Pod Insights The Vergecast This week's Section 230 hearing / gadgets go to QVC / Motorola Razr 2020 review About this episode Nilay, Dieter, and Adi discuss the latest Section 230 congressional hearing featuring the CEOs of big tech. Ashley Carman stops by to talk about how gadget makers are turning to shopping channels to market their products.
Stories from this week:
San Francisco and Oakland phase out Verily COVID-19 testing sites
White House officials considered Elon Musk for coronavirus ad campaign
We need to rebuild America’s pandemic-fighting agencies
Streaming was part of the future — now it’s the only future
Lime’s CEO on the future of scooters: ‘COVID has turned from a headwind into a tailwind’
Mark Zuckerberg just told Congress to upend the internet
The latest Section 230 hearing showed that Republicans want to make the internet smaller
The Right’s Regulator in Chief
Gadget makers’ biggest risk could be a huge reward
Influencers’ next frontier: their own live shopping channels
Everyone on Instagram will soon be able to go live for four hours
Facebook will test shopping from Reels later this year
Motorola Razr 2020 review: 5G folding flip phone feels fine
LG Wing review: learning to fly, failing to soar
Verizon’s Yahoo zombie appears again as a purple phone
First iPhone 12 mini hands-on video shows just how tiny it is
Mophie’s new wirelessly charging battery pack clips onto the back of your phone
T-Mobile expands its faster midband 5G network, nearly doubling its coverage
Microsoft Surface Pro X (2020) review: ARM gets more muscle
Amazon Echo Dot (2020) review: have a ball
T-Mobile expands into live internet TV with new TVision streaming service
PS5 in photos: our first look at Sony’s next-gen console
PS5 vs. Xbox Series X: the next-gen consoles in photos
Astro’s Playroom is the perfect showcase for the PS5’s wild DualSense controller
Control is coming to the Nintendo Switch today, but you can only stream it from the cloud
Vizio and LG’s next-gen-ready OLED TVs are up to $500 off at Best Buy
Meet the 24-year-old who’s tracking every broken McDonald’s ice-cream machine in the US
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Transcript 14,809 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? This week on The Vergecast, Addie Robertson joins the show to talk about the big Congressional Section 230 hearing, which was a mess. Then Ashley Carmen joins us to talk about the new season of her show in the making, all about hardware makers hustling on QVC. So fun. We do a little gadget lightning round, talk about the razor review, the wing review, a bunch of other stuff coming up now on The Vergecast.
0:20 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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1:37 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Section 230 Reform. Yeah, that's what I said. You're gonna be in it. I'm Neil H. Patel. My friend, Dieter Bohn is here. I'm Section 230.6. Subclause A. You want to be C1 or C2? Oh, okay, damn. Just gonna go really in the weeds. Addie Robertson is here to actually help us talk about 230.
1:57 Speaker 03 Hey there, I'm C2B.
2:01 Nilay Patel? These are very deep jokes if you're in the 230 game. And a little bit later, Ashley Carmen is going to join us. She's got a new show that we're going to talk about selling gadgets. There's actually a bunch of gadgets to talk about. So that's coming up soon. I want to start where we always start. You know, there's an election next week. This is coming out on Friday and then on Tuesday, there's an election. Maybe just an important piece of information. If you're thinking about your vote is that 33 weeks ago, Donald Trump promised a website. I think five or six million Google engineers were working on this website. We can go get tested. We enter your symptoms and then go through a drive through testing situation in the parking lot of major retailers, then get your results back on this website. That was 33 weeks ago. It's a long time ago.
2:45 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:46 Nilay Patel? There's no, there's no website.
2:47 Speaker 04 It takes a long time to implement a flow chart.
2:49 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
2:50 Speaker 04 When there's a flow chart, you gotta like, you gotta, every single line, you gotta do something with.
2:54 Nilay Patel? I feel like literally entire companies have launched and failed in the time. Like Quibi, like Quibi came and went in the time that we've been talking about this, this flow chart. A little bit of news, we've been telling this joke for a long time. Underneath all that, there was a subsidiary of Alphabet, which is a parent company of Google, called Verily, that was indeed doing a website and doing a testing program in various ways. It was always very small. This whole thing got way overhyped, but it did occur. And in San Francisco and Oakland, where they very had partnered with those cities to roll out this website and testing, it didn't work out, actually. In San Francisco, we have a story, Nicole wrote it.
3:34 Nilay Patel? San Francisco and Oakland have actually phased out their Verily COVID-19 testing program because it wasn't serving enough people in the right way. And Dieter, just before we started, you were saying the reason is because you were, you needed a Google account to get testing, which is not appropriate.
3:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, it's not appropriate just ethically, but also straight up. But if you're listening to the show, it's probably, you probably have a Google account or it's not hard for you to get one. But we need to be able to test people that don't have easy access to a Google account. They really need to be tested too. And so that needs, these testing facilities need to be more universal. They need to not have a weird requirement. I trust that Google wasn't doing anything nefarious with whatever information they were collecting in order to make this thing work. It was just the Google accounts are really secure. And so if Google wants to like, keep information secure, the Google account is a really good way to do that. It's just not appropriate for COVID testing, which should be accessible to everybody.
4:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah, as with all things with the Trump administration, really just counting over time and like reveals an enormous amount of information. So we're going to keep tracking this. It's a, to me, it's one, it's one of those things that it's just a microcosm of the entire COVID response so far is this website. Just another few little COVID updates before we jump into it. The White House considered using Elon Musk in a coronavirus ad campaign. Just the level, this is the most 2020 sense that exists. And then Nicole actually wrote, I really, we have a package going up this, this week through Tuesday, where we're all sort of just writing essays about what's at stake in the election. And Nicole wrote about our ability to fight pandemics and to do public health. It is
5:11 Nilay Patel? very powerful. It starts with personal anecdote. I just encourage you to go read it. I really, really enjoyed it and was very proud to publish it. Then two more little, I keep calling them the sort of second order effects of the pandemic. Julia noted that every major media company has gone through a dramatic restructure to become streaming first companies. That's Disney, that's AT&T, Time Warner, say AT&T. Like AT&T is like messing with HBO and CNN right now. That's what's happening. But Disney's on it. Netflix is actually going through a dramatic executive restructure.
5:42 Speaker 04 And they just raised their prices.
5:44 Nilay Patel? And Netflix just raised its prices. Now I have to disclose Fox.com has a Netflix show, The Verge has a Netflix show, many disclosures all the time. But anyways, Julia wrote a great piece about how the pandemic has accelerated that trend to streaming and all the companies are restructuring because of it. Check that out. And then Andy Hawkins has what I thought one of the more, you could see it coming, but it actually happened pieces. Lime, which is the scooter company, first they went through a huge downturn because of the pandemic and now they're on like just meteoric growth. They've actually doubled a bunch of their numbers and the CEO said to Andy, COVID has gone from a headwind into a tailwind. So because people are not using public transportation, they don't want to sit around, they're using scooters. We, that's another trend that's just accelerated. Very interesting piece up on the
6:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, and those scooters, they don't go very fast. So you really do want a tailwind. Otherwise, you know, you're just
6:33 Nilay Patel? It'd be great if like, what's the one in, in New York City that was like Vespa's? Revel. Revel.
6:40 Speaker 04 We've got them, we still got them here in the Bay Area.
6:42 Nilay Patel? It'd be great if, if, but the end of the pandemic, everyone was just like cruising around on a Vespa looking scooter, like it was like Italy in the 40s. It was just like one of those moments like men stopped wearing hats after World War II, but after the pandemic, we all just cruised down on scooters. Okay, that is enough of that. Obviously, the pandemic is first and foremost in our minds. We're covering it a lot. The election is a big deal, but the election to me is going to segue right into this hearing conversation. So Addy, there was a Section 230 here. It was actually, the title of the hearing was very direct. It was like, Section 230, did it give you jerks too much power? And then Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai were in front of a Senate committee. How'd it go?
7:23 Speaker 03 Not great. I mean, I feel like if this thing is, anytime you see a Section 230 hearing, you can mostly be assured that it's going to be a weird nightmare. But this one was Facebook and Twitter and Google coming out with testimony that actually did open the doors to some pretty interesting questions, especially Facebook, which we're going to talk about. And then the entire rest of the four-hour-long hearing was Republicans trying to litigate really specific moderation decisions and Democrats saying, hey, it's ridiculous that we're doing this a week before the election. Let's talk about election security. And then a couple of people just saying they're refusing to participate because it's an embarrassment.
8:01 Nilay Patel? That, that happened, I think, twice. So what Addy was mentioning was before these hearings begin, the, you know, the witnesses at hearings release their testimony, their opening statements. So you can get them there in PDF. I think a lot of people looked at Facebook's and said, whoa, Facebook is making a play here. This is a big deal. Facebook is saying, let's reform 230. We have some ideas we want to participate in good ways and bad, mostly bad. And so then we, you kind of expect the hearing to be about this big proposal from Facebook to reform 230. We'll talk about it soon, but the hearing was just a circus instead. I think there was one question, or maybe two, that were actually about 230, and the rest of it was just pure.
8:43 Nilay Patel? I mean, Ted Cruz wants us to talk about this, and so I feel bad that we're going to talk about it, but he, he obviously rehearsed it. He put out, he tweeted out a poster that looked like a boxing or MMA poster, Cruz versus Dorsey. I mean, it was insane, right? So it's Cruz's turn to speak, and he says, well, look, I talked to, I talked to Sundar Pichai and I talked to Mark Zuckerberg yesterday. I'm going to use my time on Jack. And he just started yelling, and he literally at the end was like, who the hell elected you? And Jack was like, well, I invented Twitter. There's no other answer to that question. And it was just that level of theater the whole time.
9:26 Speaker 03 I think we have to also mention that Jack looked like somebody dragged him out of a cave.
9:30 Nilay Patel? Yes, long beard, but like the cave had great stylists in it. Yeah, for sure. But I definitely saw that picture of him and I immediately went and like cleaned up my beard a little bit. I was like, I can't, I want to be nowhere near that future. Yeah, super long ZZ Top beard and his hair was like messily coming forward with like perfect curls. And he looked good, but in a way that suggested that he either was about to just rip the solo from legs or look through your trash. It's like one or the other two was gonna happen.
10:00 Speaker 04 Or institute a coup using wizardry in old Russia, right?
10:06 Nilay Patel? I definitely watched, I've been watching really dumb movies to just distract myself. And I watched Transformers: Age of Empires and I was like, oh, he's Merlin. That's Merlin. Merlin invented the Transformers. Addy, did you, I mean, obviously there's these moments of chaos that we should just talk about. But did you gather anything from this four hour adventure?
10:26 Speaker 03 I mean, the thing I gathered is largely in the testimony, which is that it looks like sites are, it looks like large tech companies are maybe going to be lining up behind this one specific sort of bipartisan, maybe less objectionable than the other bills. Otherwise, it was a, a repeat of a bunch of decisions we've already heard from about. Also, it just kind of convinced me that a bunch of senators are terminally online because it is bizarre how much time they spent on Twitter, a site that is just orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook and Google.
10:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah, let's talk about that for a minute. This has been, I think, one of the more interesting sort of subplots of this whole year-long conversation about social media moderation, which blends right into the antitrust conversation, which blends into every other conversation. The last hearing Zuckerberg was on the stand and he was talking and somebody asked him a question and he was like, oh, that was a Twitter decision. Right? Like that, that was an exchange that occurred where Mark Zuckerberg was like, I didn't do that. Twitter did that because they're all confused. About the fact that these are different websites run by different companies. The CEOs don't even necessarily like each other, but Twitter just occupies this psychic space for our politicians that is crazy to me.
11:43 Nilay Patel? So Facebook is huge, right? It's like 2 billion active users. Just everyone in the world is like in Facebook. They also own Instagram. They also own WhatsApp. It's just this massive company with this huge footprint around the world. Google is huge. Until recently, if you wanted a coronavirus test in Oakland or San Francisco, you needed to Google. Right? Google is massive. They own YouTube. They are the only general search engine that exists. Everybody encounters Google. Facebook and Google also have multiple other interlocking businesses. So Google owns Google Cloud.
12:16 Speaker 04 Yeah.
12:17 Nilay Patel? Like it's just a massive company with a huge footprint. Twitter is just Twitter. So Twitter, the last stat I looked at, Twitter has 31 million active users in the United States. United States has about 322 million people in it. So one in 10 Americans uses Twitter.
12:32 Speaker 03 And the vast majority of people who use Twitter do not really post much on Twitter.
12:36 Nilay Patel? Right. They're just consuming tweets.
12:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, I see this, I see this like three ways. There's one, Donald Trump is on Twitter and therefore it occupies a whole lot of people's attention and mind share because he's very on Twitter. Two, in terms of the size thing, like you don't get mad at the sky, you get mad at the rain. Like Facebook is just too big to try and do anything about, I think, in some people's mind. They just, they take it as a given. But three, there's this argument that we actually should probably get more into, I think you were going there, Addy, is even if a tiny number of people use Twitter, it is like the seed for a whole bunch of things that happen in the news. It is the thing that you'll see it on Twitter and then it turns into cable news for six hours a day or whatever. And so that is, I think, maybe where they're coming from.
13:21 Speaker 04 That's, I may be giving them too much of the benefit of the doubt there. Maybe Addy's right, they're just terminally online, but you could make the case that Twitter has outsized importance in American politics because the people that are using it are the people that set conversations in broader platforms later.
13:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think that's totally right. And that's the thing I keep kind of turning over in my head because on one hand, like, yes, it's very influential because it like everything that happens on Twitter often sets the conversation. That means it's very important to figure out who can participate and what they say. On the other hand, that's also just, that's like saying it's like a really influential news wire service or something. Like, I keep joking that eventually Twitter's final form is like Bloomberg buys it and turns it into a news wire. Because the only people on it are like PR people and journalists and politicians. So it's just like a Bloomberg terminal, but everybody snarks on it.
14:15 Speaker 03 So it just, it raises this weird question where if the argument is that lots of people pay attention to this thing where people post news. Is that putting it in the same category as something that just massive numbers of people use purely as like a service provided by a company?
14:33 Nilay Patel? Well, so this is the question. This is the reason I brought up antitrust. Usually when you want to impose some, when our government historically has wanted to go and monkey with a private business. It has needed some reason to do it. And so with antitrust, one reason is, well, you're the only company in the market and we think you're foreclosing competition or behaving in some harmful way. We're going to come and do stuff to you. That's a pretty high bar. Like this case against Google is the first antitrust case in like 50 years at this scale, right? To do speech regulation where the government is gonna, you know, like set the First Amendment aside and say to Twitter what they can and cannot do. Which is what all of this comes down to is how should Twitter moderate content on its platform?
15:17 Nilay Patel? It's an even higher bar. And so you have to say Twitter is the only social media platform in the world that matters. And it matters so much that we can set aside the First Amendment, which is just Twitter is a chaotically run company. That only one in 10 Americans use. Like, it's not a well-run company. It doesn't like operate in a rational or reasonable or stable way that any moment it feels like a carrie off a cliff. And the thing that Congress on kind of both sides of the aisle is doing is saying Twitter is so important. That we can, we can end run the First Amendment.
15:53 Speaker 03 I feel like I should also, like, the thing that makes this even weirder is that this entire debate was largely about Twitter adding warning labels to tweets and like, maybe making you click through to them or limiting their reach, that this entire thing isn't even about takedowns for Twitter, which just like, I understand, again, like, reach is on the internet, like, that's a part of speech, like, making something very difficult to see, that does absolutely matter. But on the other hand, we're not even talking about deletions. We're having this giant conversation. They're not even taking down the tweets.
16:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah, what was the Mike Lee line? He was like, now, when we talk about censorship, and I define censorship as adding labels and doing fact checks. Do you censor stuff? And all of them were like, no, that's not censorship. Like, all three CEOs. And he was like, well, I am using censorship with a different definition. And it was, it was one of the most insane moments of that entire hearing, where United States Senator decided that he had his own definition of censorship, that they should all agree to, and then admit that they were doing the thing. And it was like, they're very smart. They're the CEOs. All of them are billionaires. Like, you can't just fool them by being like, here's what I'm saying. I've defined murder as blinking your eyes. Have you murdered anyone? It's like, no, they're not gonna fall for it.
17:12 Speaker 03 I mean, it's like, it's like a monkey's paw where everyone is having a debate that I think is very interesting, and they're doing it in such, just the stupidest way possible in the worst faith they could possibly do it.
17:23 Nilay Patel? Well, so, actually, this was my big question, is, we need to talk about the potential substance of 230 and what Zuckerberg said about it. Disclosure, my wife works for whatever they're calling Oculus now, which is a division of Facebook.
17:35 Speaker 03 Facebook Reality Labs.
17:36 Nilay Patel? Thank you, Facebook Reality Labs. I should know this, but I don't report on it. So, anyway, the question that I have is, is there a charitable read on the circus itself, on the purpose of the circus itself, beyond a bunch of people wanted to be seen on social networks, yelling about social networks, and being censored on social networks right ahead of the election? Like, that is the, to me, it's like, that's the obvious cynical take of why they wanted the circus. Oh, I think it's worse than, I think the obvious cynical take is, is three clicks worse than that. Okay, sure. But is there a non-cynical, good faith, there was a point to the circus take?
18:13 Speaker 03 Okay, I can give the good faith and Neela should give the bad faith. I think the, if you were going to be really, really charitable, you're still mostly just taking a weird utilitarian view. And it's that the idea is to get this on the table, is to, yes, maybe it's a circus, it's really loud, but everybody thinks that the way that tech companies moderate their platforms is a huge issue and this draws attention to it. This is kind of the reasoning behind a lot of the loose consensus between left wing and right wing folks who hate big tech is like, yes, I disagree with them, but at least they're bringing up the issue.
18:48 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I think the three clicks, worst bad faith interpretation, which if you ask me right now in this moment of extreme election anxiety is the nightmare scenario is election day comes and goes, the votes aren't counted, we're still waiting on a winner and Donald Trump tweets, I won, I'm the president and Twitter puts a label on it.
19:11 Speaker 04 Right.
19:11 Nilay Patel? Saying this is not true. And I don't thi- I think this entire exercise was for the Republicans on the committee to try to work the refs to make that moment of massive outsized importance such that Twitter doesn't do it. Or, you know, there's some other set of nonsense that happens. Vladimir Putin sends the internet research agency to tweet and put ads on Facebook saying both Biden and Trump won, you know, like to destabilize the whole election and the platforms are shy about moderating that stuff. That to me is, that was the goal of this, was to, to work the refs because the election is, is so contentious. Now, were they successful at that?
19:54 Nilay Patel? I'm not like a fan of how any of these companies run their moderation teams. I don't, I don't think they do a good job and we've written how many features from KC about how simply operating YouTube and Facebook at scale means that some people get PTSD, right? There's just like a fact of Facebook. Like if you want to run Facebook at the scale, you need some moderators, those moderators have to look at horrible things, they're going to get PTSD. That is just a fact. You should start there with your moderation decision. Do we think that they enforce their rules well? Do we think that they write their rules consistently? We do not. So I don't want to give them all too much credit. But at this hearing, All of them made it seem like they are thoughtful and rigorous and consistent, above the fray, and they are not going to back down. So was this hearing even successful at doing that?
20:38 Nilay Patel? Like, I don't know. It is crazy to me that Jack Dorsey came away from this looking like he had it. He's got a handle on it. This is what we're doing. This is how we're doing it. And you can actually see Twitter's moderation decisions are getting more aggressive over time. They're absolutely getting more aggressive over time. They are more confident in what they're doing than they were previously. I don't know if it's the same for Google and Facebook, but for Twitter, which is where all of the psychic energy is located. Yeah, they're just being way more aggressive than they used to be. So I don't know if this hearing was effective in working the refs, but via the bad faith interpretation, I would say that's what it's designed to do. Addy, do you think it's that dire?
21:15 Speaker 03 Which part of it is that dire? I mean, everything's dire.
21:18 Nilay Patel? The work the refs ahead of election misinformation.
21:21 Speaker 03 I can't tell anymore because I just, I am in such a tech policy bubble that we all understand the extreme nuances of all of these things. And like, we get why what Ted Cruz said that was ridiculous this week is different from how he was ridiculous last week. I keep suspecting that there's just this large contingent of people for whom the tech lash and like the anti-big tech, section 230, whatever, is just this ongoing stream of nonsense they don't really care about. That like, yeah, maybe they probably like us think that tech companies and like web platforms screw up all the time. But they're just like, oh, yeah, no, okay. It's another thing where big tech wasn't good. And like, they're not going to see this as even a new beat in the story.
22:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I feel like the nightmare version of this coverage is always like the local news headline that's like, should Twitter have to abide by the First Amendment? And you're like, well, we're just on different planets where on my planet, the First Amendment only applies to government. I don't know about yours. And like that, I think that just amount of noise in the system certainly allows for a lot of policy decisions that to me look like terrifying speech regulation.
22:29 Speaker 03 I am surprised nobody's brought up the utilities argument, I will say. Everybody keeps trying to like, Everyone in the Trump administration keeps trying to say like these companies are basically utilities, but no one will come out and actually say it.
22:42 Nilay Patel? Yeah, their magic word is the modern town square, which is very funny because implies that like the town square previously was a well-regulated place where everyone was constantly just exchanging opinions instead of like just a place where people were yelling on some soapboxes and other people were trying to buy apples. Like, that's my impression of what old town squares were like. I don't, I know, I never once won.
23:03 Speaker 04 If we did refer to them as town squares, we could start calling Jack Dorsey Constable instead of CEO. That can be fun.
23:09 Nilay Patel? He did kind of look like a constable. Let's talk about the actual 230 proposal that Facebook floated before this hearing. There's a lot to 230. I think the way I just want to set it up is I think the First Amendment prevents even the most aggressive Republicans from saying out loud, here are the moderation policies that I think Twitter should have. Right? I mean, it's just very direct, like Congress shall make no law respecting freedom of speech. Like, there it is. They can't do it. They're Congress. They can't do that. But 230 is this big weapon where if they take it away, Twitter becomes liable for everything published on its platform, at least until some sequence of court cases solves that
23:53 Nilay Patel? problem for them, or at least provide some boundaries. And if they take it away, Twitter's costs go up, their liability goes up, and Twitter might have to shut down. So it's like this existential threat for platforms of all sizes. Somebody who works at Apple Insider like retweeted me yesterday during the hearing and was like, if 230 goes away, we have to shut down the Apple Insider forums. Like, the liability risk is too high. I assure you, they're not a monopoly. Like, right? So 230 is this huge, huge weapon. It's an existential threat for a bunch of companies. And so they keep threatening to take it away so that they will impose speech regulations voluntarily that are whatever you might want
24:34 Nilay Patel? to have. But there is still some like 230, the PACT Act, which is what Addy has been saying, seems to be the 230 reform that everybody's settled on. So Addy, what is the PACT Act?
24:44 Speaker 03 So the PACT Act is is sort of a collection of different pieces, but the main thrust of it is that it's focused on, okay, we won't tell companies how to moderate exactly, but we're going to make sure that they publish what they're going to moderate for and like give you extreme transparency into like their terms of service and how they're moderating. And you have an appeals process. So if you think your ban was unreasonable, you can call a customer service line where a live representative will help you. And also, if a court orders that something is illegal, they have to take it down within 24 hours.
25:18 Nilay Patel? So that's a pretty moderate set of reforms, right? That's like Twitter needs to have customer service.
25:23 Speaker 03 Right. Compared to, say, any of the really strange Section 230 bills that are like the FTC should create a speech commission that you have to apply to, or the Earn It Act, which was like, the DOJ gets carte blanche to just make rules. And if you don't abide by them, then too bad.
25:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah. But the Earn It Act was also like, you don't get to use encryption on your messaging platform, right? Wasn't that the trade?
25:47 Speaker 03 No. So that was the thing. It never actually came out and said that. They made a big deal out of like, no, it doesn't actually say that. It just says the DOJ can do whatever it wants. And then Barr comes out and he's like, you know what's terrible? Encryption.
26:02 Nilay Patel? So what's the connection between screaming about individual tweets in a hearing and the PACT Act? Like that, that's a pretty broad range, right?
26:11 Speaker 03 So if you want to, I'm being sort of charitable here. If you want to talk about it, then a lot of the hearing focused on trying to prove that Twitter's moderation was inconsistent. So it would be, somebody would bring up, hey, there was this horrible dictator who'd said something horrible, and you didn't label that. But then Trump said a different thing, and you labeled that. And then Jack Dorsey would try to explain, like, the state monopoly on power or something. Like he distinguishes between saber rattling internationally and violence against your own people. But the point is, they were trying to establish that like, they were being unfair. And the Pact Act, the point of it is to mandate that companies are, in air quotes here, fair. So, under this rule, Twitter theoretically has to publish its standards and Donald Trump
26:56 Speaker 03 has to be able to go and appeal to those standards and get a really good explanation, or have his tweet unlabeled, I guess.
27:05 Speaker 04 A long, long, long, long time ago, I got put in charge of the forums at Trio Central. And we were talking about the Trio smartphone. And, you know, like, every website with a forum, you publish moderator guidelines. You say, "These are our rules." They're relatively vague, but like, you kind of know what they are. And then there's moderators. And then, because it was small, I got to say, "Look, if you want to appeal any of these things, you just email me. And don't argue about it publicly. And I'm probably not going to litigate it with you publicly, because then that's all anybody will talk about ever." So it sounds like what they want is for, just like, this endless opportunity to nitpick
27:50 Speaker 04 moderation rules out in public, and like, make it the focus of discussion around these things. Like, that, I don't know, that just sounds like a nightmare to me. My original cut of my very first moderation rules was, "My decisions are final. If you don't like it, go somewhere else." And like, that could have worked. But the problem now is, you can't go anywhere else, at least if we're talking about Facebook.
28:12 Speaker 03 So this is the thing that's really weird and hard, is that it feels like there is a fundamental difference between something like the Apple Insider forums and Twitter. Like, they feel like just fundamentally different services. One of them's kind of like the phone company, and others, like, some kind of random hotline you can call and like, chat with people.
28:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
28:31 Speaker 03 But they're trying to make laws that cover both of them. The Pact Act has this, like, small business exemption, but it's kind of narrow and hard to tell exactly how it would be enforced. But basically, they're trying to make law that's going to affect both these incredibly different kinds of services. And they're basically doing it only by ever talking to the people who run the gigantic services. And that's really frustrating.
28:55 Speaker 04 And I just continue to point out that Twitter is not, it's not even in the category of gigantic.
29:00 Speaker 03 Okay, it's not even, it's bigger. It's
29:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
29:03 Speaker 03 Twitter is still like a really big company.
29:05 Nilay Patel? It is a very big company.
29:07 Speaker 03 It's not a community.
29:08 Nilay Patel? I feel like we could just, that's like hours of conversation. It happened to us too. We're like focused on Twitter, but I think I've said this on like every episode of the show that we've talked about YouTube on ever, like YouTube creators are always mad at YouTube. They're always mad at YouTube. And what happens in YouTube chat, like live stream chat, I watched the hearing on YouTube yesterday and the live chat was up and I was like, this is horrible. I was like, someone should moderate this chat. Like YouTube has this enormous scale of moderation problems and content monetization problems and they're all hyper-specific. You need to know the language of YouTube to understand what is happening on YouTube. I don't know how you could take any particular
29:52 Nilay Patel? law that you've written for the problems with Twitter, glue them onto YouTube and actually make life better for the individual YouTube creator or the member of the YouTube community that just wants a nice place to watch videos and talk to other people in that community. But that seems impossible.
30:08 Speaker 04 Well, Eddie, you brought up in your piece, I mean, there's YouTube, but you also brought up, I think you brought up Reddit. Like Reddit has got like subreddit where they set their moderation rules. And so like, does each one of them going to be subject to the rules of the pact act? Is Reddit as a whole going to be? Like, it sounds like a, like a fiasco.
30:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, it, well, this is the problem is that it's really hard for me to answer those questions because they put out this year, this bill, they actually did have a pretty good hearing on it where they invited mostly a bunch of legal experts and they kind of hashed things out. But it's really difficult to tell what this would practically mean for a bunch of companies. Because yeah, it's all, it's this very angels dancing on the head of a pin kind of scenario where they're making these rules. And then those rules have to get translated through not only individual moderation decisions, but the fact that a bunch of these decisions are made by AIs. And so you have to assume that you can like make a bot that understands the spirit of this law, or you just have to prepare for this gigantic flood of people contesting the rules. And I feel like nobody is prepared for that.
31:05 Nilay Patel? I think that the issue underlying all of this is when Dieter ran the trio central four.
31:13 Nilay Patel? His first instinct at a rule was if you don't like it, go somewhere else. Right? What was your big competitor at Trio Central forums?
31:21 Speaker 04 There were a bunch. Paul Menpo Center had forums. There was also Trio Knots.
31:25 Nilay Patel? Dieter's so in it. He's like, they're, he's like, here, here they are ranked by their dangers.
31:30 Speaker 04 Howard forums was a, was a big one.
31:31 Nilay Patel? Oh, Hofo was great.
31:32 Speaker 04 Hofo was great.
31:33 Nilay Patel? Right? So that's a competitive market. If you're mad on Trio Central, you're going to go to Howard forums or you're going to go to Trio Knots, and that is a reasonable thing to say. If you are mad at Twitter, are you going to go to Parler? Right? Like, I don't know that that is the answer. None of these companies are one for one competitors with each other. If you're mad at Twitter and you go to Facebook, you have a wholly different kind of experience. If you're mad at YouTube and you go to Vimeo, you're going to start making very arty movies for a very much smaller audience very quickly. Is like, isn't the real problem here that there's just such a lack of competition? That we feel comfortable making what is effectively speech regulation?
32:10 Speaker 03 I can't, like, that's a thing that sounds so incredibly reasonable, and it's a thing I feel like I said for a really long time. And the more I watch people try to make alternatives, the more it just, it feels like there is no world where there are three separate but roughly equivalent Twitters that you can move between. Or like, it seems like when competitors show up, there's stuff like TikTok, which, yeah, is not a one-to-one substitution. And I, so I don't know anymore. Like, it feels like also the more people talk about tech as just these three big companies, the more they will never see something like the Trio forums as viable again. That like, nobody's going to bother joining independent sites because they only define themselves as either
32:53 Speaker 03 "we don't exist" or like a Facebook group, or "hey, join us specifically because you hate Facebook", which is a dumb reason to join something.
33:00 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, there's a, there's a scale issue. Like, like, Discords are super popular right now, right? Like, but they, they work because they're smaller. So there's always something, but there's not, there's never like going to be. I don't see Discord taking Facebook on anytime soon, for example.
33:15 Speaker 03 I mean Discord and Reddit are interesting because so much of them are self, they're like community moderated and they work, they're more like software. Like Discord is almost literally software. It has central moderation, but it's, I really like the idea of social networks as being software and tools that then moderation ends up falling to communities. That has its own share of gigantic problems, but it, it's the thing that like feels good to me and that makes me happy and very little about social media makes me happy.
33:46 Nilay Patel? Have I said the thing about the Eero subreddit on this show yet? I know I talked to Dina about it once, but there's an Eero, the Eero router, there's a subreddit of passionate Eero fans on Reddit and it has insanely strong moderation. It was very funny to me. So you can't even post in the Eero subreddit unless your account is of a certain age and you have enough karma and those numbers are not disclosed.
34:10 Speaker 04 Wow.
34:11 Nilay Patel? Because they don't want people to game it. So they're like high numbers that are secrets by the mods and they're like, we don't understand why we need this, but in order to keep the Eero subreddit peaceful, we're gating the community and moderating very harshly because like Nighthawk fans show up and like troll the Eero forums with bots. And every time we have one of these hearings, I'm like, I feel like we should ask the mods from the Eero subreddit to tell Congress what it's like to moderate their mesh wifi router community with that and like, we're going to take those tools away from them.
34:44 Speaker 03 I want that so badly. I want them to hold those, like when they were doing antitrust reform, they were like, hey, we're just going to call up a bunch of companies and they're going to tell you how like Apple screwed them over. I really, I would kill for a hearing where they would just bring up people who are actually moderators or like runners of small services that rely on 230 and let them talk.
35:05 Nilay Patel? I would actually love for them to call up some people whose businesses and livelihoods were affected by Fasta Sesta.
35:11 Speaker 03 Yes, there've been like news about them opening investigations into seeing what the effects of those were. And I haven't heard anything about it since and I am super curious about it because yeah, it's the test case for any kind of change to Section 230.
35:24 Nilay Patel? Actually, we should probably, in case people aren't familiar, explain. You could probably do it better than I can, what I was referring to there.
35:30 Speaker 03 So Sesta Fasta is, which maybe we refer to it as Fasta Sesta. It's a law and it just, there are a couple of things that Section 230 just doesn't protect against. So the one before this, the best known one is like copyright, that there's just a carve out. And so Sesta Fasta used that same logic to add a carve out for anything related to anti prostitution or anti trafficking laws. And the result was that basically anything related to sex work ended up becoming ridiculously dangerous for sites to host and they just kicked off sex workers. And I mean, that is complicated by the fact that it's a bad law in general.
36:11 Speaker 03 Like I might totally believe that anti harassment laws are valid and that therefore, if we're going to talk about keeping harassment and libel off a platform, that's a conversation. Anti prostitution laws are bad. And so it's hard to make a one to one comparison. But yeah, it's not a good law. The Sesta Fasta, it's a bad carve out.
36:30 Nilay Patel? We have had a little coverage, but you're right, Addie. We should take another crack at it in the after period. You know, the future is coming. I'm told that there's a future after Tuesday. I just can't quite see it, but we should probably take another crack at it. I want it, we said we were going to talk about this. We've gone a little bit over in this section, but Facebook did put forward a proposal in its testimony. It seems very aggressive. Can you just quickly give it people of what a sense of what it is?
36:53 Speaker 03 So it was aggressive, but it's sort of more rhetorically aggressive than specifically. So the paragraph that they, that Mark Zuckerberg has is, "The debate about Section 230 shows that people of all political persuasions are unhappy with the status quo. People want to know that companies are taking responsibility for combating harmful content, especially illegal activity on their platforms. And they want to know that when platforms remove content, they're doing so fairly and transparently. And they want to make sure that platforms are held accountable." So then he says, okay, look, changing, it's a significant decision, but they should, quote, "update the law to make sure it's working as intended. We support the ideas around transparency and industry collaboration that are being discussed in some of the current bipartisan proposals, and I look forward to a meaningful dialogue."
37:37 Speaker 03 The "do not mention" pact specifically, but transparency is like the Pact Act is the highest profile transparency-related 230 bill. Somebody called it out in the hearing. So it seems related to that.
37:49 Nilay Patel? It feels like Facebook is saying, yeah, make, change the law. We can pay to comply with it, and other smaller competitors might not be able to, and this is great for us.
37:59 Speaker 03 I mean, Facebook already puts out these ridiculously detailed transparency reports every quarter and has these gigantic policy teams that are all working on similar things. So, yeah.
38:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I think, as Zuckerman said at the hearing, they're, right now, they're like, moderation and compliance, the amount they spend on moderation and compliance is more than Facebook's revenue at the time of its IPO, just to give you a sense of how much Facebook spends. So that is one of those moments where you see the big company saying, yep, pass the regulation, we can pay for it, and our competitors might not be able to. And people have read that very aggressively. I think Mike Masnick at TechDirt was like, "Facebook declares war on the open internet."
38:36 Speaker 03 Throwing them under the bus, slightly less active.
38:38 Nilay Patel? Throwing the open internet under the bus. Do you read it that aggressively?
38:41 Speaker 03 I can't tell. I think it's sort of that. I think throwing under the bus is not a bad comparison. Like, it doesn't necessarily, I don't think that, like...
38:50 Nilay Patel? Is it a school bus or a Greyhound?
38:51 Speaker 03 No, it's different. Like, I guess more like allowing it to fall under the bus. I don't actually think that there's this conspiracy where Facebook is trying to shut down Discord or something, but I think it's like, look, people aren't going to stop complaining about Section 230. I should, we should do something to get them off our back. Let's do the thing that we can deal with and is not a huge problem for us. And other companies, oh, sorry, too bad. There's the bus.
39:14 Nilay Patel? Okay, we gotta wrap this up. One thing I do want to call out, regardless of what happens in Congress with 230 in these laws, the Trump administration did put out an executive order asking the FCC to reinterpret 230.
39:28 Speaker 03 Sorry, clarify, clarify.
39:29 Nilay Patel? Clarify. It's just amazing. Again, you can just read it. We started the show with jokes about the subsections of 230. 230 is remarkably easy to read. I encourage everybody listening to this, just go read it. Buy the Kossoff book, The 26 Words That Created the Internet. Go read that book. Like, just read, but read the law. You just Google it and read it. It's very short, very easy to read. Anyhow, the Trump administration asked the FCC to reinterpret, clarify the law. This caused enough consternation to see that a Republican FCC commissioner, who said, "This is a little First Amendment meat for me," got yanked and replaced. This happened. Trump did this. And Ajit Pai, who was a little iffy about it, finally decided to do it. Brendan Carr, who's a commissioner kind of next in line if Trump wins to be
40:14 Nilay Patel? the chairman, is like all over Fox News, like shows up on Tucker Carlson and rail about Twitter all the time. And McKenna wrote a profile of Brendan Carr and his big shift from sort of Reagan-style, small government, limited regulation to like MAGA warrior, let's regulate Twitter. It's a, that's like a big story. That's a big shift in the party. That's Josh Hawley. That's all these characters that we talk about, saying we should regulate companies directly in a way that sort of previous conservatives did not want to. Read that profile. It's very good. It's up on the site. Kind of puts a lot of this into perspective. Okay, we gotta stop talking about 230. Addy, thank you.
40:49 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:50 Nilay Patel? So much.
40:50 Speaker 03 Thank you.
40:51 Nilay Patel? After the election, I'm sure this is all gonna come up again. We'll have you back on soon, but thank you so much. All right, we're gonna take a break and come back with Ashley and we're gonna talk about some gadgets.
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42:18 Nilay Patel? We're back. Ashley Carmen's here. Hey, Ash.
42:20 Speaker 06 Hello.
42:21 Nilay Patel? I was just saying, it's been like, we've talked a lot in Slack, but it's been months since we've actually talked. So this is very nice.
42:26 Speaker 06 I know. I was really excited I got to come on because I haven't talked to you or Dieter in what feels like an eternity.
42:32 Nilay Patel? It's been a long time.
42:33 Speaker 02 Here's my new, here's how I, my new COVID management style. If you want to talk to me, you gotta launch a video series.
42:40 Speaker 06 It has to be in the sales contract that you get to talk to Eli today.
42:45 Speaker 02 It's, I've become a real monster of quarantine management. It's great. No, but you, In the Making is back. That's your video series where you talk to gadget makers about making stuff. You know, I love hustlers. This is some like true hustler coverage that you're doing. Your first episode out. It's about people trying to hustle their way into live shopping. Tell us about it.
43:03 Speaker 06 Yeah. So for people who don't know, it's called In the Making. It's on YouTube. It's about all the challenges that independent hardware startups face. This season, we're just doing a couple of episodes, doing it during the pandemic, which has been an interesting challenge. But the first episode covers, I'd heard from gadget startups before that they had gone on QVC and HSN, which like shocked me, shocked me because I don't know about you guys, but I definitely think of grandmas when I think of QVC and HSN. And I'm like, grandmas are buying like Mophie battery packs on QVC? Okay. Like, sure. So anyway, I was like, you know what? I really want to dive into that. So for This episode, I spoke to a bunch of different companies, including Zag, which owns Mophie.
43:46 Speaker 06 Also, a smaller startup named Somnoks, which makes a $600 sleep robot, which we can talk more about if you're interested. And another company that we previously covered on The Verge that makes a bunch of different stuff. But one of the things they make is something called the Sobro, which is a connected coffee table that has like a refrigerator in it and like Bluetooth speakers and charging ports and all the things. So I talked to them about how QVC works and whether it's been successful for them. And there's some mixed stories, but the wide agreement seems to be that QVC and HSN, the secrets of selling lots of gadgets in minutes that you probably never knew about.
44:24 Nilay Patel? Who is buying the gadgets from them on QVC and HSN? Do they know?
44:27 Speaker 06 Well, so this was kind of like the thing that's a little difficult to get because I talked to QVC and HSN first of all. And I was like, okay, grandmas. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. Our, our main age demographic is between 35 and 60. And I'm like, hmm, that's a large range there. And a lot of the companies didn't really want to speak to it, but one of them did. It's not actually in the episode, but he, he said, yes, the buyers are definitely older. But he's like, but don't think that's bad because they have tons of cash to just spend and they're like willing to watch the segments and they need to buy things for people. So he's like, it's great. We don't reach them on Instagram or Facebook. So actually this is super awesome for us.
45:10 Nilay Patel? Is it like old people and like very stoned young people? That's my sense of the split where you're like, I definitely need a coffee table with a refrigerator in it. It's 3am, I'm calling that number.
45:20 Speaker 06 Well, according to QVC, they are one of the top Facebook Live streamers as well. They have like a special deal with them. So it is entirely possible that, you know, someone shares that link or you have a fond memory of QVC and you just go check it out and all of a sudden you're hooked in and you're like, oh my God, I'm watching this on Facebook Live or in their app or wherever, they're everywhere, they're actually everywhere.
45:41 Nilay Patel? All of this just makes me a little bit afraid. My dad was the night shift ER doctor when I was a kid. So my mom worked in the day and my dad worked at night. So that was just like the deal they had. And she could never fall asleep when he wasn't working and my house was full of QVC stuff. Like food dehydrators coming out of our ears. Like if it was as seen on TV, my dad was like, yeah, that seems great. Cause he was just like, It was like Wisconsin in the eighties. There was not a lot of other content to consume.
46:09 Speaker 06 Amazing.
46:10 Nilay Patel? At like three in the morning when I couldn't sleep. And now I'm just like, this is horrible. We're about to get so many zag battery packs.
46:18 Speaker 06 About to say, you should check in with your mom.
46:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah. One element of your story that I thought was really interesting was how much of a performance, like how much of a show QVC is for these companies. Do they feel, were they like, I gotta get amped up to hustle out some battery packs?
46:34 Speaker 06 Yeah. So one aspect of this video that I also mentioned, if people watch it is, we also talk a little bit about the psychology slash the techniques that QVC uses to sell you on things. So like you're kind of mentioning this idea of, we only have 15 units left. Better by now, like things like that. But the, so what QVC does is they invite the companies to have a spokesperson, a host to come on with QVC's own hosts. So for a lot of these companies, they take this really seriously. So the one who makes the SoBro, for example, hired a former Broadway actor as their host. And he, you know, is obviously very charismatic and personable. So for him, he's just a salesperson, but they are really, he's a full-time employee. Like this is an investment for them.
47:18 Nilay Patel? Wait, really? Like this company has a full-time QVC guy?
47:22 Speaker 06 Yeah.
47:22 Nilay Patel? Amazing.
47:23 Speaker 06 Yeah. Like this is a huge part of their business. And
47:26 Nilay Patel? It's wild.
47:27 Speaker 06 For the sleep robot company, they just happen to have a really charismatic CEO who was great to talk to. And he goes live himself, but obviously he's a huge proponent of the product. So he gets kind of almost like interviewed and then the salespeople do their job, which is like, wow, that's amazing.
47:43 Nilay Patel? We always talk about retail for these gadgets in terms of Amazon being a huge monster, right? Like this seems like a really big lucrative, not Amazon sales channel, but it is only, there's only like the two companies. Do they, do they have the same kind of relationships with the QVCs and HSNs as we hear about so much with like Amazon?
48:03 Speaker 06 Well, I will say, I think they're a little bit afraid of QVC and HSN because they're the gatekeepers in the sense of like, if QVC doesn't book you, you're not booked and you're not going on QVC. And they're scouting products. So like, one of the companies we interviewed, the one behind the SoBro, was saying they went to a trade show and QVC came up to them. It was like, we know, we see potential here. Like this could sell. And so it's kind of like talent scouting on QVC's end, but then once you're hooked in. They don't want to lose that. So there's still, though, that comes with some major risks, actually, for some of the smaller startups. So this sleep robot company, for example, did great their first time on QVC. They sold, keep in mind, this is $600 sleep robot. And you guys have talked to enough hardware companies, and I'm sure you've talked to about
48:48 Speaker 06 retail, where you know, honestly, I have heard from a company, they're like, we do great. We sell like, one unit a day at Best Buy. And I was like, that's great. Like, what? You have to really like, start thinking about this on the scale. So for this dude to sell out the first time he went live, 60 units of a $600 sleep robot, that's like, their year, you know? That's amazing. So he got totally hooked on it and was like, you know what? Next time we go, 250 units.
49:14 Speaker 04 Wow.
49:15 Speaker 06 And because they're a small startup, you know, that's why startups use crowdfunding a lot of the time, is to front that manufacturing cost, get the money. So they're bootstrapped and they don't have a ton of cash, but he fronted the cost for manufacturing only to not sell out. And so QVC, I guess, they don't like to talk about their deals, but according to him, QVC does have a clause that they have to buy back any product that doesn't sell. So what ended up happening is, he had to buy back all the units that didn't sell.
49:42 Speaker 04 Oh, my gosh.
49:42 Speaker 06 And that's a huge problem.
49:44 Speaker 04 The thing that I think that I vaguely knew, but you really explained really well, is when you sell in Best Buy, Best Buy buys it in wholesale, and then it's theirs, and it's their problem. But when people go on QVC, they literally have to, like, give their products to QVC, sell them, and then buy back the other stuff. So there's like, an extra layer of buying and selling that happens behind the scenes that turns out is very beneficial to QVC and not so much to the people that come on. But apparently, the chances of getting a big payday are so hot, or so exciting, that they're willing to take that risk.
50:17 Speaker 06 Yeah. And I mean, so this company behind the SoBro, for example, they're not, they're not a startup, and a lot of the things they sell are like, mini muffin makers, which, yes, it's cash to front, but you're also probably gonna like, be able to sell those. It becomes especially risky when you're talking about a wild-ass gadget, like a $600 sleep robot.
50:38 Speaker 04 Wait, can you just tell me more about the $600 sleep robot?
50:40 Speaker 06 It is a robot. It's a pillow. It looks like a pillow. But there's, I guess, a motor inside that kind of like vacillates, like it moves. So it's supposed to sync up to your breathing so that it's like you're holding, as if you were holding like a human or something. You're holding it. It's like breathing. So you're supposed to kind of like follow its breath and then fall asleep.
51:02 Nilay Patel? I don't think you would have sold any of these on QVC.
51:04 Speaker 06 And this is why.
51:08 Nilay Patel? I'm like, I don't, yeah, the Terminator is in bed with you. So you also cover Instagram and you and I have been talking about this a lot. That Instagram is just slowly turning into a catalog.
51:20 Speaker 06 Feels like decades ago that we talked about your like first Instagram purchase. And why'd you push that button?
51:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I have a whole story about Grittles that I'm like thinking about in my head.
51:29 Speaker 06 Oh, boy.
51:29 Nilay Patel? Like dad Instagram and dad TikTok went crazy for Grittles at the beginning of the pandemic. It's a real, it's a real thing. I'm not going to talk about it now. But if you're interested, just tweet at me. But Instagram is basically doing QVC now on their lives.
51:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, so this past year has really been huge for live shopping on the tech platforms. So Instagram rolled out live, they've always had live, but now you can tag products in live. So it can be like live shopping. That was the summer. Amazon rolled out its live influencer program. So now influencers can go live on Amazon, basically like QVC. Google, this isn't live, but Google's kind of starting to dip its toes into this idea of like influencer shopping. They have an app called Shop Loop that is not live. It's more like shoppable stories, but I can, I'm sure they're heading that way. So, and then Facebook also has shoppable lives.
52:22 Speaker 06 So, yeah, I mean, this is becoming a full-fledged thing where you can just, I imagine soon, we'll be seeing a lot more lives where you're going to be shopping from them. And it's going to be like QVC, but on your phone.
52:34 Nilay Patel? I noticed on Prime Day, like, if you opened the Amazon app, like, one of the first things you saw was something that looked exactly like QVC. And like, Prime Day is so overwhelming that for Amazon to hire its own video host to just like, get you through it, seems incredible. There's a part of this that seems very connected to what Julia covers, which is QVC is a cable channel. I don't know how many people have the QVC app on their Roku or whatever. Is there like a, just an inflection point coming where enough people leave cable behind? And the tech platforms just sort of take over the function?
53:08 Speaker 06 It seems possible, but what I will say is I've watched, you know, a decent number of Amazon lives and obviously we've, all of us have seen Instagram lives before. Really, I think what makes QVC work is they have these amazing studio setups. If you watch the video, you'll see we have a, one of the B-roll we use is them jump starting a car in the studio. Like, they have resources. Their hosts look good, they're in a real set, they have a professional camera person, there's lights. When the influencers go live, some of this looks like trash. Like, them in their bedroom, trying stuff on. And I'm not going to say that won't work for some people, but I think for a lot of people, you're kind of like, why would I buy this?
53:51 Speaker 06 It makes sense for YouTube to tag videos, you know, like, you're doing your thing. I just don't know how, live is a whole different beast. You have to keep people entertained. I think you really have to be professional. So some people will probably be able to pull it off, but I have a feeling it won't be as DIY as it looks right now.
54:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I just wonder what the future of, the day that QVC is like, Amazon Prime streaming has a QVC-like channel on it, or the Amazon app livestream host is killing our business? It just seems like that's the day that's coming for us.
54:25 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, the difference is that I guess in this case, like QVC is the retailer, right? So QVC has a vested interest to sell these things and they they're curating what they sell. Whereas with Instagram, it's not, they're not a retailer. They don't really care. They're like, just buy some stuff. We don't care what it is.
54:43 Nilay Patel? We just want to take some points off the credit card fee.
54:45 Speaker 06 Exactly. Yeah. And same with Amazon. Like, they are a retailer, but I think the way they're doing it now more is like, just the influencers can tag affiliate links. So I, it's just interesting, different dynamics in retail versus the platform should be like, anyone can go live, just we'll get a cut of whatever you sell. We don't care what you sell, though.
55:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah. All right. What's in the making? You got another episode coming. What's the next episode?
55:04 Speaker 06 Yeah. So the next episode is about Chinese entrepreneurs. Obviously, this year was a lot of discussion around TikTok and WeChat in the government and in the US. We're not focusing on software, but we're talking about the unique challenges that Chinese entrepreneurs face when they want to break into the US.
55:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that sounds amazing. Do they have thoughts on TikTok?
55:26 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah.
55:26 Nilay Patel? I'm down for it. Okay, Ashley, stick around. We got to come, we got to take a break. We'll come back. We have like a lot of gadgets. We're going to do a gadget lightning round. I just want to hear your take on the many, the many weird phones that we have. We'll be right back.
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57:03 Nilay Patel? All right. Dean, there's like a lot of weird phones this week.
57:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, you know, we have been, I've been saying I'm excited for phones to get weird again. Weird phones are back. Different form factors are coming. Get ready for excitement. And the very first wave of them has crashed upon us. And I'm just going to keep waiting for the next one, I guess. It's like, there's a surfing metaphor in here somewhere. But yeah, I don't know. So I reviewed the Motorola Razr, the 2020 edition, which has 5G. And they fixed all of the problems from the first one that they were capable of fixing. So it doesn't creak anymore when you open it. It doesn't like make a cracking noise. It does make a little bit of like a slither noise. You can like hear the plastic screen sliding.
57:44 Nilay Patel? Weird.
57:46 Speaker 04 But it's fine. It's like a totally perfectly good, fine phone. It just costs $1,400 and the camera is mediocre, right? But you know, it's prettier than the LG, not the LG. It's prettier than the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5G. Got it. Made it through.
58:03 Nilay Patel? I feel like part of your job is just remembering really horrible phone names.
58:07 Speaker 04 I just want these folding phone prices to come down because right, I'm tired of talking about them in this context of, if you got a whole lot of money to throw away and a phone that would otherwise cost you $400, go for it. But that's what the Motorola Razr is.
58:22 Nilay Patel? Every time I look at this Razr, I think if that phone had a good camera, I'd buy it.
58:26 Speaker 04 It does.
58:27 Nilay Patel? I'm so taken with it.
58:28 Speaker 04 It has a good camera, like one out of four times. It's like, wow, got that. That's great. And then the other three times you're like, why is, why is it doing? What is it doing? There was one night mode shot where the, the Z Flip, regular Z Flip, uh, took the shot at like 800 ISO and wasn't in night mode. And, uh, the Moto Razr saw that and they're like, oh, yeah, this needs to be 3200. And we're turning on night mode also. It's like, what are you doing?
58:56 Speaker 04 It's a grain city, but for no good reason.
58:58 Nilay Patel? Ashley, does, is the Razr entice you?
59:00 Speaker 06 First of all, I feel like a few of the stories we're going to talk about are literally look like headlines from 2006.
59:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. No, it's that season of phones again, a hundred percent.
59:12 Speaker 06 Every time I see it, I'm like, wait, what here is it? I actually don't know. Um, no, this is, I mean, this phone is really cool. And it's funny because I remember when we were doing Circuit Breaker, I was always like, I want like a cool flip phone. This was my whole thing. And now it's here and now I'm just like, meh, okay. You guys proved me right. You could do it. And now I'm like, I just want my iMessage.
59:32 Speaker 04 There's that also. But the thing that I'll be curious about is what phones like the Razr do in response to whatever happens with the iPhone 12 mini. Uh, because if the point of the iPhone 12 mini is that it fits in a pocket, uh, or a purse in a better way or whatever. Well, a folding phone actually can make in theory a better case for that. Um, they just haven't done it yet. So if the iPhone 12 mini turns out to be wildly popular, I think we can expect maybe a bigger push for folding phones, uh, next year.
1:00:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And there was a iPhone 12 mini hands-on video.
1:00:06 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:00:07 Nilay Patel? It not, not in English. I think it was Italian. It was a very strange video, but the thing is very small.
1:00:12 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:00:13 Nilay Patel? The LG Wing came out, Heimer reviewed it. We got a hands-on of it and a video that you can watch. This phone to me looks sick. Like, I definitely want a phone where you just like flip it out. It makes a T for some reason, and then you can brandish it in like any one of six configurations. It does seem like the software is kind of all over the place though.
1:00:31 Speaker 04 I mean, it's an LG phone. What do you expect the software to do?
1:00:34 Nilay Patel? But this is one of those where it's like, if, if not, this is, this is the iMessage phone. Like, we just had a whole thing about Congress. LG should go in front of Congress and be like, look, y'all. If iMessage ran on this phone, everyone would buy this phone because it looks crazy.
1:00:49 Speaker 04 Right.
1:00:49 Nilay Patel? This is the competition. You're not getting Ted Cruz. And then Ted Cruz would like scream at LG like, that, is that the moment you want?
1:00:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, I don't know if the LG wing is the, is the, the standard bearer for that moment.
1:01:01 Speaker 06 I would love that.
1:01:03 Speaker 04 I mean, LG is fully in the, like, honey badger phase of its smartphone life, right? It's just, it has been trying weird stuff forever, and it's just getting weirder. This thing is nuts. Like, you remember they had, they like had the thing with like the modular batteries? It had a removable battery and like this, like bottom of the phone like unlatched? And you could like attach other modules to it along with like spare batteries? They just do this stuff. It never lasts more than a year or two, but someday, one of these things is gonna land. Someday. I believe in it.
1:01:33 Nilay Patel? I'm just telling you, there are people out there right now who always want the weirdest phone. And they can't get it because they want blue bubbles too.
1:01:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:01:41 Nilay Patel? Telling you, Congress should just be focused on iMessage.
1:01:42 Speaker 04 Give up on blue bubbles. Let it go.
1:01:44 Nilay Patel? This is, I think, the headline that Ashley was calling out is being straight from 2006. Verizon made a Yahoo phone?
1:01:50 Speaker 06 I literally thought this was like, and I don't know, like someone vetted it. And I was like, what, you guys? Like, this is such an old link. Why did you even like? How did this end up on your Twitter? I was like, what? How did Tom get duped by this?
1:02:04 Nilay Patel? The only reason I want to bring this up is to just, right, all the carriers are doing media stuff, right? AT&T bought Warner, Time Warner, turned into Warner Media. Julia spends all of her time tracking the politics of Warner Media. And like the slow destruction of whatever it was to be replaced by AT&T executives. T-Mobile, we got one of our lightning round headlines here. T-Mobile just launched a new TV streaming service called TVision.
1:02:29 Speaker 04 Which is relatively inexpensive right now, as all TV services are in their introduction.
1:02:34 Nilay Patel? And then it'll get more expensive over time. And then T-Mobile also has all kinds of deals. Famously, T-Mobile gave away Quibi for free. So T-Mobile, I would say, has content efforts, but not at any particular scale. But they're, they're doing bundled content stuff. Verizon, I just need to disclose, I used to work for Engadget, but Verizon. Like bought AOL, they bought Yahoo, they, that was all wrapped up in the Huffington Post.
1:02:56 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:02:57 Nilay Patel? All of it has failed.
1:02:58 Speaker 04 They took, they took an oath to.
1:03:00 Nilay Patel? They took an oath and then they renamed oath into Verizon Media Group. They own TechCrunch. Like their media efforts have just been so weird and wacky. And they're trying to sell the Huffington Post now. No one at AOL knows what they're doing. And they're like, what if we do a Yahoo phone? Meanwhile, ATV is like, we own CNN. Like the difference in scale between those two approaches is very funny to me. And I, I'm just gonna say this right now. I would use the Yahoo phone. Pure spite. We were talking about battery packs. MagSafe is a big moment, I think, for phone battery packs. Mophie made a battery pack that just clicks on the back of your phone.
1:03:35 Speaker 04 I love this thing.
1:03:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:03:37 Speaker 04 I love it so much. So it's not actually not just a battery that clicks. It is a battery that clicks to your phone, but what it actually is, what are they, what's the, the ring on the back of the phone? Pop socket. The pop socket.
1:03:45 Nilay Patel? It's a pop socket?
1:03:46 Speaker 04 So it has a little ring on it, but it's just a square that you 3M taped to the back of your case. And then what the battery does is it just locks onto that square and has a Qi charger inside it. And Qi charges your phone through the square, which means that you get a pop socket. You get a little phone stand. And when you want to have a spare battery or put a battery on your phone, you just like slide it onto the back and you're charging. And you're done. You don't, you don't have an extra case sticking out of the bottom, covering up the port. And like hassles and fiascos, you just like slide the battery on and you're charging your phone. It's the best.
1:04:21 Nilay Patel? A great product for a pre-pandemic time. Dieter, T-Mobile is expanding its 5G network. What does this mean to you?
1:04:29 Speaker 04 You know, go outside and if your phone shows a 5G icon and you're on T-Mobile, do a little happy dance and hope that it's not slower than LTE, because it might be. But the networks aren't very saturated yet, so it might be okay.
1:04:41 Nilay Patel? I feel like a lot of people who have started getting iPhone 12s on AT&T have realized like, AT&T says it has millimeter wave.
1:04:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:04:50 Nilay Patel? It does not. The AT&T 5G E logo versus real 5G logos are also very funny to me.
1:04:56 Speaker 04 Oh, by the way, actually, AT&T, when it does have millimeter wave, I think, I believe it shows 5G plus. So if you have an AT&T iPhone, it's either 5G E, which is LTE advanced, or it's 5G, which is sub 65G, or it's a 5G plus, which is millimeter wave.
1:05:11 Nilay Patel? Yeah, they also own CNN, which I would just point out again, is ridiculous. Surface Pro X review and an Echo Dot review, the new ball shaped one, go read them. I think Dan was a little less taken with the ball shaped Echo Dot.
1:05:24 Speaker 04 The dot shouldn't be a ball. The bot should not be, it should not be a sphere. It should be, it should be a disc.
1:05:31 Nilay Patel? Spheres are hot this year.
1:05:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, I was about to say orbs are the thing.
1:05:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, but the, you want to hang, you want to hang the dot on the wall. You want to put it in a weird corner. You don't want to set it on the table.
1:05:41 Speaker 06 It's a design piece.
1:05:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, but that's what the big Echo is for.
1:05:45 Speaker 06 I literally was upstate in an Airbnb and every light was an orb.
1:05:49 Speaker 04 Wow.
1:05:50 Nilay Patel? Fox, Foxconn's building a giant orb in the middle of Wisconsin.
1:05:53 Speaker 06 I think orbs are in.
1:05:55 Nilay Patel? They should make it an Echo. Oh, can I, can I just say one Fox, something before we talk about the PS5? We press released today, San Francisco 49ers launch first 8K instant replay system in the stadium with Fox on industrial internet, which is the Wisconsin subsidiary. So they got to 8K.
1:06:11 Speaker 04 Wow.
1:06:12 Nilay Patel? I don't know if that stadium is 5G. I guarantee you there's no, yeah. But it's just funny because like, it's a huge scoreboard inside a Levi stadium and then like, the Foxconn logo is there? And it's like, this is all just a waste. Okay. The PS5 is rolling out in very strange, like staggers, right? There was like, people have done unboxings, we played with the controller.
1:06:30 Speaker 04 Same thing has happened, happened with the Xbox.
1:06:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:06:33 Speaker 04 Series X. And like, this is how the Surface came out. People do hardware hands-ons without that. This is, you should get ready for more gadgets to be unveiled in stages in this way, going forward, I think.
1:06:44 Nilay Patel? I think it's just like pandemic times, right?
1:06:46 Speaker 04 Maybe.
1:06:47 Nilay Patel? Anyway, we have a bunch of photos of PS5. The thing looks enormous. It looks ridiculous. Every, every time I look at a photo of this thing, I'm like, I'm buying Xbox. I'm gonna be honest.
1:06:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:06:56 Nilay Patel? Like, I'm a PlayStation person. I'm like, I, I don't want this.
1:07:00 Speaker 04 So I went over to Veron's place to look at it and play a little bit of Astro's Playroom. It is huge. It's just, it's gigantic. You eventually are like, you become a little bit blind to it. Eventually, sort of, you know, in the same way that like you become blind to, I don't know, the notch on your phone, which let's be honest, still looks really dumb. But yeah, it's, it's so big. Ashley's just shaking her head.
1:07:30 Speaker 06 It's horrid.
1:07:31 Speaker 04 I watched, I watched Ashley in the Google Doc, like click on a thing, her name popped up. And then I know what happened. She looked at the picture and then she started shaking her head.
1:07:41 Speaker 06 I just pictured like, I just pictured what would happen if like I walked into my boyfriend's apartment and he had this and I was just like, no, like it would just be a flat, no, you need to put that away. That's not allowed in this apartment here.
1:07:54 Speaker 04 But so, okay, I played Astro's Playroom and there's like two things to talk about with it. One, you know, it's, it's a little, you know, cute little game. The graphics are very good as you'd expect. The ray tracing is very fun. You can like see reflections on things and like move them in the shadows and everything's in real time and that's all fun. I think we'll find out much more about graphics in the games closer to the full review, but the DualSense controller is bonkers. Yeah. It's, um, you know, it feels like a controller, whatever, but they have put a louder speaker in it and they have put stronger haptics in both the hand grips and in the middle, I think. Maybe it's just on the two sides. And so the very first thing that you do is like, they show a graphic of these cute little robots like falling into the controller on the screen.
1:08:39 Speaker 04 And then you tilt it left and right and you can feel them moving from one side to the other. Cause it's just, you know, it's just adjusting the haptics, right? So it's just tricks with, you know, taptic engines or whatever, but they do really clever things. And so when the little robots are running around, you, anytime, anything that your avatar in the game does something, the noise comes out of the controller. It's like you hear its footsteps and the sound of its footsteps change depending if you're walking on glass or sand or grass or whatever. And they literally give you a little dit, dit, dit, dit, dit of each leg as it hits the ground in the controller. Like it's, it's completely like, it's a tech demo. So they're like showing off, but there was just like a little like, oh, I love this robot now. This, I love this robot and I identify with this robot because I can hear it walking around on the sand
1:09:24 Speaker 04 right now. And I'm hearing a little crunch of its baby little feet and I'm feeling it and then, aww. All right. Now I actually get a PS5, even though.
1:09:30 Nilay Patel? Even though it 100% looks like a space helmet. Fine, I'm gonna get one. I want to bring this up. The Xbox and PS5 are gonna kick off a TV upgrade cycle. It seems very obvious. That's gonna be a mess. I'm just telling you right now, it's gonna be a mess. Like, all those fun TVs, like the OLEDs, Dolby Visions, most of them won't support these consoles at their highest settings with variable refresh rate with 120 Hz. It's a mess, like just the HDMI standard, like all that stuff. We should just do a whole episode. I should just bring Welch on the show. Yeah. And maybe Tom too. But the TV upgrade cycle that's about to happen is going to be very confusing. And so there's like one Sony TV that will do it. There's a Vizio TV. Vizio Always is like the head of the curve.
1:10:15 Nilay Patel? It was HDMI 2.1 and variable refresh. Not all the ports on all these TVs will support the consoles. So you're gonna buy a new TV that supports 2.1 and then plug it in the right port, which some, like, a lot of people listening to this are like, yeah, that's pretty normal. But just imagine, like, the regular PS5 customer buying their PS5 and being like, why doesn't it work? And because they plugged in a wrong port in their TV. It's gonna be a mess. I'm just calling it out. I'm gonna, I'll have Welch back. We're just gonna do an hour long in HDMI standards. It's gonna be great. That'll be the most popular first guest episode ever. The last thing I want to call out, as because as always, we've gone over our self-imposed deadline that nobody but me cares about. Monica wrote this incredible story about a 24-year-old who's tracking every broken McDonald's ice cream machine in the United States.
1:10:59 Speaker 06 Hero.
1:11:00 Nilay Patel? It's just incredible. It's just, it's just one of those like weird, wacky internet stories that blew up. She saw it. Just go read it. It made me happy. It's a very confusing time. Read about the guy who's obsessed with broken ice cream machines.
1:11:13 Speaker 06 It is very upsetting when you walk to a McDonald's that's near your apartment, let's say, and their machine is broken. It is upsetting. So I appreciate this person.
1:11:21 Nilay Patel? But isn't like the broken ice cream machine, like, just like a well-standing cultural phenomenon?
1:11:26 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's just weird though. Like, why are they always broken? I don't have an answer. I thought it was just like, they don't want to use it. I don't know.
1:11:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah, the ice cream is just there to lure you into the French fries. That's where the money is.
1:11:37 Speaker 06 Right, yeah.
1:11:39 Nilay Patel? But go read that story. Monica did a great job. I wanted to call it out. Okay. Last thing, absolutely last thing. We are finalists for a Discover Podcast Award. There's a link in the show notes. Just go, just go vote for us. We like winning awards. It makes us, makes us feel good. All right. You can tweet at us. Ashley is at Ashley R. Carmen. Addie is at TheDextrarchy. Dieter's at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. Dieter, you got a Tuesday show coming up, it seems like.
1:12:02 Speaker 04 We have one more Tuesday show coming, and then we're going to take a pause. And that Tuesday show is going to be a different kind of director's cut reviews. We're going to do the, the reviews that happen at iFixit. They review stuff in a certain way, and we're going to talk to them about how they do their takedowns. We're going to talk to them about how they do their teardowns. I suspect they're going to want to talk about right to repair a little bit. And, you know, see what's up.
1:12:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And then after that, Decoder is launching on the 10th. It's my new show.
1:12:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:12:30 Nilay Patel? But you can go subscribe to that right now on Apple Podcasts. You can listen to the little trailer I made. I stole a trick from Casey Newton and just said, here's what I believe, which is a very hard thing to do. It took me weeks to write that script, but.
1:12:41 Speaker 04 I had to edit out so many Mustang references in this, this is what I believe script. You wouldn't believe it.
1:12:46 Nilay Patel? Look, as a, as an official pickup truck owner now, all I do is talk about my car. That's just who I am. But no, go check it out, subscribe to it. We'll promote it when the first episode comes out. I'm done self promoting now. That's it. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ash.
1:13:00 Speaker 06 Thanks.
1:13:00 Nilay Patel? Thanks to Addie for, for talking about Congress with me. Thank you. Someone has to do it. Addie always does it. Great. We'll be back next week. Talk to you then. Rock and roll.
1:13:12 Speaker 04 Vote.
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Previous iPhone 12 and 12 Pro review with Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel Next Tearing down the iPhone 12 with iFixit Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
