, every week, my man. Yeah. You do a thing. Same name renowned in the podcast world for its consistency. I saw Nick Quah, who writes the Hot Pod newsletter at Code. He was like, "Man, no podcast has ever been as consistent as y'all."

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  The weird thing is, we introduce it a different way every time. So we really gotta work on that.

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  The segment is called Skate 4 is not a joke. Do I look like I'm laughing?

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  By the way, Nick Qua did not say anything about us being consistent because I have no idea what the hell you just said.

• 1:01:35Speaker 04

  Skate 4 is a video game that could exist if EA didn't hate people and want the world to burn.

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  If you, if you might be familiar with Skate and also it sequels Skate 2 and the much beloved Skate 3.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  Which came out in the Xbox 360 era.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  There's still no Skate 4. EA had the temerity to make a joke at the end of their presser about there not being Skate 4. Just to rub it in. So they know, they know we want Skate 4.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  And then they make fun of us for wanting Skate 4. It's not a joke, is what I'm saying. It's not funny. You know, make Skate 4, please.

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  You know what this reminds me of, Paul? The, for like the past, I swear to God, decade. Every time Phil Spencer would get on the stage for an Xbox announcement, he'd be wearing like a, like a Battletoads t-shirt. And like they were, they're just, just really just like milking every piece of like hype they can get out of that franchise before they finally released the game. I just realized that I'd used the phrase milk and so he's milking the toad, which is wrong. But they finally released it. So did you just have to wait five years? That's how long it seemed like a trip for Battletoads.

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  I have, I have waited at least five years. It's been very many years.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  But yeah, it's true. I guess now that they're joking about it, maybe, maybe now we're on the five year timeline.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're just gonna tweet it out. They're just gonna tweet it out. Valve should definitely announce.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  In a tweet.

• 1:03:11Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's do a little, Dieter, I know you're super excited about Zelda.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  All of the Zeldas, there are three, there are three Zeldas to be excited about. They've remade the Game Boy game and it is the cutest thing you've ever seen in your entire life. It's like moving around little diorama characters. There is the insane Zelda game where they gave it to somebody else and you have to like kill things and tune to the beat of the music and that looks like fun and everyone seems to love it and that's available right now for the Switch. And then they posted a teaser trailer for a sequel to Breath of the Wild. They're probably just gonna use the same engine, because of course they are, because they spent a lot of money making that engine. And Ganondorf is there and he's looks real mad and it's just, whew.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  I don't wanna be, I don't wanna be that guy, but sometimes Nintendo puts out a trailer for a Zelda game and it doesn't come out until the next console generation.

• 1:04:13Speaker 04

  I know they already, they already made the engine. It looks like they already got the same character models, so that's good.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  They've already made a cutscene, that's what the trailer was.

• 1:04:21Speaker 04

  I just don't wanna get, I don't want you to be hurt, like I have been hurt by Skateboard.

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  Look, I'm also, I'm still recovering from the fact that they had to completely reboot Metroid. Metroid 4, which, Metroid Prime, so I'm still bummed about that, but fundamentally, I have decided I will no longer get mad about video game delays, because if there's a video game delay, it probably means that there is a better chance that the people making that video game aren't being forced to do crunch. And crunch is a huge problem in the video game industry. We've been writing about it, Megan has been writing about it forever. It's getting increasingly worse instead of better, from what I can tell. And, uh, yeah, so you know what? Delay your game. It's fine. We'll be okay.

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Dieter will just keep grinding on the original Breath of the Wild.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  I have put so many hours into the original Breath of the Wild.

• 1:05:11Nilay Patel?

  And then we'll just wait for the next one. All right, there was hardware news, D3, though.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft said some Xbox stuff, you wanna walk me through that?

• 1:05:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Xbox Project Scarlet is a PlayStation 5.

• 1:05:26Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  I mean, they're always, it's always like that.

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's always like, but they're, I mean, from what we know, because we don't know the actual specific specs, right? They're basically the exact same thing. It's like next gen, it's the AMD chips that like AMD just announced, basically, right? CPU wise. And then a mysterious SSD that's faster than anything you could even imagine, which is exactly what what the PS5 has, which is really exciting. So they they said some dumb words. They said 8K, which I, I mean, you could probably play like overcooked in 8K, which will be a great time. But also frame rates up to 120 frames per second and variable refresh rate. They said ray tracing

• 1:06:14Speaker 04

  as well. I believe that's announced for the PlayStation 5. I mean, it's there, it's the same hardware and they're doing the exact same. They also said.

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  What if this is what AI 8K plus 5G means? I'm gonna, I'm gonna just free. If I get the end result of all this is I start building the Xbox in my parents' house.

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  Fine.

• 1:06:36Speaker 04

  So one of, one possible Microsoft advantage is this X cloud stuff and the hybrid gaming cloud, which I feel like might be one of those things that doesn't really get delivered on time or work very well.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  So I, the X cloud thing, I don't think they did a very good job explaining what their idea is here. Like, you can stream games, cool. But if you happen to buy one of our super expensive Xboxes, it will stream the game from there instead of from the Xbox that we maintain for you in the cloud. And apparently, if you do it from your very expensive fancy Xbox that you buy and put in your house, it's still gonna have a spinning disk because we'll never gonna kill spinning discs ever, which is fine by me because we killed the headphone jack and look how that turned out. Then it'll cost, it'll cost less to stream, apparently, or like cost less to get your game from your own Xbox than it would if you just subscribed to the whole thing. They haven't announced pricing. I'm, I'm very curious to see what their model looks like here.

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  I just, I feel, I'm skeptical enough that Google wholly focused on Stadia can pull it off. Yeah. Yeah. If Microsoft is going to put all these things like you're playing, you're playing, what? Oh, Halo. There's a new Halo coming out, right? You're playing Halo and then you press pause on Halo. You turn off your TV and then like, cause then you like play Halo from your laptop, streaming over your local network. And then you go on vacation and now you're using like a, a real X cloud server. Cause and your save was in the cloud. Like that sounds like a cool world, right? Where you're, you're getting the best of both worlds. Cause you've got like a, a real console at home, but you, when you're on the go, you have the same game. I mean, that'd be cool if

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  they could pull it off. I have no indication that they could actually pull that off.

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  Well, see, I think what you're missing is that the, uh, it's an intelligent cloud and an intelligent.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  And with their intelligences combined, yeah, they can do anything. Yeah.

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  Okay. Well, there's also some details about Stadia.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Right. Yep. So it's 10 bucks a month. You can buy a founder's edition, which will get you the $70 controller and a year of service for 130 bucks. So you save, you know, 60 bucks or whatever. And they're also going to have a free tier at some point. And, uh, you're going to be buying the games, but if people want to offer their own subscription services on top of Stadia, they will be able to do that. And I believe Ubisoft is like, ooh, subscription services. Why yes, let's do that. Which means that in addition to having to deal with the 50,000 streaming video services that are coming, uh, from Disney to Quibi to whatever. Uh, you're going

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  to have to deal with, uh, every single video game manufacturer deciding it wants to get in on this action and offer its own subscription service. So welcome to hell, my friends.

• 1:09:27Speaker 04

  Or what if you don't?

• 1:09:31Speaker 04

  So I've, I've, I've been trying to put together a list of like, I think sta- stadia might be really good for Borderlands 3, Cyberpunk and like GTA 6, right? Like huge worlds that Twitch reflexes are fun, but they aren't make or break for the game. Right? Nintendo is Nintendo. There's only one place to play Animal Crossing. Fortnite, best Fortnite console, best Dark Souls console, like bet, you know, all the, any, any game that, you know, obviously fighting games, anything that is like Twitch reflexes is totally going to be Xbox, PlayStation 5. Also like, I'm curious what you guys think about the price of the Xbox Scarlet and PlayStation 5?

• 1:10:14Speaker 04

  Because famously, Microsoft screwed up by making a $500 Xbox One, because they bundled Kinect when Sony did a $400 PlayStation 4.

• 1:10:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:25Speaker 04

  Uh, but, but this is kind of a whole different world because this is like competing against like the Xbox One X and, you know, the PlayStation 4 Pro. So like, are, are both Sony and Microsoft going to land at $500?

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're gonna illegally collude with each other and then set the price at $500. They're gonna price it. It's definitely gonna happen.

• 1:10:44Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, I, I think it makes sense, right? They're both cutting edge hardware. The previous generation consoles, no one's crying out, as far as I can tell, crying out that they're not getting what they need from them, right? Like, previous console generations, they went with display resolutions a little bit, right? Like Xbox 360 got you to HD, Xbox One, uh, I'm sorry, the Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro got you to 4K. Like, they're both saying 8K, but that's like, no one even has that, right? Like.

• 1:11:14Speaker 04

  And dumb.

• 1:11:15Nilay Patel?

  So I, I think they're gonna price them high and call them the flagships. You're gonna get a bunch of stuff. You, you're gonna get frame rates out of them. You're gonna get maybe variable refresh rates, maybe, right? 144, 120. That's cool.

• 1:11:26Speaker 04

  Variable refresh rates add load times.

• 1:11:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  And I mean, to be honest, like, so one of Google's things with Stadia is that games are gonna start really fast, right? But obviously, so are the games on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlet. What I'm wondering is if you made a, a game optimized for these ultra-fast SSDs, like, you know, it's famous, the famous Sony example is Spider-Man, like, you can see, you can move through the world faster because we can load it into memory faster because our drive is faster. If Stadia is on older hardware, doesn't have ultra-fast SSDs, can they even run that game? Because like, what we're looking at is Stadia is a bit better than Xbox One X, but it's gonna be a lot less powerful than a PlayStation 5 or Scarlet.

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  So, is Stadia either will have to upgrade, or Stadia will be the low-powered service?

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  I think, maybe, I don't know enough about these architectures, I think they might be architected differently enough that that isn't a thing. Like, Stadia might persist the entire world in one memory space, but have you in it differently versus an Xbox that is like, trying to load it on the fly as you move through it.

• 1:12:38Speaker 04

  But they, they can only give you each user so much RAM, right?

• 1:12:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they're Google. How much RAM do you want?

• 1:12:46Speaker 04

  Oh, maybe they can run it at a loss, like YouTube?

• 1:12:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  No, Google, Google has a history of providing more than enough RAM for all of your needs. Just look at the Pixel 3.

• 1:12:57Nilay Patel?

  Alright. Well, see, I think, I think that's a really, like, there's a part of me that thinks Stadia is, uh, like, really super compelling.

• 1:13:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't want to have a console in my life, I'll just pay the subscription fee for the service, or maybe I'll even play 10 AP in the free tier, and there's like four games, and I'll be able to play them wherever I want. Like, I really only ever play like, two games at once.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  I would, I would be, I would be telling you I'm subscribing to Stadia right now, this minute, if it was coming to the iPad.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, that's interesting.

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, you know, Xbox controllers and PS4 controllers are coming to the iPad.

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Nilay Patel?

  So, there's another way to go, which is play your great iPad games.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  Control everyone's your life.

• 1:13:36Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, but like, if they said, like, what game do I play the most? I play Madden the most. They said Madden's gonna be on Stadia. Like, my next generation console, I would, I would just do Stadia and play it there, and like, play it wherever I want when I travel. Right, like that's a thing I want to do. Do I think that any hotel has the wifi I need to actually play Madden Overstadia? I do not. And like, that's where it kind of like falls apart for me. Like, the, the true value I'd get out of it just like goes away because it's not local. Yeah. And then I think like, do I want to buy yet another round of consoles right now? I don't. But I also just bought a PS4 Pro like at the very end of its life cycle. So maybe that's just me. But I think that what to buy, how much to pay conversation here is gonna, it's just gonna start to look radically different. Versus, I don't want the stupid Kinect, so I'm buying a PS4. Yeah.

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  Okay. That's a lot of our chest. All of it. It's the most of it. Uh, but do tell me if you want me to break these episodes up more. Because we can. It's just more of me talking, which honestly is not a very hard lift. Let me know, or if you want us to just have one chat show, I'm actually very curious. Thank you to Megan for coming on and doing the E3 roundup. Very helpful. Uh, better than, than we did, I think. Um, thank you to you two gentlemen. Always a pleasure. Why'd you push that button is going on right now. They just started a mini-series, Death Online. The first episode is about what happens on Facebook when you die. It's a lot, but it's kind of funny, but it's a lot. You should like, they're in it. This is their first mini-series, they're trying it out. I think it's super interesting. Ashley's gonna do an entire episode about a robot that died. People are very sad.

• 1:15:05Nilay Patel?

  Paul, it seems right up your alley, I gotta be honest with you. It seems, seems tar- laser targeted at Paul Miller. Check that out. It, that, that season is so good. Why'd you push that button? You can obviously listen to all the stuff they have on the Code Conference, on Kara's podcast, Recode Decode. You can listen to Pivot with Scott Galloway. Scott, you have a presentation at Code that was incredible. Definitely start listening to that show. And obviously Recode Media with Peter Kafka. All available on the Vox Media Podcast Network. That's it. Rock and roll. Paul. Snip. Snip.

• 1:15:51Speaker 10

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