HQ, selfie authentication, and solar panels turning air into water

Let get this out of the way: Nilay and Dieter are not on the show this week. But really, we’ve got a great show hosted by Verge podcast professionals Lauren Goode and Casey Newton. Oh and Paul is still here, too! So what are we talking about on the show today? Well, a lot. Lauren, Casey, and Paul analyze the news that was at the top of the site this week, including a glitch that left American Airlines without pilots during the week of Christmas; a rundown of the new trivia app HQ; and the reveal of the man who deactivated Trump’s Twitter account briefly a few weeks ago. Also, Lauren gives us a closer look into the newest episode of her video series Next Level, which deals with solar panels that turn air into drinking water. There’s a whole lot in between that, like Paul’s weekly segment “Whiskey pods? No.” So, listen to it all, and you know what? You’ll get it all. 02:56 - Google might merge back with Nest to make more smart home products 10:23 - The man who deactivated Trump’s Twitter account has revealed himself 17:35 - HQ 25:35 - Facebook uses selfies as login authentication for suspicious activity 29:02 - Verge holiday book recommendations 32:00 - ‘Only a few hundred’ American Airlines flights still lack pilots after massive computer glitch 34:27 - Inside the decade-long fight to expose Morgan Marquis-Boire 38:53 - Next Level season 2 episode 3 52:07 - Paul’s weekly segment “Whiskey pods? No.” 55:56 - Amazon unveils $250 AI camera and machine learning tools for businesses 1:04:50 - Is now a good time to buy a new phone / laptop / TV? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Simple Human. Day-to-day life has room for improvement. That's the basic thinking behind Simple Human. Their goal is to improve the way people go about day-to-day tasks, one innovative product at a time. They offer product solutions across a wide spectrum of home needs, including superbly well-lit vanity mirrors and touch-free sensor soap pumps. Now, Simple Human has introduced another dimension of ease and efficiency for your life with their sensor trash can with voice control. Finally, the voice-activated sensor can allows for faster and easier access to the trash when life gets a little messy.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  So, you can visit simplehuman.com to purchase your sensor can with voice. Enter VERGE at checkout to receive 15% off any sensor cans with voice. Again, use the promo code VERGE at simplehuman.com for a discount on your own voice-controlled sensor can.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast. I'm Lauren Good, and that was my not very good impression of Neelai Patel, who happens to be out this week along with Dieter Bone. So, I'm very excited because I'm joined by Paul Miller and Casey Newton.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Hello.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Hi, Lauren.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Hi, guys. You should say hi to Paul, too.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Hey, Paul.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Just to be nice.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  Hey, Casey. This is going really well, and it's gonna be a really great show. I'm very excited.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  You know, this is like the insane taking over the asylum, and I'm quite excited about it.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Now, this is perfect because, Lauren, you do a podcast. You're like a professional at this. Casey, you're starting a podcast. You're like an amateur about to go pro.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  And I am frequently on the show, so I should know what I'm doing.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Paul, you are a pro.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  I think between the three of us...

• 1:57Speaker 02

  This is your moment, Paul.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Like, this is what it's all been building to for you, is you've finally sort of overthrown your masters, and now you get to create the Vergecast of your dreams.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  That's right. It's all about...

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Robots.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  That's right. And I'll just say that in lieu of scissor vodka ads during the show, we will instead be promoting our own podcasts.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  But rest assured, listeners, there will be lots of promotion during the show.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  There will be indeed, read by Paul, about trash cans.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Speaking of trash, let's see what's in the news this week.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been a great week for news. And by great, I mean not great at all. We work in the news, so we're obliged to write it and follow it and be immersed in it. For everyone else out there who's listening, who isn't required by their job to follow the news, but just has it in their face all the time. Anyway, I'm sorry. We are going to get started. Let's start with, this is probably not the biggest news we're going to discuss today, but I'm intrigued by it. Google and Nest. There was a report in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday that said it was likely that Nest was going to be merged back with Google, back into Google, I should say, and that all the people who've been

• 3:13Speaker 01

  working on Nest products will then effectively be working on Google's smart home products. And this is all part of a larger initiative for Google to basically compete with Amazon. And earlier today, I called this the tech news that will surprise nobody. Casey, what's your take on it?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  I think this is long overdue. I think it's been unclear why Google had a separate hardware division from Nest. They spent $3 billion on Nest and then continued to develop their own home IoT hardware independently. And the result of that was a lot of lost time. The history of the Nest acquisition has been one of near total underperformance. They had the botched acquisition of Dropcam. It took them years to get out a second product after the initial thermostat. They had tons of problems with their first fire detector, fire alarm. And so it's just been sort of nothing but problems over there. And I tweeted

• 4:12Speaker 02

  about it today, and, you know, some employees were sort of messaging me saying, listen, that's all in the past. We're in much better shape now. And, you know, I don't know, maybe they are. But, you know, you look at what Amazon is doing in the home, how far along they are with Alexa, how long it took Google to get home out the door. And it makes a lot of sense that they would want to just kind of get everyone together in one room and have that be the hardware IoT room.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  I'm sure there was tension. Like, I don't know specific stories about it, but generally speaking, when you have a rival camp set up in a company to do the same thing, there's going to be tensions over resources and all kinds of other things. So, yeah, it was always going to be a recipe for competition. And by the way, this isn't totally unusual at Google, right? You look at the fact that they have Google Play Music and also YouTube Music, which are different apps that do the same thing, because YouTube is sort of allowed to be quasi-independent, even though it winds up competing with Google's own services. So there are just a handful of those spots in the company where I think Google would benefit from a more streamlined approach.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  And correct me if I'm wrong, but when Google first acquired Nest, Google was Google, right? That was, wasn't that pre-Alphabet? So if I remember correctly, then when Alphabet happened and Google created this, this sort of new corporate structure, and then it, it, you know, cast Google and Nest into completely separate entities, I think at that point, it was like, well, why is this happening, right? I mean, you have Google, which is this behemoth, and then you have this much, much smaller entity that is making the same kind of products that Google is starting to get into. And I think from a software perspective, it actually makes more sense. I mean, hardware is hardware, right? But what matters more is the software that it's running on. So Nest has its own software, it has Nest Aware,

• 6:02Speaker 01

  the subscription service, it has, works with Nest Platform, which works with all these third-party apps and stuff like that. The more Google gets into that, I mean, everybody uses Google software in some way, right? So it just seems like it would be impossible for Nest to really build that software product out on its own.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, Google bought Nest in February of 2014. Google became Alphabet in 2016, and Google's Nest acquisition was widely viewed as a failure in 2016.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  And there you have it.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Do you guys use Nest products?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  I have a thermostat in my home that was pre-installed before I got there and it seems fine, although not super intuitive. It's a first generation product. So I have no objection to it, but nor am I racing to buy additional Nest products for my life.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Paul, do you use it?

• 6:56Speaker 00

  No. Now, my thermostat right now is, my room is really cold, but the rest of my apartment is really warm. So if I get too cold, I go into the living room.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  That's incredibly high tech.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's my current level of automation.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Paul's like, I have a blink.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  That's why I want like robots, you know, not just thermostats, but a robot could pick me up out of my bed, bring me to the living room where I could be warm. You know what I mean?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Or what if the robot could just blast heat at you, like out of a, some sort of chest-based furnace?

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Like a low, a low-grade flamethrower.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  That would be great.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  They're probably working on that, realistically.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  I hope so.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  I have a Nest camera and I have to say my favorite feature of the Nest cam, which I don't use all the time, but I do use when I'm not home, like when I'm like away, away, is the fact that it has a microphone. So I can, you know, theoretically, like if I had a cat, like theoretically I could talk to it when I was away.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  And just give it instructions that would confuse it?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Come give me a hug.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  You mean a speaker? You can like talk out of the camera?

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Oh, excuse me. Well, yeah, it goes both ways. You are correct. Hi, I am a tech reporter. I meant the speaker, correct. So you can speak outwards, which is, which is kind of fun. And I mean, I think that's like, there are worst-case scenarios where you, you get a notification and there's some movement in your home and you look and there's a person who's not supposed to be there and you could like scare them and be like, hey, like I'm calling the police or whatever you need to do. And then there's, there's the really benign sweet feature of like talking to your pets or your kids.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Have you ever gotten a push notification that seemed scary and then you looked into it and it was totally fine? Or it was actually scary?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have. Well, I, no, no, none that were, actually were scary, knock on wood. But I've gotten notifications that it would be in, maybe an odd time of the night, or really, really early in the morning. And, uh, and so I'll look and it, it'll just be like literally a shadow appearing because the light has changed and some, something has appeared in the frame that has triggered it. And so then I'm like, is there someone out there on the patio? And it's like a shadow, it's like a branch waving in the wind. Uh, and, and granted, their software has gotten better over time. So it's gotten much, much better at that kind of detection of different objects and things like that. And I think their outdoor camera is supposed to be really good at that stuff because it's an outdoor camera. Uh, but yeah, I've had like a few moments like that where, and then it's ended up being nothing.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I, I think what you're getting at is this is all just kind of commodity hardware. Like, does it matter if you buy a Nest Cam, or an Alexa Cam, or an Apple Cam? Like, it's all just sort of the same. And I think what was initially so promising about Nest was that they were going to bring this kind of tender love and care to these really unloved products around your house, like a thermostat, a fire alarm. And it just kind of feels like they went from that to eh, never mind, like, here's a drop cam. Like, but we're calling it a Nest Cam now. It's just, it's just super hard for me to get excited about it, or believe that the next generation of product leadership in home automation is going to come out of them. Cause I just think like structurally, it just seems really messed up.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  And their founder is, well, one of their founders is gone. The, the brand name founder is gone. Tony Fadell.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yes. He's working on go-karts.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  No, I don't, that was a while ago. He's working on a bunch of stuff, I'm sure. All right. Now that we've fully dissected Google and Nest for you, you're welcome, Nest. Let's move on to the next news, which to me is just the biggest news of the week, which is that we found out that Casey Nguyen was not in fact, the employee at Twitter who disabled, temporarily disabled President Trump's.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Was it you that started that rumor that I was behind that?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  You know, I just figured you have so many ins at the company and you know a lot of people there and you're very passionate about changes on Twitter, like.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  I, well, you know, for what it's worth, I am not part of the crew that says ban Trump from Twitter. Uh, and, and. There are many reasons, but like my biggest one is practical, which is, let's say he did get banned from Twitter and was unable to create a new account for himself ever. He would post somewhere else and someone would write a bot and that bot would immediately post whatever he said to Twitter. So all you would be doing is introducing a four-second delay in between Trump posting something somewhere and that something showing up on Twitter. So you can have all the arguments in the world for why you think Twitter should get rid of Trump. I have some colleagues who think that it would just be really funny and that's why Twitter should do it. But at the end of the day, you know, it's not going to make any difference with regard to the president using it as a platform.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  That said, somebody did actually deactivate Trump's Twitter account and this week we found out who it was. And the credit goes for this scoop to TechCrunch, who found the man, who is a German citizen, whose name I am unfortunately going to butcher. He is of, I believe, Turkish descent. That's what the TechCrunch article said. And his name is Batyar Dusak. And he was working for a staffing company, a third-party contractor called Pro Unlimited. And on his last day, he got a report that, from somebody who had reported the president's account for something. We don't know what. Now, here's where I have to become a little bit of a media critic.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  The TechCrunch story left a lot of really important questions unanswered. For example, they did not tell us what was the report that the contractor got. So we don't know, you know, what sort of spurred the initial action. Two, the contractor was very cagey about what actually happened. He has said it was a mistake, but he seems to be using that word not to suggest it was an accident. In other words, it was intentional and now he feels bad about it. But that just raises so many other questions, like, what did you think you were doing when you did this? Why did you do this? Was this politically motivated on your part?

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Are you sympathetic with those people who say that Trump should go? What's the deal? Like, when we first found out that this was a contractor on his last day who had done this, a lot of us thought this must be somebody who's really fed up with President Trump and wanted to just kind of give him the middle finger on his way out the door. And reading the TechCrunch article, that might be true, or it might not be true. He simply isn't saying, and they sort of didn't, they didn't write in the article what they had asked him that he would not answer, really, like, for the most part. So it does sort of remain a mystery. Now, I should say there are good reasons why he might want to leave some of this stuff somewhat vague. There has always been the potential that maybe the FBI would investigate. He's apparently safely back in Germany now.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I read that he, like, set the action in motion, walked away from his desk, 11 minutes later it happened, and, oh, by the way, he was going back to Germany soon.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Right. And, you know, he says he wants to live an ordinary life, and he doesn't want to be defined by this forever. And, you know, I'm sure there might be people out there who would wish him or his family harm, and so he wants to sort of say, hey, like, please forgive me, I did this thing. But, you know, if this was a story that you followed and just wanted to know more, you still don't know almost any of the answers to the questions that you have.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Except you do know that a contractor working for Twitter has the ability to shut down the Twitter account of the leader of the free world.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  That's a great point, yes. It's really very unsettling, and, you know, I have poked around on this, and people have suggested to me that there was a time when what the contractor did, it would have sort of been escalated to a supervisor for approval, essentially. That seems not to have happened in this case. Is it that the person responsible was, had quit Twitter, wasn't available? Like, we don't know. But it seems like there should have been some kind of secondary approval. It didn't happen here. Twitter won't comment on the specifics, but they say, we put new safeguards in place to ensure that this never happens again. And so I think we can assume that the next time a contractor flags the president's account, it will have a second layer of review before it gets suspended.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Paul, your take on this?

• 15:04Speaker 00

  I just love the way this article ends, Casey, your article about the TechCrunch article. "But I love Twitter," he told TechCrunch, "wearing a sweater emblazoned with the stars and stripes. And I love America." What more can you say?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  He comes across as a little cartoonish, but like in this really lovable way. There's a quote that he also said in the video where, like, in response to the question, "How did this happen?", he says, "I had a wild time in America." Which is such a-

• 15:33Speaker 00

  No kidding?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Which is such an amazing answer to that question. It was like, hey, you deleted, you suspended the president's Twitter. Like, what was all of that about? And he says, "You know, I had a wild time in America." As if this were just one of a handful of crazy hijinks that happened to him while he was abroad.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  I went to a Six Flags.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  He's like, "I ate a bunch of hot dogs."

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yep. Saw the Empire State Building. Suspended the president's Twitter.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  God, it must be so fun to just have that attitude and then be like, "Peace out." You know?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  We should make him stay for several more months. Well, Casey, I'm happy to know it wasn't you, just because I was worried about the FBI coming after you and then what would happen to us.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm always worried about the FBI coming after me, but when they finally catch up to me, I think it'll be about something else.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  But, but I'm glad to know this is at least partially resolved, even if there are still some holes in the reporting that has been done.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Yes. And worth saying that CNN also did an interview with him on Thursday, and he was equally unforthcoming. So I do suspect that TechCrunch asked him some questions that he just refused to respond to. He is keeping his cards close to the vest.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Let's move on to the next story, which I'm going to admit is another somewhat lighthearted story here. I heard that you guys talked a lot about net neutrality last week, and things have been pretty heavy lately, so we're lightening it up a little bit, but we are getting to more.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  And we're talking about news. This is really refreshing and interesting for me. We're coming up with like, like months of like, the biggest product just launched. Will Apple or Google still be relevant? And now it's just like, you know, everybody's really actually on vacation until January.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and trust me, there's going to be plenty, plenty more time for reporting on the bigger stories of the day like net neutrality, the influence of social media and elections, sexual harassment and tech and other industries. So, uh, but for now, I want to talk about HQ. Uh, Taylor Lorenz from the Daily Beast wrote this fantastic article, I think it was earlier this week, uh, might've been late last week, about how she went to go profile the host of this new, uh, game show slash trivia app, HQ. Uh, she spoke to this host, he's kind of, he's blown up in popularity and she spoke to him and he said all these very nice benign things. And then when she went to go cross check that with the press team at HQ, they kind of lost their minds.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Uh, they were shouting on the phone and they, they said this guy couldn't say what his favorite salad chain was. I mean, it's, it's a great story, but let's back up the bus a little bit. Casey, you've been playing HQ. Tell us about it. Have you won yet?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  I have won. Uh, I cheated a little bit because I had an extra life, uh, because if you share your promo code, uh, and, and somebody signs up with the app, then you get an extra life. And so if you miss a question, then you get to come back into the game, uh, but you only get one extra life per attempt. So on one of these attempts, I missed one question, got back in the game, answered the rest successfully and for my labors, won a dollar and 26 cents. Uh, if you haven't played HQ, it's very simple. You sign up, uh, download it. It's currently on iOS only. I guess that's a keynote, although presumably Android is forthcoming. Every day at 3:00 PM and 9:00 PM Eastern, you get a push notification on your phone. You open it up, there's a host and the host does a little quiz show and he or she asks 10 questions, I'm sorry, 12 questions.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Uh, they're all multiple choice questions. There are three choices for every answer. It starts out really easy, but it gets hard in a hurry. And if you answer all 12, then you get to share in the winnings. So a typical pot for them would be a thousand dollars, but as the games got more popular... I think they've done up to $8,000 now. So some people are winning 30, 40 bucks a pop. And of course, even if you lose, it's such a brilliant idea because everyone thinks that they can answer 12 questions in a row. Like, it's just achievable enough. You will lose almost every single time, but you might win once or twice, and it's kind of enough to keep you going. They ask about everything under the sun, from grammar, to sports, to movies, to music, to geography, sort of everything that you would expect to hear on Jeopardy.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  But they've sort of boiled it down into this really fun format. Every game takes like 12 or 15 minutes to play, and it's a lot of fun. And we've written about it, a lot of others have written about it. And then after Taylor wrote her piece about it, it kind of blew up even more, because what her piece was about was that one of the hosts of the game, Scott Rogowski, is now the face of it, and in some ways is becoming as popular as the game itself. And so it's gotten a little bit out of control, and the people who are working at HQ are clearly going a little bit insane as their app becomes much more popular.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, what amazed me from Taylor's story is that this guy Scott, I mean, he's getting recognized when he's at the ATM. People were dressing up for him as Halloween. He's legitimately become a sort of app celebrity or Insta-celebrity. What's surprising to me most, I think, about the popularity of the HQ app, which admittedly I've not played yet, is that in general, like in the world of digital media and our app experiences today, we're not very good at appointment stuff. I mean, we want everything when we want it. There are algorithms that are tweaked to cater to our need to watch things, or view things, or look at photos, or whatever, when we want to do it, when we have the time. And this is actual appointment participation. This is like two times a day, people have,

• 21:06Speaker 01

  right? It's two times a day. People have to be on their apps at a certain time, in a specific time zone, to do this thing collectively. And I just think that's kind of cool.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there hasn't really been appointment viewing on the phone before, right? Like, you know, in high school, I would race home to watch Seinfeld on Thursday nights. That hasn't happened in either the desktop era or the mobile era until now. And so I do like the idea that you're going to be primed to open up your phone at a given time for something that is just really wholesome and fun, and could make you a tiny, tiny bit of money.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Paul, have you played yet?

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I, the first day I played, Ashley wanted to get that extra life. So she, so I signed up with her promo code and then we played that day. And that was the same day that all of this blew up. So I like played a normal game and then I tuned in that night. He came, he came, they like, the show was like delayed for like inexplicably for a half an hour. It's like, oh, he's just dead. Like he's been murdered by his CEO. And then he comes on and he, I mean, to his credit, like, I mean, because the whole point is he's basically a stand up comedian doing this quiz show. And like he riffed on the, the whole idea of, um, this is horrible, terrible PR day.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  I think he said some joke, like if you, if you like, answer all the questions correctly, you maybe have enough money to hire a good PR firm.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  But it was, but I, I kind of wonder this disappointment viewing thing, like, you know, I've been obsessed with Twitch for a long time. And then, you know, obviously live streaming went mobile over the past like three or four years. Um, with like, uh, you know, Periscope and stuff like that. But like, this is one of the first live stream interactive, even on Twitch, there's very few actually interactive things. Other than like, you know, your, the streamer gets notifications when you like it, or, you know, the streamers are talking to comments and stuff. But this is an actual game that's interactive and combining video streaming. But I just kind of wonder how, how much room is there for, for more of these?

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Cause like, I'm not bothered by this push notification that I get twice a day from HQ because that's the only one. But what if there were like five popular live stream shows? And like throughout the day, I'm getting push notifications that they're going live. Like, I feel like I'd give up really quickly.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you have to, you probably have to pick. I mean, you know, some people watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy and some people just watch Jeopardy and you get to decide which of those people you are. I do expect there will be copycats that try out other formats and in fact, I think something HQ should do is launch a second and a third show that were slightly different, but use the same mechanics and try to figure out, you know, is there another kind of game show that we could do that would be even more popular. But man, you can just sort of imagine them becoming a mobile game show network and that kind of had this mass participation. And I think it could be really fun. So, you know, I don't know. I was, I went to a dinner last night and was talking to some venture capitalists who have looked at HQ and they were kind of saying they're, they're playing

• 24:15Speaker 02

  a wait and see approach because this feels like the kind of thing that could just be a fad and that a month from now, we might all be getting tired of these notifications. And so, you know, maybe it's just going to kind of come and go. But I don't know if I'm ready to give up on it yet. I still feel like there are a lot of things that they could do. And I would absolutely expect that you'll see something similar from a Facebook or a Snapchat sometime in the next year.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Well, I could totally see one specific show being a fad, but I really think this format is very compelling. I don't think this format is a fad.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. I mean, the show itself might be a fad, but the idea of playing fun games on your phone, like, you know, the last fun game on our phone that everybody played was Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go was orders of magnitude bigger than HQ, right? Somebody told me last night, it was like 500 million downloads or something like that. HQ isn't nearly on that level. But man, if you can kind of capture lightning in a bottle, find the right format, it can get super popular in a hurry. And so I agree with you, Paul. I think we're definitely going to see more stuff like this.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  I think we're going to see stuff like this on our Peloton bikes while we're living in some Black Mirror future.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Sure. I mean, listen, whatever helps you get more value out of your $2,000 stationary bike.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  They're making a treadmill, did you see?

• 25:27Speaker 02

  I've heard that. It'll probably be $8,000.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Can't wait to try it at CES. Facebook, let's talk about Facebook. Should we talk about Facebook's influence in the election as we've been doing for the past several weeks? Or should we talk about Facebook's using your selfies to verify your identity? Uh, let's talk about the latter.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, I, somebody else has to explain to me what's interesting about this story. Like, I use my face to log into my iPhone now, so I don't know why it seems interesting that I would log into Facebook with my actual face.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is not entirely new. I mean, there are other types of biometric authentication systems already in place. What's funny to me about this story is just that, you know, inevitably, there's going to be some backlash to people, the idea of people having to upload their faces to Facebook for identity verification. Like, we don't upload our faces to Facebook 17 times a day already. Like, "Oh, I don't know, my privacy." Well, you just shared an Instagram story for the 20th time.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Well, that's really, like, I don't know if I'm beating up a straw man here because maybe nobody actually felt this way, but there did seem to be this hint of a reaction, like, "Can you believe those guys at Facebook asking me to upload my face to them? I'm not gonna let them see my face." That's, that's, that's exactly what they want, and I'm not gonna give them the satisfaction." It's like, calm down, they have your face. They have so much of your face. They have, yeah, they have a 3D depth map of your face, and they will, like...

• 26:56Speaker 00

  So, apparently, this is for suspicious activity. It's not gonna be used, at least, Facebook is saying, this isn't gonna be used for, like, regular logins. But as someone who is very tired of switching apps to my two-factor authenticator app all the time, I would be, I'd be very happy to use my face as, as a second factor.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, faces are not spoof-proof. Uh, they can definitely be, be hacked, and, and people have shown that. But, but I think we do have all of these two-step and two-factor authentication methods right now for verifying our identities. Once you kind of go in, go over into the dark world of biometrics, it's really, it's really hard to go back. And I think as the tech industry moves more and more towards this idea of, like, a federated identity that exists in some way, um, this, to me, seems like it's the next obvious step.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Gang, let, let me pitch you on an idea. Uh, you've heard of two-factor authentication. Let me tell you about two-face authentication, and here's what I mean. You're able to log into your phone with your face, but if you want to log into Facebook, you have to upload a second face of your choosing. So you designate a second face, preferably the face of somebody who's always around you, like maybe the person who sits next to you at work, or a partner, a loved one, family member. And only if you upload an accurate representation of their face, can you then get into your own account. Is that the future of security?

• 28:20Speaker 00

  Do you have-

• 28:21Speaker 02

  I will quit my job to start this company.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Do you have to flip a coin to decide which face?

• 28:26Speaker 02

  I think that could be part of it. I mean, I'm open to suggestions on the product roadmap.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  What if, what if, what if, the first time you logged in, you had to use your face? And the second time you logged in, you had to use a book. And you had to carry that book-

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  -with you everywhere you went.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  To Facebook authentication.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  And that would promote literacy.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  And books.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Which is what this podcast is all about.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  We're gonna, we're gonna get into some of our favorite books later in the show, and also do some reading exercises that you can do with children.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Are you reading any books right now?

• 29:04Speaker 02

  I'm reading a great, it's a sci-fi book, and it was recommended to me from Twitter folks over the summer when I was asking for books to read, and it's called The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  How is it?

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm really enjoying it so far. It is about a person who, every time he dies, he wakes up again at the beginning of his life, and he is like trapped in an endless loop. So-

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Does he wake up as a baby?

• 29:24Speaker 02

  He does. He wakes up as a baby, and like, as he matures, like, he sort of like gains access to more and more of his memories. But it's a really kind of fun fantasy, because he has a photographic memory, so he remembers everything from previous lives. So in one life, he learns everything he can about science, and then in the next life, he learns everything he can about religion. And sort of like with every life, he just tries to learn more and more and more, which, you know, if you've ever like looked at a library and thought, I wish I could just read all of these books, like, this book will resonate with you.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  That sounds lovely. Paul, are you reading anything right now?

• 29:55Speaker 00

  I'm reading, um, was it Somebody's Cathedral? Let me look, let me look.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Who's cathedral is it?

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Here's the thing, is like, I don't read. Turing's Cathedral.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  By George Dyson. And he's, he's talking about von Neumann, who had apparently, you know, all, almost all computers nowadays use the von Neumann architecture.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Von Neumann was also involved with like the atomic bomb. Von Neumann had a photographic memory. Also apparently had a large head and he liked to drive cars very fast.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Large heads are one of our biggest problems with two face authentication is when the head doesn't fit in the frame. Be a real problem.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  That's why you need a book.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Lauren, any book recs?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Well, so I've been on the road a lot lately for this next level series, this video series I've been doing. And my reading habits have been interrupted as a result. But I was trying to read Silent Spring, which is a 1960s book by Rachel Carson about our use of pesticides. And it's like, it's a tome, it's academic, it's a tough one, not gonna lie, but I'm interested in that topic. I did recently read Barbarian Days. It's a book about surfing. It's a, it's a, an autobiography about.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  William Finnegan.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you. It was, it's fantastic. It's a really, really good read. It won a Pulitzer Prize and I thoroughly enjoyed that because he was surfing. I don't know, this was decades ago when he first picked up surfing and he used it as a way to sort of see the world and experienced life through the lens of surfing as he was coming up as writer. And a lot of the places he discovered and waves he discovered were previously undiscovered because people didn't have apps to just look up forecasts and where things were happening. And he met a lot of interesting people along the way and it's just, it's a very, very good book.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  So there you have it. Those, that's the Vergecast holiday book recommendations.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, give it a whirl.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Good gift ideas.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  When you, uh.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  For friends and family.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  When you're tired of talking to your family or Alexa, just read, just read, read a book. I have, we have a couple more things to get through quickly before we take a quick break for an ad. But this might be one of my favorite stories of this week. American Airlines, a glitch in American Airlines' computer system somehow allowed their pilots to all simultaneously take Christmas week off, resulting in thousands of flights unstaffed, unpiloted for the week of Christmas. They had to double back and figure out the glitch, of course, but offer people time and a half to volunteer to fly during this week. They say they've got the problem somewhat solved at this point, but man.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Talk about not a very merry Christmas.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  It's just the best. Like, you know, you imagine them logging into whatever horrible portal that Oracle built for them in like 1993 so that they can request Christmas off. And they all get emails, thousands of pilots, saying, "Congratulations, you get Christmas off this year." And they go home and they tell their loved ones, "Honey, I know I haven't been home for Christmas in 17 years, but their request got approved." And they all start crying. "This is the one." They make all these huge plans. And then administratorbot.exe emails them saying, "Dear employee number 571, due to an error error in serverbot9000,

• 33:15Speaker 02

  you have to fly to Shanghai on Christmas." And that happened like 18,000 times.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yes. They probably just gave them a nice lamp or something. It's probably like a leg lamp that they gave them as compensation.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  That's crazy. Just like imagine feeling sympathy for major airline employees, you know, after what they've done to us. And yet, here I am. Here I am.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  I love it when stores are open on Christmas or Thanksgiving, but also feels just so terrible.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. Like, you've got a tip bit. If you get coffee on Christmas, like, you gotta leave $5. Like, you just have to.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to glorify what we do, but it's kind of like the news business, too, when you're sitting at home with your family on a holiday and everyone's watching the TV and you see like broadcasters working a basketball game, or you're just watching some show. You're like, well, someone's there in the studio or on the field or doing what they do, along with 150 crew members. So, yeah, you know, people work the holidays. And apparently, American Airlines pilots are going to be working them, too. But that means that people get to go home for Christmas or whatever holiday they may celebrate. So that's a nice thing.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a Christmas miracle.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Before we move on to the next segment, I do want to give a shout out to a very big story that ran in The Verge this week. Chloe Ann King reported, this is a follow-up report that The Verge did about a well-known security researcher who has been accused of some pretty serious stuff, violent sexual assaults throughout the community. And it's all coming to light now, and it's another big story in a series of reporting that we have been doing about sexual harassment in the technology industry. It's fair warning, it is a very explicit story, and it's violent, so it might be very upsetting for some people, but if you are inclined, I recommend that you go read it,

• 35:11Speaker 01

  and it's a very important topic. And it's really, honestly, it's not a topic that's going away anytime soon. We also reported earlier this week, based on reporting from The Information, full credit to The Information, Andy Rubin stepped back from Essential, the new hardware startup that he recently founded, because of some apparent misconduct that may have happened at his previous employer, Google. And, yeah, this stuff just, it just keeps on coming, and we are attuned to it.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. Dieter tweeted something that really resonated with me. It's like, you know, multiple times this week, I walk up to a group of people, and I just say the name of a famous, well-respected man, and everybody knows what I'm talking about.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm glad this stuff is coming out, but man, it is wild.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  It is. There was, of course, the Matt Lauer announcement earlier this week. There are obviously members of our government that have come under fire recently, and some of them, it seems, for a good reason. And let me just state, too, that This is not fun for anybody. I mean, this is not fun for the women who have come out after sometimes years of harboring these experiences and are now going on the record or speaking to lawyers or talking about what happened to them. And, you know, maybe in some ways, people think, oh, it's like some type of vindication. And it's not fun for anybody. It's not fun for the women who have to speak out about this.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  And it's sure not fun for a lot of women who are reading about it and are recollecting their own experiences as well. So, but we're staying on it. So, keep coming to theverge.com to read more about that. And I think we're going to take a break.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  This week's episode of The Verge Cast is brought to you by Squarespace. They did it again. Okay, I'm going to tell you a story about how I use Squarespace that I think everybody should know about, and I don't think I've told it before. I hang out with some friends and they've got business, right? And their business had a WordPress site and it was broken and they said, Paul, can you fix our WordPress? And I told them, I don't F-word with WordPress, except I didn't, I really said it. And, um, because it's just complicated. I don't like PHP and databases and stuff like that. But I told them I would make them a new website from scratch with Squarespace if they would

• 37:48Speaker 00

  give me a chair so that when I'm at their place, I can just sit in a really comfortable chair. So, they bought me a super comfortable chair and all I did was made a website with Squarespace. And let me tell you who got the better end of the deal. That was me because it's really easy to make a website with Squarespace. So, you can go to Squarespace.com for a free trial. When you're ready to launch your website, that's very easy to make with Squarespace, use the offer code VERGE to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. It's Squarespace.com, offer code VERGE. Now, I'm going to tell you the other things about Squarespace that I'm supposed to tell you instead of telling you about a story about how I got a free chair. Beautiful templates created by world-class designers.

• 38:31Speaker 00

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• 38:53Speaker 02

  Welcome back to the Renegade Vergecast. We have stolen the microphones and the means of, we have seized the means of production and distribution and we get to do what the heck we want with this podcast. And what I'd like to do is to talk to Lauren Good about her amazing series, Next Level, which is back for its second season. And I just watched an episode that you did that felt, it looks like magic. It feels a little too good to be true because there's a company making solar panels that turns air into water. So tell us about what the heck this is.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  I'm happy to tell you about what the, I'm gonna, happy to try to explain it because I am not a material science expert. So we talked to this company in Arizona called Zero Mass. They have been working on this technology for the past six years, but just very recently, the stuff they've been working on became more widely available to consumers. We headed down to Scottsdale to their headquarters. It's kind of a cool headquarters. They're, they're, they've actually taken over an old car dealership. So you drive up and it's like Volvo, except they're making, they're producing water. And what they're doing is they're using this, what they say is a proprietary porous material to absorb moisture from the air.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  And then they're using sunlight to heat that back up and effectively start a condensation process that then produces, produces water. That water is then, you know, goes through a filtration system. It goes through a mineral block to add things like calcium, magnesium, you know, set the, balance the pH. And it's effectively potable water. But the interesting thing about it is that all of this is happening in a standalone sort of solar panel system. So there are no wires involved. They claim it's a very sustainable solution to getting drinking water from the air. I mean, look, like we all know that water exists in the air. It's in the atmosphere to actually pull it out of the air and make it drinkable.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Is the process and like in a lot of ways we've all experienced that happened before with our air conditioners. If you've used an air conditioner, you know that you you plug it in, you start the air conditioner, you get cool air and then a byproduct of that is the condensation that forms in the air conditioner. But that happens through electricity. And in this case, they're saying here are these totally self-contained, sustainable panels that you'd set up on your roof or you'd set up in an area where there's a problem, you know, with access to water. And then it's like this totally self-contained thing that produces water. That's their pitch.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Which is amazing. Is that was there a particular breakthrough that enabled them to do this now?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. My understanding is that a lot of it has to do with the materials science. So the CEO, the founder and CEO, this guy Cody Friesen, he is a material science and engineering expert who had been teaching at Arizona State University and started to develop this while he was teaching there in the labs. There are others who have worked on this. There's a company, I believe, in Dallas that's been doing this. UC Berkeley is working on what they call a metal oxide framework, but that's a fancy way of saying like a material and contraption that could absorb moisture from the air. It really seems like it all comes down to this material that is going to absorb moisture from the air. And then the other processes are things that it seems like anyone

• 42:11Speaker 01

  can really do. Like a solar panel is not a new thing. Standard, you know, photovoltaic technology has been around for a while. Having some type of like mineral block that makes your water drinkable or purifies it in some way, not a new thing. So it seems like all of the players in this space that are trying to make this work. First, they're going to have to, you know, come up with a material that makes it happen. But then second, they're just going to have to package it and sell it in a way that makes sense. So I think this is the sort of thing like to answer your question that they've just been working on for a really long time. They have the materials, they had all the parts in place, and now they're just like, okay, we're ready to try to sell this thing. We've been piloting it for a couple of years now. We're ready to try to sell it to average consumers.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  So let's say I've lost all access to water and I need my several liters of water a day. My, I think it's five liters, you said, you can get from one of these in a day. How much is one of these going to set me back?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  It is $2,000 per panel, but they're selling them in two panel arrays. So you end up paying $4,000 for the panels and $500 for an installation. $4,500 for what amounts to, on average, they claim of five to 10 liters of water per day. Now, that, depending on how much bottled water you drink, or how much you may already be paying for processes like reverse osmosis, or filtration, or whatever it is, that may work out to be not a bad deal. But we also spoke to this professor, his name's Dr. Ashok Gadgill. He's at UC Berkeley, and he is this water expert. And he's considered a rock star in the world of water, because in the 90s, he developed this UV light system for purifying water.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  And he's really, his inventions have really impacted people, especially in developing markets. And he, he didn't want to speak about zero mass specifically and what they're doing, but he sort of, he expressed enough skepticism about the business model of it to make me think twice. Like, he, he said, you know, I still think that it's more, I'm paraphrasing, but I still think it's more cost efficient to think about conserving water, or purifying water. Of course, he's, he's an expert in purifying water, right? As opposed to paying upfront for these panels that are going to harvest water from the air.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. My, my impression of what he said was like, we'd be better off having municipalities and other sort of, you know, large systems figure out ways to reclaim water than asking consumers to pay $4,500 to make their own. But that also, yes, this technology does work. But what I wondered was, how fast can the cost of this come down? And like, what are the charity implications? Is this something that the Gates Foundation might say, you know what, we're gonna just like buy 100,000 of these panels and like, put them all over like Africa, or Southeast Asia, or other places where they may have trouble with access to water?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Right, that's a really good question. In fact, I believe Cody Friesen, the CEO, was at one point a Clinton Global Initiative Fellow, and this project was somehow connected with that.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Right now, their answer is that if you're an average consumer and you're living in a developed market and you want these panels, you're going to end up paying that $4,500 out of pockets. When they go to a place, they claimed that after Maria hit Puerto Rico, they went and set up panels there. In that case, you're either a donor is sponsoring it, you know, giving money to have it set up, or you're working with a multilateral institution there that is able to somehow support the funding of it. It seems as though the only way this would ever really be go totally mainstream, and especially in developing markets or areas where people are going through some type of disaster, would have to be with some type of subsidy or donor support.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  So it seems like if that's the route they want to take, then yes, they would likely have to partner with some major organization that has the funding to make that happen. But the reality is also that they may end up being a product that mostly wealthy people get for their nice homes in Santa Barbara, or they, or frankly, like, they could, I mean, they could be selling to preppers, for all we know, you know, people who are just like, "I really want that water off the grid."

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Preppers makes sense. I mean, when I'm just like thinking about the business that this company is in, it strikes me that the only customers who can afford their product don't need it because they already have running water, right? So, you know, like, if you're a rich person, you have a beautiful house, you know, also, like, no, no offense, but the panels are kind of ugly, right? I mean, they're like these giant, like, contraptions that look like they take up a lot of space, too. So you sort of need like a pretty big roof to accommodate these suckers. You know, if you're a rich person, you might not want to put those on your roof when, again, you just turn a faucet and as many liters of water as you want come out.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Right. Well, one of the, one of the homeowners we visited down in Scottsdale who had these, who had these set up, it was kind of interesting, we asked to speak to early testers, and it turned out that, like, Either they weren't available, or they were investors or friends of the company. So it was like really hard to get a truly objective view on this from early testers. But one of the early testers we did speak to was a friend of the company. And he and his wife had had these panels set up on their roof for a while. And people down in this area, the Scottsdale Phoenix area, kept saying to me like, "The water here is not very good." People are already paying for expensive filtration systems or ARO, reverse osmosis, going on because there are concerns about contaminants in the tap water.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  So it's funny because you think about just like developed markets, nice homes. You know, think about these like communities of beautiful homes, like the ones we saw there. And you're like, "Oh, they don't have problems with water." But in reality, they might. Or you think about a place like Flint, Michigan, where obviously they've had serious water problems over the past couple of years that have not been adequately addressed by the government that is supposed to be supporting them. And like, you think, okay, well, there are places here in America that you wouldn't normally think of that where people may still have a need for cleaner water. So, um, yeah, it's like when I asked them, "Who's this for? And who are you best going to serve?" The answer was kind of all of the above, which is, "Well, okay, I'm not really sure. I think we'll still see."

• 48:16Speaker 01

  First of all, if the technology is viable, if it's economical, and if so, who's going to end up buying it? That still all has to shake itself out. So we are somewhat skeptical about that. But also, I don't think it's fair to say like, "Well, if you're in a somewhat wealthier developed market, you don't need the water."

• 48:32Speaker 02

  True. Although I feel like I need to speak up in defense of Scottsdale Water, since I lived there for two years. And Scottsdale Water is like really great, at least when I was there. I mean, this was like 2004 to 2006. So maybe something like terrible has gone awry since then. But I used to write about that city. And so I've like toured their water filtration systems.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  It's, you know, it's a rich city. And so they have a lot of money to put into infrastructure. So it's strange to me to hear that there are people there who are worried about contaminants. But I don't know, I'll have to read up on that.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  I hope it's okay.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  It's no Flint, Michigan, I'll say that, yeah.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  I have one question from the video.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  It's like every panel's connected to the internet? Is that required for water creation? Or is that just for their data gathering to improve it or something?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  That's for their data gathering. That's a good question. Yeah, they want each panel ideally to be speaking to each other. So that if one panel, for whatever reason, isn't producing an optimal amount of water, it could effectively communicate that to a panel nearby. They also want all of that data sent back to their network operations center so they can monitor remotely how each panel is doing. And they monitor things like climate changes and stuff like that that could impact the output. I mean, one area we did not really dive into because we simply didn't have the time was like, oh, that's interesting. Let's say you have an internet-connected thing. You effectively have an internet of things item like plunked down in the middle

• 49:58Speaker 01

  of somewhere where people may not be aware that it's internet-connected or could potentially be vulnerable in some way. But yeah, they are supposed to be connected.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Maybe Nest can get into this next.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  [laughing]

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Lori, if people want to watch this video, we're thinking, check it out.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Then go to theverge.com. Go to YouTube, youtube.com/theverge, and you can find all of our episodes of Next Level there. You can also go to theverge.com. You can go to Facebook where we're putting alternate cuts of the episodes on Facebook. And we have one more episode coming up for the season. It's going to be airing next week. And I don't want to spoil it too much, but it's going to be really cool.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Nice. And by the way, you should check out every cut of Next Cut and then let us know which one you preferred in the comments.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  That would be

• 50:43Speaker 02

  And with that, I think it might be time to take another break.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  This episode of The Verge Cast was also brought to you by The Number Eight. Actually, it's a company. E-I-G-H-T, like the number, but it's for mattresses. So have you noticed how many mattress companies there are recently? So many. But one company is different. It's called Eight. Eight is smart. It's the iPhone compared to the flip phone. Unlike its foam counterparts, the Eight Smart mattress is an innovative bed that uses real technology to help people sleep better and live healthier. By sleeping on Eight, you can discover how many hours of sleep you need each night to feel energized. You can also optimize your

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• 52:12Speaker 00

  This is the part of the Vergecast Casey and Lauren might not be familiar with, but every week I do a segment and it always has the same name. And it's called Whiskey Pods? No, so I was really excited this week to learn about this Jim Beam. How do you say that? Jim Beam? I always thought it was Jim Bean. It's no, it's Jim, Jim Beam. But you should definitely say Jim Beam.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  It's Jim BM.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  Jim Beam. Beam is a, so it's a, it's the world's first intelligent bourbon decanter. Which is basically, yeah, it's a voice controlled bourbon decanter. It kind of looks like an actual just total prank, but they're selling it for $35. I was hoping this was whiskey pods and that they would sell some sort of proprietary Jim Beam pod that was, you know, only compatible with their voice activated decanter. But it turns out you could just pour any bourbon into this or probably any liquid. But be careful.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  And yeah, it's a, it's a voice assistant named Jim, which is voiced by someone named Fred. So playing, playing the role of Jim is Fred? Fred, Fred is a master distiller at Jim Beam. And he's real smarmy. He, he won't actually tell you the weather or really any information. But if you ask it to ask him to pour some whiskey, he will. And yeah, so no whiskey pods. We got really close though, and I really appreciate this sort of. Jokes, joke products that are real.

• 54:12Speaker 02

  I almost don't know where to begin on it. So all it does for your $35 is just pour your whiskey for you?

• 54:17Speaker 00

  And, and say sort of like southern witticisms.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  So such as what?

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Just like folksy, homespun wisdom.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  It's like, it's like, you know, if you ask me what the weather is, it's like, well, I have no idea, but it's always good. It's always the correct weather to drink bourbon.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  You know, that classic southern.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  The only thing I like about this is that whenever we pay for something that's internet connected or supposed to be intelligent and it's really expensive and only provides like a minimal service. Everyone's like, for that price, I wish it would just pour me a drink. This actually does. So I appreciate it for that.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  This, it's got built in 3G service to power the voice recognition, but your, your 3G contract runs out after six months. And then it just doesn't work anymore. I don't know.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  I mean, I actually think that's fine because clearly this is the sort of thing that people are going to use one time and then put at the very back of their cabinet and never see it again until they move.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  I will say.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  You know, uh, this is obviously a terrible product and the people involved should feel ashamed for making it. But, uh, it does sort of presage a coming world where we have technology that, um, measures our drinking, right? Like, like I kept waiting for you to say that this was going to give me analytics on my bourbon consumption, uh, which presumably, you know, would terrify my doctor. So I would just be very curious to see if we eventually get, you know, a Fitbit for drinking, uh, and, and how that may change our behavior.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  Well, maybe that's a good transition. So I've got a couple of other topics I want to talk about in my, my portion of the show.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  You guys had, had your chance. So there's two new like smart cameras, uh, that just came out. Amazon has this $250 camera called AWS Deep Lens.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Which I'm guessing is some sort of reference like Deep Blue or that kind of classic AI. It's a camera with a computer inside and you can set it up to do different sort of AI type tasks like recognizing items or faces or actions. Like they have some pre-trained AI stuff or Amazon can help you train it to do whatever you want AI-wise.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  So it's basically an Amazon Echo Look, but instead of judging your outfits at home, it's just going to judge your outfits at work?

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, I guess it's the idea is like Echo Look was what we did with this tech stack. What would you do with this tech stack? Maybe is one way to think of it.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Because it's like, what would you do with a camera that could run AI routines all the time and communicate with the cloud? And I think, you know, what Casey said of like bourbon consumption, like if you think about it, like where we're going is, is we'll just have cameras on us that will just judge all of our activities. They'll be like, they'll be, they'll be like a camera just innocuously placed at my desk somewhere and it will like, Paul was sad that day. Paul didn't, you know, Paul was slouching way too much. And, you know, like we can do so much judging with these cameras and that's basically what we're being set up to train these cameras to do,

• 57:47Speaker 00

  like detect faces, differentiate between hot dogs and not hot dogs.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Is there anything remarkable about the tech, aside from the AI aspect, is there anything remarkable about the, the, I don't know, the specs of the reference product?

• 58:02Speaker 00

  I mean, it seems like as kind of with a lot of these things, there's sort of this blend. I think the industry is still trying to figure out how much of this should be run on the local device and how much should be run in the cloud. And obviously, Amazon has a big cloud bias, but they have put a decent amount of power into this machine so that you can run a lot of AI stuff locally, which I think is interesting. But still, it seems like mostly this stuff is supposed to have in the cloud. Google is also coming out with a camera called the AIY Vision Kit. Which is, you know, the Amazon was, is for industry, it's like $250. This is for like makers,

• 58:44Speaker 00

  and it's about $50. And it's for the Raspberry Pi, but they come with this Vision Bonnet Circuit Board, which is an, it's got an Intel processor to run the, like, to run Vision-type neural network stuff. So this is obviously giving me a lot lower power and, you know, less capable theoretically. It also seems much less cloud-dependent. And Google's doing a lot of machine learning stuff in the cloud, but they, I don't know, it's just like, you know, we see Amazon come out with stuff like the, what's the look? Yeah, the look. That's the one that helps you get dressed?

• 59:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Google has clips and stuff, so they're clearly doing stuff, but there's like, we gotta get this into the hands of developers. So developers create products that also help acclimate people to having cameras on them, judging them all the time.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  I've been thinking, as you've been talking about this, Paul, about like all of the other like creepy dystopian inevitable use cases of cameras like this. And I'm thinking about cameras that send reports like, "Hey Casey, you were sedentary for 11 hours today." "Hey Casey, you were in meetings for six hours today." You know, like, there's just all sorts of strange observations that cameras, "Oh hey, that's a third night at a bar this week, Casey." Like, you can just start to imagine all sorts of things that a camera might tell you that maybe you're not ready to hear.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  Especially, so imagine this, the camera records you at all times, right? It uploads everything to the cloud, right? You have unlimited cloud storage, and so there's, you know, maybe five or six 1080p streams in the cloud at any one time of you and your activities in your face. And then you learn about something like resting bitch face. You're like, "Oh, I've never heard of that term before. I wonder if I have resting bitch face." And then you like, just, "Well, let me run, run the footage through," and then you could get like a, like a report, you know, a couple hours later, and like, "Yeah, actually, 80% of the time, you look really mad and sad or mean."

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of like going back through the journals of your life and instead of instead of looking at written journals and saying like, "Oh, that was that was a good time in my life," where I was really sad for like those months or whatever it is. Now it's like you have you basically have a TensorFlow neural network figuring that out for you and telling it to you.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I also just wonder how this transforms private spaces. Like you go over to someone's home and you're on camera, you know, like what happens to that footage?

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  It's, y'all, it's about to get creepy up in here.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, okay. But here's so my my first inclination when I hear about these things is to go to that dark dystopian place almost almost all the time. And I do feel that in general, we're very quickly getting to the point where lines are going to be crossed with regards to personal privacy. We're pretty much already there. But what if you think what if you also think about it this way? Our phones essentially do all of this now. We carry our phones with us almost 24 hours a day or they're next to us, you know, next to our beds. They have sensors in them. They have really smart software, you know, AI personified on it. They've got cameras, of course, all kinds of different cameras. And

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  like, what if in some way these little cameras are just the phones turned around at us rather than in our pockets or us staring at them?

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  I think there's like a sense that a phone is under your control because you you do most stuff with it manually, whereas a camera kind of observing you from a distance feels a little scarier, right? Because like, like if it's always on, like, my phone is off right now. I mean, I guess it's listening for me to say, "Hey, Siri," but other than that, it's not doing anything, right? Whereas a camera is just, you know, silently judging.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's more obtrusive. That's true. I mean, it's it's inevitably more obtrusive. But in terms of the the packaging of the hardware and what's available and what's like, what's actually happening, like on the device or in the cloud, it's we're already sort of willingly giving a lot of this information away. The change happens when all of a sudden this thing is packaged in a certain way and turned to face us.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, my my theory is that we always do it to ourselves first. It's like we share this information with the companies before they like come looking for it or or steal it from us or something like that.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  It's like, cause like I feel like with a lot of online services right now, like if you like, if someone showed up at your house 10 years ago and they're like, hey, we'd like to make a profile about you on the internet. We'd like to take all the photos that you've taken with your friends where you look decent. And we're gonna put them up and we're gonna put some stats about you on there and people can, you know, write about you like a guestbook kind of thing. It's like, that sounds pretty creepy, but it's like, but if you give are given the tools by Facebook to make that profile for yourself, you you end up doing it.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  I I try to avoid, I I try not to think too much about the dystopian things, but the camera ones do sound pretty dystopian. And you're right, the the stuff in our phone is very similar, like this, this whole Intel.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Movideo's vision processing unit, that's very similar to like the Apple's AI processor that they have.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  You know, our phones definitely have these things. The big thing our phones lack is the ability to stay on all the time, running and recording all the time, which these fixed cameras could definitely do.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  At what point should we tell our listeners that we've been pointing cameras at them the whole time? They've been listening to this.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  No, they did it to themselves.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  You did it to yourself first. You listened to this podcast for free. You gave it away for free.

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  It's not our fault. Okay, I have one more question. This is kind of left field and you feel free to beg off this one because it's it's kind of unfair. But we've had this, we've had this lot, we we plan our show in a Google Doc and we've had this line forever where it's like, should you get a $1,000 phone, laptop or TV? And we never end up talking about it because we always go over on time. But I I changed the question a little bit. Do you guys think is now a good time to buy a new phone slash laptop slash TV?

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Phone, yes. Laptop, no. TV, yes.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  I completely agree.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  That was exactly where I was gonna go too.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Well, this is a very interesting conversation then, isn't it?

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  Everybody agrees. Wonderful. So my theory is that CES is coming up. The eighth gen Intel chips are just rolling out for laptops and there's only a few on the market. At CES, we always see crazy new designs. We haven't seen the best that Nvidia can offer with its like new Max Q designs, which are what I'm most interested with laptops. So I think we're gonna get a bunch of new, great stuff CES. But right now, there are just amazing 4K TVs for very cheap. And there is a gamma of phones between $1,000 at the high end and like $500 for like the OnePlus 5T. There's really great options.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  I totally agree with that. I think like it's actually amazing how good of a TV you can get right now for like 600 bucks.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, like the Roku TCL?

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. When you consider like, I mean, so you know, I'm a, I have an iPhone 10 and I got it through the plan where I pay like, I don't know, like 45 bucks a month or something like that. But you know, over the, over the course of two years, that's a very expensive proposition, right? But the, like you can get a state of the art TV for 60% of the price. It's amazing.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  It makes me wish that my TV would break.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  I'm about due for a new TV, so I may be buying one of those sub $1,000.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, mine is like 10 years old and it's completely fine and it kills me. Like I keep waiting for something to happen where I'll be like, oh, yeah, I gotta get rid of this thing. And it never happens.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I mean, you could probably argue picture quality in that case. Or just look at it, you know, put your couch to the side of the TV for just like a few weeks and view and look at the crappy side viewing angle with like the shadow on it and be like, and you can totally justify it.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  I like that. I'm gonna do this for sure.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Super Bowl, do it.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  It's a good idea.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, so my, my thought about the phone is that the reason why now is a good time to, to get a phone is not because I am enamored of any of the major phone launches this fall. I'm really not. I've, I've switched between the iPhone. I've used the Essential. I've used the Pixel 2. The Pixel 2 is actually pretty great. I've used the iPhone A and the iPhone 10 now over the past few months and.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  I'm not overwhelmed by the iPhone X, I'll just put that out there. But there isn't going to be any major other phone innovation for the foreseeable future, like at least for the next several months that we are aware of. So I think now is a time, if you're like worried about something coming in in the next few months and kind of usurping everything we just saw, that's probably not going to happen. So now's a good time to get your phone. TV, we've already discussed why. Laptops, so Paul, you bring up a good point about the Intel eighth generation chips and how that could impact things. I still think someone's got to come up with a good solution for making these laptops thinner, lighter, more powerful, and offering a better solution than dongles. Like, I'm really missing, I have a new MacBook Pro, and I'm really missing my ports. I have to be honest.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  I had to replace my laptop this year, and my best option was basically to get the 2013 MacBook Air that had just had like slightly modified internals. The state of Mac laptops right now is so depressing to me because that company has led the industry with laptops for so long, and it just feels like the eye is off the ball. There are endless reports about the new keyboards breaking, being extremely susceptible to dust and other particles getting inside and ruining them. And so, you know, I have friends now who ask me like which Mac laptop to get, and I just sort of throw my hands up and I say, I do not have a good answer for you because there are so many trade-offs involved with all of them.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Casey's like, 2011 MacBook Air. I mean, Walt Mossberg has a bunker of 2011 MacBook Airs.

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  How many full-size USB ports do you need? Is one enough?

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  I would even say at this point, one's enough.

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  I, so every, so right now, I guess I use, I guess I just use one, but I also use a DisplayPort port to connect to an external monitor. And I have an external power cable that I connect. So like, I have three things plugged into my laptop at all times. Oh, and also my headphones. So I'm using four ports at all times. And so the move away from ports with no accompanying like ease of use on anything else is just like driving me insane.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think if I had to stack rank what I miss the most from ports on this new MacBook. Which, by the way, I had to run out and buy in the middle of a, in the middle of an Amazon event. We were, Casey and I were covering in September. Yeah, because my 2012 MacBook Pro just completely died. The keyboard stopped working and then it was, anyway, all kinds of issues. But I knew I was, I was in the market for a new one. Anyway, stack ranking, the ports I miss the most. I would start with USB. I would say I would love at least one standard sized USB port, followed by SD card. We transfer a lot of photos at The Verge and I transfer a lot of photos and video clips, like, just in general. And I really, I do miss that. And then MagSafe.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Although MagSafe and SD card ports are probably, like, pretty close. But, yeah, I miss MagSafe. I'm not the first person to say that.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  And there's, there's no.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, there are.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  Surface Laptop is still The Verge's top pick right now. But that doesn't solve all those problems for you.

• 1:10:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, and also, like, not everybody wants to switch to Windows. You know, like, not every, like, people who, like, you know, went to college 15 years ago, like me, and got, actually, I had a, I had a PC in college, so that's a bad example. But, you know, I started, uh, once Intel Chips came to the iMacs, like, I bought my first iMac, uh, really got sort of absorbed into Apple world. And I have no strong desire to go back on the learning curve and relearn Windows. Like, I would, I would prefer to just kind of stay where I'm at, and I don't have good options. So, I don't know, maybe I should check out a Surface Book or whatever.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  I have one on my desk you can use. I used it for about a month, the new Surface Book. I actually used it for a month running 10S and then got the, the free upgrade, uh, to, what is it, 10S Pro? So I could actually download external apps, because prior to that, I was like, oh, this is so infuriating. And it is a really nice, beautifully built laptop, but you're totally right. Once you get hooked into an operating system, I think more so than phones, once you get hooked into an operating system on a desktop or laptop, it's really hard to break away.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  So you have it.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  Well, thank you so much for your input. Thank you for sho, you know what, you guys saved the show.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  Yes, we really did. I have, no, you, I, I would have to agree.

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  You saved the show.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  I mean, Dieter unfortunately fell ill.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's really sick.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  Neel is in, uh, on a beach, hopefully somewhere.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Hopefully, he's having a little, he's having a little Jim Beam. Poured by a human.

• 1:12:06Speaker 00

  So that's our show. Now is the time that we promote things and it's great to have you here, Casey, because you've got a new show coming up. What can you tell us about it?

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  So if you love The Verge perspective on things and you'd like to hear more interviews, do I have the show for you because in coming weeks, you're going to get your first listen to Converge, a weekly conversation with The Verge hosted by myself. These will be live, in-person conversations with some of Silicon Valley's most interesting people. We're going to talk to them about their backgrounds, how they got to where they are, how they see the world, and we're hopefully going to have some fun along the way. So we're developing that for you right now and I'm really excited to share it with you soon.

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  Soon, soon like next week?

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  Not going to be next week. We want to make sure that Neil I can listen to it and give it his final approval. So we have a few things that we need to do left, but it is coming together at terrifying speed.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  That's very, I'm very excited about that. And obviously Lauren Good hosts Too Embarrassed to Ask in addition to the Next Level video extravaganza multimedia series.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  Yes. Too Embarrassed to Ask airs Friday mornings. We answer all of your embarrassing tech questions on the show. We love getting your questions, so send them in to us on Twitter or you can leave them on my Facebook page or you can email them to us. And thanks for checking out Next Level and for listening to our segment about it.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  And there's Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, Recode Media with Peter Kafka.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  And we can't forget, Why'd You Push That Button?

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  Why'd You Push That Button? Which, can I be honest, is my favorite.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  It's so well done.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  It's really great.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  It's really, really well done. That's with Ashley Carmen and Caitlin Tiffany. And they, they're doing Venmo stalking, right? In the latest episode?

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  No, that was last week.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  That was last week, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  Oh, that was last week. And then before that, they did one about why people re-watch their own Instagram stories.

• 1:14:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, they got this guy talking about like, like addiction and like how companies design stuff so that we get addicted to it. And that was awesome. What else? And we're on Twitter. You go at Verge. We're on Snapchat, Verge. Instagram, at Verge.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, is that? This outro, like, I feel like the show is really good, and then we got to the outro.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  And then it went off the rails.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  I don't want to leave. I wish I knew how to quit, you guys. I don't.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  How do we follow you guys on Twitter? Here, there's a question. Keep things rolling.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  I'm @LaurenGood with an E at the end.

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  I'm @CaseyNewton, and if you go to my profile, you'll also see a link to a daily newsletter I've been doing, five days a week, about social networks and democracy. So if you're interested in what Facebook and Twitter mean for the world, go to my Twitter profile and maybe sign up.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  I didn't know we were doing other promotions, too. All right, I'm on Strava, so if you...

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  Follow Lauren on Strava to learn where she's riding her bike.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Where I'm working out, where I'm surfing and cycling, all these things. You just, it's private, but if you request me, maybe, I don't know, maybe I'll let you work out with me. Where else can we promote ourselves?

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  That's all I want to promote. We have to end this show before people unsubscribe from the Vergecast.

• 1:15:27Speaker 00

  I'm at facebook.com/paulmiller.biz. And thank you, everybody, for listening. We'll be back next week with more Vergecast. Rock and roll?

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  Rock and roll.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Rock and roll.

• 1:15:40Speaker 00

  Paul, oh, promo code is promo code.