Why Facebook acquired WhatsApp

The Vergecast is a discussion of all things relevant and irreverent in the worlds of art, culture, science, and technology — and anything else that pops into the twisted minds of this week's hosts. Join Dieter Bohn, Chris Ziegler, David Pierce, and Ellis Hamburger for a scintillating discussion on latest tech news. On this week's episode, we discuss the dizzying sums of money Facebook spent on WhatsApp, the Loop mobile wallet, and Google's indoor mapping prototype, Project Tango. Audio: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast. It is the week of February 17th. I had to look down and check it. 2014. I am Dieter Bone.

• 0:30David Pierce?

  I'm David Pierce.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  I'm Ellis Hamburger.

• 0:32David Pierce?

  And That took you a while.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:34David Pierce?

  Is that you okay?

• 0:35Speaker 00

  I'm sitting in Josh's seat. He's not here.

• 0:37David Pierce?

  A lot of pressure.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  He hasn't been here for a while. If you weren't aware, Josh has a big announcement that I guess I'm making.

• 0:45David Pierce?

  Yes, you are. I mean, it's like he's been tweeting about it.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  It's out there. It's out there in the world.

• 0:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  That Josh, Josh had a baby.

• 0:51David Pierce?

  And it is a baby.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  And so that is

• 0:53David Pierce?

  And he still has it.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  He's on paternity leave and not with us, except in spirit.

• 0:58David Pierce?

  Right. Basically, all Basically, all I know about Josh's baby is that Laura keeps tweeting.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02David Pierce?

  It's still there.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  It's still there.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  He's probably watching right now, so be careful what you say.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  It's a beautiful baby.

• 1:08David Pierce?

  Laura just keeps me like, we got a baby on Tuesday.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Laura's very mad that the baby can't read.

• 1:12David Pierce?

  And, I mean, it's

• 1:15Speaker 00

  Pick it up.

• 1:15David Pierce?

  What fun is it until I can read? Come on.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Were we supposed to talk about the Verge baby vertical, or is that still a secret?

• 1:22David Pierce?

  That's such a good idea.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  No, it's not.

• 1:25David Pierce?

  Just, just apps for babies.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Well, it's about, it's about implants.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Diaper reviews.

• 1:30David Pierce?

  Oh, I see.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that kind of thing.

• 1:32David Pierce?

  That's not bad.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  You can monitor like the baby's vision and make sure their eyes are on the prize for their whole life, you know? We don't want any losers.

• 1:39David Pierce?

  So it's basically like, if you like, really are hell-bent on getting your kid into like, an awesome preschool, you just, you're all over Verge babies.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, they all go to the Montessori schools, that kind of thing.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  No, no, no. See, you got it all wrong.

• 1:50David Pierce?

  Montessori schools.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Verge babies isn't about babies. Verge babies is about the same thing that The Verge is, only it's staffed by Muppets.

• 1:58David Pierce?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  It's the Muppet Babies version of The Verge. We all speak in high squeaky voices. We're perishingly adorable.

• 2:05David Pierce?

  But we cover the same thing all the time. I'm into it.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:07David Pierce?

  Like NSA, we just get really angry, but it's babies. So what do you think? It's adorable.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  They're so cute. They're so angry about the neutrality, y'all.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Prism. Cribs neutrality is gonna be the hot topic, I think.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Oh, my god.

• 2:20David Pierce?

  Okay, so it was a week.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:22David Pierce?

  It's been a week.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  It seemed like it was not going to be a week and then Facebook decided to make a week out of it.

• 2:27David Pierce?

  No big deal.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  So they bought WhatsApp for a billion, no, I'm sorry, sixteen, no, maybe nineteen billion.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  It's sixteen billion dollars in cash and stock plus three billion dollars in restricted stock that vests over the course of three years.

• 2:43David Pierce?

  Okay, explain that in English, because I have gotten this tweet a thousand times.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  That's all it is. It's basically sixteen billion upfront and three billion over the next few years.

• 2:50David Pierce?

  Yeah. Is that so that the founders and employees will stay at the company?

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Uh, among other reasons, yeah, I'm not totally sure on the structure of it. All that really matters is that it's the biggest deal to ever come out of like a venture backed startup in history.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:04David Pierce?

  By like a pretty wide margin, right?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  And the even bigger deal is that WhatsApp is arguably Facebook's biggest real competitor for people's attention on mobile phones across the world and now they own it.

• 3:17David Pierce?

  You think?

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:18David Pierce?

  You think WhatsApp is Facebook's biggest competitor?

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Four hundred and fifty million users right now?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Active.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  And well, active, that's monthly, but then like some like over half are using it like once per day.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, seventy percent are using it every single day.

• 3:29David Pierce?

  But isn't WhatsApp like a fundamentally a one to one messaging thing, which is not what Facebook has ever seemed to have that much interest in?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Not necessarily. The point is that it's private, whereas Facebook, everybody has these ballooning friends lists that they cannot maintain, uh, which, you know, in some ways is a strength.

• 3:45David Pierce?

  Was that like a, I have a lot of friends humble brag?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  About, yeah, it was.

• 3:49David Pierce?

  Okay, I was making sure.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you and I both, we've been on Facebook since like a certain time during, uh, late high school, college, when you watched your kind of social life bloom as you just added friends, friends, friends on Facebook and.

• 4:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was like, there was definitely a period of my life where every single person I met just like instantly added them on Facebook.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  And now we don't talk to.

• 4:08David Pierce?

  You I saw at a bar, let's be friends on Facebook.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  And now we don't talk to almost any of them.

• 4:11David Pierce?

  No.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Which in a way has kind of diluted the value of the ability to post to everybody. So what a lot of people are doing is using Snapchat to share with just a few people or especially around the world, since Snapchat isn't as popular globally quite yet, they're using apps like WhatsApp, um, to communicate with one person or with a group of people and they're posting. The same kind of stuff.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Like photos of friends and family, but they're posting it to private groups and you know, there's no feed. But people are getting it all in their pocket. There's no desktop component. Everything is very, very urgent. And that's part of the reason that it's so sticky and so addictive. And they were one of the first apps to really take your phone book and turn it into your, your social graph.

• 4:52David Pierce?

  You know what's super weird to me though is vital. What you just described is also Google plus and that didn't work at all.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  The, the, the thing that's different about WhatsApp is it's not social in the way that we traditionally think of social. It's just, it's a utility app.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  It's pure.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  It replaces.

• 5:07David Pierce?

  It's a messaging app. It's a texting app. Right. Fundamentally, like does other stuff, but it's.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  But it does it pretty well and it does it for a buck a year after the first year. And critically, it works on everything. They made a solid J two M E app for feature phones. They've got it on Android. They've got it on BlackBerry. They've got it on Windows phone.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  It's on Windows.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Symbian. iPhone. They've got it on Symbian.

• 5:28David Pierce?

  Is it really on Symbian?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:30David Pierce?

  I feel like all you did is say was symbian and I'd be like, oh, it's everywhere.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:32David Pierce?

  It's on every platform on the planet.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  And what they did was.

• 5:35David Pierce?

  BlackBerry app?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  It was such a, it was such a sleeper hit over the years. It, everybody's been saying it didn't get much press. I think 2009.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Uh, and it was one of the first true BBM replacements on iPhone. And they were actually on iPhone before push notifications even existed within iOS. So back then it was a status system. So you could see what your friends are up to, just like kind of your AIM status.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Just like Twitter. That was the original idea for Twitter. It was like.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Status update broadcast thing or.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:01David Pierce?

  It's like, hey.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  And what they did was they made themselves a replacement for SMS, which made it really easy to understand. You don't have to explain to anybody in all these countries where WhatsApp is really critical to people's lives. You don't have to explain what it is. You say, you're spending a lot of money on SMS right now. Switch to this. Your friends are on it. That's it.

• 6:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, that's the easiest thing ever, right? It's like, I was, I did some research on this yesterday and it's, the SMS is a hundred and 20 billion dollar.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:29David Pierce?

  Industry every year. That's a crazy number. And like most of that, I don't know this for sure, but I'm sure most of that is outside of the US.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  And it's all at some point going to be eaten by. Digital like database.

• 6:42David Pierce?

  Right. Well, and texting is like the fundamental way people communicate a lot of places. Like you hear these stories about like people in like in Africa, there's all this infrastructure for sending money over text messages. And it's like, it's huge. And if you just show up and you're like, hey, want to do the same thing, but for free, it's like, why not?

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Hard to sell. Yeah. That's what's kind of crazy too, is that it's hardly changed.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  So we should talk about, we should talk about the scale here. Cause like you, every year we, we look at like Apple's quarterly results. Oh, lots of billions and you kind of lose track.

• 7:08David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  So I hear $20 billion and you just think, it's insane.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  What do you even compare it to?

• 7:13Speaker 00

  How can we put that in context? It's what, what percent of Facebook is it? It's like eight, nine, 10%?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Just less than 10% of Facebook's market cap and it's 35% of the cash they had on hand.

• 7:24David Pierce?

  I mean, that's a giant number.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  And a board seat, and a board seat, which is also an investment. I mean, that's a big deal.

• 7:31David Pierce?

  So Apple's market cap is $474 billion. So this would be like Apple dropping $45 billion on something.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Comparatively.

• 7:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  The point is Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars and then it tried to buy Snapchat for three billion. And when those events took place, people were like, just like you did, Dieter. This is huge.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  A billion dollars.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  And then now this is multiple, multiple like degrees bigger than that. And I think that the reason is like with Instagram, there were a lot fewer users. But the engagement was good. With this, as Zuckerberg said, this is not only half as big as Facebook in terms of active users, just about maybe a half to a third. But the engagement is so high. Mark Zuckerberg said that this is the only app on the planet that has higher engagement than Facebook.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  So yeah, he keeps, he kept on saying, we're going to, they're going to hit a billion users. We see it coming. And you look at the graph, their user graph and that seems obvious.

• 8:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's insane. This graph in, in this post that you wrote, which is really great, is just wild. Like it just, it's like a hockey stick.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I mean, yeah, Ellis wrote this, this great post about it and you know, Zuckerberg's like mission statement for Facebook is connect the world's people. Right? And when we were talking about this piece, I was like, I always listened to that and heard like, oh, mission statement snoozed. Oh, this is just words that some committee put together. I don't care.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  But it's supposed to be as broad and as vague as possible.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Right. But it's not a mission statement. It's a threat. Like we were playing around for headlines for this thing. One of the headlines was like, Facebook is no longer the social network. Facebook wants to be just the network.

• 9:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Like I look at Mark Zuckerberg now and I'm like, oh, he's going to control every way that most people communicate on the planet. That's great. It's not just like he's the biggest social network. It's everybody has, every, every has to talk through Zuck.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  As, as the mobile guy, Dieter, uh, how many people in the world have phones? Do you know?

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Man, why you gotta put me on the spot like that? Come on.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  So I'll throw out a statistic that people were, were talking about this week is, uh, they're expecting five billion people to have like a mobile device by 2017. And, uh, now Facebook and WhatsApp are in better position than anyone to capture that opportunity.

• 9:54David Pierce?

  Right.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  And so essentially what that says is especially to investors, since Facebook is a public company, it says this is a huge opportunity, uh, to capture that just pure communication, talking to your friends. Like even if Facebook for some people is stale, this is something that's never going to be stale. And I think WhatsApp's success proves that.

• 10:10David Pierce?

  I mean, and you just like, you're, you're defining Facebook as like this one particular thing. And like, this is Facebook being like much more than just Facebook, right? Like facebook.com might die, but like Facebook's never going to die.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Right. So what is, so what does that look like to you? The, the next version of Facebook?

• 10:25David Pierce?

  I mean, it's, it's Disney. Like Kara Swisher wrote this really great piece, uh, about this and she compared Facebook to Disney, which is brilliant. And just like Disney has all these different companies and like they find, you know, smart ways for their companies to work together. Like there's ESPN stuff at Disney World, but ultimately those two things have nothing to do with each other, except that they're both owned by Disney. And like what, what they can do is that just brings them so much money that they can buy other things and then some of them don't work.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  And Disney doesn't let them jeopardize each other.

• 10:54David Pierce?

  No, they don't. They're, they're totally separate companies. Disney, the only thing they have in common is like the CEO of Disney makes money from them.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Right. And with Facebook and the, and perhaps the infrastructure and when Facebook acquired Instagram, people really were doubting whether Mark Zuckerberg was going to let, uh, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom. Maintain control and they did add ads, but if you look at the Instagram sign in screen, there's not even a sign in with Facebook button.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay, so.

• 11:22David Pierce?

  But at the same time, like there's, there's clearly, and I think this is what's interesting about WhatsApp is there's, like I see people's Instagram pictures all over Facebook now. They're everywhere and it's like, there's, there's a really easy connection between those two things and they, like they win together and I think there's huge opportunity for them to do that with WhatsApp where it's like, if you know.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  I don't think they're gonna. I don't think they're gonna for a long time. I think, I think Jan is, uh, no ads, he wants to stay independent.

• 11:47David Pierce?

  No, but I'm not saying ads, I'm saying like what Facebook offers them is, is a value add. What Facebook can say is like, oh, you want to talk to all your friends? You know, who has all of your friends is, is me, it's right here.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:57David Pierce?

  And I can just plug in all your friends. I don't, you don't have to, you can use it however you want. And this is what happens, this is what Instagram is too. Like you can plug Facebook in Instagram together as much as you want or not. And like, that's really smart.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  I think you are risking your brand when you put Facebook next to whatever, whatever it is that Facebook just bought. I mean, whenever.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  It was WhatsApp, by the way, that they just.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, well, I'm talking about any company that Facebook.

• 12:23David Pierce?

  Tell me more.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  WhatsApp.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  So have you ever noticed that when a massive company, let's say Google or Facebook buys a smaller company, that people somehow think that the smaller company, you know, maybe for good reason, they think they're selling out.

• 12:35David Pierce?

  For 16 billion dollars.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Basically, they basically raid the App Store comments saying, how dare they, I'm quitting right now. People don't want.

• 12:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, but people hate everything. Like that's, I think that's the, this tiny, there's this tiny little group that forms the 100,000 people strong against the new Facebook. And they get 38 people to like it. And that's like, but we, you know, we, we see that and that's like, I think most people, A, I think most people really like Facebook and B, most people don't care. Like I don't think it's going to change anyone's WhatsApp experience.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's, there's, there's two things. One, is it going to ruin WhatsApp? And I don't think so.

• 13:09David Pierce?

  I mean, does Facebook have a history of ruining anything? I don't think, like it really does.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Facebook.

• 13:14David Pierce?

  They've killed a bunch of apps, like they bought Dropio, right? I really liked Dropio and then they bought it and just immediately shut it down. I was pissed about that, but they've never kept something alive and ruined it.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, the second question is, is this going to fix messaging? Like we, Ellis and I always complain like, oh, messaging is fragmented. There's Hangouts and there's WhatsApp and there's Kakao and there's Line and there's Google Talk and whatever else.

• 13:34David Pierce?

  What was that third one you said?

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know, Kakao.

• 13:37David Pierce?

  Is that a thing?

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:38David Pierce?

  Oh, it's huge.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  In South Korea.

• 13:40David Pierce?

  Really?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Everyone uses Kakao Talk.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:43David Pierce?

  Fair enough.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  All your friends.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  So.

• 13:45David Pierce?

  All my friends.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  With Facebook money, are they gonna be able to like, I, I want the messaging fragmentation problem fixed. Having one company in control of it isn't really my ideal solution, but at least it's a solution. If everybody just uses WhatsApp from now on.

• 14:00David Pierce?

  Sure. But there's no other way to solve your problem except that.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  No.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Dieter, you're gonna complain because WhatsApp isn't on desktop.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  You know who doesn't control?

• 14:08David Pierce?

  You want email is what you want.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  I want email.

• 14:10David Pierce?

  You want in, you want faster email.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  I want SMS that doesn't gouge me.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Standard, you want a federated standard that everyone agrees on, which is never gonna happen again.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  We forgot how to make those.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:19David Pierce?

  Yes, we did.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Well, they, they just, they're slow and nobody can agree on one thing. Nobody can agree on what they want the standard to be, what they want, uh, how they want it to work. And that's why it's not gonna happen. But so you, you just said WhatsApp. I, I feel like, uh, I feel like you'd be pretty upset if everybody switched to WhatsApp and you couldn't text from your computer.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Nah.

• 14:38David Pierce?

  I would. That's the only reason I use an iPhone.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:41David Pierce?

  I message from my computer.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  I love texting on my computer.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  My iPhone.

• 14:44David Pierce?

  Really?

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:44David Pierce?

  Cause I broke it. You're back.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  I dropped it.

• 14:47David Pierce?

  That's fair. Yeah, you did.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  I, I super glued it though, which I feel really good about.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  So let's talk about some stats. Uh, combined, uh, combined these two companies command in the, an absolutely enormous portion of the world's photo uploads. And, but you know what, you know what WhatsApp also has is 200 million voice messages sent per day.

• 15:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, that was surprising.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  And Facebook's calling has been, I don't know, a soul that uses it.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. They've got, they've got a voice message thing.

• 15:17David Pierce?

  I forgot about that.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, people.

• 15:19David Pierce?

  I'm gonna, can I leave somebody of, I'm gonna just keep going.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  You can't do it on the web for some reason. It's in their Messenger app and you can hit the little I button in the Messenger app and, and call somebody. But I don't know anybody that uses it, but this is clearly working for WhatsApp.

• 15:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  And I think that this kind of hints at like a future where like Dieter was saying, Facebook controls, you know, all these communicate, communication pipes that people are using. And Facebook doesn't care how everybody wants to talk, but they're gonna buy any new company that develops a new way for people to talk that people. Love. And I think that that's the path that we're going down. I mean, Facebook is is in some ways, it's like too big to fail, but also too big to innovate in some ways unless it's on a smaller scale like with paper, which was built out of their creative labs. And people were saying the only reason they were able to build paper was because it was a group of like 10 people.

• 16:05David Pierce?

  So, okay, huge ambition for Facebook, insane. How pissed off is Google right now?

• 16:10Speaker 00

  So reportedly, they they offered 10 billion to WhatsApp. And I I think the information posted today that they were gonna, they were willing to beat Facebook's 19 billion dollar offer.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Really?

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. They real mad.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  I mean, if I'm WhatsApp, they made the right call. They absolutely made the right call.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  To go with Facebook instead of Google?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Google, I mean, you like, I ask you.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  You want to talk about companies that kill products, right?

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, Google's the company that eats you. Yeah, like they'd show up and four days later, they'd be like, just kidding, you're on the Gmail team.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  We'll never see you again. Bye. Like, you get to deal with.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Can I, can I pour a beer on the studio floor for Sparrow right now?

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Pour it out for Sparrow.

• 16:45David Pierce?

  Sparrow, that's exactly what I was thinking of.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Can I just do this right here?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Oh, God. That was upsetting.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  My producer, John, says I'm not allowed to pour the beer.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:52David Pierce?

  No, but it's like.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Especially something like.

• 16:54David Pierce?

  First of all, I I really do think, and and actually, if if that's true and Google was willing to beat it, I actually think it says a lot about what WhatsApp is doing and what Facebook has brought to the table, uh, which is to say, which is Disney, right? Like, they, they have all this money. They're like, here, you have all the money, all the resources and all the talent you could possibly need. And also will leave you completely.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  I want, I want a Facebook theme park.

• 17:19David Pierce?

  That's the dream. It's like, give it time.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Imagine Zuckerberg building Epcot Center.

• 17:23David Pierce?

  What if Disney just bought Facebook? Tomorrow, they're just like, we just bought Facebook. And now we own Facebook. It's gonna happen. You heard it here first, people. Disney, Disney's like, Facebook.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  It's Mark Zuckerberg's teenage afro.

• 17:34David Pierce?

  It's just Mark Zuckerberg.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  No, it's just Pex. He just, he just flexes. It's a giant building of his, never mind.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:40David Pierce?

  I also really like the story, the, that they finalized the sale on Valentine's Day. It was like Mark Zuckerberg's awkward Valentine's Day present.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  He's like, here's 19 billion dollars. Congratulations. Happy Valentine's Day.

• 17:52David Pierce?

  Mm hmm. Be a good Valentine's Day present.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  So do you guys use WhatsApp? Cause it's not, nobody in the US uses it.

• 17:57David Pierce?

  No, I mean, I also think that's partly what Facebook is buying. Like, everybody talks about the next billion, right? And it's like, those are the people we want are the people who don't currently use. Right, right. That's like, the next billion is going to use WhatsApp. And like, it's already out there. And that's, I guess if you can't get there, just buy your way in. And it's just, it works.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  You really just need to look at one chart and, and there's this chart that, uh, that I found online sourced from, uh, Onovo, Onovo? I don't know.

• 18:27David Pierce?

  It's a, Facebook bought them too, didn't they?

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, they did. Uh, so what it says is, is in countries, it basically has all the top apps in different regions around the world. And if you look at the United States, Facebook Messenger is leading. Uh, but in a place like Spain, of all the Messenger apps, 97% of people use WhatsApp whereas 13% of people use Facebook Messenger. And, um,

• 18:52David Pierce?

  What's, what's the, is there a name for this chart?

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Let me see if I can get it.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  The chart is really, really good on the screen.

• 18:57David Pierce?

  I'm picturing it in my, my mind's eye.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  I'm sending it, I'm sending it over.

• 19:00David Pierce?

  No, but I think countries like Spain are not where it gets really interesting. Places like, places like China and places like India and places like Africa are where this gets interesting because those are the places that are now like really in a real way coming online fast. And there's this, I mean, we've sort of seen it with Facebook to some extent. Like there's this crazy inertia. Everybody talks about like, you know, you stop being cool and you die. And like, that's not true. Microsoft's not cool. Microsoft's doing just fine. Like Facebook's not cool in the US anymore and everybody still uses Facebook.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  That's why I think that all the companies that they're going to acquire going forward, unless they're like Aqua Hiring or unless they're doing a, uh, a, uh, I think they're gonna let them operate independently so they don't

• 19:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  jeopardize what they've built. That's kind of the conglomerate angle.

• 19:43David Pierce?

  Right. No, it's totally true. I mean, but I still think that like what, part of what Facebook wants, this is that chart, by the way, and this is wild, actually.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  So you can see Facebook Messengers, Facebook Messengers in the blue.

• 19:55David Pierce?

  Look at that, Kakao killing it in South Korea.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:58David Pierce?

  Killing it. And then just nowhere else. That's great.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  What's funny, it's, uh,

• 20:02David Pierce?

  Wow, these are big numbers.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  And Viber, which our Rakuten just bought for $900 million.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Come on.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Isn't even on the chart. I don't see it.

• 20:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I like, I, I do think this is the huge growth industry that nobody has been talking about for a long time because it's already so big.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  And there are billions more people to get phones in the next 10 years.

• 20:23David Pierce?

  And, you know, everybody, nobody in Silicon Valley thinks about how important text messages are.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Apparently they do.

• 20:27David Pierce?

  But they, I mean, they do now. But, I mean, WhatsApp's been out there for a long time and they've been super popular for a long time and like, I mean, even, even, you know, we, the press, don't talk about WhatsApp. It's just like the huge company that nobody's ever heard of, except that everybody uses.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:42David Pierce?

  It's really bizarre.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't talk about, like, my electricity bill either.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Right, right. You don't talk about Con Ed with your buddies?

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Con Ed in New York is the worst.

• 20:51David Pierce?

  My buddies all the time.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  By the way, if you, if you are listening to the show or watching the show and you work for Con Edison.

• 20:58David Pierce?

  I hate you.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  I hate you so much.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  So, let me ask you guys, what other spaces, what other communication spaces could you see Facebook going into?

• 21:05David Pierce?

  I was just gonna ask you that. What's next? What else, what other crazy popular app is out there?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Now you're on the spot.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  There's nothing, like, I don't know. What, what's worth a bunch of money?

• 21:15David Pierce?

  Twitter.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Twitter.

• 21:17David Pierce?

  Like, I'm not totally kidding. I think they're too big at this point.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  What about video chat?

• 21:20Speaker 00

  Video chat? Like, who cares about video chat right now?

• 21:22David Pierce?

  Skype is the only.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Dude, teens, man.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Skype is like the thing.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Teens are video chatting still. I don't know about you. You're antisocial.

• 21:27David Pierce?

  What are they using, though? It's, I think.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  They're using weirdo apps like Ovu.

• 21:31David Pierce?

  God, Ovu. I was afraid you were gonna say that.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  And, uh.

• 21:34David Pierce?

  Doesn't Cisco own Ovu?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Not totally clear.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:38David Pierce?

  Somebody does. Uh, but yeah, I mean, that would be interesting, except that I think, I mean, that Skype sold for, what was it, 8.5 billion dollars? Like, there's that.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:48David Pierce?

  Somebody already, somebody beat them to the biggest player there.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  That'd be Microsoft.

• 21:51David Pierce?

  That would be Microsoft. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what else there is. And, like.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  I think I could see them buying, like, a really big social games company that is proven success.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Well.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Not just with one game.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that that's the Zynga thing like that didn't work out.

• 22:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, that went not great for them.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  I'm not talking about Zynga necessarily. I'm talking about something more like like along the Quizop line of things that isn't that isn't freemium. That's more like.

• 22:17David Pierce?

  But is that but Facebook at this point, is that a big enough?

• 22:19Speaker 00

  It's about it's about communications like you need to think in terms, you need to think of him as Zuckerberg as a robber baron instead of building railroads. He's building everything we use to talk to each other or buying it.

• 22:30David Pierce?

  But so he wants to be everywhere all your friends are is really what it is.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  I don't think it's about friends.

• 22:35David Pierce?

  No.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  No, I I think.

• 22:36David Pierce?

  I mean, that's what Instagram is. Instagram is only sort of tangentially a communication.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  I think he wants to be the layer just above like the pipes.

• 22:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  He wants to be between you and like, you know, the the wire.

• 22:48David Pierce?

  God, is he gonna is Facebook the next Comcast where like everybody hates them and it turns out they run the world anyway?

• 22:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  What's funny is that that's what a lot of people think like Facebook wants to be in developing countries, you know, with Facebook for every phone. They're like, oh, I I don't know what the internet is. I just know what Facebook is.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  They build the login identity but plumbing for a bunch of apps. People use it because it's easier to hit that button and create a new password for every single freaking app.

• 23:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, it's true. I I've logged into an extraordinary number of things with Facebook.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I you know, after you're like, no, I'm not gonna do it. No, no. And then eventually you're like, oh, fine. And then once you do it that first couple of times, that's it. They got you.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  See, you know, it's the fun underdog story of this is that is that the founders were rejected from Facebook and Twitter a few years ago as employees. And now and now they're like, what's up?

• 23:31David Pierce?

  And now they have all of the money.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Sign that check.

• 23:34David Pierce?

  All of the money. Do we know how much the founders made? They probably don't.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  I think they owned.

• 23:40David Pierce?

  They're definitely one of them is gonna like Instagram picture their bank account.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  For the main for one of them.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Yan owned something like thirty five percent of the company.

• 23:49David Pierce?

  A small amount of venture capital, right? So like it was a very tiny number of people involved in this and they all made so much money.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. That's a pretty outstanding return.

• 23:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, they did good.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Right. Was it Sequoia that was like the only company invested in them?

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they invested. They had a $250,000 seed round from whatever. Uh, they Sequoia invested eight million dollars and then a little bit later like, well, you know what? We should. We should get an insurance policy. Let's get another 50 million. When they got the 50 million, he the founder took a picture of WhatsApp's bank account. This is from a Forbes article and it was over eight million. They hadn't got dug into any of that original investment.

• 24:26David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, good company.

• 24:29David Pierce?

  Wow. Yeah, I mean, it was like-

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Were they forty-two people?

• 24:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:32David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, it's crazy.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  They work out of some office with no sign. Uh, hard to know who's doing anything there. They say just come around back and knock on the door.

• 24:41David Pierce?

  This is a front for the mob.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  I think that's what people were saying.

• 24:43David Pierce?

  It's definitely a front for the mob. I don't care what anybody says.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  Let's talk about something else that's fragmented and terrible.

• 24:48David Pierce?

  Wait, hold on, no, I have one more question, and then we can move on. Yeah.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Got a good transition, though. Wasn't that so good?

• 24:53David Pierce?

  Just come right back to that.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  It's too late now.

• 24:55David Pierce?

  Are you going to start using WhatsApp?

• 24:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:58David Pierce?

  Yeah?

• 24:58Speaker 00

  For like, two days.

• 25:00David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:01David Pierce?

  I'm gonna, I'm definitely gonna download it and be like, this is ugly, because it is, it's so ugly. I hope, this is the one thing I hope Facebook pulls off, is that they like, Facebook clearly has good design. Like, Facebook Messenger app is really beautiful. Paper is really nice. And if they would just, like, some head of design at Facebook just needs to download the WhatsApp guys and be like, listen. I was wondering about that. I understand that you're your own company, it's totally cool. You guys are green, we're blue. I'm just gonna punch you in the face every single day until you make your app better looking. Mm-hmm. And then, they're just gonna do it. That's what I want.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  I think it's part of their charm.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  No, that's not a thing.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  No, it is.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Look how ugly it is, it's so charming. No, no.

• 25:38David Pierce?

  Yes. Yeah, it kinda is.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Snapchat's looks and bugs cultivated some sort of trust early on, I think. Because, you know, something is-

• 25:47David Pierce?

  The underdog, like, it's very-

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if something is extremely polished and, and, you know, you think the production value is big and you think there's a lot of money behind it, and where there's money-

• 25:56David Pierce?

  Sure, that's why people like the roof for indie movies.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Right. Um, so here's what somebody just-

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Now, there's money, there's sixteen million dollars. They have money.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna start using WhatsApp, but apparently it is so pervasive some places around the world.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  You're, it says you're busy right now.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  That's not possible. Well, I am busy, but-

• 26:14Speaker 00

  I'm sending you a message right now.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  I dare ya.

• 26:16David Pierce?

  Are you on WhatsApp? Can I do it from my computer? No, I don't care.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Somebody just tweeted at me, app-ing someone, as in sending someone a WhatsApp message, is in the Dutch dictionary.

• 26:25David Pierce?

  Actually, I'm-

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Unless this guy completely made it up for no reason.

• 26:28David Pierce?

  Is this the verb now?

• 26:29Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 26:29David Pierce?

  Cause you Facebook, do you app somebody?

• 26:31Speaker 00

  No.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  At me.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  No.

• 26:32David Pierce?

  I hate that. That's awful. But that's, I mean, if it's in the dictionary, that's what it is. Like, the worst thing about Google Hangouts is that I don't know what to say to somebody when I message them on Google Hangouts.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Hang out with me.

• 26:42David Pierce?

  I'm like, hey, I hanged you. Like, that's weird. Not gonna say that.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  That's also bad.

• 26:45David Pierce?

  Like, I outed you. Nope. That's not good either.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  That's not cool.

• 26:48David Pierce?

  It just doesn't work. I hanged you out, like, hmm.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  And Hangouts just doesn't work on iOS, so that's cool.

• 26:53David Pierce?

  No, God, it's so bad on iOS.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  I don't know, man. I'm gonna app you. Definitely sounds like a deviant sexual act.

• 26:58David Pierce?

  Or like a sort of subtle thing you would say on the phone in case your phone is being bugged, but you're definitely gonna murder them. This is all back to my theory that WhatsApp is just a front for the mob. And Facebook is like, they just bought the world's mob for sixteen billion dollars and now they can be in every country they want. That's my theory. I'm sticking to it. Alright, let's move on.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Uh, Loop Wallet. So this is mobile payments thing, right?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  You had a good segue. You had a good segue.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  It's too late. It's gone. Let it go.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  It was about fragmentation.

• 27:23David Pierce?

  It is. This was poetry.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  I was excited about it.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  It's gone. It's gone.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  I only just learned how to spell segue.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Sieg.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  That's how it sounds when you pronounce it. For those who don't know, it's S-E-G-U-E, not S-E-G-W-A-Y.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  The more you know. Ellis hamburger, ladies and gentlemen.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Fun fact.

• 27:42David Pierce?

  Okay, Loop Wallet. So it's about Loop Wallet.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  Loop Wallet-

• 27:45Speaker 00

  L-O-O-P.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Is pretty incredible.

• 27:48David Pierce?

  I guess it's really called Loop.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  The technology, at least. It's called Loop.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  The app's called Loop Wallet, and there are two form factors out, uh, that you can order right now. One is a little square fob with a built-in card reader, and one's like a Mophie-like case. Both of them have magnetic transistors inside of them that let you hold your phone up to any credit card reader. Not the ones with the little, you know, Wi-Fi sign on it that you're like, oh, what is that? Google Wallet, Mastercard, PayPal? This is any credit card terminal. Well, over ninety percent of in the United States, you hold it up, you pick the card on your screen, you hit the button, and it somehow beams this magnetic signal to the, the reader.

• 28:25David Pierce?

  Well, it's all just like, it's just the-

• 28:26Speaker 00

  It's like brute force, right? It's just like magnets.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  It thinks it's been scanned. I wasn't even, I wasn't even aware that these reader heads could be communicated with over the-

• 28:35Speaker 00

  So it'll work with almost everything unless you have to put your card in. That's great, but it doesn't actually work because everybody's like, what are you doing to my machine?

• 28:44David Pierce?

  Right. Are you hacking me?

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, there's this shot in this video that we're playing now where you like, it might actually be this, where you like lean over the counter and you're like, it's cool. I got this. I'm just gonna touch your cash register for like 10 seconds.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Look at her face. Look at her face. Watch this.

• 28:59David Pierce?

  Don't worry about it.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  She's like, thank you.

• 29:01David Pierce?

  She has no idea what to do with you. This, you're like, oh, it's fine. I'll just do it. And she's like, you just robbed all of them.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  No, in the cab, that's cool. Just be like, they're not looking.

• 29:09David Pierce?

  I mean, but the, I don't know, like this, I don't know. So you wrote a review and I was editing this and we argued about this for like three days. I just, I am so unconvinced that this is even a good idea.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  So for like slim wallet people like me, I don't care.

• 29:25David Pierce?

  Right.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  And for people with really thick wallets.

• 29:28David Pierce?

  Do you have a George Costanza wallet? Cause I do.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  For people with really thick wallets.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Cash, so I have a little bit. I'm also, I mean, you're, you're, you're front wallet, right?

• 29:36David Pierce?

  No, back wallet. No, get out of here.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Come on.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  You're ruining your spine. Yeah.

• 29:41David Pierce?

  I, I, so I have to like buy new jeans like every three months because my wallet tears through the back pocket of my jeans. This is true. Constantly.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Front wallet, man.

• 29:49David Pierce?

  No, that's ridiculous. You are just, where's, where am I gonna put my chapstick then?

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Stop carrying chapstick around.

• 29:56David Pierce?

  Then what's, no. Then my lips will fall off.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  I've been talking to people about Google Wallet, like Chris Ziegler, and he was saying that when he tried to use it, even though it was officially supported at the stores he went to, they still didn't know what he was doing.

• 30:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, nobody does. And, and I think like that's the, the sort of conclusion you came to that I thought was really interesting is like, even if this works, when you're like, hey, can I pay with my phone? Somebody's gonna be like, what?

• 30:20Speaker 00

  No, it's not even just phones. Everything is broken and terrible in America when it comes to payments. It's like, we can't do chip and PIN. Europe, everything is chip and PIN. It's more secure.

• 30:29David Pierce?

  Explain what that is. I actually don't totally understand what chip and PIN is.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Your, your card has got two things on it. It's got the regular swipe, but it's got a little encrypted chip on it. And then you tap it. So it's tapped to pay. So great. And then instead of signing, you have to punch in a PIN.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  It's like two, two factors of verification.

• 30:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  And they have so much less fraud than here.

• 30:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  So much less fraud.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  And we're not doing it with no chip and signature.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  We've got signature.

• 30:53David Pierce?

  Signature is the most insane thing ever.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Have you ever?

• 30:56David Pierce?

  I have never, ever signed my name the same way twice in a row. It's never happened. I just walk up, I like scribble a bunch of things.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 31:03David Pierce?

  Like if, if you steal my credit card, you can have all of it.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, my, my checkbook got stolen.

• 31:08David Pierce?

  Nobody's gonna find out.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  In college and they were writing checks to Domino's and whatever. So they were sending me the canceled checks after, you know, and they charged me for it. I'm dealing with the bank and it was the worst. And I like, you could tell instantly it was forged because they actually like signed my name in full and cursive.

• 31:23David Pierce?

  Instead of just like random nonsense scribbles.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  D and D trick. And yeah, I was like, come on, who does that?

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Like, what do I actually sign my name? And then you're like, what did we just prove?

• 31:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, right.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  I just told you it wasn't me.

• 31:35David Pierce?

  Right.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  So.

• 31:36David Pierce?

  So, but chip and pin is, is coming to America, right? It's gonna be a thing.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Slowly, but they're, they're gonna go with chip and signature.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  So here's what's happening in 2015.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  I know, no, it's not.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  At the end of 2015, this was actually also news this week, which was inconvenient for Loop Wards launch.

• 31:52David Pierce?

  It was like the same day, wasn't it?

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Uh, so, I mean, it's not completely related, um, because the magnetic part is only like half of what Loop's trying to do. But, uh, yeah, it certainly kind of undermines one of their, one of their points. So what's happening here? Some camaraderie?

• 32:08David Pierce?

  Jeter just loves me, that's all.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  He had a rogue wire that was starting to drive me crazy.

• 32:12David Pierce?

  Oh, okay.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  Control.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  So anyway, um, lost my train of thought. I was watching.

• 32:16David Pierce?

  Came out the same day.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  The Bro Pat.

• 32:18David Pierce?

  Chip and pin.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. So by 2015, end of 2015, uh, if you don't buy a chip and pin reader for your grocery store or coffee shop, you are going to be liable for fraud and not the credit card companies. So that's basically a huge incentive for them to buy, uh, chip and pin credit card readers, which presumably by that point will also in bundle in NFC readers as well.

• 32:42David Pierce?

  So this is what I don't totally understand is why and maybe I'm missing something here, but why have Visa and Mastercard not figured out a better way to solve this problem?

• 32:51Speaker 02

  They don't care.

• 32:52David Pierce?

  Like they're just printing money, so I guess they don't care.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Why do they care?

• 32:54David Pierce?

  But it clearly like where the, the, those two things like Loop Wallet and the chip and PIN thing make it very clear that the only people who can change this system are Visa and Mastercard.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  I mean, when you've got a duopoly.

• 33:06David Pierce?

  No, but I'm saying Visa.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Retail associations.

• 33:08David Pierce?

  Right, no, but Visa and Mastercard can show up to the retail association and be like, "Hey, you're going to change everything in the next two years." And they're going to be like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, we'll do that." But like, Jack Dorsey rolls up and 80% of people are going to be like, "Shut up."

• 33:19Speaker 02

  So you know what's the funny thing?

• 33:20David Pierce?

  Full suit, bro. And then Loop Wallet shows up and they're like, "What is that?"

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Is Starbucks the only place in America where mobile payments are used as often as they are? I think I saw a quote, it was like more than 25% of Starbucks customers are using their phone to pay.

• 33:35David Pierce?

  I think McDonald's has a big thing. Starbucks is the biggest by far.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  People know what they're doing with Starbucks apps on their phone and it never ceases to impress me. I'm like, "You know how to do what? You know how to hold up a QR code, do a reader and do this?" I was like, "I couldn't teach my friends how to do this."

• 33:51David Pierce?

  No, it's great. I have, I have a bunch of friends.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  And they don't use their phones any other stores.

• 33:54David Pierce?

  No, I have, I have a friend who was like, uh, who makes a budget in Starbucks every month. She buys like a $25 Starbucks gift card, puts it on the app, first day of every month, funnels it up, and then when it's out, it's out. She can't go back to Starbucks for the rest of the month. And I was like, "That's the best system ever." And it's all on her phone. It's super easy. She like hits the thing, pays with iTunes and it's done. And then like, it's the best thing ever. And it's the same thing. When you walk in, you hold up your phone and they know what to do. You know who else does a good job of that is movie theaters. And they're the only other ones that like, when I walk in and I'm like, "I have it on my phone." They don't freak out. Otherwise, everybody's like, "Why?"

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Airports.

• 34:30David Pierce?

  I know, I still get like, I hand people my plane ticket and they like, move it around and then they put it on the reader and they're like, "This is it. It goes over. I just, uh, it's over here." And then it's like, everybody behind me is pissed off. Like, it's just not, it's not good.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  So, Ellis, you need to go. You need to head over. You're, you're going to be on

• 34:46Speaker 02

  No, no, no. I was, uh, I was, I'm, it got moved to a little bit later.

• 34:49David Pierce?

  It's basically what we're saying is we want you to get out. Just please.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Please leave.

• 34:53David Pierce?

  Please go immediately.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  You're a lovely person.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  If you want to get Z power in here, that's cool.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, we want to talk about Project Tango, which just got announced today. And it seems completely terrifying and insane.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  It's like her. It's like what's happening in her where the person Scarlett Johansson inside the phone is seeing through the phone, popping out of his shirt pocket through his eyes and seeing the whole world.

• 35:16David Pierce?

  That's beautiful.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  This is the beginning of that.

• 35:18David Pierce?

  Which is amazing, but also terrifying, which is like the best thing about everything that Google does.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  All right, so there's a video, I guess we're going to look at a little bit of it while you.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Everything at Google seems so friendly on the surface. And now they've got the robo dogs with 3D vision.

• 35:32David Pierce?

  God. Listen, I'm in on that. Project Tango, I don't know.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Skynet.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  All right, thanks, Alice.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Let's check out this video.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  My name is Johnny Lee and I work in the Advanced Technology and Projects Group at Google. Our small team here, based in California, has been working with universities, research labs, and industrial partners to harvest the last 10 years of research in robotics and computer vision to concentrate that technology into a very unique mobile phone. We are physical beings that live in a 3D world, yet mobile devices today assume that the physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen. Our goal is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  This is going to allow people to interact with their environment in just a fundamentally different way. We can prototype in a couple hours, something that would take us months or even years before because we didn't have this technology readily available.

• 36:32Speaker 05

  What happens if you have all of these pieces in a phone? How does that change what a phone is?

• 36:39Speaker 03

  We have created a prototype phone containing highly customized hardware and software designed to allow the phone to track its motion in full 3D in real time as you hold it. These sensors make over a quarter million 3D measurements every single second, updating the position and rotation of the phone, fusing this information into a single 3D model of the environment. We have a problem called navigation indoors, and it's a solution to that problem.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  It tracks your position as you go around the world, and it also makes a map of that.

• 37:12Speaker 06

  Imagine that you scan a small section of your living room and then are able to generate a little game world in it. I don't know of any other controller or gaming device that can do that at the moment.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  Putting all this together, they pulled in experts from all around the world and got them all working on the same project. Those are very high caliber people. Why? It's very simple. I think actually people believe in the vision.

• 37:38Speaker 05

  Localization and mapping is there on your phone and you just use it. It's this ability to follow in other people's footsteps.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  And we can also like benefit from what we do for the project back for the open source community.

• 37:50Speaker 06

  Use it for visually impaired, give them auditory cues on where they're going. You know, being able to map your home, oh,

• 37:58Speaker 04

  check out, let me see how this furniture looks in the room. Virtual windows to sort of different worlds. I mean, the possibilities are really endless.

• 38:08Speaker 03

  Over the next few months, we will be distributing dev kits to software developers to develop applications and algorithms on top of this platform. We are just in the beginning, and we know there is a lot more work to do, but we are excited about where it is going to go. The future is awesome, and we believe we can build it faster together.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Well, that was an inspiring and beautiful vision of our terrifying hellscape of a future where Google knows everything about us and our homes. And here to talk about it is Chris Ziegler.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  No, I'm still Ellis Hamburger. I just, I look a little different.

• 38:48David Pierce?

  Google's so good at making videos.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:51David Pierce?

  Like, it's unbelievable. I got to the end of that and like, I'm actually super afraid of what's coming out of this. And I got to the end of that video and I'm like, yeah!

• 38:57Speaker 00

  So this is like, this is Google.

• 38:58David Pierce?

  Know about my house.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  It's ATAP. It's the advanced projects thing, which is part of Motorola and...

• 39:05David Pierce?

  It's like the only part of Motorola that they kept, right?

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:08David Pierce?

  Was ATAP.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  And it's got Johnny Chung Lee, who was on the Kinect team and has done a bunch of cool... He did the thing with the Wii remote on top, at the top of his head.

• 39:15David Pierce?

  And Regina Dugan, who's like doing all the crazy tattoos to identify herself. Like, they're the ones doing really insane stuff.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  So, okay, so it's a phone that can map 3D space inside and using cameras and gyroscopes and sensors in the...

• 39:28David Pierce?

  Which is not especially insane technology. Like, I met with a company months ago that had like an add-on for the iPad that could do the same thing. And you just sort of, you like stood there, held the iPad and like spun around in a circle slowly and it would actually map the room.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Well, Lighter has been doing this for... I mean, that's what Google's using for the self-driving cars, right? To get like millimeter level accuracy on them.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  But to have it on a phone and like have it in your pocket that's tracking you around?

• 39:51Speaker 03

  So the really obvious application to me, Google's being like intentionally very vague about where this is gonna go because it's just a developer kit at this point. But you can see how this would have obvious implications for like Street View and like whatever Street View 2.0 is, right? You can see where, you know, you could just arm millions of people with these phones and you can map the interiors of buildings very easily and send that data back to Google. All of a sudden, they've literally mapped every millimeter of every building.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the robots will know exactly where to go when they come to kill us, right?

• 40:21David Pierce?

  And they can just be like, I mean, the crazy thing is like you can be like, I want Doritos. And they can literally like direct you to Doritos.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:28David Pierce?

  And on the one hand, that's awesome. And on the other hand, that's super insanely terrifying.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  It is. It is. That is terrifying. But until they get to the point where they can direct me to a specific flavor of Doritos, does it even matter? Is the question.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  No, the answer to that question's always Cool Ranch.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  True.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 40:46David Pierce?

  It just assumes that when you put in Doritos, it's like, did you mean Cool Ranch?

• 40:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:50David Pierce?

  And you're like, yes, I did.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  You put in Triscuits, did you mean Cool Ranch Doritos?

• 40:54David Pierce?

  Cool Ranch is objectively the best flavor. I mean, that just isn't true, but that's okay.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Well, okay, it's objectively the best flavor until like it gets in your head and I'm going to say this to you and you will never eat them again.

• 41:05David Pierce?

  No, don't, don't, ah.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Kind of a little bit of a.

• 41:08David Pierce?

  Don't do this to me. Nope.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Just a little.

• 41:10David Pierce?

  Wait, what flavor?

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Let's, let's. Cool Ranch, if you, if you, if you just stop and smell it, you're like, oh, hmm, dead fish, just kind of rotting fish.

• 41:18David Pierce?

  Oh, that's not as bad as I thought it was gonna be. I can live with that.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  Just a little.

• 41:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, I thought you were gonna say.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  A little bit of day old salmon smell.

• 41:23David Pierce?

  So is this really just Street View though? Is that like, is that? Well, no, that's just an obvious implication, or you know, an obvious application of it. But like, what, what else is there? This is a Motorola project, not a Google project. So it's not like they were planning. That's an interesting point.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:35David Pierce?

  Uh, for that anyway, but you can see how that would make a lot of sense. Sure. But I mean, okay. So I get the, the things that occur to me are indoor maps, right? So you go to Macy's and they like tell you what's nearby this. I mean, on some level to me, it sounds like it's almost something like iBeacon where they can be like, you're near this. Let us serve you ads.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  So assistance for the visually impaired, instead of just like.

• 41:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Don't, don't run into things kind of technology. It would be like you could, they could.

• 42:01David Pierce?

  Could actually walk you through something.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  See, you know, see.

• 42:04David Pierce?

  Right.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  The space, um, and Cool Ranch Doritos.

• 42:09David Pierce?

  And games seems to be the other thing. Like Ellis, Ellis points out her and like you've, you guys have seen this movie, right? No, I have not seen her.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  You know what I have seen though is, uh, the first four episodes of season two of House of Cards.

• 42:19David Pierce?

  So there's a scene in her where he's there, he's sitting on his couch, playing a video game and the video game is not on a TV. It's just like literally in front of him. Is this a spoiler? No, it's fine. It's cool. You should watch it. It's a good movie. But he's sitting there and like to make the guy move, he literally goes like this to like make him run up a hill. Yeah. And things like that, it's like, when you have actual awareness of your surroundings, you can start to build things like that. Like that's not that big a step from, I know what your house looks like. Uh, but that seems like a weird thing for Google to do. Right. But then there's like Ingris, I, Google makes no sense to me. It's essentially where I'm at right now. I have no idea what Google is doing as a company. That is the beautiful thing. Like Facebook now has.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  No, but that's

• 42:56David Pierce?

  They're like, here's what we do. Google's like, stuff is cool. Let's do that.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  But that is what makes Google such an amazing company is that they can literally fund anything they want using ad AdSense revenue.

• 43:07David Pierce?

  Google has all of the money.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  That, yes, exactly. And so they're just like, let's go do some cool stuff. That's why Axe exists. That's why they're doing self-driving cars, which aren't even commercializable.

• 43:17David Pierce?

  Internet balloons.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Twenty, internet balloons.

• 43:19David Pierce?

  Well, so, internet balloons makes sense, right? Because it's for them, like, the one thing that I sort of universally get about Google is that the more people they put online, the more people who use Google.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:29David Pierce?

  And that, the more people use Google, the more money Google makes.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Which goes back to Facebook, too, by the way.

• 43:34David Pierce?

  Right. No, agree. But so those things are, I get those steps. So like, Project Moon is, on the one hand, like, you know, a lovely thing to do for people who couldn't get on the internet otherwise. But it's also, it makes really obvious business sense. Something like this, it's like, I, I, I mean, other than the scary thing, which is serving me ads every step I will take every single day, I don't see how this makes any sense for Google.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Well, you can see how it's a, it-

• 43:58David Pierce?

  Other than to be like a cool, look at us, we're Google move.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  Right. But if you look at it the same way as you look at Project Glass, it's a moonshot where it's not commercialized. I hate to use their term.

• 44:07David Pierce?

  Did you just say that you used the word, duh?

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Stay with me.

• 44:10David Pierce?

  I can't even, you've broken me. I can't speak.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  Stay with me.

• 44:12David Pierce?

  You used the term moonshot and didn't immediately, like, call out that you were being ironic about it.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  No, no, I, no, I, I called out that I was being non-ironic about it. Like, I hate to borrow their PR term, but, but no, no, no.

• 44:23David Pierce?

  That was a disruptive innovation you just spit out right there.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  I'm gonna pivot.

• 44:27David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  So Project Glass is not, not a near-term thing, right? It's a near-term thing for a thousand nerds, us included.

• 44:36David Pierce?

  Right.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  But it's not a near-term thing for the masses. But you can see how in 30 years, everyone is going to be wearing some form of heads-up equipment on their face that will look completely normal. They'll look like Eaters glasses. Um, and I meant that in a good way.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  I meant that in a good way, not a bad way.

• 44:54David Pierce?

  No, but again, that's the same thing, right? Like that puts more people online more of the time and that's an obvious win for.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  What about the robots? Explain the robots.

• 45:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, that's the same.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Explain buying Boston Dynamics.

• 45:05David Pierce?

  Right, or the self-driving cars.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Go back to Dieter's, right, but go back to Dieter's, uh, vision impaired example. You can see how Google could end up making a device that basically leads you to all these retail establishments, uh, that.

• 45:17David Pierce?

  Right.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  A little helper robot. Is that what you're saying?

• 45:20David Pierce?

  A little, little. A little dog robot.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  A next generation Sony IBO.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  Right, that, that leads you around and, and tracks you and.

• 45:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Everything Google does makes sense. They've never done a single thing I didn't understand.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 45:34David Pierce?

  It all, I get it now.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  It all ties together to the same grand thing.

• 45:37David Pierce?

  More than anything Google has ever done, this seems like the Minority Report move. Where you like walk around and there are ads just blaring at you all the time.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:44David Pierce?

  Cause if Google then goes to businesses and is like, hey, we know exactly where people are in your store all the time.

• 45:52David Pierce?

  Give us some money.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  No, no, that's such an unbelievable win. Think about that, like if, if they can accurately map right immediately on the device, the 3D space on a computer. They can, on a heads up display, accurately project stuff onto that surface.

• 46:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  So like, like they can literally put an ad on that wall and that curved chair and whatever else.

• 46:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, and it's just, it's, they own this whole stack for advertising and it's, that's super scary. I mean, it's the same thing, like I, I met with Apple about iBeacon forever ago and, and my question kept being like, you know, this can be terrifying, right? And they were like, yeah, but it won't be. I was like, but you know, this could be terrifying, right? And they were like, yeah, but it won't be.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  It'll be fine.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  Are you excited about, uh, iBeacon at MLB this year?

• 46:35David Pierce?

  I guess, I mean, this is the same thing, like there are ways in which it's super insanely handy. Where like I can, one of the things they were telling me about that I, I think it's just as a like, high level possibility, I don't know if they're actually doing this, but they were like, we can figure out where the shortest bathroom line is or like where the right food is near you. Or we can, you know, figure out where you are if something goes wrong. And like, that's all really, really great. But you know what's gonna suck is when you walk in and every single step you take, there's another ad from another vendor that's like, hey, come save a dollar on your $13 beer. If you come to our thing right now with your app, with your iPhone. I don't want that, like I don't.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  So you're saying you don't want to save a dollar.

• 47:13David Pierce?

  I don't want to save a dollar. No.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  You just want to pay full price.

• 47:16David Pierce?

  I would rather pay a dollar more and not have them serve that ad.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  What ties together, I'd make it a little bit, but definitely Facebook with that Disney metaphor and now Google.

• 47:25David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Like, we, these aren't, we can't think of these companies the way that we used to. They're like, they're giant conglomerates now.

• 47:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  It's like, you need to think of them like GE in the eighties that just did everything, right? They bought NBC and everybody was like, yeah, okay, whatever. That's near GE. That's what you do, right? Like, that's what, like, when Google does some crazy shit, we just have to be like, yeah, Google, let's, we don't know. They got, they can't stop spending money and doing weird things.

• 47:49David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's weird that Apple is like the most cohesive of all of these and the biggest of.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Weird.

• 47:56David Pierce?

  I guess. I mean, Apple, like, of all companies to just throw money at random things to see what's going on.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  How hard must it be to be at Apple and be in charge of R and D and not just, like, release the weird crap you're making?

• 48:06David Pierce?

  Right, exactly. Because they're, I mean, what's their, what's their cash on hand? Like a hundred and forty billion dollars?

• 48:10Speaker 03

  Over a hundred billion, yeah.

• 48:12David Pierce?

  Like, Tim Cook could have rolled up with like a bunch of nickels and bought WhatsApp.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  They could have bought like six WhatsApps.

• 48:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. And, and yet they, they don't, which is really interesting. And I don't know why, to be honest. Because like, this isn't, it's not a bad strategy, this conglomerate move, where they're like.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  It's kind of a bad.

• 48:26David Pierce?

  No, but Google and Facebook are both so, it is, but Google and Facebook are both so big enough and their, their thing is so, like, fundamentally well-known and well-understood that there's no danger in branding. It's the same with Disney, like.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:39David Pierce?

  When you hear Disney, you think Disney World. That's just the thing. And they got so big doing that, that they were like, we can do whatever else we want and people are gonna think of our core.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  You know, when I hear Disney, I think Rescue Rangers.

• 48:48David Pierce?

  That's super weird.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  Well, one of the reasons that GE, super weird. One of the reasons that GE has been around for a hundred and forty years and still seems to be a fundamentally sound company is the fact that they have been hedged for so long. Like, they're in so many different businesses that when one is up, the other is down and it just kind of all evens out.

• 49:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  That can't be said for a company like Apple, right? Which has virtually all of its eggs in one basket.

• 49:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Um, and to your point, yeah, why not?

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Well, they got like three baskets.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, but three fundamentally similar baskets.

• 49:18David Pierce?

  GE's fundamental thing was light bulbs, right?

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:20David Pierce?

  And that's, see, that's the thing. That's what I associate still with GE. And like, I, anything else that comes from GE, it's like, oh, it's GE. They're like, they make light bulbs. Like, I don't even know if they make light bulbs anymore. But they were, they built a thing and did it and did it so big and complete that they then could do whatever else they wanted without killing that brand. Maybe.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  We bring good things to life?

• 49:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. Check in.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  They used to have a really nice typeface, too, then they changed it.

• 49:45David Pierce?

  Their logo is terrible looking. I'm on their Wikipedia page. It's super ugly.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Is it still the Curse of GE?

• 49:49Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  Oh, it's awesome. It's a great logo.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  It's like a hundred years old.

• 49:52David Pierce?

  But it's like, it's also in like a washing machine and there's, it's like, I don't know.

• 49:55Speaker 03

  It's awesome.

• 49:56David Pierce?

  It's in a GE washing.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  But yeah, so, so you can see how Google is just kind of like throwing stuff at the wall in every conceivable direction. And even if one of them, say, for example, they figure out how to make people live forever, which is a business that's actually now.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  Then they will be in really good shape.

• 50:13David Pierce?

  That's true. They're gonna be on the internet a lot if they live forever. Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Is there anything that Google could do where you would seriously go like, I don't, like, really?

• 50:21Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, if they bought Applebee's.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  If they bought Applebee's?

• 50:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  I don't know. I would, we would find a way that it made sense for them.

• 50:27David Pierce?

  They would just put fiber in all of the Applebee's everywhere in the world and they'd have super fast internet.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  You're right.

• 50:31David Pierce?

  And they would like kill the coffee shop office with Applebee's.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  By the way, can I just say that this, this seat where I'm sitting is Josh's seat? And in every Verge cast, he comes on and he complains about his hair.

• 50:42David Pierce?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  It's this seat, because mine just started going crazy.

• 50:45David Pierce?

  You haven't moved your mic at all. It's really upsetting. Like, I don't, I don't even know how to look at you right now.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Complaining about my mic. Yeah. No, but no, this seat ruins hair.

• 50:51David Pierce?

  I mean, your hair does look terrible.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  It's.

• 50:54David Pierce?

  I'll just be honest.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  What is going on with the, we should move on and talk about, this is the worst.

• 50:59David Pierce?

  Should we talk about Mobile World Congress? That's coming up next week.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  Uh, well, no, we, we, we, yes, we should talk about Mobile World Congress.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  It's more exciting than the internet being the worst because the FCC has no guts.

• 51:10David Pierce?

  Can Google buy the FCC? Is that a thing?

• 51:12Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 51:13David Pierce?

  Is that allowed?

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Kinda. Do I wish they would? I mean, they capitulated to Verizon on, on wireless.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  They could certainly buy the United States, in which case they would own the FCC automatically.

• 51:24David Pierce?

  Good point.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Right. How many WhatsApps do you think the FCC costs?

• 51:26David Pierce?

  Wait, so is this gonna be the new thing? Everybody talks about it in terms of Instagram? Are we gonna be like, they bought it for one thirty second of a WhatsApp?

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  Poor Kevin says that.

• 51:33David Pierce?

  That's awful.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  I feel.

• 51:35Speaker 00

  Poor guy. Well, you know, it's funny, the idea of Google buying the FCC because paying for it is actually the real problem because the FCC won't man up and classify broadband as a common carrier like a telephone, like a telecommunications line. They're going for this middle path again and they're doing it because going the common carrier route would be World War III because of all the money from the cable industry in Congress.

• 51:59David Pierce?

  It is really funny that World War III is just like a bunch of really pissed off lobbyists.

• 52:03Speaker 00

  FCC, that's what they gotta do.

• 52:04David Pierce?

  Like lobbyists throwing money at each other as a World War III.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you look at, um, I, I think you can tell that, that Tom Wheeler, who is the recently installed chairman of the FCC feels very, uh, bound and tied by Verizon versus FCC, the, the ruling that came out recently, which we've written about extensively. Check out Eddie Robertson's coverage if you haven't already, because it's very good.

• 52:25David Pierce?

  She just writes like one really angry thing every 48 hours. She's really great.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  And it's great.

• 52:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Uh, so you can tell that he feels unsure about how to proceed and he feels like the FCC is just like kind of dead in the water here. So he put out this long list he'd been saying for...

• 52:41Speaker 00

  See, you say unsure and I hear, I, I, I don't see, I mean, I see that, but like behind it, I see fear, trepidation and something really slimy because he just came from the cable industry. The guy who used to be in charge of the FCC is back in the cable industry.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  I think that's a little unfair for a couple of reasons.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  I'm warming up to Tom Wheeler. There was a lot of trepidation about the guy when he, when he took the, the office, uh, which was totally fair, but, uh, you didn't, you, well, you kind of need to consider the fact that when he was at NACTA, which is the cable organization, uh, it was seriously the underdog. Like all kidding aside, like the cable industry was a non-entity.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Early, mid 80s?

• 53:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he left, uh, before they got big, but he was like fighting from the, the underdog position. Um, and the same argument could, could kind of be made with the CTIA. Like he left in what, 2001, 2002, something like that?

• 53:34Speaker 00

  The CTIA is a wireless version of the cable industry as a group.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  Right. Um, and then he's kind of been floating around in investment firms since then.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Look, I mean...

• 53:42Speaker 03

  But, but anyway, my, my point, the, the, what I was getting to is that he put out this Long list of things that FCC is going to do.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  And if you read through the list of bullet points, everything is kind of like, ah, we'll wait and see, we'll wait and see, we'll, we'll, we'll consider this carefully, we'll talk about this, but there are no.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  No, that's fine, but it's like, we'll wait and see, we'll wait and see. You're saying that like it's a reasonable thing.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  No, I'm not.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  You're saying that like it's not completely obvious what the FCC should do here. Isn't it completely obvious what broadband is?

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Yes, no, it is, it is completely obvious.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  So why does everybody see it except for who?

• 54:17Speaker 03

  Tom Wheeler.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  Tom Wheeler, chairman of the FCC and the cable companies.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  Well.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm just doing the math.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  Right. I, I think that he is, um, a realist about being a politician in Washington DC.

• 54:32David Pierce?

  I mean, you've seen House of Cards.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  So that's what drives me crazy is like, that's, it just is. And they all have so much money.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Yes, they do.

• 54:41David Pierce?

  So much money.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  He's being a realist. He's being, he's being very cautious is the way I'd.

• 54:46David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 54:46Speaker 03

  You give him the benefit of the doubt. Don't write him off yet.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  I'm okay. I, I have the tiniest, tiniest bit of non-desperate feelings. I'm not, I won't call it hope. I won't call it.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  There, there's no question.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  Complete in order.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  I think we can all agree without question that the state of, uh, the internet and of the, uh, internet industry right now as it stands is completely miserable and terrible. And makes us all want to die. It's a terrible thing. Um, and it's Tom Wheeler's job to fix that. And there's a lot of weight on his shoulders, not just in the cable industry, but in the wireless industry as there always is.

• 55:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Uh, so we'll see.

• 55:26David Pierce?

  Fair enough. All right. Let's talk about Mobile World Congress.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's starting what? Like Monday, Sunday, Monday?

• 55:30David Pierce?

  It like kicks off in earnest on Monday. There's some stuff on Sunday, but it like mostly happens Monday and we have a bunch of folks there.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 55:36David Pierce?

  It's gonna be great.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  Could be a way bigger show than last year.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, we're expecting Samsung to actually announce something at the show, which like they, we thought they were done.

• 55:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  We thought they were done showing off big, important stuff at big shows. And now they're like, nope, we're gonna go ahead and do Mobile World Congress.

• 55:50David Pierce?

  I wonder if it's because Mobile World Congress was so bad last year that they were like, we can just take over the show and do it this year.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  It's cyclical. It's like when the shows get soft, they're like, oh, we can use it now.

• 55:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  And then when the, when the show gets big, they're like. Screw this.

• 56:02David Pierce?

  Guys, we're gonna bail.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  So S5, the new Galaxy phone, then like apparently it's gonna have a fingerprint scanner. We talked about this on the the Verge Mobile Show, which you should listen to, it's great.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  It's great.

• 56:11David Pierce?

  It's terrible.

• 56:12Speaker 03

  Fantastic program.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  We recorded from a jail cell this week, it was amazing.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  We did.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  And then not one, but multiple Galaxy Gears.

• 56:21David Pierce?

  Which, didn't the Galaxy Gear just come out?

• 56:24Speaker 00

  Came out like three days ago.

• 56:24David Pierce?

  I mean, I guess, good for Samsung for being like, okay, we screwed up, this is bad, let's try again. And that's kind of Samsung's move.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  You're giving them too much credit. There's no indication that the new Galaxy Gear will be any better than the previous one.

• 56:35David Pierce?

  They're like, we screwed up, let's do it again.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  This is a company that had its second generation tablet ready to go. And then Apple announced the new super thin iPad, that was the two that was ridiculous thin. And within a matter of like three weeks, they scrapped their whole tablet and came out with one of the same thickness.

• 56:52David Pierce?

  I mean, this is the insane thing about.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  They just like turned it around.

• 56:54David Pierce?

  This is the insane thing about Samsung that is like the most underrated feature of Samsung is they can make anything unbelievably quickly at incredible scale.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:03David Pierce?

  Uh, and so Samsung's ability to just like rinse and repeat is insane.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:08David Pierce?

  Uh, and I think that's like eventually going to be the story of the Galaxy Gear. Like they're gonna get to a point like they did with the Galaxy S phones where it was like, it was bad. And then it was slightly better, and then it was slightly better, and then it was good, and then it was really good. And they're like, and now nobody cares, because it's really good, and Samsung can do it so fast and take so many chances that it's not gonna matter.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Here's the difference, though, with the Galaxy S, the smartphone, the concept of a smartphone.

• 57:33David Pierce?

  Actually, the first Galaxy S's were pretty good, too.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, not bad.

• 57:36David Pierce?

  I'd captivate, solid phone.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  But with the, with the, with the Galaxy S, the, the concept of what a smartphone was supposed to be was already well established. With wearables, there's still no clear indication, uh, what a wearable is supposed to be and what kind of wearable people want.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:53David Pierce?

  Right, well, and Samsung as, as leader is, is a lot less established.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:57David Pierce?

  Samsung as fast follower is great.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  Sledgehammer to force people to, it's marketing sledgehammer to get people to buy its smartphones, like, okay, that doesn't affect my life.

• 58:05David Pierce?

  They've made such good ads for the gear.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Doing it with wearables, though, I have to look at these stupid things.

• 58:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  And PC people struggle with them and.

• 58:12Speaker 03

  You don't like the digital boil?

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Dude, it's so bad.

• 58:17Speaker 00

  So anyway, multiple gears. Multiple gears. Great.

• 58:21David Pierce?

  And then HCC is supposedly doing.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  Wearables.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  Wait, wait, wait, but we need to discuss.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  No.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  New Galaxy Gear, Tizen instead of Android.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, wait. Let's not, let's, no. I don't, we, I don't care if it runs Android or Tizen, just don't suck.

• 58:36David Pierce?

  I mean, my.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  Like, I don't want Tizen on my phone because I want apps, but there's no app ecosystem for wearable.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  So I don't care what operating system it runs.

• 58:45David Pierce?

  As long as it plays nicely with your phone.

• 58:47Speaker 00

  Is really good is gonna pick up an app ecosystem.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  You know what's going to, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put a terrible thought in your heart.

• 58:52David Pierce?

  Pebble has done, right? Like, they have, theirs is their own thing.

• 58:55Speaker 03

  I'm gonna put it, I'm gonna put a nightmare of a thought in your heart and soul.

• 58:57David Pierce?

  Running Tizen?

• 58:58Speaker 03

  No, even worse. What's going to happen is Pebble is going to develop such a lead with their app ecosystem that the killer app for the Galaxy, the next Galaxy Gear is going to be a Pebble emulator. That allows you to run Pebble apps.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  That'd be amazing.

• 59:12David Pierce?

  I'm all in. And then, and then Google will buy them, or Facebook will buy them, and I won't have any idea why. But so HCC's ones are supposedly what's happening, is what I'm very excited about.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  They're doing the phone later.

• 59:24David Pierce?

  Right.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  March 25th.

• 59:25David Pierce?

  But they're potentially doing a watch based on the Qualcomm Talk that you reviewed forever ago.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  I did, and, and I'm really hopeful that if this happens, it will not use the same wristband, which is the worst wristband in the industry.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  It's really insane.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  It's so bad. There are two things that made it really bad. One was the fact that the band was touch sensitive, so you would just, like, randomly touch it and things would happen. And then the battery was at the very bottom of the band for no apparent reason.

• 59:51David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  So it was really uncomfortable.

• 59:53David Pierce?

  You couldn't, like, put it down on a table.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  The Qualcomm Talk, that prototype, was the Mirasol screen, right? Which is, which is, we've been, I've been looking at Mirasol technology at trade shows since I started going to trade shows.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  It's been six or seven years.

• 1:00:08David Pierce?

  It's just objectively.

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  You trundle over to Qualcomm's booth and they'd have this little postage stamp thing, and there'd be no backlight, like, oh my god, it's a color screen with no backlight, it works.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  And just every year, the postage stamp got bigger and bigger, and now it's big enough to be a watch.

• 1:00:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  So if they get rid of all the crappy parts about the Qualcomm Talk watch, which is literally everything but that display, and they make something with that display.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  If they just get rid of.

• 1:00:28David Pierce?

  It's a solid name, but Talk's not a bad name.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  No, it isn't.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  It's a pretty bad name for a watch.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  Actually, on the back of the package, if I remember correctly, it says "Tic", and then it shows, like, an old-school watch, and then it says "Talk", and then it's just.

• 1:00:39David Pierce?

  That's pretty good. It's pretty good.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42David Pierce?

  No, but I think like Mirosol is is just objectively like good.

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  It's great. It was it was made. It's fate was to be in a smartwatch.

• 1:00:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  Basically.

• 1:00:52David Pierce?

  I also really like that we are our piece says there's just a sentence in this piece which which Rich wrote for us based on a Bloomberg thing. Which says also says HTC has two other wearable devices in the works, including an electronic bracelet that plays music. Like what? What is that?

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  This is a company that can't afford to make a bunch of random crap. Google can do whatever it wants. It can make balloons, find a space and give you internet.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  You know what this thing is gonna be called?

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  HTC needs to focus.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  This is gonna be called the Boomwrist.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  I guarantee it. The Boomwrist.

• 1:01:20David Pierce?

  You're so right.

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:01:21David Pierce?

  This is the most upsetting thing. It's just gonna have Beats logos all over it.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  No, they I thought they were done with Beats.

• 1:01:28David Pierce?

  You're never done with Beats. No one's ever done with Beats.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  It's like it's like the Hotel California of sound systems.

• 1:01:35David Pierce?

  Never ends. And then a Google Now smartwatch, which which seems super obvious.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, but apparently none of this stuff is gonna be shown to humans at Mobile World Congress.

• 1:01:44David Pierce?

  Oh, really?

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  It's gonna be like backroom meetings where they try to sell it. Is what I think the Bloomberg report said.

• 1:01:49David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  So do you think with the Google Now smartwatch, do you think it's conceivable that this is going to be like Google's Nexus smartwatch? Do you think this will be an official partnership?

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  That would be interesting. And I will say.

• 1:02:00David Pierce?

  Wouldn't it be weird if that came from HTC though?

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  Do you guys use Google Now?

• 1:02:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, all the time.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  I just started again because I realized that it got a lot better than the last time I tried it.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  It's gotten way better, but it's still like eh.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  But it's like it's like terrifyingly good now.

• 1:02:14David Pierce?

  I use it most when I travel. It's fantastic for when I travel.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  I'll load it up and it'll be like, yo, like your package got delivered. I'm like, I don't even know what package you're talking about. Like it just knows things.

• 1:02:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  It knows really terrifying things about my life, but I don't know.

• 1:02:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree. No, and and the thing that I love about now is the like just little bits of like things that are happening. And it's like, it just reminds me of like things I have to do today, like emails that I have.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Or like, here's here's the game you forgot was on. Here's the score, you know?

• 1:02:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, it's great. And it's so much better than it used to be. And I mean, we've been saying for forever that since the beginning of Google Now, it was like, oh, this would be good for wearable devices.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:02:53David Pierce?

  It's like, it'd be so nice if I could just look at my watch and it's like, here's what's next on your calendar and here's how long it'll take you to get there.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  And you remember Google, Google bought Wim not long ago to do presumably exactly this.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  That, yeah.

• 1:03:05David Pierce?

  And Wim was like, Wim did a decent job, like really early on.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  Wim's, Wim's.

• 1:03:10David Pierce?

  Decent is strong.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  Wim's fatal flaw was not including Bluetooth in the, in the Wi, it had Wi-Fi, it had Wi-Fi, but no Bluetooth.

• 1:03:17David Pierce?

  Whoopsies.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:03:18David Pierce?

  Sorry, guys.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  So the last thing that we're really expecting is the Nokia's X phone, the Android phone, and.

• 1:03:24David Pierce?

  What are we expecting this to be?

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  It's gonna be a phone that runs Android.

• 1:03:31David Pierce?

  Got it. No, but is this like?

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  It's gonna be low end, right? And it's not gonna.

• 1:03:35David Pierce?

  So this is like, but this is Nokia owned by Microsoft's Nokia.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  Well, not yet, not yet.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  That's, that's the thing.

• 1:03:42David Pierce?

  So they're gonna make this phone.

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  Nokia engineers are like, we made this and we're releasing it, goddammit.

• 1:03:45David Pierce?

  And then like 25 minutes later, Satya Nadella is gonna come up and just smack it out of their hand on stage and be like, you shut up.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  For the low end. Who cares?

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  Well, so devil's advocate.

• 1:03:54David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  And, and, and Tom has been.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  And by devil, you mean?

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  I mean, Tom Warren.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  Android, Tom Warren.

• 1:03:59David Pierce?

  Tom Warren's advocate.

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tom Warren's advocate.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  Trepid Microsoft reporter, Tom Warren.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  They have so fundamentally stripped, presumably they have so fundamentally stripped this version of Android of its Android-ness and replaced it with Microsoft services and Microsoft UI that, or Nokia UI, I guess technically, that no one will know that it's Android and there's zero chance that they will mention the word Android on stage at NWC.

• 1:04:24David Pierce?

  Then why do it?

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  That's a great question.

• 1:04:28David Pierce?

  I mean.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  You're asking the right questions, David. You should be a journalist.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  Presumably because Android can run on lower end hardware than Windows phone can.

• 1:04:37David Pierce?

  I mean, that, that's.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  That's gotta be, that's the only reason I can think of.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  No, but, but is that seriously true? Like if you look at the Lumia 520, it's so cheap. It is so cheap.

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:04:44David Pierce?

  It's so not very good, though, is the thing.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, but neither is low end Android.

• 1:04:47David Pierce?

  Well, fair. No, but I, I just, I know, I don't get it. Like, I don't get why this is a smart move.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  It's a hate, it's a hate release. Like, a bunch of engineers at Nokia were super pissed that they didn't get to build their own stuff. So they built their own thing. They brought Steve Neill up. He's like, I don't know about this. And then he didn't get the job at Microsoft. He's like, ah, screw it. Put it out there. I don't care.

• 1:05:04David Pierce?

  Do it.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  Well, so we were talking.

• 1:05:05Speaker 03

  Talking about this just a little bit on the mobile show, I think what may have happened is at some point Nokia was seriously working on Android across the range as a plan B in case Windows Phone failed. And that project got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until eventually it was just like an Asha replacement. Uh, and then they're still using Windows Phone on the high end, of course.

• 1:05:26David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  But at you can imagine how at one point they were like, yeah, we might need to bail the Android. Like that's a, that's a serious possibility. So they were, you know, exploring it across, uh, across the range. And now the, the scope just got smaller.

• 1:05:37David Pierce?

  I mean, but that, that ship sailed, right? Like they're not, they're not gonna switch to Android.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  The, the platform was burning. They jumped into the ship and now the ship has sailed. I don't know.

• 1:05:48David Pierce?

  But it's like still sort of slowly sinking as it sails. It's going very fast.

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  Lights on fire because it's a burning platform.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. It's like a Viking funeral.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  Burning sinking ship.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59David Pierce?

  I've learned a lot just now.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 1:06:01David Pierce?

  Uh, yeah, I'm really curious to see how that goes down and even more than that, to see how they talk about it. Because I think if they're like.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  They will never say Android once.

• 1:06:08David Pierce?

  You don't think?

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  No, they will not say the word Android.

• 1:06:11David Pierce?

  Then what are they gonna say?

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  I mean, did, did Amazon say Android when they announced Kindle?

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 1:06:15David Pierce?

  Well, but they, they named it though. They were like, here's what, do you think Nokia is gonna have their own name for whatever OS this is?

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  Probably, yeah. They'll call it X. I don't know. Just like every other phone on the market.

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  I hope that's something finished that's completely unpronounced.

• 1:06:27David Pierce?

  They should just call it Asha and just like, hope nobody actually knows what Asha is and they just go for it.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  We were actually talking about.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Asha's, uh, Nokia's low end phone line.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  Right. You remember, uh, Dieter, I think you were at this Nokia world where they, um, they introduced Asha for the first time. And they spent like half an hour talking about what Asha meant.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Speaker 03

  Like, I can't remember what language it is, but it's like, there, you know, they described it. Uh, so yeah, maybe they'll do that.

• 1:06:49David Pierce?

  Lovely name. I Googled it and I get the American Speech Language Hearing Association.

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  I don't think that was it.

• 1:06:54David Pierce?

  I feel like I'm close.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  I don't think that was it.

• 1:06:56David Pierce?

  Maybe not quite there.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll see. I mean, it's, it's a weird move. We've been saying for years and years and years that if they had taken the Nokia like N9, which was their first new design language phone.

• 1:07:08David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  Uh, that was running Migo. If they had taken that and just put like ICS on it, it would have been an amazing device.

• 1:07:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, we've been saying this for forever, right? Like if they would just, Nokia builds better phones than anybody.

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  We just reviewed the Icon, uh, which is not quite up to Nokia's standards.

• 1:07:27David Pierce?

  No, I, I like, I can't say it for sure. So I can't. Can't like write it, but I am so sure that everybody at Verizon just like gets off on ruining good things.

• 1:07:38David Pierce?

  They're just like, oh, you made this really nice phone. No.

• 1:07:43David Pierce?

  Throw it in the dirt, make it twice as large and put 40 logos on it and then we will sell it in our stores.

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  Make it an inch thick.

• 1:07:50David Pierce?

  Yeah. Or like they have some secret backdoor deal with Samsung where they're like, you can only sell ugly phones, except Samsung.

• 1:07:58Speaker 03

  You know what? You're right. Think about the Samsung continuum, which was the worst phone ever made.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Oh God, the Samsung continuum.

• 1:08:03David Pierce?

  Oh man. Wait, was that the one with the two screens?

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, only it wasn't really two screens. It just had like a piece of plastic over the screen to make it look like two screens.

• 1:08:10David Pierce?

  Wait, okay. Speaking of Samsung, I have a question for both of you. So I just reviewed this Galaxy Note Pro, the big tablet.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  Is this big?

• 1:08:17David Pierce?

  It's, it's a television.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18David Pierce?

  Like I, I, the only way I can think of describing it.

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  There it is.

• 1:08:22David Pierce?

  That is the Galaxy Note Pro.

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  You used it as a, as a, as a literal like food tray.

• 1:08:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  In your review, which was amazing.

• 1:08:27David Pierce?

  You can carry things on it. It's lovely. Um, but A, it's now just horribly broken. Thank you, Michael Shan. Uh, and B is what I, I get to the end of this whole thing and I'm still like, this is what everybody thinks is about to happen, right? Is that we're going to make tablets that are our primary computing devices, right? Like there are all these rumors that Apple's making a big thing or like a, somewhere between the MacBook Air and the iPad. Samsung's doing it. Everybody like the surface is sort of this, like, is this a good idea? Do we want this?

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  To make a reform factor?

• 1:08:59David Pierce?

  Are laptops dying that, and eventually we'll just all have tablets and that'll be like the thing that we do?

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:09:06David Pierce?

  Yes. But like PC sales are down, right? Tablet sales are, I just, I don't know. We're at this weird inflection point where like people are writing that nobody cares about tablets anymore. But then tablet sales are growing and PC sales are dying.

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  Here's what people do.

• 1:09:19David Pierce?

  And I just, I don't know.

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  But here's what people, here's what people really want. They, they buy their iPad and then they buy a keyboard case for it.

• 1:09:25David Pierce?

  Right. Just buy a laptop.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  Just do it, just buy a laptop.

• 1:09:28David Pierce?

  No, that's the thing, but I think ultimately, I mean, the trend seems clear that it's gonna be iPads and keyboard cases. And for the life of me, I can't figure out why for anyone who actually does anything ever. And I guess maybe that's my fundamental theory is that most people just wanna like, sit around and not do stuff.

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  Like, those things are different, just buy a laptop. But if this thing right here, with a little bit thicker screen, and when you pulled it off, it turned into an iPad, and when you put it on, it was a Mac, would you not buy that?

• 1:09:58David Pierce?

  Yes, I would buy that.

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  You would buy the hell out of that. So it's a, it's a hinge problem, and it's a battery complexity problem.

• 1:10:03David Pierce?

  No, it's also, it's also, it's also a software problem.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:06David Pierce?

  Like, if you can make a device, I mean, I also wanna like, be able to chop off a corner and have it be my cellphone, but like, I don't know, all of these things, like, I get, this is the Moto Atrix all over again. Like, I said, when the Moto Atrix came out, I was like, this is the best idea, this is the future, and I was just so wrong, just so wrong.

• 1:10:24Speaker 00

  Just cuz it was a, but it was bad software.

• 1:10:26David Pierce?

  It was a terrible product. But what they did was they were like, we made a phone, and you dock it into a tab, or you dock it into whatever you need it to be, and then it works as that.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  But you also have weird feelings about the padphone.

• 1:10:35David Pierce?

  I love the padphone. I love it so much.

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  I don't understand these feelings.

• 1:10:40David Pierce?

  There's a new one coming, and it's coming to AT&T, and I'm gonna get it. It's gonna be the best. It's gonna be the best. I'm gonna use the padphone station all day.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  Do not.

• 1:10:48David Pierce?

  All day.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  Don't do that.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  No, do not, because you learned what it's like to try and work on Android. You learn what it's like, what it's like to work on Android that can actually let you have multiple things on the screen at the same time. It's not good.

• 1:10:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, beyond everything else, that's the problem.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  It's way better than what I expected. The multitasking on the Tab Pro is way better than what I expected, but I wasn't expecting much.

• 1:11:07David Pierce?

  Right. No, I mean, it's ultimately like, I can sit here and like, resize my browser, and I can have eight apps open if I want to, and they're however I want them to work. And it's just, Android is a million miles away from that.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  Bottom line is that.

• 1:11:20David Pierce?

  But if if that thing like if I could dock it into a keyboard and it would run Windows.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Look at you try and drag windows.

• 1:11:25David Pierce?

  That would be great, but that's I don't know that that's possible either.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  So that's that's like that's straight up just a Haswell. It's a processor problem.

• 1:11:32David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  OS problem.

• 1:11:33David Pierce?

  I mean, this is also what like.

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  And presumably we'll fix that.

• 1:11:35David Pierce?

  It's also the possibility of like Chrome OS and Android merging, right? Is that when I want it to be, it's an Android tablet and then I dock it in and it's a it's a Chromebook.

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  But but Chrome OS is only marginally more. In fact, it's not even more functional than Android.

• 1:11:46David Pierce?

  It's way more functional than Android.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  It's a browser.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  Come on.

• 1:11:50David Pierce?

  Like, all I use is a browser anyway, and to be able to have like a bunch of windows open and do stuff side by side and like everything's a web.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  I have a Chromebook. I love it.

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  That's a window problem. It's not an OS.

• 1:11:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, but honestly, I think at a on some level, the biggest productivity problems we have on these mobile devices are window problems.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, lack of windows. Yep.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  Button problem.

• 1:12:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, like easy switching between stuff and window problems and like Chrome OS is a small way of solving.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  Trying to make me say WebOS, aren't you?

• 1:12:19David Pierce?

  It's true.

• 1:12:23David Pierce?

  Shit, they got it right the first time.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  The first time was terrible, but not terrible, but not great, but that that concept of of of panels that the lost that never got made.

• 1:12:33David Pierce?

  Well, there's a joke about the Irish, like the Irish discovered civilization and then they had a Guinness and lost it.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37David Pierce?

  It's like, it's like, that's what WebOS was.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  Well, Dieter, you're gonna buy an LG TV for this very reason.

• 1:12:43David Pierce?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  No, I'm not buying an LG TV. No, I'm not buying a TV for five years easily. I've got a TV that's like two, maybe three years old. Oh, it's two years old. I've got an Xbox One plugged into it now.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  For Titanfall.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, which I can't play anymore, which I'm really bad at and.

• 1:13:01David Pierce?

  I didn't know the beta was going offline last night. I didn't play and then I tried to play and now I'm really sad. I'm terrible at that game.

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  I'm terrible.

• 1:13:08David Pierce?

  Just awful.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Also, the Xbox One is embarrassingly large.

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  It's it's not.

• 1:13:12Speaker 00

  It's so big.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  Put it next to anything else, a cable box. Uh, TiVo.

• 1:13:19Speaker 00

  I've got the, you know, the.

• 1:13:20David Pierce?

  Like I could, I could definitely like.

• 1:13:21Speaker 03

  Live in the ocean on my cable box.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  IKEA is replacing its expedite shelf line, which has got all the hipsters angry because that it's perfect for holding records.

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  And we use it as an entertainment center. Oh, yeah, we wrote about that. Yeah. And we use it in entertainment center and we use it to have, you know, we've got records in it because you have to have records if you live in Brooklyn. Um, but underneath.

• 1:13:39Speaker 03

  Just moved here and just immediately bought a bunch of records.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. Underneath, uh, I had a little expedite slot with an Xbox 360, a Wii and an Uya. Everything was in there.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  Why already don't trust you?

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  It was fine.

• 1:13:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, this, this conversation is going south.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  All three of those things out, I'm like, I'm gonna place all this with the one. It's gonna be awesome. Eh, nope. It has to sit on top of my entertainment center.

• 1:14:00David Pierce?

  Maybe that's why IKEA discontinued it.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02David Pierce?

  Cause they were like, crap, it doesn't fit the Xbox one. We gotta try something else. It could be why. No, that thing is, is large. It's very large.

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  Stupidly big.

• 1:14:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10David Pierce?

  And super loud. It turned out.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  Well, that's because literally every component of it has a fan, the, the, the power supply, the connect has a fan and the box has a fan.

• 1:14:20David Pierce?

  That's true. The connect fan is my favorite.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:14:25David Pierce?

  All right, are we, I feel like.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  I think, I think.

• 1:14:26David Pierce?

  I think we're done.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  We'll wrap it up.

• 1:14:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  So if you want to contact us, you can, you can email us. The email address is [email protected]. Is that right? Just vergecast, there's no the, just [email protected]. Uh, we're also on Twitter. I want to thank Ellis Hamburger, who was here earlier. He is at hamburger.

• 1:14:42David Pierce?

  She's awesome.

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  Which is the best. David Pierce is at Pierce David, which is the worst.

• 1:14:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:14:48Speaker 00

  Indecently the worst.

• 1:14:48David Pierce?

  Just, I'm telling you, please, everyone berate whoever at David Pierce is on Twitter. He's actually a very nice guy.

• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  Don't do that.

• 1:14:54David Pierce?

  We've talked a few times because sometimes I, I berate him into trying to give me his Twitter. Very nice guy, but please, everyone berate him into giving me his Twitter handle. Thank you.

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  Chris Ziegler is as the power. I am at backlon and, uh, there's a really good story behind that, which I'd love to tell you sometime. Uh, but until I do, uh, this weekend, your family, keep Josh away from him.