ARM powered PCs, Google vs Amazon, and Messenger Kids

This week, Dieter Bohn runs the show with Paul Miller and Natt Garun, and it's been a wild week of news. Amazon and Google are basically feuding right now: Google is pulling YouTube from the FireTV so the podcast trio ponders what this frightening predicament means for the streaming and the open web. Also, Microsoft launched some ARM-powered Windows 10 PCs, so you bet these tech luminaries are going to talk about it. There’s lots more in between that, like Paul’s weekly segment (say it with me) “Color me surprised,” so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 05:00 - Microsoft launches ARM-powered Windows 10 PCs with ‘all-day’ battery life 17:44 - Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon 845 processor 22:40 - How Messenger Kids takes more from families than it gives them 30:17 - Google and Amazon are punishing their own customers in a bitter feud 40:27 - DeepMind’s AI became a superhuman chess player in a few hours, just for fun 44:21 - Major airlines are about to ban ‘smart luggage’ 49:45 - Paul’s weekly segment “Color me surprised” 52:06 - Instagram is testing Direct, a standalone messaging app that replaces the current inbox 54:57 - Apple's had a shockingly bad week of software problems 1:00:22 - Bitcoin hits $15,000 1:04:01 - CryptoKitties Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:49Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast. It is the flagship podcast of theverge hello. And I am joined today by incredibly smart people. Paul Miller is here as usual.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  And Nat Garin is here.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Hey, it's been a while.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  It has. We've been, we've been missing you. Neelai is not here. He is on vacation. And I'm sorry I missed last week. My voice was such that I couldn't talk for more than 45 seconds without falling into a coughing fit of death. So that was, that was super fun. Also, as long as we're talking about, about flagships, I want to point out that our very, very good friend Ezra Klein on his podcast, The Weeds over at Vox.com noted that we are in contention for who gets to be the flagship. And I just, I want to say that he's a very nice guy. They have a very nice podcast, but we are, we are, we are definitely better.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Duh.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  So the beef is, is real now.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  The beef is real.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  It's acknowledged.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Also, I want to point out that Walt Mossberg tweeted, who's at Ezra Klein? Never heard him on the flagship podcast, The Vergecast. And that was liked by Ezra Klein, I think in a concession to non-flagship status.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Well, you definitely shouldn't go listen to the weeds and listen to their recent net neutrality episode.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Definitely not.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, you should. Uh, so, hey, it's been a kind of a busy week for news in a way that December usually isn't. What's that about?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  I have no idea. I think they should allow us to relax and charge our batteries for CES.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  I blame Qualcomm. Uh, they're holding this like three day event in Hawaii. Uh, our intrepid reporter reviewer, Dan Seifert, is out there learning about chips. Yeah, it's actually still going on right now as we podcast. And I think right today, they're talking about 5G, which I still think is the biggest. I don't know. I feel like 5G is still in the flim flam zone. Is it, is there a standard that everybody's agreed on? Are they actually rolling it out anytime soon? People like, hey, we got 5G. It's like, ah, do you? Is it real? It's in a few cities in the US from Verizon.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like that's when FiOS was coming out and everyone's like, oh, snap, FiOS. And then they waited three years until it came to their address. And then they waited another year until it came on their floor in their apartment. So it's gonna be a while.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Aren't we still at a stage where whatever Qualcomm decides is 5G is 5G?

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Not if you ask Apple. Uh, no, I'm just kidding. Uh, actually, I have no idea what Apple thinks of Qualcomm and 5G. Uh, I do know that they're not friends. Uh, they're, they're, uh, they're trying to stop each other. Uh, Qualcomm is using Palm's patents to try and block importing of the iPhone 10. I'm not gonna go there. I'm not gonna have too many feelings about that. I'm gonna try super hard. Okay, no, except I did tweet a thing. If you take the cards on the iPhone 10 and start like dragging them around, they don't do what you would expect a physical object to do. They just kind of float all over the place and then you let them go and they like drop into an icon. Like, it seems like what they want to do is get reordered, but instead what they do is just kind of, and then they fall away.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  I wanna know I don't have an iPhone 10.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Oh, well, you should get one and then you can complain about the notch, just like me. Um, actually, Lauren, Lauren Good and I, uh, have been progressively making each other hate the iPhone 10 more and more, just by like pointing out little nitpicks to each other day by day. And any one of those individual nitpicks, it's like, fine, whatever. But then like my nitpicks are piling on top of her nitpicks and it's, it's like snowballing into this, I don't know about how I feel about this phone thing.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  It sounds like a super healthy relationship at work.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  It's really, yeah, it's really super great. Uh, anyway, she's writing a story. I'm putting her on blast, it's gonna come. Actually, hell, as long as we're talking about Lauren Good, if you haven't watched the final episode of Next Level, uh, it is incredible. She goes and puts on like four different exoskeletons, exoskeletons designed for like factory work and also for, uh, you know, people that need assistance walking. And it looks incredible. It's a really good story. Go watch Next Level. Um, okay, Qualcomm, Hawaii, the big, big news, I think it hasn't, it wasn't like the biggest traffic news. It isn't the biggest like story that everybody's definitely paying attention to, but I think it's the most important news of the week is that they finally announced a bunch of like real, actual laptops that are really gonna go on sale that are running on ARM processors.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Windows on ARM.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  What's remarkable to me is they're running on like, you know, plain old, good old bog standard Snapdragon 835s. The same thing that's like in my Android phone.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is like a real partnership with Qualcomm and Microsoft, as far as I can understand. Like their development platform was the 825 for a while. And then now they've got the 835 to put it on, but like they built this specifically with Qualcomm to make, the way I'm thinking about this is obviously Microsoft tried to do the thing where what if your phone could become your computer? Like you'd plug it into a dock or that, you know, that's been a dream forever. Um, and this is what if your computer became a phone? What if you, we just took a computer and then made the insides of it, phone internals? And I, and it turns out it's a great idea.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  You think so? Hmm, I do too. The, the, the, the problem is, we know that the Apple's A whatever processors on the iPad Pro are completely capable of running fast enough to handle like full-on computer stuff, even though the iPad itself has software that is like, yeah, yeah. But Dan's like done some hands-ons and he's played around with these a little bit, but he hasn't had enough time to fully judge it. But I am, color me like skeptical that a Windows laptop running on a Snapdragon 835 is going to feel fast enough. I have a, I have a hard enough time using, you know, my, my MacBook with its M3 processor

• 6:55Speaker 00

  at times. And so are people willing to accept the thing that like theoretically could run any Windows app, but like the Intel stuff's gonna run on that like extra layer of computing? And like, I don't know, what am I trying to say? When you have a computer and you do too much stuff, it slows down, you just get mad at the computer. And the way that phones and the way that the iPad solves that problem is by just not letting you do that much, right? You can't run five apps at a time. It can, the, the screen has a max of two or three at a time. Windows and like actually Chromebooks that run low-end processors, you just use it until it's slow and then you have to figure out where that line is. How many tabs do I get to have open before this thing sucks? So it's up to you to figure that out. And

• 7:40Speaker 00

  I don't know if that is gonna work for Windows. Like is it, are people just gonna get salty about the fact that this thing gets slow when they start pushing it?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Well, they're gonna start out with Windows 10s, right?

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  So the only things you can do on that are like play probably Solitaire, watch Netflix, and use Edge as a browser, right?

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  So that's, that's never gonna get slow. That's great.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  That's not so bad.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  So then you pay to upgrade to actual Windows.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  And... There's a, there's a few really interesting tricks that Microsoft did here to actually get this to work, and I find it very fascinating. So basically what Microsoft is doing is UWP apps, like the Windows Store apps, should, should just work. Basically, the developers still have to upload an ARM version of their app, but if they've developed it inside the UWP framework, then that should be a trivial process for them to do. So you'll get not a ton, a, a certain quantity of UWP apps that you can use. Then, any other app that

• 8:47Speaker 01

  is made for Intel will run in an emulator, an X86 emulator. But the thing that's interesting that Microsoft's doing is they've taken a lot of the, like, the common DLLs. Like, when you, when you build an application, you have your core logic of your application, but then you end up relying on a lot of libraries, like, I need this math library to do this fast thing. I need this file system library to access files and stuff like that. And those are, on Windows, are DLLs. They're sort of external to the core program. And Microsoft is recompiling some of the major ones for ARM. And obviously, it's the core kernel of the operating system is ARM. So a lot of the things that applications will

• 9:30Speaker 01

  rely on will be ARM native. And then the rest of it will be emulated. And so really big monolithic apps like Photoshop are probably going to be slow. But the basics, I mean, I feel like they've done, they've done better than just being like a Chromebook.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  There's a lot more flexibility and you don't get stuck where it's like, I cannot do this thing.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Well, and they also avoid, like, it's a different kind, like, the Chromebook, the problem is, like, you sometimes are like, well, I bought a Pixelbook. So like, I used it over the Thanksgiving holiday. It was the only computer I brought with me. And I've already talked about how much I love 360 hinges. I think all laptops should have 360 hinges and touchscreens. But the problem is, you are always, you cannot get away from, are we going to run the Android app or the web app version of this thing? And it's got to the point where... It won't, every time you install an update to an Android app, it gives you the opportunity to like, set it as the default Android app. So literally every time I click a Google Doc link, I have to make sure that I don't accidentally click always and open it in the Android app of Google Drive, because Google Docs on the Android app kind of sucks, but on Chrome it's great.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  So I'm always terrified of clicking a Google Doc link on a Google Pixelbook. So that's that problem. They avoided that problem. But are they gonna have the two world? The question is like, is there a two world problem of X86 apps going to be equally annoying or not? And I think that there aren't a ton of great Windows apps still. There's like the basics. But how quickly is that gonna become annoying? And how quickly will there be new, you know, Windows apps that run on ARM that will solve that problem?

• 11:13Speaker 01

  The big question would be if it's just visibly sluggish whenever you're in an X86 app. Because Microsoft is trying to make it completely invisible to the user, whether you are or are not in an X86 app.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  So, and the thing is, is that like, so like Slack, for instance, that runs on Electron. Electron already runs on ARM. My Chromebook, I've put another Linux distro on my Chromebook.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Of course you have.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Oh wait, this Chromebook is, the Pixelbook is X86. But there are versions of like Visual Studio Code, which is based on Electron, same as Slack is based on Electron, that run on ARM. So like, tons and tons of software has already been re-engineered to be cross-compilable to ARM. So I feel like a lot of developers will be able to do like a small amount of work to get a big performance win on Windows. And then, and then the fact that you have this release valve to possibly slow, but at least completely usable programs, I feel like is a big win. The big thing though is, is the, is the actual hardware that this enables. I mean, they're talking about like 25 hours of battery life, which sounds pretty absurd.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  25 hours of battery life and you'll be able, they'll be able to make LTE variants without it being a huge pain. Like, we've been waiting for the LTE Surface Pro for a while, right? That's the problem with every single x86 laptop tablet device thing. They're not even making an LTE version of the Pixel Book, for example. They used to do that with like the old version, the whatever that thing was called, the Chromebook Pixel. So like getting LTE modems on laptops with x86 processors has always been kind of a mess. Because it required way too much re-architecting of the board and whatever. And making sure the antennas work and blah, but these are built from jump to enable that option.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  And having LTE on the device itself is so much more convenient than like hitting that tether button. I know people like, eh, don't be such a baby, just hit the tether button and it's fine. But it's actually, it's legitimately so much better to just be able to know that you've got LTE on that device. You don't have to suck your phone's battery down.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Well, especially if you can get like 20 hours. Let's say you get 20 hours of actually using this laptop with LTE on. And then it's got like the same sort of standby that a phone has. Where it's basically hardly using any energy when it's asleep and it's got instant wake up. Like it's actually enabling, I feel like, a better computer. So if it's tolerably fast, which I think is the big remaining question, I think it'd be awesome.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  I mean, if it's tolerably fast, like Matt, do you think this is, becomes the new de facto standard? If it's tolerably fast, is this, would you be?

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, depends on what the price point is, right? Like if it starts, it's what, like starting around like $800 that, you know?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I think there might be a 600, but yeah.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, like if it's tolerably fast, then yeah, like 600 seems reasonable. But if it's like 800 and God helps, if it gets up to like the $1,000 Chromebooks, then it's like, well, what's the point? I don't know.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  I mean, if it's, yeah, I don't know either. I'm really excited, I'm really excited to try it. The other thing that's interesting from Dan's post, like they just look like every other Windows device. They didn't, they're not doing anything radically different. They're not making them really tiny or they're not doing like extra weird, there's already a million weird hinges anyway. But the, they just look like every other laptop. So the other question is, you know, they're like, you'll go and there'll be one with like the Intel Inside badge on. And there'll be one with, I don't know, Snapdragon inside, whatever, some other badge on it. How are they going to market these? How hard are they going to push these? When a regular consumer goes into Best Buy, are they going to know which, like, the real consequences of these two things?

• 14:57Speaker 02

  I think the best marketing strategy they could do is probably to just literally work with Best Buy to talk to their salesperson. Because I feel like a lot of people go, most average consumers, I think, that aren't as tech forward as we are, probably walk into a Best Buy trying to buy a laptop. And they're like, I've seen the surface on the commercials and I've seen the MacBook, but like, my budget's about $700. What can I actually get that's good? And like, it's up to them to work with vendors to educate people on like, here's a thing that you may not know about, and it looks super boring, but it fits your budget and works with whatever you want to do or get out of this laptop.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  I feel like it could, if you're like, just list, yeah, if you're just listing the specs, someone's going to walk up to this and it's like, okay, this gets, you're looking at two $700 laptops. One of these gets eight hours of battery, one of these gets 25 hours of battery and has LTV. And it's like, why, why is this even a choice? Like, why is this eight-hour battery laptop even on the market? Like, I don't even understand.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just like, battery life and all that stuff is super easy to market, but it just doesn't sound that fun. Or like, it's not a fun commercial to watch, especially if the laptop just looks super boring. So I think that like, literally their best way is to just getting better at working with vendors to educate the people who come in to buy stuff. And like, not discourage them from the flashier options, but just be better at saying like, here's your budget, here's what works.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  It's not that exciting, but it's better bang for your buck.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  And they don't have the Windows RT problem, where it's like, this is Windows, but it's.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Sort of.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Quote, unquote, Windows.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. I don't know, I keep going back to the fact that these look just like regular, the other laptops. Like, they could have gone to a world like, yeah, we'll still give you eight hours of battery life instead of 20, but it weighs literally nothing. They could have like, made them thinner and put smaller batteries in them, and they chose not to.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  I mean, I feel like under there's diminishing returns for like a laptop lighter than a certain amount, especially if it's going to have a full-size keyboard and a nice, nice display. But I may, maybe we'll get those cool, magical, paper-thin, lightweight devices. I would rather have 22 hours battery, though, personally.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would. Well, man, yeah. I have problems with the way that batteries are getting talked about now. Like, it used to be that, like, Apple would promise eight, and then you could actually get 10, and it was amazing. But now, everybody gave up on trying to give you real battery numbers. So Microsoft is just like, it lasts 16 hours of video local playback. It's like, not helpful. So I never know when I bought, when I get a new laptop to test, whatever number they give kind of doesn't matter. Unless you actually test it and use it, you don't actually know. That's frustrating. Anyway, the other news out of Qualcomm is the Snapdragon 845. And Paul, convince me that I should care. And I mean, it's going to be the standard on a whole bunch of Android phones. Great. What's, what's special about

• 17:56Speaker 00

  this compared to the 835? Because it's the same nanometers, right? It's like the second rev of it.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the TOCK, T-O-C-K, right? Tick, tick, tock. It's apparently still a thing in Armland. Basically, it's 30% faster at the same power draw. Is, is the best that I can understand. And also, there are certain cases, seems like where you could get, like, 15% more efficiency at, like, the old performance. So, I mean, that's nice. It's a nice little improvement. It's got, you know, the faster, better LTE modem. But yeah, it's basically 30% more performance is the main thing. They're, they're doing some AI-type chip stuff, but

• 18:43Speaker 01

  it's not quite as interesting. It's not quite as interesting as the Apple, Apple stuff. There's also some, like, image processing stuff, which is similar to the image processing chip that Google has for the Pixel 2 that they just turned on.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  It's going to be, it's going to enable, like, 4K video on basically everything, is my understanding.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, yeah. Well, that's for, yeah, for playbook. Playback, dude, you can get dual. 2400 by 2400, 120 frames per second for VR. It's amazing. Wow. I can't believe it. But yeah, like that three, 3X AI performance is, but, but they don't have something that's like really dedicated to like a neural network processing like Apple and Google are doing.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  As far as I understand. But yeah, it's faster. I mean, and, and the thing is like, you'll just put it in the next flagship. And so your next flagship is probably going to have this chip. So it's, you don't even have to think about it. Right? The, the, the next flagship phone that you want to buy is probably going to have an 845.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  The problem with these chips though, is like, it says it enables all these things, but like, I think as we found on like the recent Circuit Breaker Live show, the hardware could be super good, but if the software isn't that great, like the implementation of the actual feature is going to look drastically different and might not be that great. Like I think we talked about all the image processing from the different phones that use similar chips and like iPhone and the Samsung does completely different things and what the pixels are doing. So like, who knows what this will look like in actuality, right?

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dieter, I don't know if you watched the Circuit Breaker Live we did this week, but James and Sean had these, these example photos because they're working on a, like a phone camera shootout. And yeah, like it's like the editorial decisions of these companies for what photos should actually look like are, are, are crazy. How different some of the photos end up looking.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So like the hardware could be awesome, but then like what you actually get in terms of when it's put into your phones. Ultimately that comes down to the manufacturers themselves. So like, this is all super exciting and stuff, but I don't know how much it'll matter in the long run. If the different software that uses them kind of basically dictates whether or not you're going to buy a device.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:00Speaker 00

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• 21:42Speaker 00

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• 22:27Speaker 00

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• 22:31Speaker 00

  All right. I said I want to talk about kids. I have lots of feelings about Amazon and Google and also other things, including Bitcoin. But I want to talk about kids first. Nat, what did Facebook do this week? If you're listening to this, you probably know, but give us the rundown.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Facebook decided that it didn't have enough spinoff apps and wanted to make another one. So now it's going to release a kids' version of its Messenger app, which is designed for kids ages six to 12, and it'll have parental controls. Parents can decide who their kids can talk to in their contact lists, and it's not going to serve kids ads allegedly. And because the law requires that you have to be 13 years or older to sign up for a Facebook account, you don't need a Facebook account to use the Messenger app. However, Obviously, parents are kind of concerned because it's not unthinkable that Facebook can link the parent to the kid, even if they don't have the account.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  And also, just in general, people are kind of very distrustful of Facebook at the moment.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  How does it work without an account? You just type in your friend's name?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you can sign up with like a phone number or like your name. I think in general, Facebook, I mean Messenger as an app, doesn't require a Facebook account at all. So you can still use it as just a plain messaging app. And you can use it to use, you know, filters and stickers and draw on your face and whatever. But they're making a kid-specific one, I guess, to compete with Hangouts and iMessage because they probably think that parents are already using these types of apps to talk to their kids, so why not get into the space?

• 24:04Speaker 01

  That makes sense. Parents are definitely talking to kids through messaging. And if you can, only way you can do that messaging is having a Facebook account. And you can't have a Facebook account if you're younger than 13, then Facebook has to do something, right?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Well, Facebook doesn't have to do anything.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  They don't have to do anything. But they figure if you're a parent, so Casey wrote some really good stuff about this, but here's my calculus. I'm a parent, I've got a kid, I want to talk to my kid. My kid doesn't have a Facebook account, and so I'm going to talk to my kid using iMessage or Hangouts or whatever. And then if I'm talking to my kid using iMessage or Hangouts or whatever, I'm going to talk to other people using it because I'm already in the app. So I think from Facebook's perspective, this is, you know, Casey's point is that this is about like getting the kid ready, getting them early so that when they turn 13, they're ready for their Facebook account. They're so excited they can finally turn it on instead of just using the Facebook Kids Messenger app. I think from the other side of it, this is actually about, they want to make sure that parents who are talking to their kids aren't enticed to use another messaging app, and

• 25:04Speaker 00

  it makes the parents more likely to use Messenger. So there's no ads in the Kids Messenger app, but there's definitely ads in the Parents' Messenger app. And so anything that would tempt a parent away from using Facebook Messenger is a danger to Facebook.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  That 12-year-old is going to have a hard time when they turn 13.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  They're gonna get grown up, move on to the grown up messenger and you're like, wow, this sucks. Grown up sucks.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, man. Growing up sucks. First I have puberty, now I have this?

• 25:32Speaker 01

  There's ads in Facebook Messenger that I just have never noticed.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Um, I think they used to serve them in like Messenger Day, you know, like their Stories version. Um, there may be some sponsorships there and also you can talk to like bots. So there's all the different companies that you can chat with.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  And I think those are not going to be available to talk to kids in the, their kids' version.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Speaking of bots, and there's like a games tab and blah.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Casper matched me on Twitter, or sorry, on Tinder. I'm not talking about like, like, wait, Casper the mattresses, right? And I'm not talking about it's like swiping left, swipe right, and I swiped right on Casper. No. Casper was added to the list of people who I have already matched with. And so I, and now I had a conversation that was already populated in Tinder with me and Casper. So I had to click on Casper and say, unmatch this person. And on Tinder, unmatch this person is like, what did, what did they do? So I said, they're spam.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  That is disturbing.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  It was kinda weird.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Also, why does Tinder think that you want to have a close intimate relationship with the mattress?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  I mean, you spend every night on it.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  That's true. Yeah. Okay, we need to.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  That's creepy.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Am I crazy for not being that worked up about the Facebook Kids thing? I don't know. Maybe it's just that I already don't trust Facebook's disclosure. My wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook, uh, so much that like, yeah, they're gonna do something creepy and that's just the way of the world. But it's, but it's also true that like the, the kids today, an eight-year-old is, if an eight-year-old has a phone, they're gonna find and use a messaging app. And so from Facebook's perspective, the devil's advocate argument here is if you're a parent and you want to like make sure it's a messaging app that you have some sort of, I don't know, oversight on, I guess?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess the problem here is what Casey wrote in his piece in the fact that they're trying to get kids in early, right? Like, I think that a lot of people are learning about, slowly learning about what Facebook is doing with their information and how they're selling it, or how they're aggregating their data and how it's being used. And a lot of people are uncomfortable about it. So those same people who are probably uncomfortable about how Facebook is using their data are gonna feel uncomfortable about the fact that they're asking kids to kind of get started and get familiar with the Facebook platform and eventually become another, like, source of mines of data for them when they're 13 years old.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, there's no way there doesn't become a "take everything that we learned from you in this Facebook Kids Messenger thing and turn it into a Facebook profile" button, right?

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, like-

• 28:16Speaker 00

  There's no way they don't do that at some point.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  But I think you're right that, to be fair, once these kids grow up, they're going to start signing up for Gmail. And Gmail does similar things, right? Like, they serve you targeted ads, they, you know, they track your Google searches and give you stuff that they think you might like to buy. This is just another way for to do it. I think it just seems a little more gross coming from Facebook, given that people just are starting to have a lot of reasons to not like Facebook.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  I mean, not just starting. We've had a lot of reasons not like Facebook for a while.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  I've been developing this new metric about social networks based on my listening to "Why'd You Push That Button?" with Ashley and Caitlin. And my thinking is this: social networks are incentivized to maximize the amount of attention you pay to them. Because they monetize by eyeballs. But how useful they actually are to you is how much value they provide to you. So if I can do the thing I need to do very quickly and get on with it, I might spend less time- In their app or on their website, but I got more for my actual personal goals.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  This seems like a wash in that metric because they are, I feel like providing something that's valuable to parents. But they are also, you know, they are pushing their regular thing of trying to maximize the amount of time that you're using their app. So I'm skeptical about it because it's a, it's a, it's a time maximizer, but it also does seem to provide value. So I'm not, I don't hate it.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Just use text messages. That's fine. You can totally trust your wireless carrier. Plus your kids should learn how to, you know, be terse and pithy in their communications. And so 160 characters should be enough to communicate any message you want.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Honestly, if my six year old can type to me on a messenger app, I'd be pretty impressed.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, six year olds are pretty smart. Okay. We gotta get into this. Amazon and YouTube slash Google, this fight is the most annoying, horrible garbage. Most internet ruining thing. It's not, it in itself isn't ruining the internet, but it, to me, it's a portend of things to come. And I'm just, I'm super pissed. So here's the story. For a while, quite a while, you couldn't buy like a Chromecast on Amazon and that seemed weird. And then you could buy an Echo Show and it would show you YouTube videos and like a custom interface that didn't have any YouTube ads or YouTube suggestions

• 30:55Speaker 00

  or comments or thumbs up buttons or whatever. And so Google said, huh, this sucks. And so they said, you can't do that anymore. We're, we're blocking that. And then Amazon was like, bah, that sucks. Why are you not letting us show YouTube? So then they changed it such that the YouTube app on the Echo Show is basically just a web interface that you could like interact with via voice. And then huh, turns out that Nest products disappeared from the, the Amazon store. And then huh, now you can't even access the YouTube webpage on the Echo Show and YouTube is getting yanked from the Amazon Fire TV at the end of the year. And they're now just in this huge massive fight with each other.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  And it's whether or not Google stuff gets in Amazon stores. It's whether or not YouTube gets displayed quote unquote properly on the Echo Show or on the Fire TV. And

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  This feels like a high school fight.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Feels like you broke up with hers and now we can't be friends and you're not invited to my party and you can't come with that. It's insane. It's so petty.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're like one step away of like, Dieter, can you tell YouTube that I think it's fat?

• 32:08Speaker 00

  No, that's definitely happening. It's happening in the press right now. They're issuing these dueling statements about each other, like past each other. They just need to like, I want them just get on a phone together and talk to each other and sure, record the call and release it to the public. I don't care, but this is dumb.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  They should do like-

• 32:25Speaker 00

  You're hurting consumers.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Like a national tour of debates.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Town halls.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  The worst thing to me is which one, like you, the instinct from like everybody in all of these fanboy fights is to like, pick a side. Oh, Google's terrible. Oh, Amazon's terrible. No, they're both terrible. Amazon saying that we're not going to sell Google products in our store is very, very petty. If you ask an Echo to order you a Chromecast, she offers you a Fire TV stick. Come on.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  I mean, it's petty, but it's kind of hilarious.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  The thing that has to be in my bonnet is of course web standards. I get that Google doesn't want Amazon to use undisclosed APIs to display videos in ways that don't like monetize those videos or offer the suggestions that YouTube wants, right? I get it. And no one ever said that, you know, YouTube's special APIs for directly displaying a video is part of the open web. And so if they want to preclude Amazon from doing that, fine. You should note that that's a little bit scary because a lot more of the stuff that happens to you on your phone, on these digital assistants are happening through those APIs that are, you know, controllable by a terms of service and companies not fighting. And so this fight that Amazon and Google are

• 33:41Speaker 00

  happening, having right now is going to happen in other contexts and other ways, either because two other big internet companies are fighting, or maybe because your very own internet service provider is fighting with somebody. So that's, that's like a bad sign, but whatever, those are the way that APIs work. Fine. Terrible, but fine. But then the thing that I'm really, really, really hopped up about right now is Google is saying that the Amazon Echo Show, and I guess the Fire TV, I don't know, sure, but especially Echo Show, is violating its terms of service by altering, altering the website. I gotta find the exact language here. It's, it's like Section 4B of our Terms of Service.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Are they running like a grease monkey script on it? Yeah, you agree to not alter or modify any part of the service. And I could be wrong. I'm very, if someone tells me I'm wrong about this, that's fine. But if all Amazon is doing to alter the service is put an Echo Show voice interface on top of the existing website, then that is very, very, very bad of Google. Because what they're essentially doing is saying, anybody can use YouTube on the web on youtube.com, except for people that happen to be using a browser created by a company that we're mad at. Right? I mean, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what we're saying. Okay. And from my perspective, that means youtube.com is no longer part of the web

• 35:11Speaker 00

  because it's not agnostic to the web browser. You should be able to use any web browser on any computer to visit a webpage. That's the way it should work. Right. Well, what about, like, say I run AdBlock, right? Am I violating terms of service? I suppose. I don't know. That's, it gets really hard. But like, the different, if you're running AdBlock, you're violating terms of service. So, yes, I suppose if they wanted to say, is that altering the webpage? I suppose. Like, it gets really fussy really quickly. But if they want to block an individual user for running an AdBlock, we can have a debate about that. A lot of, you know, journalism websites like pop up with things saying, hey, you're running an AdBlock. Please don't. Otherwise, we aren't going to show your journalism. That's troubling, but whatever. But if they're, they're just blocking an

• 35:56Speaker 00

  entire browser simply for having a voice interface, because it happens to be made by Amazon, that is terrifying. Yeah. Right? Yes, it is terrifying in a way. I love this beef so much.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  I think a little bit because it's like watching like a reality show where like, you know, like the kind of the worst two characters who you were never like really rooting for anyways. Of course they get into the dumbest argument.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  But I didn't, there's something about it. I like, I like it when big companies like this do terrible things because I like to believe that they are, are in some sense fragile. That they are in some sense, because they are so large, that they have a capability of doing a large dumb thing. And I don't think in this case, it's really going to end up really biting either of them in the ass. Especially because the echo show is a slightly marginal product.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  But the fire TV is a huge deal.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  The fire TV is a huge deal. I mean, Amazon and Apple had a beef for a long time and Apple or Amazon wasn't selling a lot of Apple products. One that they kind of balance each other out and they keep each other from being the one world dominant tech company. But also I like to think that in here somewhere is the Achilles heel of a tech company. That one of them will do something so stupid and so over overtly.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Evil.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Evil to, to actual people. Because, you know, obviously actual people own the echo show and bought it so that they could ask it to watch YouTube videos.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  That it will actually come, come back to bite one of these companies one day. I think that would be great.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  Funny to me. What's funny to me is, uh, I think both companies are acting terribly. But I'm all outraged about the web portion more so than I am about the Amazon portion because Amazon as a giant retailer, I just expect Amazon's going to do shady things. Like anytime you're selling products, I expect that you're going to do something shady and Amazon, even though their tagline is the everything store. We all know Amazon's going to do it, but Google. You don't, they, they claim to put themselves to a higher standard and care about the web. And they're, they're not meeting that higher standard that they have by, whether they want to or not, set for themselves. So even though they're both equally complicit in doing equally terrible, stupid things, it's easier to get outraged at Google because Google has set itself up to,

• 38:27Speaker 00

  don't be evil and be good for the web in a way that Amazon, Amazon never said it was nice. Amazon never said, hey, I'm a good guy. I'm helping the internet. They don't care.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  I, I also think it's bad timing on Google's part as a proponent for net neutrality. If you're going to be pushing for net neutrality and at the same time you're going to block specific devices from accessing your website. It's like, hmm.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, and then the message that popped up on the Fire TV, I, there's another tweet of mine. It's, it's almost word for word, like the messages that pop up when, I don't know, DirecTV or Comcast getting in a fight with some random cable channel. And it's like, this cable channel is going away. Call your cable company now to yell at them. Or this, this channel is going away. Call, I don't know, Viacom and yell at Viacom. Like no one, really? That's what it's going to be? That's, that's what we're getting on the internet now is like companies popping up error messages as a way to like throw shade on another company, which is terrible, also hilarious. And again, Nat, the, when you ask for a Chromecast, it tries to sell you a fire stick. It's just amazing. Cause you know, they hand coded that in, right?

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Somebody's like, screw these guys. They're just like plugged it in.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  But overall Nat, does this make you sad or glad?

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Of course I'm sad. YouTube is like, I don't have cable anymore. Um, so YouTube is sort of my main entertainment. Like I go home and the thing I watch on TV is like YouTube, Twitch and like maybe a little Sling TV and that's it. Like hardly anything else. So like basically losing my like main source of like entertainment at home when I just want to go home and just. Literally rest my brain from everything that's going on on Twitter. Now I come home and like I open my TV and I get this like error message. It's like call your cable company. I'm like, oh, why? It's not relaxing. It's bad for everyone. I'm not excited about it. I also think that this fight, especially from two of the biggest tech companies in the industry.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  So that's a really bad precedent for everyone else.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, Alpha, Google's parent company, has taken the same computer algorithm that won the Go championship and can teach it to beat literally anybody at any game invented by humans in less than a day.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  This is the best Freudian slip that you could have made. You called Alpha.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Well, Alphabet, but Alpha is part of Alphabet. Never mind. Just, Paul, educate me.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, let's, let's explore this. There's a robot that is now in charge of Google.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. His name is Alpha.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  So, so.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  What I want is for Alpha Zero, the new AI, to, we should plug in, if this fight between Amazon and Google is actually just a game, like a war game. We should just plug in the, the win states of this game into this AI and just let it fight it out inside the AI. And at the end, they'll decide who gets to win this fight between Amazon and Google. That's what I want.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. So this is what's so exciting. So Google, Google has an AI subsidiary named DeepMind, who has created AlphaGo.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Does Google have it or does Alphabet have it?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  I think it's part of Google.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Who knows anymore?

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Okay, who knows? Okay, so they have, you know, they had AlphaGo, right? Which, what a go, is super good a go. And what they've been working on and iterating it on is this idea, this AlphaZero idea, is that they start with nothing. They only program in the rules of the game and then they just have it play against itself until it reaches like superhuman status.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  Grand master, superhuman status.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it can beat any human in the world. And typically each new generation of this AI, like one of the first things that they tested on is can it beat the last generation? And it can. So, so they were doing that with Go and they're like, huh, let's try chess. And now they have an engine that can train itself from scratch in four hours to beat the best chess AI that exists.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Which is, which is just bonkers. And, and, and it's exactly like you said, like basically the idea is that if you can take the problem that you have and distill into a, a relatively small set of rules, which they, they thought chess would be harder for it because there's a, a lot, like a lack of, like in Go, most of the pieces have the same weight of value.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  And chess, you have pieces that have different moves and different values. So they thought it would be a lot harder, but turns out it's not that hard. Um, so if you can, if you have any problem in the world that can be defined with chess or Go-like rules, and you can write those rules down, hand them to AlphaGo, and it can play itself turn by turn, in about a day, it will have the best possible solution.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  I'd like to see them make an AI that plays Monopoly against each other and see who kills each other first. Or who gives up and kills themselves first.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Incredible.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Oh my God. And also you have to kind of decide, uh, is it auction first or, uh, you skip if you don't buy it? That's a big rule.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Wait, auction for free parking?

• 43:40Speaker 02

  No, like if you land on a spot and you decide not to buy it, is it immediate auction? That's like the biggest fight that people get into about Monopoly.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Which one is the real rule?

• 43:48Speaker 00

  Nobody, nobody plays the auction way. That's never happened.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  But that's why.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Nobody does that.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  But because you don't do that, that's why Monopoly games last three hours of your life. Every time you try to plan, everyone walks away angry.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  That's the point of Monopoly. That's, I mean, that's what it's for.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  This is why we should just have robots play Monopoly, because Monopoly sucks.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Sorry, I have a lot of Monopoly feels.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  It's about to be Christmas, I gotta play Monopoly with family. It is not fun.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Is that like a tradition?

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Kind of a thing, yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  All right, that's enough AI. Before, before I read another ad, because I'm tired of reading ads, Nat, this thing happened today that is, um, I don't know, I, it's weird. What, what's the story?

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Long story short, um, there's, so there's this thing called smart luggage. It's a new product category of things that are like, you know, your, your luggage, and it's got like an app that tells you where it is in the airport, and it's on its way out to you from whatever terminal. And you can charge your phones with it when you're waiting by the gate. Um, these things are kind of controversial. Um, so now major airlines.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  They're controversial because like. Really, what, unless there's a cellular radio in it that you can track it across if your luggage gets like truly lost, all it is is a battery you can plug your phone into and a bunch of like other stuff that is dumb.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's basically an oversized external battery. But major airlines are kind of worried about it because I think in general, they've kind of banned like some batteries from being carried on board since they explode, as we know, from the Note 7.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  You can't, you can't check it. Every time I go to the airport now, I say, have you got any batteries whatsoever in your luggage? Which, by the way, having quit vaping makes me feel very, very good because I tell them the truth, like, no, I don't, I don't have any e-cigarette batteries in my suitcase. And then I have, I have this little moment where I'm like, oh, that was, that wasn't a lie. I'm such a good person.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Good for you, Dieter. Anyway, major airlines, including American, Delta, all the usual suspects are announcing that next year they're going to ban these types of smart luggage, especially if they've got battery that you can't remove, which I have a lot of feels about because one of these luggages include Blue Smart. I reviewed Blue Smart two years ago and literally got stopped at TSA because they've never seen a thing like it before. And they opened it up and literally just found exposed wires to it and they're like, where are you going? And I was like, CES. And they're like, I see, solo traveler by herself going to the largest event in Vegas. Okay. And I was like, oh crap, I am going to not go to CES, I'm going to be arrested, I'm going to be put on some kind of list.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  So anyway, as you know, airline travel.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  You're not in jail, currently.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  First of all, I'm not a terrorist. Thank you very much. But airline travel has been super complicated over the past year. There's been this laptop ban, there's this battery ban, it's kind of ongoing. So now, American, US-based airlines are kind of like, we don't want to deal with this battery thing either, so just don't bother buying them. And if you have one that removes the battery, great, take them out because you can't bring them onboard.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  Sure. I mean, look. I don't know if there's, there hasn't been any big battery exploding things since the Note there because we had hoverboards and we had Note, but I'm very curious, what has the airlines been about it about lithium ion batteries all of a sudden? Like, it feels like they were worried about the Note, sure, but then like increasingly over the past six months, they've gotten more and more terrified of lithium ion batteries. What do the airlines know that we don't know?

• 47:19Speaker 02

  I don't know, because I haven't heard of anything exploding on planes that's related to batteries. I guess they're just trying to be extra careful, but not, I've not been aware of any kind of incident where that has happened. Like, anything that's, like, the only thing that I've seen related to explosion is literally just planes crashing into each other on the runway. So it's not anything consumers did.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, we have to stop talking about that. It's terrifying. I would buy smart luggage, but now that you have to take the battery out, it's like, well, no, if I have to carry it with me anyway, I'm just gonna buy an external battery and I'm not gonna buy smart luggage.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like-

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Just kill smart luggage.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  The nice thing about smart luggage, I guess, is some of them have those like built in weight thing, which could be helpful if you're trying to check a bag, or like it needs to be a certain weight to get carried on board. But, you know, that can also be mitigated by like a handheld weight thing that probably costs $5 on Amazon.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  On Amazon. So it's not a big deal. Like, I don't think you need to, yeah, like, these smart luggages are kind of nice, but I don't know if it's like $400 is nice.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  All right, I'm gonna read an ad and then I'm not gonna forget the thing that we never forget that always happens no matter what. So, did you know that every year, millions of people receive the gift that nobody likes? Underwear. But we still give it to our family and our loved ones who just don't want it. But the problem isn't that they're getting underwear, it's that they're getting the wrong kind of underwear. So I'm gonna tell you about MeUndies, the only underwear that makes for an amazing gift. MeUndies. So here's the deal with MeUndies. They have a soft, flexible weight span. They're three times softer than cotton. It's made out of a magical softer-than-cotton,

• 49:03Speaker 00

  naturally, sustainably sourced fiber. Also fairy dust. Maybe not fairy dust. MeUndies made underwear. It is the perfect gift that everyone is going to love you for because you gave them underpants and that's not weird at all. It is a holiday miracle. So, don't give underwear, give MeUndies. And if you want to do it, and I think you should, you can get 20% off the softest underwear and socks. They also make socks. Socks make a really good gift. Rack.com. Actually, I had a really good article about how socks are actually a really good gift. You also get free shipping and 100% satisfaction guarantee. Go to meundies.com/verge. That's meundies.com/verge. Paul.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  You do a segment and we don't call attention to the fact that you do a segment every week. It just happens naturally without a whole lot of weird meta-conversation about the fact that it's happening every week.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  It's called...

• 50:01Speaker 00

  And it always has the same name.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Color Me Surprised.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Oh, boy.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Uh, so this is a lamp called Color Swing that Adami wrote about. It's hard... Maybe this isn't hard to describe. It took me a while for my brain to get really excited about it, but then I got weirdly excited about it. It's a lamp that that lights up in different colors, like a Philips Hubel, right?

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's not special at all.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  But the color is based on the ambient environment, like what colors are around it.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  So kind of like a lizard?

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Or like a chameleon?

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Like a chameleon, yeah, but a light. And if you think about it, that light is...

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Isn't the point of a light to change the ambient?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you think there's be like a feedback loop here? Yeah, but I don't know.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  I feel like I'd be disturbed if I walked home and say, I like, was wearing a white shirt when I left the house and then it like rained on me on my way home and I walked in and all of a sudden my room is now gray. It's like, wow, that's great. Thanks, light.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  But isn't there something weird about like, that's like how humans work, like, like someone smiles and so you like smile back at them, you know? It's like a, it's like a kind of communication. I'm imagining having a party and somebody in like a weird colored dress like walks past the lamp and then the lamp is a different color. And then that reflects light, light off of everybody else who's all wearing white for some reason. And I don't know.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Oh, then the whole room turns red?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  That would be cool.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Right?

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  There's something just kind of trippy about it. Also, it's not actually a real product. Uh, it's a prototype, but there are, you can apparently do similar things. Um, there's a color sensing lamp on Amazon for a hundred dollars, right?

• 51:51Speaker 02

  You can build your own too, right? Like there is like RGB sensors all over the place that you can just build into your lamp if you really want to create this effect.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  I think I want to.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  I think I'm very excited about this concept.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  You should do a video on it.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Maybe we will.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Lightning round. Nat, Instagram, an exclusive story written by CaseyDun.com, is creating a separate messaging app for Instagram Direct.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Like I said, Facebook loves spinning off apps because they think that your phone has all this room, this magical storage room on your phone to download yet another app. But I guess the idea is a lot of people use these photo sharing apps and some of these photos are intimate. And they don't want to accidentally share photos that they don't want public with private messages. So I guess the idea of direct is that you can use this particular app to have a private chat that is photo based. Sure, I'm not super into it. I don't, I honestly don't think that Instagram Direct is that popular, but I could be wrong, but like... The idea is they really want to focus on the fact that you should have a private versus a public persona, which I guess everybody has on the internet anyway.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think Instagram directs numbers have been inflated, maybe artificially, because they made, they built it into stories and stories were really popular. And then if you see a story, you end up using Instagram direct because you're like tapping that message button.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, but then now you're on Instagram and you're seeing these stories and you want to talk to your friend and then you're taking to a different app to talk to your friend about it. And then like, you know, eventually stories is going to be its own app and yet another thing I have to download on my phone, which has not enough storage already. Can you tell that I have a problem with storage on my phone?

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. So here's my thing. Like I am using Messenger most often because I can trust that 90% of the people I want to talk to are there and it works better across multiple phones than SMS or whatever else. WhatsApp even is a pain because you got to re-log in when you switch your SIM card. So that's, I use Instagram or I use Messenger for that. But Messenger sucks because Facebook has like thrown too much crap into it. But I kind of trust Instagram to not make a crappy messaging app because they have done a pretty good job not making Instagram itself crap up with stuff.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Are you sure? Because a chronological timeline.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  They've done okay. And so I can trust that most people have an Instagram account. And so I could see myself making this my main messaging app because the other thing that's nice about it is it if I'm, I should be using Instagram more and like Twitter less and Facebook less because Instagram was a nice calming app. And so if I have a messaging app that is, happens to push me into Instagram every now and then, or vice versa, I'll have a calmer, chiller life because I'll be looking at pictures of the beach instead of Donald Trump tweeting or my crazy uncle on Facebook. It seems like, like a nice thing. It's like the chill messaging app option.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  I just can't believe how many messaging apps there are.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  I just, I just, if you asked me five years ago, it's like, oh, something will be ultimately like Windows Phone, where you just have an integrated messaging experience. Of course, of course, that's where the future is going. No, that was wrong.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Okay, this is not lightning, but whatever. Uh, why is Apple, everything Apple makes software-wise garbage this past two weeks? Everything is broken.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  You tell me, you own the iPhone X.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  It took forever for me to get the iPhone X. I mean, do we have the list of bugs here? Okay, uh, there was the, you can type root into the login screen on Hi Sierra and just get root access.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  That's literally how I used to hack into, like, when I was growing up, my parents or my uncle put a software on our computer that's like, you could only use the internet for two hours a day. And I literally just type in admin, admin, and just overrode the whole thing and like unlimited internet every day. So it's kind of crazy that like between 2004 and 2017, things have not changed.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  In 1998, I worked at a photo lab at a grocery store and they had this computer terminal that was like the, and it ran lockdown software, but it was technically connected to the internet, but you couldn't do anything. And it, it didn't even have a graphical user interface. It like ran DOS, but it was designed to like scan the bag, the barcode, and like put their customer information in the system, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you like, if you were very, very clever, you could bring up a terminal window. And then I used that and I knew it was connected to the internet. And then I would spend all day, every day browsing the internet with links. Like the, the, the text-only internet browser in 1998.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  It was incredible. Um, okay. Apple fixed that bug by releasing an update, which then broke file sharing.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  iOS had yet another date crashing bug where if you, it was like this whole thing where like you had a recurring, a location alarm thing that would like set your phone into a boot loop.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  And yeah, they released a thing to fix that, but it also got, they had to release iOS 11.2 early on like a Saturday to fix that bug because it was like rolling up on people. What's going on?

• 57:00Speaker 01

  I feel like I said on this podcast, like maybe six months to a year ago, that Apple has kind of forgotten how to make software. And it's, the way I see these things, like from a developer perspective, right? Apple lets you target their platforms with their, their tools, Xcode, right? Xcode, like over the weekend or something, or earlier this week was broken. Like you updated to the newest version of Xcode, but then you couldn't upload to the actual App Store anymore because they said there's a version mismatch. Like Apple is very controlling of the sort of tools they give you to make software. And if Apple doesn't know how to make secure, good stuff with those tools, what chance do you have?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  And it makes, it makes me feel like there's, the whole foundation is shaky, which is just such a terrifying place to be with software because why would I build software on this shaky foundation?

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think it's like that dire. Uh, I mean, all these things could be chalked up to like, oh, that was really dumb. You gotta fix the thing that allowed that bug to happen or fix the thing that allowed that problem to happen. You missed it, oh well. But I think for me, it's just iOS 11, just like the more, you know, I reviewed it. I think it's pretty good, but it's, it's starting to feel just a little bit all over the place. And this goes back to the nitpicks with iPhone 10. Like my, my biggest nitpick is if you turn on do not disturb mode, there's no visual indication unless you go into control center that do not disturb mode is on. And so it's very easy to turn it on, forget about it, and then not know why you're not getting notifications later on.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  It just seems like all this entire like product season for them, it's. You know, like, there were a lot of rumors earlier on about production issues, right? Like, it seems like everything is super last minute for them, and it's just like, they're kind of like, "Oh crap, we said this is gonna launch at this time, we gotta rush it out," and then this is what happens. They got super ambitious, and this is what we get instead.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  But I will say that they've done a better job making and releasing iPhone X's than we were worried about. Like, they're getting them out the door.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but who cares if you get the iPhone X, they don't work that well.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Well, the iPhone X's are working fine, it's the software that's bad.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true, but like, yeah.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm just saying, like, I'm willing to give Apple a little bit of hardware credit on these early production issues, and like, are they gonna get them done? Because they worked through them pretty well, as compared to Google, which has just had, like, rolling disasters with its hardware launches.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  But they're not hiring Quan Quan High School interns to help make them, right?

• 59:34Speaker 02

  I mean, who knows?

• 59:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  It just looks like, it looks like the sort of symptoms that you get in software when its complexity is beyond your understanding. And so it becomes like a bug whackable. Like, you obviously have plenty of smart engineers on staff who can go and fix bugs. But if you have a bad overall architecture, then when they fix a bug, they make another bug. And that can be a real problem. And possibly they're in a similar state with their design, where the complexity of the design of their software is to a point where it's getting inconsistent, and like, no one has it all in their head, or they're not, you know, driven by a single vision somehow. It's just unsettling for me.

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  All right, last lightning round, last thing. We don't have a ton of time, because we gotta end this, but like, we gotta talk about Bitcoin. It went from like 7,000 to 15,000, and then some other thing is messy because of that, and who knows where it's at right now as we're recording this thing. What the hell is going on? I'm super dumb about Bitcoin. Coinbase is like flailing right now because Bitcoin's prices are flying around.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  I just think that's the any sort of just like huge demand like they're not expecting that like level of traffic like like I think Coinbase as far as I understand there the traffic that they're experiencing is like is growing exponentially. As as Bitcoin's price continues to skyrocket. I mean, let's look in this morning, it was 15,000. Let me, let me pull up my Coinbase app. See the price right now, it's 17,000. It's just it is huge and like, you know, let's see.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  A month ago, it was 5, 5,000, right? Right. Like Bitcoin is has really exploded. I mean, I have overall, I don't have any like good explanation for why Bitcoin specifically right now is exploding, but I have like overall like philosophical reasons why I think.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  You're a big fan of blockchain?

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  A big fan of the blockchain. I think, I think the product of Bitcoin or the the backing value of Bitcoin is is this ledger. It's this, this history of trust and for any currency, you know, how much it's worth is sort of based on how much you think you can buy with it in the future. And you, and you make that decision based on how much, how useful it was in the past. And and Bitcoin, unlike any other currency or any like non cryptocurrencies, has a perfect ledger.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  All the way to its absolute origin. So like paper currencies, you know, sort of get away from their origin and you know, like that it was kind of used to be based on gold and now it's just we just kind of making it up.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, based on trust.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  A big, so yeah, trust is super valuable for a currency and that is the exact product that Bitcoin is so good at is maintaining this trust. And the thing, I think why it continues to grow is because it keeps on succeeding at being trustworthy. Like if somebody hacked Bitcoin, it would destroy that trust and tons of value would obviously disappear. But as long as the core part of Bitcoin continues to be trustworthy, it's just sort of seems to build on itself. I don't know how much it's actually worth worth, but like that's also is almost a nonsensical question. It's, I don't know, it's pretty exciting to me. Also, I sold my Bitcoin.

• 1:03:28Speaker 00

  Good. Yeah. By the way.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Before we had this conversation, I believe it's a Verge policy. I've never written about it for the Verge.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  Well, it's, the policy is people who work for the Verge need to sell their Bitcoin because it's fluctuating so wildly and it is so, it seems to be so, I don't know, sensitive to like crazy market shifts that in theory, we would be able to affect the price of Bitcoin by writing about on the Verge in the way that if we were to write about the price of the dollar, nobody would care because, you know, whatever.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  Can you maybe Paul describe to me what the deal is with CryptoKitties?

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is a really interesting flip side to Bitcoin. So something that's happened recently with Bitcoin is they tried to fork it to make it more useful for transactions. Because right now it takes a long time to make a Bitcoin transaction and it's relatively expensive. As a Bitcoin is becoming, some people think, almost like the digital gold, where it's something that you kind of keep in a vault, but you don't like make a lot of regular transactions with it. There are a lot of other currencies. One of them is Ethereum, which is trying to make like a world computer is what they call it. So instead of, instead of the, um, the blockchain just being a record of transactions, it's a record of transactions, but also code for modifying

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  those transactions. And some of the code that someone recently put on Ethereum's blockchain is this thing called CryptoKitties, which basically you, at a regular interval, new CryptoKitties are created, which you can buy. And you buy the CryptoKitty based on the average price of the last five CryptoKitties sold. What you are actually buying on the Ethereum blockchain, you are, are taking ownership of a, a 256 bit number. So it's just a very long number and you own that number. And then what's interesting about CryptoKitties is that it's

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  paired with a startup that made this, this Ethereum app, but this startup has just regular web software that they use. And they look at your 256 number and that number includes basically genetic information about this kitty. And so, and then, and then it renders an image on the website that it's, they're basically like Beanie Babies, but with, with genes. So like, I was looking at a, um, a Gen Zero CryptoKitty that had like a, a Dolly mustache, like Salvador Dolly. And then you could like, look at the children of this kitty and some of them didn't have the mustache, but most of them had that. And

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  I was like, well, if I, um, if I was gonna get into CryptoKitties, I feel like I would wanna invest in mustache kitties. Cause I think it's a, it's a nice, and so, and then like, you can breed the kitties and make more. So it's like, it's this combination of like Beanie Babies, Pokemon and cryptocurrency. And it's,

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  And also, the thing about it, though, is that it's not quite grinding Ethereum to a halt, but it's like, it's a lot more activity than Ethereum was really built to handle. And it's something that Ethereum knows it has to solve. So the Ethereum community is basically stoked. It's like, okay, we have this completely non-mission critical app that is hammering our system. So we can practice scaling our system so that if someone ever makes a really useful thing with Ethereum, we'll be able to run it.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  We'll be ready. So the cats are preparing them for the coming blockchain apocalypse.

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  This is just so complex. If you want a cute kitty, just get a real one. So complex.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but how much, what's the resale value of that kitty?

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  Some loving parent will pay good money for it. And if you want to put a mustache on it, put a mustache on it.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  I get, I don't understand Bitcoin at deep levels I would like to. And I think most people don't. What is hilarious to me is we spent the past 20 years in the financial system, especially in the US and on Wall Street, like, let's try and make as complicated a financial product as possible. And let's make it even more complicated. And then let's find derivatives on top of those complications. And then let's, you know, all this stuff. They built this entire weird, insane industry of finance that was impossible to parse. And maybe we've backed down a little bit from that, but not much. And it's like, well, yeah, okay. Now let's just do that with the concept of money itself. Like, we're tired of making complicated, weird, crazy systems to do stuff with money.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  We just want to do it with the idea of money itself. And that, to me, is what Bitcoin is and what Ethereum is.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  If you, the best explanation I've ever seen in my life of cryptocurrency, it's, was it three blue, one brown? This guy does like math and like physics explainers on YouTube.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  He explains cryptocurrency and he starts out like with the bare bones, the idea of a ledger. Like, just like, what if you just started with an IOU system between friends? And he builds from there and explains how they actually work. And while it is, it's a technical explanation, not a philosophical explanation. If, I feel like it gives you a much better vibe for why this might be valuable.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  All right, that is gonna be our show. If you like this show, there are other shows. The best show is this show, but probably the actual best show is Why'd You Push That Button? Yeah. It is incredible. The episode this week about sending nudes is, it's just so good. And it like, you need to listen to it because you will understand the context of how the internet actually works without a whole lot of like hair and fire judgment. It's great. You should definitely listen to it. If you haven't watched that episode of Next Level with Lauren Good that I talked about with the exoskeletons, go do it. It is incredible. She also has a great podcast called Too Embarrassed to Ask on Recode. Also on Recode is Recode Decode

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  with Kara Swisher and Recode Media with Peter Kafka. We do not speak about the podcasts on vox.com, but they exist. If you'd like to follow us, we are of course Verge on Twitter, we're Verge on Instagram, we're Verge on Snapchat. You should review us on Apple Podcasts because those seem to be the reviews that matter. If you want to follow us on Twitter, I am at Backlon, Paul is FuturePaul, and Nat is Nat Garun? Two Ts. Yes, two Ts, N-A-T-T-G-A-R-U-N. Thanks so much for listening. We'll catch you next week. And Neelai, we'll be back. And so it will be chaotic and terrible. Don't tell him I said that. Rock and roll.