Amazon HQ2, Google Night Sight, and Facebook

Dieter Bohn, Casey Newton, and Paul Miller bring you the latest this week with Amazon's announcement of the location of its new headquarters, a report on Facebook's leaders, a Google Pixel 3 Night Sight review,and a whole bunch more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Speaker 00

  Have you ever wished that you could stream high-quality HD videos on a crowded train? Or that you could sit courtside and watch a big game, but also just do that live from your couch, not actually being courtside? Or if you could share life experiences via video on social media from concerts and cool places in real time? Well, Ericsson's about to change the game in cellular networking with high-speed, low-latency 5G. Find out what the future looks like at E-R-I-C-S-S-O-N.com/5G. There's two S's in there. Don't forget, that's E-R-I-C-S-S-O-N.com/5G. All right, now on to The Vergecast.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Podcast Situation.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  I am not Neel Ipatel, if you can't tell, but I'm trying to channel his enthusiasm, his joie de vivre. His savoir faire. His panache. You are hearing the voices of Casey Newton, who's here with me in San Francisco. What's up? And Paul Miller, who is in a strange room somewhere in the world. Hello.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  We have a, I don't know, a strange show today. One, we're missing Neelai, but that's fine. We don't really need him. But we've just got a bunch of sort of things that maybe we can connect at the end. I think there's a couple of things we could easily connect to each other. And then there's a bunch of stuff that we just can't.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  But I think the biggest news of the week, the thing, well, maybe the second biggest news of the week. Up until, I don't know, Tuesday, the biggest news of the week was Amazon finally announced, I think maybe a better word might be admitted.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Admitted.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Copped to what their plans were for HQ2. And there's going to be two of them. One's going to be in Long Island City and one's going to be in Virginia.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  HQ1, HQ2-1 and HQ2-2.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  HQ2-2?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  There's also HQ2-3, HQ2 sort of, H not a Q, 3 in Nashville, right?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  And the most fascinating thing about this whole deal was just how quickly sentiment turned on them. Like, it was like a fun thing that they were doing and like cities were offering to change their name to Amazon and Bezos City and Bezos Town and whatever. And then we knew the announcement was coming and then the rumors were coming out. Wall Street Journal had some really good reporting that they were going to split it into two. And then it got announced and everyone went, "Thanks. I hate it."

• 3:25Speaker 01

  It was so crazy when you look at all of the stunts that cities went through and how excited people were at the prospect of landing in Amazon headquarters.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  And then when it actually happens, as best as I can tell, there were like four people in America who were willing to say they were excited about it. There were the two senators from Virginia, there was the mayor of New York and there was the governor of New York. Even the two senators from New York went a full day without saying anything. And when one of them finally did, Kristen Gillibrand, she said, "We shouldn't be giving away all this money, you know, while the subway's broken and families are starving."

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then everybody, the floodgates opened after that. And like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is like, "Yeah, no thanks."

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  So this isn't like an urban policy podcast. But the number one thing I was worried about- But it can be. It can be.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  So there's like, there's housing issues in New York, not, they're like on a different, I don't know, valence of what we've got here in San Francisco. There's also like transit issues, but apparently the, I assume that like the subways in New York City are horrific and bad and that this would just put even more strain on them and it would be terrible. But apparently they chose a location that's close enough to enough lines where it might actually be okay, depending on where all these Amazonians decide to live. But during the press conference where Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, just completely obliviously was excited about this thing when like there was a growing storm of anger about it, people asked him about transit. He's just like, you know, we're gonna do some more ferries, I guess, because they just

• 4:58Speaker 00

  can't decide who's in charge of the subways in New York.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  It seems like such a nightmare. I very much understand why New Yorkers are nervous about this. And, you know, I have to say it is strange for me, you know, in a past life, I wrote about local government, state and local government. And economic development is religion there. It's the only thing that city mayors ever talk about is bringing more economic development to their town. And so I imagine it must be so jarring for them to watch this high-profile example of two, you know, regions that were successful in luring huge economic development to their cities and just watching the populace crap all over it.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  But at the same time, I get it because if you've lived in one of these big cities like we do in San Francisco or folks who live in New York, you've seen that the presence of massive economic development often does not have any real benefits in your life and actually it can have some major drawbacks, the biggest of which, of course, is the cost of your rent. Having a bunch of rich people in town means you have to pay more for your apartment and that can induce existential panic in people for very good reason.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Paul, would you want an Amazon headquarters in your hometown? How about Foxconn?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely, definitely want a Foxconn. I think, you know, it's funny, this is coming on the heels of, you know, we talked about Foxconn like a couple of episodes ago. And as you might be aware, Scott Walker is now not going to be the governor of Wisconsin anymore.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Uh, which is kind of ironic, like that, that was not a popular, uh, move for him. But this is one of those things where I don't really understand American politics, just because I get it that there are things that everybody disagree, or a lot of people disagrees on, there's like 50 50 things and there's 60 40 things. But this is like a, like sweetheart deals for big companies. It's gotta be like a 90 10 thing, like most people are, are really against this, right?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I

• 7:04Speaker 02

  How does it keep happening?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I've been, uh, writing about some of the fallout in, in my newsletter, which you can find at theverge.com slash interface and

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Keeping count of the interface plugs in this episode, by the way, that's one.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  And what I have been so surprised by is, you know, it's not just sort of the, the, the usual liberal progressive hand wringers that are coming out against this. In fact, yesterday, the National Review, conservative site, um, posted a, uh, an editorial piece, uh, in which they, uh, agreed with the socialist, uh, Congresswoman Alexandra, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Um, and then the Wall Street Journal did the same thing today, pointing to the same remarks by, uh, Ocasio-Cortez, saying, look, we don't normally agree with this person, but she's right. Like this kind of handout, uh, is really beyond the pale. So, so Amazon managed the, uh, extremely rare feat of uniting the National Review, the Wall Street Journal op ed pages,

• 8:01Speaker 01

  and the New York Times op ed pages in a 24 hour period. It's crazy.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Well, and you know, Wall Street Journal, National Review, that's mainstream conservatism, you know, like, but you know, you've got libertarians out there, you know, even matter. So you got the whole fringe and most of the middle, all against this, perfect unity.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. But like, they're gonna get the kickbacks. And like, every day, since this got announced, like, oh, people are trying to like, analyze just how much money is going to Amazon. It always seems like, just tick up a little bit in every article.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, the initial reporting was, it was one and a half billion. And then I saw a story today that said, well, if you really add it all up, it's three billion. You know, the New York Times op ed I read said that there are aspects of this deal which will have to be negotiated, and that they have kind of a memorandum of understanding. But this thing may very well be ratcheted back. And frankly, I think it would be in Amazon's great interest to make some sort of massive infrastructure investments in these cities where it is investing to sort of rebuild that goodwill. Because, and you know, I don't want to make too much of this because this is extremely anecdotal, and this is, you know, among some of the, you know, the newsiest of the news.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  But one day you saw rad in the subway, and you were scandalized, and you want Jeff Bezos to fix it.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  No, I'm not, I'm not that person. But, you know, people are canceling their Prime subscriptions because they're no longer comfortable being Amazon customers.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  And I haven't yet read a big piece about this. Of course, it's very unlikely that this is having any material impact on Amazon or will for a long time. But you're starting to get this phenomenon where, you know, some of those early Amazon adopters that probably would have been really excited to support, you know, online merchandise coming to their house via mail, you know, 18 years ago, are now starting to wonder about some of those negative externalities and negative consequences of Amazon in the world. And so, you know, I actually think that Amazon is typically very insensitive to public criticism. They have, at best, an indifferent relationship toward the press.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  But that's killing them here, because they were totally unprepared for this negative backlash. And unless they make some sort of real accommodations to New York and Virginia, it's only going to get worse for them.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Okay, so we're gonna, we're gonna talk about Facebook. Later. But Facebook, another huge ongoing scandal. And now, after this New York Times story, Google just had, what, like 20% of its workforce walk out the door and conduct a work stoppage. If you, I don't know, that's not quite the phrase that you would like us to use. But like, it was a union-esque move, almost. Amazon is facing this backlash about what even a couple of years ago would have been a totally anodyne. Oh, they got a lot of money, grumble, grumble, grumble. Oh, we'll move on, we're happy about jobs. I mean, who's next? What's gonna happen to Apple? Right?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  They're next. They got, I mean, they're like, Microsoft is like, nah, they, there's some defense contractor stuff with Microsoft and actually with Google, too.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  I would like to see 20,000 Apple employees walk out over the headphone jack issue. And say, damn it. You know? When a critical mass of them forgets their dongles at home, I want them to just storm into Cafe Max and stand on the tables and demand change.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  What do we want? Headphone jack? When do we want it?

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Okay, take those four companies, right? I, the other day, I exported my data from Facebook. I'm still just kinda like trying to look around, trying to remember what will break if I cancel my Facebook account. But I'm, I'm gonna cancel it. Not because like I'm super mad at them or anything. I just like, I don't, I don't really want the liability anymore, I just wanna get Facebook out of my headspace.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  So I could cancel Facebook at any time. Google would be a little harder. I'd have to move my email off of Gmail. Google Docs would really suck. Amazon, I would hate to lose the usage of Amazon. It is so convenient and nice. And then Apple, you know, makes the computer I use. That would be pretty tough, too. But it feels different just because like, I could be mad at Amazon or mad at politicians or something like that, but that's not gonna make me stop using them because they're just so dang useful.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, like with Facebook, it's like, ah. I should quit this, but man, I really wanna check out the, what my great aunt Tilda's. Is it Tilda? It's Tilda, a name of a person?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Well, you would have to tell us who your great aunt is, Tanner.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  I don't even know. Like, the things that you kind of just wanna do on Facebook are the things that you actually don't feel good about doing a lot of the time. Now, there's some stuff, like Facebook Messenger people, there's some, there's some people that that's a, they definitely wanna do those things. Disclosure, my wife works for Facebook in the Oculus Division. I'll have to say that again later. Google quitting is like, ah, I really wanna quit Google, but I also just wanna search for this thing, but there's alternatives, right? So there's no alternative to Facebook, really. There are some alternatives to Google, whether you think they're any good or not is like one thing. With Amazon, the alternative is like, oh, I gotta go use like a random, I have to use Google Shopping, which nobody

• 13:14Speaker 00

  wants to do ever. Like, the alternative is so much worse for quitting Amazon.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  You could buy things from Walmart?

• 13:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, have you been to Walmart's website recently? Maybe, maybe they fixed it.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  I mean, they bought Jet.com.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Look, the truth is, for all these things, there are alternatives, they are less convenient, and I think it's, it's, it's actually more of the social pressures that, that keep you on, like sometimes directly in the case of Facebook, but, you know, if, you know, if you go to search for something and your friends see that you're on DuckDuckGo, like, they're gonna laugh at you maybe in that moment, right?

• 13:48Speaker 00

  What kind of friends do you have?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  I have the worst friends, which I've been, which I'm gonna talk about later in this, no I won't. No, but I, I just think-

• 13:56Speaker 02

  I use DuckDuckGo all day long for every search, and then, like, 1 in 30 searches, I have to copy and paste and go to Google, cuz I don't get a good result.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  You know what I want? I want there to be a service, and this could never exist cuz I would never trust them enough. But if there was a service where I could, once a year, pay them 100 bucks and be like, alright, I'm gonna come into your office- And I'm gonna give you my passwords and then you're gonna nuke all of my data off of all of these services, but I'm still gonna keep my account. But we're just gonna, instead of me figuring out how to do it, you're just gonna wipe me clean.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  So I'm starting, my internet profile starts from close to zero. And then I will, you know, change my passwords. If there was some way to do that, to just make it easier, which is like, hey, you know what? Find out what accounts I have on the internet, just like, I would, I would maybe trust one password with something like this, but I would love to have a service that just makes it really easy, just be like, I don't want to delete these accounts, but I don't want them to like, know anything about me over time. And so just nuke all my profiles, nuke all the information that's there and I'm gonna start fresh.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Well, and Facebook supposedly is going to introduce this kind of reset button. Like, this has been one of the commitments they have made this year.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  And, you know, then they should. You know, there's a lot of great writing out there about data as toxic waste.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  If I wanted to read a newsletter about, you know, interesting stories about those that come out, comes out every afternoon and aggregates just the best one.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  I wish that such a thing exists.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Someone should do that. And if you have heard about any such thing, please DM me. I would like to know about it. You know, there's been really great writing about the idea of data as toxic waste, right? Where sort of, it is this byproduct that is created by this result of this, this process that is important to all of us. And it kind of gets stored underground and you don't think about it.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  But it can come back to haunt you and it can kind of, you know, leak into the digital groundwater. Like, this metaphor can go on a bit, but, but, but we should think of better ways to dispose of our data so that it has less chance of coming back to haunt us.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Speaking of, bringing this back to Amazon, did you guys know Amazon has its own social network?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  What's it called?

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Like, Amazon has, I don't even know. Amazon has this thing, if you, somewhere on the left of Amazon, if you click on something and then you click on another thing, you get this stream of, like, kind of like tweets. And it's basically people like, I just got this, my son loves it and here's a picture of my son using this product. Seriously, it's a real thing. The other thing I wanted to say about Amazon is, and back to the key issue of HQ2, seems like one of their big excuses for this is the pipeline of talented tech employees.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, they just couldn't get enough workers in one place.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Well, this is, this mean like that remote work is, is truly dead as a con- like the, the, the remote work is not the true future of the world? Like, like we, we've finally decided that that's just really not going to work out for us? For big companies at least?

• 17:06Speaker 00

  I think for big companies, that's totally fair.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  I know there's been like

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Wave, waves of remote work and then backlash is against remote work and it kind of feels, goes back and forth, but this seems like a real thing where it's like, nope. The only way to get good employees is to be in one of five cities in the US.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's at least in the US. Yeah, that seems about right. Sorry. I don't know, Tuscaloosa. Why am I picking on Tuscaloosa? I don't know.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Well, I, I was tweeting about Tuscaloosa the other day because there was this extremely hot take that was published by TechCrunch saying, Amazon did exactly the right thing in its HQ2 search.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  And it sort of defended them across every dimension. But my favorite part of the defense was, um, you know, this decision could be a real wake up call for other cities about what, you know, the fact that they need to change to make themselves more attractive. You know, I'm just thinking, yeah, like I bet the mayor of Tuscaloosa is thinking, you know what, maybe it's time to just rebuild as New York City. You know? What, why don't, yeah. If we want to win economic development, let's lure eight million people here. Let's, you know, completely transform the, the city into a, a global metropolis and then maybe we'll have a chance of winning HQ2 business. Anyway, just made me laugh.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  All right, here's what's going to happen. We're going to toss to an ad and then we're going to come back and we're going to hear a very, very special episode of This Week in Elon. I'm very excited for this one. And then we're going to stop talking about doom in tech. We're going to talk about something nice and then right back to doom. So here we go.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

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• 19:56Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Sean O'Kane. This is This Week in Elon, and I'm coming to you from the roof of Tesla's Gigafactory this week. It's been a pretty quiet week in Elon, which is good because we're out here in Nevada taking a look at what's going on at the Gigafactory lately. Tesla's gotten away from some of the biggest problems with Model 3 production, and the Gigafactory is really what Tesla's future is all about. It is the machine that makes the machines. It's all of the products Tesla sells come through this place and will as it builds new Gigafactories around the world. So, we've been taking a look inside the Gigafactory to just check up on what's been going on, see how Tesla is thinking about the future, and it's been really interesting.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  We're going to have a lot more on this coming to the site pretty soon. But the thing that has really kind of struck me the most since we got out here the other day is that Reno is kind of turning into a Tesla town. It's not like San Francisco or Fremont area where their factory is, where there are Teslas all over the road, but you see Tesla popping up in all these different... Different corners of life here, whether that's being at the gas station and watching a factory worker come in off of his shift with his Tesla hat on, or going into a restaurant and having people at the restaurant recognize whether or not you're a Tesla employee. It's really kind of fascinating, at least to me, because I have kind of a mild obsession

• 21:19Speaker 04

  with company towns. I think one of the most famous ones was built around Ford's River Rouge plant, which is a factory that Tesla and Elon Musk has really tried to model itself around. Way back in the early 1900s, the goal around the River Rouge beyond just making cars was to provide basically an entire life for employees, whether that meant helping families of the workers with education, or providing them with options for housing. Now, don't get me wrong, there were definitely downsides to this. I mean, Henry Ford was kind of a total racist, and there were a lot of problems on how he kept his workers in line, and some frankly, kind of dystopian stuff when you think about how much control

• 22:04Speaker 04

  there might have been over the lives of some of those employees. You know, the kind of stuff that we think about when we think about the future of technology companies these days. It's stuff that's all been sort of tread before. And, you know, I'm not saying that that's what's going on out here in the desert. We're far from that in the Gigafactory. There's definitely other business out here. There's casinos. There's all this other stuff going on. But when you're standing at the Gigafactory, and you're surrounded by just nothing but mountains and wild horses, and you're thinking about how Tesla's actually considering building housing for some of its employees because there's such a big housing crisis here in Reno, that stuff like that really starts to enter into your brain. You start to wonder whether or not Tesla's going to go down similar roads. Is

• 22:48Speaker 04

  it going to try and build a life for its employees here, or is it going to stay sort of at an arm's length with the Reno people and let the city operate on its own compared to the Gigafactory? Another more modern example of this kind of company town idea is actually Palm. You know, the juice. The company that runs Palm is owned by this major farming family in California. And they've done some similar things where they provide housing for their workers and have them live essentially on site at the fields where they pick all of the stuff that the company sells. They provide education for a lot of the workers and their children. They make them eat healthy meals, which is kind of nice, but also, again, a little dystopian.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  But people who have looked really closely at what Palm has done with its workers kind of think that maybe they're doing it the right way. And I think what I'm getting at here is that there's sort of two paths to this. I've only been here for a few days, so I can't really say whether Tesla's ever going to wind up like either of these companies. But it's something to consider as Tesla thinks about building giga factories all around the world. Elon Musk wants about a dozen scattered across all these different countries. And you start to think about when you're employing thousands of workers and really pulling resources from a city around the giga factory, how does that change the fabric of that city? And what does it do for the people who work for the company? Anyway, those are my meandering thoughts from the top of the giga factory.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  We're going to have a lot more concrete stuff, like I said, coming to the site pretty soon. So we hope you enjoy what we've been able to gather out here in Nevada. And in the meantime, we will be off next week for Thanksgiving. So have a happy holiday and we will see you on the other side when your esteemed steward, Liz Lopato, will be back from vacation.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  All right, we're back. I would say the thing that warmed the hearts of everybody at The Verge this week was Night Sight, the feature on the Pixel 3 that lets you take pictures in the dark. And, I mean, I've been using it and... We went out and shot a video in San Francisco because Vlad wrote it up and has all the details of how it works and we can get into that. But Veeran and I out here, we went out in San Francisco and we couldn't find a dark enough spot to properly test it in the city, number one, because we've got all this smoke from the campfire in the city. So there was haze that was spreading out over the city, under the streetlights. But we finally found a dark bar and we're like, oh, let's go to this dark bar.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  And we convinced the bartender to not turn the lights on outside in this canopy area. And we sat in the dark and the cold and took pictures of drinks. Someone kept asking me if I was drinking a Negroni. Yes, I was because I wanted a red drink. And we just sat there and kind of drunk and got mad because it was so good. We were just angry. I was just sitting there and Veeran just spits out and we ended up using this line a couple of times. He's just like, "This is just filthy." You mean, "No, it looks really good." It's like, "No, no, that's what I mean. It's so good, it's filthy."

• 25:55Speaker 01

  I'm so glad we're talking about this because lord knows, it has been a dark year for tech and there is not a lot to get excited about. And I think about what it was like to write about tech when I started at The Verge in 2013 and it just felt like it was miracle after miracle after miracle on your phone. Of course, looking back, there were probably some huge stories that I missed. But man, I saw this, is it night mode or night vision?

• 26:22Speaker 00

  Night sight. I kept thinking you were wrong too.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Night sight, okay. Terrible branding, but it is a Google product. So Night Sight, I saw these photos and honestly, my jaw dropped. I thought they were so fantastic and I really can't say enough good things about them. It is an incredibly impressive example of tech. It's tech that helps people with a real problem, which is that most of us are terrible low-light photographers, right? And it's something that you can have right now that can help you capture important moments in your life to say forever and pass them on to your children and your grandchildren. So I just think this is so awesome. My question is, because I saw some tweets sort of floating around about this yesterday, does Apple have the same technology?

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Or how close are they to putting it on my iPhone? Does anybody know?

• 27:14Speaker 00

  I don't know how close they are. And so here's what the technology is. Does Apple have this technology is actually like, I'm gonna go with kind of no. So it uses the, they have this other gimmick, other feature called super res zoom. And the way it works is it uses the motion of your hand to collect extra data in extra frames and use that when it does its HDR thing of smashing a bunch of images together, right? It uses a slight movement, slight variation. So this uses the same technology, but it uses it to capture more data and information to make something, you know, work better in low light. I mean, there's some other stuff too. It does, it can extend the exposure time, but the difference here, like if Apple were to do this, it would probably just

• 27:57Speaker 00

  extend the exposure time. But when you do something with night sight, you get something with significantly less noise, because it's able to pull out extra information. So like, even in like a relatively well lit, but still dark scene, you can toggle this mode on. And when you take the photo, it'll look basically the same as a regular photo that you just take with the main camera mode, except when you look in the dark spots, there's just way less noise. And it's not just a, it's not just like a smoothing effect that you would get. It actually does legitimately have less noise because they've collected more information and figured out that there shouldn't be noise there.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Huh. That's super cool.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  So that doesn't quite answer your question. Apple could do this if they tried.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, like they have an image processing chip.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. They have the hardware and they have most of the software to do this. But the, so I, I got the, like, the early camera. I haven't updated to the new camera. That, that's what they, I really was super stoked on having an Android phone that I could just put on a different camera app that could be, I could set as my default camera app if I wanted to. What a miraculous event. And so I was taking night shade.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Night shade.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  I was taking night shade.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  That's when you go poop after 8pm.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. It's taking night shot pictures in Hawaii and they are so miraculous. It's just, it is really incredible that you could take a picture of something very, very dark and you can see it now in the camera. My only problem is there's, there's some middle point between taking a picture in the normal mode and taking a picture with night shot where some, there's something in the frame that's lit. You know what I mean?

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Like, you mentioned you had a hard time finding a place dark enough. Like, I don't live in the woods. Like, usually where I am, there are some things that are lit up, but there's other things that are dark. I, I feel like they could do even more magical things to make a photo that's somewhere in between a regular photo and a night shot photo. You know what I mean?

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Well, so the, they're in a, they're in a weird spot. This is a separate camera mode. If this were just a thing that happened automatically by default, I would probably hate it because they do look unnatural. It's the sort of thing you want to try when you can't get the shot otherwise. Uh, but they're gonna, they're gonna have to really decide what they want to do in terms of building this technology into the main camera function because they're gonna have to make some artistic choices about what kind of pictures people want to get out of their cameras. The one thing that is definitely to come to the main camera mode, I think, is this new histogram feature. They're using a machine learning algorithm to do white balance, um, uh, in this night sight mode and they think that eventually they're gonna be able to use that on the main camera mode instead of just in the special night sight mode.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Some people are saying that histogram is gonna be the hottest new social network.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Actually, I want to talk a couple, a couple more things about Pixel. So they've been issuing like a bug fix or a fix for a weird problem like once a week since this thing came out. So like buzzing speaker, apps, uh, closing in the background because they run out of memory. Apparently there's a camera bug that I haven't run into, but like Matt Hoenner, uh, over at Buzzfeed has run into it where if you open up the camera on a third party app, then the main camera doesn't work till you reset. Uh, text messages have apparently been disappearing. My very favorite bug with the Pixel by far is people would just get a random second notch appearing on the side of their screen, which is just amazing.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Which is weird, like this is like not quite, this isn't like level like Pixel 2 XL has a terrible screen levels of quality control problems, but there are a bunch of like weird software bugs that I wouldn't have expected coming out of this thing from Google. And I, it's not enough for me to like completely panic or completely freak out about it yet, but it is enough for me to go, huh, maybe it makes sense to wait on buying these kinds of phones in the future.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Are these pie problems or pixel problems?

• 32:05Speaker 00

  I think they're pixel problems.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  It is, okay.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, but Paul, you have, you have fully switched from iOS to Android. Have you turned off iMessage yet?

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Or is it still on on your computer? God, how do you live?

• 32:18Speaker 02

  I don't know what to do. I'm, I'm in an existential crisis with iMessage because I still, random people pop up at my iMessage, I like reply to them on my Mac.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  And if I turn it off, they're not going to know how to get a hold of me. So, yeah, like, so I have a few very close friends who have learned how to actually text me. But that, I don't want to stay on SMS. I mean, I got, I, I have to pick a message. I really want everybody to get on Keybase. I feel like that's the, the secure messaging platform that I prefer, but it's like, it's like, go ahead, please prove your identity so you can get a PGP key so you can message me on a keybase.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's not gonna happen.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  So that's, that's a problem. I will say, I do not like the battery life on this phone.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  What, have you got the, the three or the 3XL?

• 33:11Speaker 02

  I have the three.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  And it just doesn't feel like a new phone battery. It feels like a, like a one year in battery to me, and so I'm really worried that I'm gonna hate it. Like, obviously it's plenty right now. Um, I can't watch YouTube and play three simultaneously on my phone all day long. And, um, you know, maybe that's a ridiculous thing to ask for, but I just feel like it's not, it's not as good as it could be. And I also feel like, and maybe, you know, I haven't been using Android, so I don't know if this is usual, but I get like visual glitches. It, not like, not like it's broken, but it, the transition is glitchy, if that makes sense, like switching orientations sometimes.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Switching between apps. And so I do have this feeling that overall Android just does feel like a less polished experience than I'm used to in iOS.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  There are some things that are less polished.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  I do really like the phone.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  The thing.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  I really like picture in picture.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. The thing that I really, the least polished thing, the thing that drives me crazy, that apparently they finally admitted they're gonna fix is the share sheet. So when you wanna hit the share button on Android, it pulls up this special sheet with a whole bunch of apps on it, and it has this neat feature where you can share directly to people. But apparently, it's like a poll model. And so it like, when you hit the share button, Android goes, hey, are there any apps out there that I can share to? And then all the apps go, yeah, I can. And then it waits for all the apps to raise their hand, and then it gives you the share sheet. Apparently, I don't know. I'm probably getting this wrong, someone's gonna tweet at me, and that's fine, please do. But hopefully, they fix that, because if you wanna share a link real quick, having to like, sit there and wait and having the menu jump around is like, the most annoying thing for me. I haven't had that bad a battery life, I'm surprised that you are.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Maybe you're just playing too many threes.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Can I ask you?

• 34:58Speaker 00

  You should switch to hold down, I mean, honestly.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Hold down?

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Hold down.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Hold down is the best game that I have played this year. I play a sickening amount of hold down.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  It's like a brick breaker game.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  I will say, threes hasn't been updated for a long time, so it doesn't have the artificial home button at the bottom. So you have to carefully swipe from the bottom, because you don't wanna mess up your threes game.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  Okay, so I'll check out hold down.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Oh, I had one other thing about, oh, Android question.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Sometimes I feel like, that I have a lot of notifications, right? And I don't get around to them for a bit.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Then I start clearing them.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  And then like, 15 to 30 seconds after I cleared a bunch, I start getting new notifications. Is that a feature, or a really lame bug?

• 35:52Speaker 00

  It's a really lame bug.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  That's not a feature. That's super weird.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Okay, alright.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  Sorry.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Alright. Good to know.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Alright, so, the biggest...

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Join me!

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. Keybase, no, I'm not, just use Signal, man. That's what everybody's doing. It's easier. I dunno, Signal and WhatsApp drive me crazy because they only work on one device at a time. And plus like the web version. Which is annoying. Speaking of annoying, actually, one last thing.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  I wrote this ranty post about Google Maps and how it is getting bloated.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  I emailed both Verizon and AT&T this week and asked them when they're gonna support the Universal Profile, which is the version of RCS, which apparently everybody's gonna call Chat, although they probably are backing off on that because Carrier garbage. Anyway, they won't commit to it. It's almost the end of the year. There's like a, there's a, using RCS for business messaging like, thing happening in New Jersey, probably as we record this today, where a whole bunch of Carrier people and Google are like, "Here's how you can get customers with RCS." And like, no one is actually supporting the interoperable thing that is supposed to save messaging on Android. And, you know, it's mid-November. Figure it out. Launch the thing. Otherwise, you know what's gonna happen?

• 37:13Speaker 00

  If this stuff doesn't launch by the end of the year, you know what I'm gonna be forced to do? I'm gonna be forced to demand that Google actually support ALO. And I don't wanna be that person. I don't, I don't.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  I want, I want RCS to fail because it's not encrypted. I hope, I hope they, they never, they never get it right.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Okay, that's fair, but...

• 37:37Speaker 01

  This is, I have to say, like, as a fairly just devoted iOS person, to a point where I just like do it in an unquestioning way. Like, I can't even pretend like it's this, you know, rigorous choice that I've made after hours of debate. But, like, when I hear people talking about Android, it's always exactly like this. Where it's like, you know, "Android's great, the camera is so great, it's so customizable, but, uh, yeah, like texting is basically impossible because of some Carrier standards problem, and also the share sheet doesn't work." I'm like, "Alright, well, best of luck with your operating system." I'm just gonna keep playing hold-down on iOS.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  These are nitpicks. I play hold-down on Android, and I have a higher score on hold-down on Android than you do on iOS.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Dieter is one of the best hold-down players in the entire world.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  Shut up.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  So as you might know from Ding, the interface, excellent newsletter covering the destruction of democracy by social media, written by one Casey Newton, The New York Times published what, there's no other word for it than blockbuster story that described what Facebook was doing over the past couple of years at the highest levels of the company when the, you know, the stuff about Cambridge Analytica and Russian hacks started coming out. And disclosure, again, my wife works for Facebook, so I'm gonna probably not be talking a ton during this next bit, but there is no way we cannot talk about this thing. So I don't even know where to start.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to say is if you read, if you use Facebook, I would encourage you to read this story, which I think is called Deflect, Deny...

• 39:14Speaker 00

  Delay, Deny, Deflect.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Delay, Deny, Deflect, the three Ds. And it traces some of the high-level decision-making inside Facebook over the past two years, basically everything that happened in the months leading up to and then after the 2016 election. And there are sort of two components to that. One is Facebook understanding how it was misused by Russians, and later it would find out, you know, many others were doing the same thing, to launch these coordinated influence campaigns in the, in the hopes that it could get folks like us to, to change our votes in the election, and sort of just generally sow discord. And then it also traces

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Facebook's response to that. And I have to say, as somebody who's been writing about this stuff closely, it's the latter piece of it that I found the most compelling. And this does get into the kind of nitty-gritty of how companies hire public relations firms to manage their public perception, which I think a lot of people might find to be really in the weeds. But I also think that it is at moments like these that you really see what a company is made of, and often the kinds of decisions that get made around communications can cut against some of your stated values. So...

• 40:38Speaker 00

  So actually, okay. Again, we're fully in the I've disclosed, this is a weird thing for me to say. But when Google screws up, and they screwed up in recent weeks, well, they screwed up massively two years ago by giving Andy Rubin this huge payout to leave. By, there's a lawsuit about equal pay for women, like, just gigantic screw ups. And often, when you get the, like, inside story of what's going on at the company, you're like, oh, like, this is perhaps evil, but it seems more likely that you're just so naive and not paying enough attention that you're dumb. And with Facebook, with this story in particular, I don't know if, like, it's hard to make that case. It seemed like, this New York Times story is written in such a way where it's like,

• 41:23Speaker 00

  the most obvious explanation is, oh, no, you're trying to be bad. You're not, you're not just, you're not just, like, naive, or you're not just bumbling, you're just actually bad.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  And certainly, that has been the conclusion on Twitter and among, you know, many of the commentators out there. And, you know, the gist of what the Times reported is that, and the Times has previously reported, that in the wake of all of these calamities, Facebook hired up to three crisis communications firms, which are sort of these highly expensive boutique PR firms that come in, in the middle of, you know, a giant catastrophe, and they try to settle things down, they try to help your company make decisions that will get people to stop yelling at you. And one of the companies that Facebook contracted with is called Definers, and folks like me have been receiving frequent emails from Definers over the past year, as Facebook has kind of deepened its relationship with them.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  But the Times found some really disturbing things that Definers had done. One of them was to set up this kind of astroturf news site called NTK, where they would post kind of conservative-leaning clickbait that just happened to exonerate Facebook or cast doubt on Facebook's competitors like Google and Apple. And they posted dozens of these stories over the past year. Some of them then got picked up by Breitbart and kind of filtered into the more general news ecosystem. Looks like Paul wants to say something.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  The irony...

• 42:57Speaker 02

  The irony is so rich.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  It's almost too rich. You know, when you bite into something and it's so sweet, it hurts your teeth. That's how rich the irony is right here.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so for a lot of us yesterday, as we're reading this, we're thinking, oh, gosh, you know, for the past year, how many calls have I been on? How many rooms have I been in with Facebook executives where they have talked to me about how seriously they're taking the misinformation problem? And then to learn that their crisis communications firm was spreading, if not outright misinformation, misinformation, then certainly the kind of sensationalist clickbait that later today, as we're recording this on Thursday, they've now said that they're going to try to sort of tone down in the news feed even more.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  So it was incredibly damning. And by the end of the evening, Facebook had fired Definers, which I think was sort of the only possible outcome of this story. But then today, on a press call, it sort of took another strange turn, which was that, so I was on a call with Mark Zuckerberg and some of his other top executives. And he told us that until he read the New York Times story, he was not aware that Facebook contracted with Definers.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Is that better or worse?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Well, this is the discussion that I want to have. He also said Sheryl Sandberg didn't know about it, which from the Facebook people I've talked to is very strange because Sheryl is very involved in communications generally. And, you know, normally in these cases, CEOs have this ethos of the buck stops with me, right? Like, I might not know every detail at my company, but I know the high level stuff. And let me tell you-

• 44:30Speaker 00

  That's certainly the line that Mark Zuckerberg took when he was before Congress. He's like, look, it's my fault. You know, even if I didn't know, like, it's my, like, I'm not firing anybody because it comes down to me. He said this to Kara in the podcast.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Right. But, you know, you talk to people who've hired crisis communications firms, which I have, this almost always involves the CEO, right? Think about, think about the context for you hiring this people. Your company is in a crisis, right? There are few situations at your company that are going to demand a CEO's attention more, and certainly the Russian- Situation and the misinformation situation has been a top priority for for Mark and Cheryl during all of their communications over the past year. So the idea that their communications chief, who until recently was Elliot Schreig, had sort of done this, not told them and never reported back to them about what the company was doing.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  It really kind of beggars belief, which isn't to say it's untrue, but just that it is incredibly hard to believe. And so then, yes, Dieter, it brings us to the question of, is it better that, which would have been better? That they knew about it and are lying, or that they actually didn't know that this company was out there sort of spreading this kind of viral crap?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, to be honest, Zuckerberg not knowing matches my concept of him. And it does match, naive doesn't feel like the right word.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  It, I hate the like Zuckerberg is like a robot trope. But sort of algorithmic, like in a sense, it feels like Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg, I'm really generalizing, I'm very sorry about this, but I feel like as a person, he has a hard time dealing with edge cases. He really wants general principles to work and live by. I'd love to hear if you guys agree at all with this. And so like the Times piece leads off with a total edge case of like, are we going to delete this statement by Trump on Facebook?

• 46:44Speaker 02

  That, you know, it's an edge case that went all the way to the top because they didn't have a clear method for for moderation. Obviously, I've talked about this a lot on this show, that that's obviously a really hard, basically unsolved problem. And I feel like they set themselves up for this sort of failure of moderation when they decided to be moderators of 2.2 billion people. But still, like, I feel like they don't have a good answer for for edge cases.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  They don't. And to your point, Paul, Zuckerberg absolutely wants there to be scalable solutions for answering every question because it's kind of the only way that Facebook can survive, right? If they have to referee every single Facebook post, the company collapses. And so he is always going to be motivated to find these kind of, you know, general systems. You know, today, as we're recording, Facebook put out their second report on the enforcement of their community standards, which is like essentially like four times a year now, Facebook is putting out a report that lists all of the like police activity that they did on the platform, basically everything that they had to take down. And that is only possible because they have, they've built these AI systems. And so the

• 47:57Speaker 01

  entire report is about how much of the content that gets taken down is taken down because AI identifies it. So like, that is the Zuckerberg ethos, is let's offload all of this to the machines. And I do think that in addition to the kind of practical reasons to do that, it also speaks to the deep personal discomfort he has with making these decisions. And by the way, I think that discomfort is really justified, right? You know, as his karaoke buddy Kanye West once said, "No one man should have all that power."

• 48:27Speaker 00

  So hang on, what's the, what's this? They announced this independent oversight body, like an independent court?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  The World Court, the Hague for Facebook? Like, what is this?

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is like, super interesting. So when I got to ask my question of Zuckerberg today, I actually asked about this because all the stuff we're talking about aside, like this, honestly, it just kind of blows my mind. Okay, so in April, on a podcast with Ezra Klein of the Vox Media Podcast Situation.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Mark said that he wanted there to be some kind of Supreme Court for Facebook. And the idea was, again, like, I might be the king of Facebook, but I don't want to have to decide all of the edge cases around like, you know, Trump's post about banning Muslims from entering the country. And so today, they formally announced that they're going to do it and basically said that work is underway. They're hoping to establish this panel by, by the end of next year. And so my question was a little bit about- How it's going to work, you know, when I talk to experts in this field, they'll say a really frustrating thing about Facebook is that if your, if your content gets taken down, traditionally, there has been no recourse for appeal. Now you actually can appeal, but if you get rejected, you sort of just get a form letter.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  There is no case law about why, and in the American judicial system, if, you know, if you appeal your case, the judges will write down, you know, why your appeal fell short. And this becomes a really important way of ensuring that there is justice on the platform. So to me, what is just so crazy about this is you have this website that started for, you know, us all ogling at one another's like college photos. And now they have to think about coming up with a global judicial system. So it's, it's really a crazy milestone.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  I do not like the film, The Circle, and I have not read the book, but it's like they pulled an idiocracy, except the movie's not funny. Like, like The Circle was like, okay, I get it. I rolling like, yeah, they're going to take over everything and yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  This will be idiocracy if they decide that the Facebook court, the independent oversight group, is actually a televised court TV show. Like, like ala Judge Judy, if they have Judge Judy and like, and like, and every case, they, you know, they agree to binding arbitration to show up on the TV show. They both get paid, but really they're trying to solve this case. And it's like, it's like Pepe distributors versus like, who would the other side be? And it's like.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  I would watch the hell out of that show.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, like this is the first great pitch for a Facebook watch show that I've heard, actually. It's just, just like C-span for the Facebook Supreme Court. That is going to be fantastic.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  So, yeah, man, I don't know. It's like, this is what I love working about for The Verge is that you just, you find yourself writing about these moments that just feel like these like strange leaps forward 30 years in time. And for me, Facebook having a Supreme Court is one of those moments where I say it out loud and it sounds crazy.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  One last thing on Facebook, we got to move on. Paul, I would like you to react to the news, which Facebook downplayed, of course, that perhaps in part because he was pissed off at Tim Cook. But probably mostly because that's what everybody on the planet uses, except in America. Mark Zuckerberg decreed that Facebook executives have to switch to Android.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  That doesn't... Did it surprise me?

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  I don't know. Is that mean of him? Does that sound like a mean thing?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Well, look...

• 51:56Speaker 02

  It's not... You know, it sounds... It sounds Balmer-esque.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Um, I... Look, I have a great deal of respect for the times reporters who wrote the story. On this particular point, I suspect that their sources misinformed them. I do believe that Zuckerberg told executives to use Android phones, but Facebook has been encouraging employees to use Android phones for years. And the obvious explanation is that the majority of the world uses Android phones, right? So you don't need a personal feud with Tim Cook to explain why you want your executives using those phones. You know, certainly it's, you know, yet one more reason why I personally would not want to become a Facebook executive. You know, on account of the share sheet and the texting issue.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  All right. On The Vergecast, we cover the ever-changing landscape of all things tech. And so coming up next, we're going to hear the segment from Ericsson about the shift to 5G. So take a listen to that, and then you're going to hear from Paul.

• 52:59Speaker 05

  And now, the 5G meditation minute.

• 53:06Speaker 06

  Welcome. Just relax your body. Breathe. Repeat your mantra and feel the calm wash over you. 5G is here. 5G is here, and it's going to change the way we live. This next generation of wireless technology will revolutionize how we send and receive data, and Ericsson is one of the companies building the infrastructure we'll need. Push away the bad reception and overcrowded networks. 5G uses multiple antenna to boost capacity, so in large crowds of people, like at a packed

• 53:51Speaker 06

  concert, you can still connect and share selfies instantly.

• 53:58Speaker 06

  Embrace the cloud.

• 54:01Speaker 06

  With minuscule latency and edge computing, 5G makes even remote files behave as if they were on your device. And you will have so much more to be thankful for. Augmented reality, 8K streaming, AI-assisted services, smart cities, and the ever-growing Internet of Things. Your future is empowered by 5G.

• 54:29Speaker 06

  Lie back, be present, focus on real connections. Ericsson is bringing 5G to life. Breathe in and breathe out. Repeat your mantra and feel the calm wash over you. 5G is here.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Thanks to Ericsson for sponsoring The Vergecast and supporting the Vox Media Podcast Network, which I prefer to refer to as a situation. Now, we're back to Paul, who every single week, without fail, it's a very serious segment. Nobody ever laughs. Nobody ever has anything to say about it other than just listen in quiet repose. You do a segment that's called...

• 55:22Speaker 02

  It's called "Why Not Two?" So we covered the Android bug that added two notches.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  And it was hilarious.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  It was.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  What if I told you? What if I told you that Sharp has made a phone with two notches?

• 55:42Speaker 00

  On purpose.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  On purpose. So there's an Essential style little camera notch up top. And then the bottom... Uh, there's a home button notch. And I think the real

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Wait, there's a chin next to the notch?

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, thi- this whole thing has, yeah, it has a slight chin. So, so you basically, you have the essential notch.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  You have a home button.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  You have a bottom notch, which, to be honest, that's a sharp innovation right there.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  That is.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Then you have like the, a Samsung style chin. And then you have the iPhone XR like border all the way around the screen. But made the notches kind of seem dumb in the, dumb in the first place, but.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  I do love that it's only a 5.2 inch phone.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Are compact.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  So their, their, their last compact phone had a little bit of a notch. Um, but it had a big chin with a button. I will say, because I, I don't have this new, hot new hold down game, that this would be a great phone for me to play threes on all day.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Because I do need that home button.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  You do need to swipe up to get the home button on, um, on a hold down. That's one of the things that Android does. A lot of things go full screen. And then the home button gets hidden. So you gotta do a little swipe up. But it's less dangerous to swipe up and hold down. Because it's not a, there you go. There you go.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  Exactly. That was my worry.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  Yep. Uh, so Paul, the trick, by the way, for threes is instead of swiping, trying to get the swipe up to get the home button, just do the swipe back on the fingerprint gesture to bring down the notification area. And that will also bring the home button up. And then you don't have to worry about a, a rogue swipe and threes ruining your game.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  Look at this. The hot, hot Android, hot Android tips.

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  Amidst all the politics. What a great show. This show is one stop shop. It has everything.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  We are now entering the weird lightning round, uh, section of it. And Paul, I gotta say, I'm really disappointed that you didn't pick, uh, Keurig's new cocktail pod machine for your, your segment. This thing.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Well.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  I mean, go ahead.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  These are gonna be awful, right? Like-

• 57:51Speaker 02

  Mixed cocktails. It sounds awful. And Ashley tested it out.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  Ashley said that the margarita tastes- She said the margarita tastes like a limearita. Which, have you ever had a limearita?

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, but she's-

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's pretty much the worst thing you could say about a margarita.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  No, it's a malt beverage designed to taste like a margarita. It's like, what were, like, the Bartles and James drinks?

• 58:11Speaker 01

  It's a, yeah, it's a wine cooler.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a wine cooler. It's, uh-

• 58:16Speaker 02

  She did say that the Moscow Mule that she tried was, tasted like a Moscow Mule. But I don't know what a Moscow Mule is. Do you guys know?

• 58:28Speaker 00

  It is, um-

• 58:29Speaker 01

  A Moscow Mule is vodka, ginger beer, and lime?

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not a hard drink to make.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you have to serve it in a copper mug-

• 58:37Speaker 00

  Otherwise you're a philistine.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  -which will steal, in all likelihood, from the bar.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  So sometimes when you order a Moscow Mule, you have to give them your driver's license.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  Really?

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, because they have so many stolen copper cups.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  Ow!

• 58:49Speaker 01

  And I just want to put this out there. If you run a bar and you require any sort of deposit when you serve a Moscow Mule in a copper mug, I would just like you to tweet at me at Casey Newton, and I want to collect those stories. And I'm gonna write a Medium post.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  Great.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  So, but yeah, this is called the Drink Works Home Bar. It's also supposed to eventually make beer? Which-

• 59:10Speaker 00

  No.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  -seems pretty suspect.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. I just, I can't.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  And it needs CO2? How many cocktails are fizzy?

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Here is my idea.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  I have an idea for stunt journalism. Here's what we're gonna do.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  We're gonna take the cocktail pods-

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  And then we're just gonna squeeze them between our hands- And see if you can create a cocktail without even needing to involve the Keurig. And, yeah, we could have a viral hit.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  That's a really good idea. Just like, just get an X-acta knife, slice it open, pour it over ice, see what happens.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, why is there a machine for it?

• 59:46Speaker 00

  Uh-

• 59:48Speaker 00

  Uh, oh, uh, we made fun of this because it was super easy to make fun of, but I get what it's supposed to be, but Essential has released its first or its second ever module that I know of for the Essential phone.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  It's just a list of Andy Rubin's mistakes and you can just plug it right into the phone.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  Well, at the top of this list of mistakes is the headphone dongle. It's a hundred and fifty dollar headphone dongle. Um, it's technically the modular adapter that lets you plug a headphone in without losing your USB-C jack and I think it has a high-end DAC in it. Um, but, come on.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  It doubles, doubles the thickness of your phone, basically.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  All right, I was just gonna say, um, I'm very open to the idea that there could be a cool thing that you plug in your phone that you pay money for. Like, I have no objection to that idea. I would love there to be a useful thing that extends the functionality of your phone. Um, this one is the single worst of these I've ever seen.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  It's like a hundred and fifty dollar headphone jack, come on.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  My least favorite thing about, like, USB-C headphones, Lightning headphones, and headphone dongles is I, you know, I, uh, wear jeans large enough to hold my phone, but not quite large enough that, like, there's some, you know, there's some tension, especially when you're sitting down on that, like, that, where the jack goes into the phone, where you're, you know, do you guys know what I'm talking about?

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  The headphone jack tension of, I don't know. So I feel like this doesn't really look like it solves it, maybe, maybe a little bit, but...

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  What a sad life that we all lead.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  I don't know, I guess the only other thing, like, we've got reviews up of the Microsoft Surface Headphones and the Dolby Dimension headphones, which are both two fascinating headphones that I will, uh, not buy, because they don't quite, like, the, the Microsoft headphones don't have quite enough audio quality to justify their price, and the Dolby ones are just weird. Like, you're only supposed to wear them at home. Um, they, you can, like, dial up and down the ambient, you can do that with the, the Surface Headphones, too. Um, having used the new Sony, uh, 1000M, X, 1000XM3s, uh, like, being able to adjust the level of ambient is a really neat idea, and doing that physically is also a neat idea, because digging into the app to adjust that stuff is the worst.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Um, but yeah, just like, no one, no one has actually, in my opinion...

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  Done everything just right on a nice pair of over the ear noise cancelling headphones.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, you know, and, and I don't know, I would be interested in from you either, whether that is particularly true of the wireless ones, because I now just understand that my next pair of nice headphones will probably be wireless, because I just bought a new iPad and it, you know, doesn't have a headphone dongle thing.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  So, you know, I would love it if there was a really great pair of over ear headphones that also did the noise cancelling, that was also wireless.

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  I mean, there are a bunch that are, that, that meet all of those needs, but I also want it to charge via USB-C. I increasingly want to have an adjustment for the noise cancelling, but that's not a must have. And I want it to connect to multiple devices easily, and that is not possible in my world. I don't know, I'm probably going to switch back to the Bose, we'll see. Oh, hey, you just bought an iPad, tell us about your iPad.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, um, I bought what I refer to as the Monstrous, which is the 12.9 inch iPad, and I, I tweeted about this, but I absolutely clowned myself. I thought I was going to go into the Apple Store as, as the smartest man in the room, because I, I looked at the prices and I said, you know what, if I get the 64 gigabyte, 11 inch model with no LTE, I'm, yeah, I'm spending 800 bucks for something that I'm, that I'm going to just be using as a pure consumption device, but like, that actually feels like a kind of money ball pick, because the thing's going to last me four years, I'm going to use it every single day, and I'm going to get out at the cheapest possible price.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  So I walk into the Apple Store, and I look at the 11 inch model, and I look at the 12 inch, 12.9 inch model, and my frickin' lizard brain just starts going, well, you know, Casey, the 12.9 inch model is actually much bigger. And, and, and the bigger thing is good and the smaller thing is, is for a weak and puny person and, and no, you know, self-respecting gentleman could ever bring this into his home. And so the next thing you know, I've talked myself into buying the 12.9 inch thing, which like barely fits on my lap. Like it is a, an absolutely ungainly absurd piece of hardware that is also incredibly beautiful. And, and I've been using it a lot over the past week

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  and I have to say, the retina display is so good. All of the TV I'm looking at looks so much better than it looked on my old iPad. So I'm, I'm keeping the thing and I, I hate myself for it. Uh, it, it was, it was both the right and the wrong choice. And like that is just technology for you sometimes. Hmm. You didn't get the keyboard cover though, right? No. So I, so that's the thing is like, you know- You just watch TV on it? Well, I do a little bit more than that. You know, so whenever a new iPad comes out, the, the discussion is always like, well, can it replace your laptop? Which for me is just not an interesting question because I have a laptop and I always use my laptop to do laptop things. But I love the iPad when it's just kind of time to like lean back and relax and read or, you know, watch TV, you know, in the morning. I, I don't,

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  I don't sleep with my phone in the room because my phone has like every messaging app. My iPad has a much narrower selection of apps. And so I can sort of bring the iPad into my bedroom and like, it's just not quite as loud. But, you know, in the morning, I'll pick it up. I'll see what email came in. I don't respond to any of them, but you know, I just see what's on fire. I open up Twitter. I see what tweets I've missed. Um, and then yeah, like I get home from work and, you know, I'll, I'll wind up like watching something on, on Netflix or, or something like that. But it is such a beautiful, um, consumption machine. The battery life is, is incredible, right? Like there's so many cool things about it. And I realize that, you know, I could, I could get all of those features for much less money- Yes. -in, in another device. And that is, that is totally true. But it wouldn't be a big ass screen. It wouldn't be a big ass screen. And also like, I'm an iOS person and I get a lot

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  of value out of things syncing, you know, across. I, I love the fact that I can get my iMessages on, on my tablet. Um, I love the Face ID. Like there's just a lot of stuff that I wind up liking. And, you know, let's face it, like a lot- Of tech is about aesthetics. It's about the kind of stuff that that you just like respond to. And I will say, I brought the iPad into the office the other day and it was like, it was as if I brought in a newborn. Everybody wanted to hold it and touch it and they would hold it in the morning and they came back after lunch. It's like, can we hold it again? You know, so there really is something that is super compelling about that particular thing. And like, nobody's trying to pick up your candle fire and, you know, see what it's like.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  Speaking of compelling, would you have some updates on the most exciting story in tech other than night shot or night sight or whatever it's called? The Galaxy F.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  Folding phone.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Like, wait, is it really called the Galaxy F?

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Why did they decide to, I mean, F for fold, but it's like.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  I thought that was a joke. That's hilarious.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  Samsung can't stop owning themselves. We should also talk about their new interface, but anyway, keep going about the Galaxy.

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  Okay, well, we just have, there's a report out that it's gonna be maybe like $1,700 or something like that, which is great. That's bonkers. And then we have some dimensions. The main inside screen is 7.3 inches with a 420 DPI.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  This is great. And then the cover display is 4.58 inches with the same DPI. The thing is, we still don't know, we don't have the actual design of the device. We've, we've, we've just seen, it's like this boxy prototype that they can do these screens, but we have no idea.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  What the actual thing.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Like what it's actually gonna look like.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  It's gonna cost so much money.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. But, but that, that would be like a, like a, like a baby moment, right? You bring that into an office, everybody, everybody, the verge is gonna wanna hold that.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. Have you looked at the, some screenshots of this new Samsung One UI that they're doing? So Samsung, we've, it was TouchWiz for years and then they, they realized everybody hated TouchWiz. So they said, "Don't call it TouchWiz anymore. Call it the Samsung Experience." And we said, "Cool, we're gonna keep calling it TouchWiz." And so they realized they actually have to give it a name. And they're changing the way that their UI works on Samsung Android phones. And they're calling it One UI. And the whole deal with this new UI is they've realized phones have gotten too big. And so they just shifted everything down to the bottom. And so now everything is at the bottom. Uh, and then there's like giant headers, like their notes, their default notes interface that says like all notes.

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  It's like the header of like the section of the app you're in before you like tap into a note. And it's literally the top third of the screen is just gone. So like, I get it. You like, you get the full screen. Cause like when you're browsing or something, you can scroll up and it's there. But when you're in like an app where you actually need to tap something. They've tried to shift everything down to the bottom half of the screen. And it's like, do I love this or hate this? Is this good or really bad? Like, just get a small phone or wait, no, Samsung is genius. I, like, I was all set to be like, "Ha ha, they, they, they couldn't figure out how to make a small phone that anybody wants."

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  So they just like gave up on using half the screen. Like, but then I like look at some of these, these photos and I'm like, "Wait a minute." This, yeah, I do want all my buttons down at the bottom. That, that makes, Samsung makes sense. This is like smart.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  There's, there's, there's this one image from the, the announcement that it fills me with hope. That, so imagine the screen cut into thirds. The top third is the viewing area. So that's where you look at content. And then the lower two thirds are the interaction area. So that's how you interact or you choose what you're viewing.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  This obviously completely relies on execution, but I'm glad somebody's doing it. I hate, I hate reaching up to the top of my, my big phone.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  I hate it.

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  It, it does look silly. Like you're in your text messaging app and you can only see your four most recent messages. Because the top half of the phone is just the word messages.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  It looks so dumb. It looks so dumb.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  I have to imagine they're gonna do some sort of wacky button combo to like, let you shift that stuff back up. I don't know, man. Whatever. Whatever. Samsung, I'm gonna give this a shot. I'm not gonna make fun of it by default, but whatever. That, I think, is enough Vergecast. Oh, wait, one last thing. Black Friday's coming up. We've got a bunch of Black Friday coverage. We've got like, it's already happening. There's deals posted up from like, Microsoft and Google, I think maybe Best Buy and there's more to come. Target. Some of these deals are actually pretty good. Like 50 bucks off a Google Home Hub is pretty good. Pixelbook is pretty good. The Surface is like, cheaper. Casey, you and I are gonna have to start a buddy comedy because

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  you went with the 12.9 inch iPad, and I decided to go with the Surface Go with LTE.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Which is like a tiny baby tablet.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  It's a tiny little baby tablet. It's so little, bitty, bitty. So like, we're gonna go and we're gonna recreate that Apple commercial with me and Yami.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  And I'm excited to hold your newborn tablet like a baby and see if I like that, too.

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  Paul, is there anything for Black Friday that you're holding out to get for yourself? Are you gonna, you gonna not participate in the evil capitalist bacchanalia of consumerism?

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  I mean, Black, I don't know if you know this about me, I hate deals.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  I always feel like I'm, deals are like, they're tricking you, you know? Like, if you see a cheap TV, like a suspiciously cheap TV at Best Buy, it means it's basically like a reject, you know? It's a failed television that they're hoping to get rid of. So, deals are scams. But, I will say that after all my hating on consoles, I kind of feel like I need to get a PS4 to play Fallout with friends.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you do.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  And really sad about it, because I wish everybody had PCs, but you know, that's very unrealistic of me to expect everybody to buy.

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  Well, you know, Sony just released a silent update to the PS4 that apparently gets rid of fan noise, or it reduces the fan noise on it. So, you picked the right time.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Also, I love my PS4. That is such a fun thing. Yeah, it's great.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Ericsson, who would like you to know that 5G is not just a step up from 4G. It is a game-changing advancement. It is 100 times faster, and the ultra-liable, low-latency network means that it can connect with more than just phones and tablets. It connects everything. Imagine a jam session with band members miles apart in perfect sync. It is happening. Imagine an 8K entertainment system in your self-driving car that rivals your home theater. 5G will have the power to revolutionize existing industry models or even create new ones. This is just a glimpse of what the future will hold and what it will look like with Ericsson and 5G. Find out how 5G will transform the world at ericsson.com/5g.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  That's E-R-I-C-S-S-O-N dot com slash 5G.

• 1:13:40Speaker 07

  Hey, Vergecast listeners. I'm Spencer Hall from SB Nation, and I want to tell you about my new show, It Seemed Smart. It Seemed Smart is a show about people doing things that, for some reason or another, seemed smart at the time. Those things might include doing a little cocaine and driving a bike up a mountain. Or, I don't know, maybe racing 100 miles per hour across the country in the middle of the night with no one's permission. Or even stealing a bat from an umpire's room in a Major League Baseball park. Check it out, and if you like it, tell a friend. I'm Spencer Hall. Don't do anything smart.

• 1:14:23Speaker 00

  All right, well, I think that's enough talking about consumerism, but you should go check out the Holiday Gift Guide, which Michael Moore put together. We've got a lot of great recommendations in there. There's also Holiday Gift Guides from Eater and Curb, which are also really nice, so you should check those out. You can follow all of us on the Twitters. I'm at Backlon, Paul's Future Paul, Casey is Casey Newton, and he is Ding. The author of?

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  The Interface, a evening newsletter about social networks and democracy, which you can find at theverge.cominterface.

• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  That's great. You should also rate and review us. It's been a while since I asked for that, but give us some stars. We'd appreciate that. And of course, there are other podcasts. Recode in particular has some great stuff. There is Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. There is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. And Kara has that new podcast with Dr. Scott, Professor Scott Galloway.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Pivot, it's called.

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  Pivot, it's called. It's very, very good. So you should check those out. Thank you so much for listening. We'll catch you in the next one. Promo code, Paul.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Rock and roll.