The Vergecast - 333: 5G phones, Juul, and Microsoft's move to Chromium

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter are joined by Verge science reporter Rachel Becker to discuss what’s going on in the world of Juul — why it’s so popular, how addictive it is, and where it’s being restricted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of The Virtchast is brought to you by Merck. A decade ago, during experiments on board the Space Shuttle Columbia, Merck scientist Paul Reichert discovered conditions that crystallize a specific protein. By studying these crystals, Paul and his team determined all new ways to improve the storage of structurally fragile medicines, devising life-saving drug delivery methods. Paul is just one of many Merck scientists, dedicated to the research. to Inventing for Life. See why we invent

at Merck.com slash inventing for life. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com, a website about technology, about the future, about your feelings, about USBC,

about policy news. Mostly USBC. Mostly USBC. I'm Nelai Patel. I'm the editor-in-chief of the Verge. That's the website we were just talking about. Dieter Bone is here. executive editor. Hi, Dieter. Hello, I'm here. Well, I'm here and I'm out there in the room with you, but I'm here. Paul Miller is here. Paul, do you have a title anymore? I vacillate between freelance and unemployed. It depends on the context. Yeah, I get, I'm with you. Anyway, these are my two buddies. We talk about technology every week. How's it going? Hello. This is a strange week. We're going to do a bunch of stuff on the show that is interesting. Qualcomm demoed 5G in Hawaii. Normally you'd think, hey, we're going to send a reporter to Hawaii. That reporter is going to be really happy.

I'll tell you Sean Hollister, who went to Hawaii for us to attend these demos. Mostly filed a bunch of copy that sounded tortured because the demos were rats. We're going to talk about that. We've got to talk about what is going on with Google and messaging. Because there's always something going on with Google and messaging. Dieter's going to walk us through that. And we're going to have Rachel Becker on, who is one of our great science reporters, to explain exactly what is going on with Jewel, which I'm just going to straight out say is a nicotine company.

Not a vape company, a nicotine company. Yeah. So that's all going to happen. And then Liz Lapado, our great type of the editor, is going to do this weekend Eon. So a lot of things happening in the Verchrist. But Dieter, you have titled this section of a rundown, Qualcomm and Paradise. And so I believe it falls to you to drive this new segment. Qualcomm, the company that makes the chips in every Android phone and makes modems and stuff,

they are really, really excited to take advantage of this moment when Intel is not doing and Apple's blazing away making fast, fast chips. And they have decided, you know, Apple does its keynotes in the spring and the fall, and there's a big Google developer event in the spring, and they have hardware in the fall. Qualcomm has decided it wants to have a yearly big tech event. But they've decided they want to do it in Maui. And it's super frustrating because we really want to write about and see the stuff that they're talking about. But we have to send a reporter to Hawaii, which sounds like not a problem because you get to go to Hawaii.

but I don't know, it's always a hassle because in December, we're always getting ready for a bunch of stuff. Anyway, Sean Hollister, Intrepid Reporter, took the L and went to Hawaii to cover Qualcomm's event. And we expected three things, and we got three things so far. They talked a lot about 5G. They talked a lot about their new smartphone processor, and they talked a lot about this new processor for Windows computers, the HCX. Oh, my God. So we didn't want to go, but we went. And I'm super happy that we went because all that Sean did, the entire first.

day is look at their demos for 5G and listen to all the hype about all the amazing things 5G is going to enable. And then when he went to actually like see the demos, they were terrible. Like, they barely managed to get a basic demo setup. And it was getting speeds that were like, meh, just kind of meh. And kind of their excuse was this isn't optimized yet. Yeah. Which I guess makes sense if they're doing in New York, you know, there's a lot of signal interference around.

There's big buildings. It's like, you're in Hawaii. You're in Hawaii. You're in a situation where you could honestly just run a cable. Like there's nothing in the way. Like it should be pretty, like here's a transmitter, here's a receiver, it goes real fast, should be where you live in the middle of nowhere. We're like hitting the moment where the hype about, oh my gosh, 5G is going to change everything

hits the like, well, let's actually see what it does. And what it does is there's big, thick, heavy phones with insane notches and millimeter wave, which means it only works inside the room that you happen to be in, apparently. And then it's like the demo wasn't like fully optimized. Their grand rollout, they had a bad demo. Like, what are you doing? Like, this was your moment. You're trying to make it a big event every year and you just didn't do it.

I mean, to be clear, 130 to 140 M-Bips, it's not, it's not the worst thing. I wouldn't be mad if my phone was that fast. No. But yeah, I don't understand this line about we need to optimize it if you have a completely controlled environment. That makes it seem like the technology is. is far from ready. Like, you're not going to have every engineer that's going to deploy this network

across the nation, across the world, is not going to have as much time to set something up as you did to set up one room in Maui, right? Right. Yeah. Well, and the clarity around, like, when will you actually get, like, 5G and what will South towers look like, you know, Apple's waiting until 2020. One Plus's CEO thinks that 5G phones are going to cost an extra one to $200 because smartphones don't cost enough as it is right now.

If you think that you're going to spend 2019, like, excited to buy a 5G phone, I'm just telling you right now, I used the first 4G phones, and that was a mistake. That was a huge mistake. And I think that using the first 5G phones is probably also going to be a mistake. I just tried to do this gambit where I was like, I'm going to do my AT&T, and it's going to be just as fast. But it's AT&T, so I got 10 down. See, right, right? Like, this would be a fine upgrade.

This would mean I could stream to Twitch from my home with a 5G device. It'd be fine. Until AT&T captured data because you're not streaming Game of Thrones for free. I'd be poor. Well, that's the thing is I got to succeed on Twitch. I got to get the ninja money so I can afford the bill. So you can write it off. Yeah.

I do think this is an important time to explain that 5G is not an upgrade patch to physics, right? There are physics-defined limits to how much information can be carried over a wave, depending on what frequency that wave is, and then how much noise is on that as well. So, you know, fiber optics right now is how we get the most information, because you're using, like, the spectrum of light, which you got real tiny waves, and so that's great. So 5G is adding these millimeter waves, which are tiny waves. so that they can hold a lot of data, right?

It's just like a high frequency means you can get more bandwidth. The downside is it doesn't propagate very far. But, you know, 5G is not going to magically make a ton more data appear in the regular spectrums. Well, I think there's some expectation that over time. So first of all, I want to agree with you that it's not a hack over physics. I agree with you. I don't want to contradict that idea. But there is some expectation that over time, the way it's going to do,

band steering and like multiple input multiple like all of that stuff will be able to move more data over the existing spectrum but the first thing that's going to happen is they're going to do millimeter wave and they're going to have to put way more base stations everywhere so there's a huge infrastructure deployment piece and then they're going to like bring it to the 4G spectrum I mean we're looking at 10 years right like realistically LTE deployment was 10 years we're now like in it fully we're at the peak of that cycle and think how LTE really tailed up speed-wise right at the end as they were starting to pile multiple frequencies together. So 5G will have a lot of those advantages.

I would say it took, yeah, are you adding 10 to now? It's 2029. You know, there's a part of me that's like, I know this is not actually feasible, but there's a part of me that looks at the range that I were expecting from these millimeter wave towers and like their ability, their inability to go through walls. And that makes a part of me be like, what if we all just got together and bought Eros across the nation and just used those. What was that Wi-Fi company called?

There was one. It was called like Riot Wireless. Yeah. Right? Where it was like mesh Wi-Fi hotspots. What if we just all agreed to just share Wi-Fi passwords with each other forever? And then that we don't need cell towers anymore. That was Steve Jobs' original plan for the iPhone.

Yeah. Walt tells the story all the time where he was like going to partner with Comcast and every there would be your network and a public network on every Wi-Fi router from ISPs. And the iPhone wouldn't need a cell connection because he hated the carriers. And that, to me, is still the dream. Comcast did have a crazy... Was it Republic Wireless? There was some company that was going to put a Wi-Fi router in your house.

It would mesh to other Wi-Fi Routers. This was, like, 2008. It wasn't successful. I think Republic is one... It's like a password-sharing service, kind of. Or they have, like, open access points. There's one that does this Wi-Fi router thing that's still pretty popular, apparently, in, like, France.

Forget what that one's called. France. Why are you making fun of France? France is fine. Millimeter wave doesn't replace a Wi-Fi router because it does not go through walls. I mean, think if you have a Wi-Fi router and you're 100 feet away from your Wi-Fi router in like two rooms over, you're going to have sometimes trouble connecting to your regular Wi-Fi router.

Millimeter wave has way more difficulty propagating. Yeah. So look, they're demoing it. We're at that stage. I would imagine we're going to go to CES in January and just see lots and lots of silly 5G things that seems likely. But I would just go back and read our reviews of like the HTC 4G epic touch or whatever it was called and just how horrible the Thunderbolt, how horrible this first

generation of 4G devices were. And it's just going to be all of that all over again. Yeah. Because the sacrifices they need to make for the radio, the battery, and the power consumption are too much at this period of time. Now here's the ironic thing. After 10 minutes of debunking hype, I am actually kind of excited for Qualcomm's chips. And I shouldn't be because I've been burned by Qualcomm before, especially when they made like smartwatch chips recently.

But their new Snapdragon 855 is coming to phones and it's got stuff in it. And then there's the Snapdragon 8CX and the X stands for extreme. No, it doesn't. Come on, it does not. Yes, it does. What does the C stand for? Close. The A close to extreme.

But so, okay, so Qualcomm is the first big company after Apple to ship, in theory, when they ship these things, seven nanometer chips, which is, you know, half as many nanometers as the chips that you have right now, which enables more power efficiency and theoretically more power. Presumably that'll be great for phones, and I hope it's really good for battery life for phones. I want more power, but I'm not like super worried about that, which is maybe weird because they're so far behind Apple, but whatever. But for laptops, it is actually deeply fascinating to me because they're claiming that this, you know, this 8cx chip is the equivalent of a core I5U series, which is like the desktop class I5 Intel chip and that they have way, way, way less power consumption as well. And so this dream of having a Windows laptop that could actually last 20 hours and actually be something. you'd want to use seems like maybe, maybe this time it's going to be okay, Paul. Reading these specs, this sounds like the perfect laptop chip. I don't want to be hurt.

I'm scared right now. How good this looks. This is very emotional. Paul, tell me which specs are filling you with such deep anticipation. I'll give you seven of them. All right. Wow, that's more than I wanted, but here we go. Seven nanometers.

That's not the right spec. Who cares? It's twice as fast when you run seven watts through it. Maybe. So that's it. That's the only spec. It's a seven nanometer arm chip. Ten years ago, how did computers get faster?

The process size of the chips will get smaller, right? But in recent years, it's become very difficult to make chips at a smaller process size. So we've done all these shenanigans to try to make faster computers. We've got all these AI accelerators and all this garbage. but still if you can get the process size down, it's less electricity to do more work. Okay. So you're saying this chip,

just because it's seven nanometers, you think it's actually competitive with an Intel Core F5, which is what most people would have in their lottops. Yeah, I mean, they're claiming, I mean, again, if any of these claims are true, and they manage to ship it, and if Windows runs well on it. All right.

I think we all understand why Deter is scared. Yeah. They're claiming to, beat out, like not the super slow kind of Coram-style ultra-Utrak-book chips. They're claiming to beat out or meet like the MacBook Air style quorum chips. Okay, so let's go to the sort of Microsoft set. So they have this chip, they promise it's really perform it. It's as fast as an Intel CPU.

It doesn't mean anything if Windows on Arm isn't a real thing. And it's been around for a while. Is it more real now? There are more promises, Neelai. Firefox has promised it's going to run natively. All of Microsoft stuff is going to run natively. I'm looking at a screenshot that lists Spotify and Minecraft and Netflix and Hulu and Norton by Symantec. Oh, what you want is Norton running natively on your arm chip.

That's, whew, finally I can switch. So we're going to get into this later, but because of some other stuff that's coming to the edge browser, they're going to make that run natively in our arm, I'm sure, which means that a bunch of the web apps that you use are going to run better on Arm in theory, possibly. Maybe hopefully I'm scared. I don't think it's going to be great on ARM in terms of like software being like natively compiled to ARM. But I think it's going to be better than it was, which isn't hard. Hold me. I'm scared. I have too much hope right now.

That's where my head is at right now. Here's what I want to do. I want to I want to run Linux on this because with Linux, a lot of times, even if something isn't already compiled for your system, you can typically compile it to ARM. Linux has pretty good arm support. and you can, yeah, you can run Firefox and Linux on Arm. Yeah. You're golden. I like how your answer last week to the bad pixel slate was like, I'll just put Linux on it. And your answer this week to like, these promises might not come true are like, I'll just put Linux on it.

Like that's good. That's good. I'm into it. Are we looking at like all day battery life or all week bad? Last year they demoed Windows on Arm and they're like constant connectivity, week long battery life. None of those things happened. I think there's one Samsung Windows arm laptop that like is in the world right now. Yeah.

There's not very many. There's a few and they're bad. They're slow because they're running basically phone chips and they have 14 nanometers, which everybody knows it's garbage. You should throw your laptop and your phone in the trash right now. I feel so bad for Intel. They're just like not a part of this conversation. And when they are, it's going to be at 10, right?

Like it's still three nanometers too many. We spent the past two months talking about how stupid fast Apple's iPad Pro is, right? And one of the reasons it's stupid fast and has stupid good battery life is because it has a 7 nanometer chip. Now, there's a lot of other reasons that Apple's chips are so far ahead of what Qualcomm and Intel have been able to do. But that's one of the very big ones. And so even if, and I'm assuming it's true, that Qualcomm's chips are not as efficient or fast or even as high quality, as Apple's chips, they've at least cut that lead down by a significant amount, which is something that Intel hasn't been able to do despite many promises.

And so I'm way too optimistic. I know my heart's going to get broken. But, I mean, I'm telling you, Neelai, GameLoft says they're going to have a native arm code for their games. So it's going to be fine. This is amazing. I still can't find what the C stands for it. And now I'm really suspicious.

Could be crappy. So when is this stuff going to ship, Deeder? You know. All right. When is Sean coming back from Hawaii? When does her friend come back from Qualcomm jail? Yeah, they're saying second half of 2019. All right.

So I would imagine that all this means is they demoed a bunch of stuff. They made a bunch of announcements. CS is coming in January. We'll probably hopefully see a bunch of arm laptop news, maybe some 5G like hotspot things, right? And then we've got a ways to wait before these things actually ship. Yeah. But it is good that Apple is getting some competition in sort of the thin and light laptop thing.

It would be wild if there was a great arm Windows laptop with connectivity in all-day battery life before Apple does a thin and light MacBook running arm. It would be absolutely crazy if that happened. I think that that is a real possibility. That would be crazy if they just cede that advantage because they could do it right now, right? We all feel like they could. All right, well, maybe some competition will come into this market. You know how I feel about that. I feel great about that.

All right. Let's take a break. And then we're going to do this week in Elon, and then Rachel's going to come talk to us about Jewel. You ready? Yes. This episode of Virtrast is brought to you by Better Mortgage. Better Mortgage believes in a mortgage process that feels as magical as getting the keys to your new home. They're doing it by combining technology with an amazing customer service to deliver better pricing, commission-free loans, and a personalized way to see how much house you can afford.

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Just ask yourself, what would the boss do? The boss would choose Hilton. From modern meeting spaces to amazing pools, Hilton hotels and resorts, have everything you need to get down to business and a little pleasure. Check out Hilton hotels and resorts. Travel. the boss. Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags, and everybody else, welcome to this week in Elon. I'm your host, Elizabeth Lopato, deputy editor at The Verge. This week, we're going to talk about SpaceX. So, you may have noticed that this week, SpaceX didn't land its rocket booster for the very

first time. There was a splashdown instead. It wasn't an explosion, as we have seen sometimes in the past. So I was trying to figure out how much that matters, and I went into this weird rabbit hole because it turns out SpaceX is a private company, which means that there's less available information for me to figure things out with. So, welcome to this Odyssey. Just to give you an example of how hard it is to figure out what's going on between private companies and public companies, no one actually really knows SpaceX's valuation, or at least most people can't seem to

agree. So with a public company, it's super simple, right? You multiply the outstanding shares by their prices and, ta-da, it's a valuation. But with a private company, you kind of have to estimate. So I've seen estimates that range from $25 billion to $27 billion. That was CNBC. Bloomberg has pegged it at $28 billion. And the Wall Street Journal has said it is worth more than $20 billion, which is, I think, probably the safest thing you can say, right? The consensus seems to be that there's disagreement about how much more than $20 billion

SpaceX is worth, but that does seem to be the floor. Cool. So this is why it's difficult to figure things out, because if I were talking about Tesla, I would just pull the share price, multiply it, we would know. Now, it's also kind of hard to figure out, like, what the revenue is like, how much profit they're making, even if they're making a profit. So that makes it harder to figure out whether or not the failed landing matters to SpaceX financially. I've got limited information. I don't know how trustworthy some of it is, and I'm not entirely sure where all of it is coming from.

But that is not going to stop me. So here is my speculation. I don't think the water landing matters very much. Remember, landing the boosters for these rockets has always been a secondary objective for SpaceX. Also, that was a used booster, right? Like, it's already flown. So, you know, it landed in a splashdown the first time, and then it was refurbished. And the things that Elon Musk has said publicly about this particular situation suggests that he thinks that the booster can be recovered again and maybe even reused, because the other thing that happened for SpaceX this week is that they landed a booster for the third time, so it seems possible they could recover the booster from Wednesday and fly it again. The reason I say this is because one of the things

that matters for SpaceX as a company is the ability to refly their rockets. They've been very public about this. They're very bullish about this. They think this is going to bring down the cost of going to space a lot. So it seems like this is actually probably not a very big deal, although it is extremely cool video, which I highly recommend you watch. It's very sideways. Very windy today. There go the legs. Come on. Oh.

Stick it. It's pretty sideways. Nope. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But I then started thinking about, okay, what is going on at SpaceX? Well, there are a couple of things, right? When we talk about Tesla, I can tell you kind of what investors think, because I can look at the stock price and be like, oh, yeah, the stock price fell. So that means that investors have lost confidence or, oh, hey, the stock price is right.

and that means that they're excited. I can't do that here. But part of the benefit of being private is that you get to pick and choose your investors. And so those investors have a much longer expectation for a return on investment than somebody who might be trading Tesla. You know, here's something that, you know, you hear again and again is that they're actually looking for people who are not trying to make a return for like 15 years. So I think that this is unlikely to matter financially for the company, not only because it seems much more minor than some of the other things that we've seen happen with SpaceX, but also because the investors are less worried about short-term returns. One thing that I might mention is you might remember that there was a big

explosion in 2015 and a big explosion in 2016, both of which delayed SpaceX's other plan launches. There was an explosion in 2017 that did not do that. But the reason that we know that those things mattered is because last year, the Wall Street Journal got a hold of SpaceX's 2015 finances. I did tell you this was a rabbit hole. And look, I know those are profoundly out of date, but we're dealing with a private company and limited information, and that's some of the clearest stuff I've seen. So I pulled those numbers because I remembered they showed that the margins were pretty thin. And rereading it, I thought, oh, okay, the margins are pretty thin, but this is not the sort of thing that's likely to move the needle in the same way as those two explosions

did. But the other thing that I saw when I reread that report is that there were projections for SpaceX's launch schedule, specifically for next year's launch schedule. Again, these are old projections. Obviously things change, businesses change, people change things. But the number at the time was that they thought there was going to be 52 launches. And right now it looks like they're actually going to be around 20. So that's about the same cadence as this year. Now, you might wonder, okay, why are those different numbers? I did tell you this was a rabbit hole. The reason they're different numbers is in part because the business conditions have changed, right? Like, there are fewer people who are sending up certain kinds of satellites, which means there are fewer people who are ordering rockets for those satellites.

And so SpaceX has rejiggered its business to try to deal with that. Part of it has to do with the telecommunications venture Starlink, which is a constellation of 12,000 satellites that are meant to provide continuous internet service from orbit. And there were some details about that in the WSJ report, too, a projection of 40 million subscribers and revenue of 30 billion by 2025. but I haven't seen anything since then and Starlink has changed. So in conclusion, I feel crazy and I'm not totally sure what's going on at SpaceX, so I could be wrong. But it does seem like that splash down, no matter how dramatic it looked and how disappointing it felt to watch, probably isn't a big deal in the long run. I'm Elizabeth Lepado. That's been this week in Elon. I will see you next week. All right, Rachel Becker is here. Hello, Rachel.

Hi. Rachel is one of our science reporter. She's in New York this week. It's so good to have you here. Thank you. And I figured it would be a good shot to have you on and talk about Jewel, which is a thing that both you and I have a relationship with. I've been trying to quit that relationship for a long time.

But you've been reporting on Jewel, which is a little USB stick-looking nicotine babe, and they, like, dominate this market. Yeah, they're huge. I started reporting on Jewel this summer when Bloomberg reported that the company was raising money against a $15 billion valuation. 15 billion. It's huge. It's huge.

And when you look at the vapes in the marketplace, there are ones that are made by companies underneath big tobacco companies. So like your views, your Mark 10, your blue, those are all the products of big tobacco companies in the sort of Russian doll scheme of company ownerships. And then there's Jewel, which for now, for now, is independent of big tobacco. And you can just see it, when you look at the numbers, you can see it just taking off. So I think it was views.

It was certainly big tobacco vapes that dominated the market starting in 2013. And then Jewel just really took over starting in 2017. And it's really kind of reshaped the vaping marketplace. And there's like government interest in this. The FDA is like stop it. The kids are addicted to nicotine. And now there's big tobacco is interested in like buying it chunk. Yeah, that's what the Wall Street Journal is reporting, that Altria, which is the parent company of Philip Morris, USA, which makes Marlborough in the U.S.

Again, it's like a Russian doll of nicotine addiction. They're just like companies within companies within companies. But it's interested in buying a bit of jewel. That's crazy. So why to take off? I have a theory, but you're actually the reporter, so I want you to tell me. So why did you take off? It's such an interesting question because when you look at the landscape of the vaping marketplace, you've got the Sigelites.

coming on the scene in 2007. You've got the mods, you've got vape pens, and then you've got these pod systems like Jewel. To me, I think that it comes down to a couple of different things. It comes down to the design. It's convenient. It doesn't leak. It's discreet. It comes down to the marketing, so other companies focus more on TV. They focus more in promotions with the retailers. And Jewel was the first to really lean heavily on social media. And then it's also the recipe. So Jule has a higher dose of nicotine, and it's in a formulation called nicotine salts, which resembles the form of nicotine that's in cigarettes. And the nicotine salts are more palatable than the free-based nicotine, which is the form of nicotine that you find in most other vapes, you find it in cigars and pipe tobacco. And that's harsher, and big tobacco's known that for decades, that it's harsher.

And because nicotine salts are more palatable, you can afford to pack more nicotine. a higher nicotine dose within the pods. So you basically vape a jewel. Is that the verb? You jewel. You're the one who does it. Not anymore. Dieter, what's your verb?

I don't talk about it because I would never inhale nicotine ever. That would be wrong. That would be wrong. Anyway, I quit smoking forever ago. And then the jewel came back in my life. And I was like, oh, nicotine. I really like this. And then it's been like a year of me trying to stop.

So to me, it's, this thing is more like a cigarette than anything else. And that, because of the higher nicotine dose, it just feels like the most addictive thing in the world. And then you look at the, like, the teens on Instagram and they're like, there are Instagram posts where they're like dramatically throwing jewels in the ocean to be like, I'm done with this now. So is it just more addictive? So it's a hard question to answer. And scientists, some scientists won't answer it because there hasn't been a really great, well-controlled study that looks at jewels. compared to other vapes compared to cigarettes and says, you know, are the people who start with Jewel more likely to continue using nicotine than the folks who start with a free base

vape? So that's one answer. I mean, I'll give my answer. My answer is yes, but not necessarily, like, medically speaking, but you have this thing that is convenient, easy to hide, easy to have on you all the time, has a very high concentration of nicotine. They say one of these pods is supposed to be the equivalent of like one or two packs of cigarettes or something, but people can go through them much faster than that. And so you are able to have this high concentration nicotine hit without any of the social or many of the social things that come with smoking a cigarette. You don't have to walk outside. You don't smell. You know, you're like less of a

skis. You've just got this little thing and you can just take a quick hit of it and you can do it more often. And so the pragmatics of the thing, combined with the high dose of nicotine that it provides, you add those two things together. And, you know, to me, it's like, I had an easier time quitting smoking than I have had quitting using the jewel. I agree. I actually went to a fancy restaurant in New York last night, and it's like the restaurants have caught on here. There's just no vaping signs and bathrooms all over the place because they know. They know what you're doing in there. And they would like you to get out so the next person can use the bathroom. So, okay, so that's the jewel. But it's a tech product.

It spun out of, it was Pax Labs, which is the weed vape company, and they spun out the weed stuff and they renamed Pax to Jewel, right? I think so. It's a really weird corporate structure. They know they're in trouble. They know the FDA is coming for them because they think teens are addicted to nicotine. Do they have competitors? I mean, you and I looked at their patent a while ago, but it seems like there's holes and you can get around it. Yeah, they do have competitors.

They're suing a bunch of them right now. So they have a patent of nicotine salts? Yeah. Well, kind of. It includes nicotine salts in various formulations. So the way you make a nicotine salt, you take free-based nicotine, you take an acid, you mix them together, and you should get a nicotine salt of various forms. Jewel, in their pods, they use benzoic acid, so you get nicotine benzoate as a salt.

Jules patent also includes a variety of other acids. But it's going after a lot of patent infringers that kind of combine a bunch of different aspects of the jewel. So, you know, it's the salt in the pod or it's the little cartridge combo. So that's kind of part of it. So it's suing a bunch of kind of less legitimate competitors. And then on the other side, it has competitors in the nicotine salt space that are making open bottle nicotine salts that are for the refillable vapes. That's not really like, that's comparing kind of apples to oranges because part of jewel. The

selling point is the fact that it's so convenient and it's part of the system, whereas the open bottles, you know, they might leak, they might spill, you know, it's very different. So I think the biggest competition that Jewel has or will have that it has had was from big tobacco. And so companies like the views vapes were, are made by British American tobacco through some subsidiaries. I know you're listening to this in your car. Watching Rachel be so frustrated at how hard it is to explain the ownership structures these companies is very entertaining. She's just like, ah. Anyways, the companies behind's views, they say, you know, they've been using nicotine salts since way back, since before Jewel. Fantom Ventures, which is the company behind the Blue Line of Vapes, which is a subsidiary of Imperial brands, which is a tobacco.

company. They are also incorporating nicotine salts and are seem to be pretty happy with the result of using nicotine salts trying to make a product that's more like a cigarette. Mark 10 vapes have some nicotine salt products as well. Jule has been clobbering all of them like crazy. I mean, when I say Jule is dominating the market, I'm not exaggerating. They are dominating the market. And so I think the biggest competition it has faced as.

from Big Tobacco, it's crushed that competition. And so Big Tobacco will have to innovate if it wants to keep competing with Jewel. Is that a good public policy outcome? Does the FDA want nicotine innovation? Are they just like stop selling this to teens and pleased wither and die? That's such a good question. So if you'd asked me this in 2017, I would say FDA wants nicotine innovation. I think the FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, came out with this whole kind of harm reduction strategy for nicotine. It was kind of part of this whole package where the FDA proposed reducing the nicotine levels in cigarettes and kind of along in that same moment pushed off the deadline for vape manufacturers to apply for FDA premarket authorization.

to keep their products on the market. And so by signaling that FDA would make, potentially, would require cigarettes to become less addictive by reducing the nicotine levels and also saying vape manufacturers here, you have more time to apply to stay on the market, I think the idea was that it would foster innovation to make better vapes, like better alternatives to cigarettes.

Now I think the FDA is sort of walking that back And you see that with the flavor restrictions that the FDA announced the other week. And they just worry that kids are addicted to nicotine. It's like short of it. Yeah. And the kids, I mean, I don't know if they're addicted, but the kids are definitely using it. It's a 1.5 million increase in high schoolers and middle schoolers who are vaping over last year. So I think it's like 3.5 million high schoolers and middle schoolers have used e-cigarettes.

Yeah, it's a huge number. Can I use this opportunity to explain my ideal vape product? Oh, God. Yes. As someone who smokes real cigarettes and would like to not do that and has a hard time quitting real cigarettes, I want a product that will, I can match my current cigarette pace as vaping. Because my fear, if I went over to Jule, I would just go insane on the nicotine and then I would be more addicted to nicotine. I mean, that is effectively my experience, that I was able to just stop smoking. I quit smoking while I was studying for the bar exam.

Whoa. Because my theory was that if I could do it during the most stressful period in my life, that I would just do it. And it worked, it just happened. I think I, for a while, I used to go outside and blow bubbles because I was just so used to taking breaks. So I just like, it's crazy. It's also like smoking was like a good way to like make conversation.

I'll tell you, blowing bubbles outside a bar. Great way to make conversation. So I found it way easier. And now it's like, it's pretty, like, it's pretty much. been a year almost. I'm pretty close. And it's still like, ah, I think about it more than I should in a way that I didn't was like that. So, Paul, I wish it had a timer. Like, there's, there's innovation they could do to that product to make it work better, to make you quit smoking. But that obviously goes against her business model of selling you nicotine. And have they cleared that up,

Jule? Like, have they addressed this very obvious conflict of interest they have? Because they're like, we just want people to stop smoking. But you're like, but don't you want people to not be, inhaling nicotine all the time? Is that the real goal? Well, they don't say that. They say that they're a switching tool, not that they're helping people quit, and part of that is regulatory, so they can't make those claims that they're helping people quit nicotine without going through this whole FDA process. So right now they're saying they're a switching tool to get people off of combustible cigarettes and onto vapes. This is like everything the Vergecast is about. This is like a regulatory interference question.

This is a vendor lock-in question and a walled garden. Proprietary products with patent restrictions. You love your walled gardens. My fear is if Jewel came out with like a flashy new product that had like an app, you know, connects over Bluetooth and then you regulate how much nicotine you can have a day out of this, this jewel with your app. The FDA would be like that apps are for kids. It sounds like you're trying to sell them with the kids.

Wow. You know what I mean? Like it would die on the vault. That's my fear. A product like that can't exist because innovation is not really allowed right now. There are definitely rumors that Jewel was considering a Bluetooth-enabled vape that would communicate with your phone, too. And some critiques I've heard of that is that you're basically giving this company that is selling you something you're addicted to access to your data about how often you use it, how much you use, and is also letting you kind of control your settings potentially. So, like, yeah, there seem to be pluses and minuses.

Surprising no one, I think the regulation is good here, Paul. Because their incentives are so upside down. They have no incentive to get you to quit. They have every incentive to get you to buy more stuff. I know. Wait, Paul, what's your experience been with the sigilikes, which, you know, are the disposable kind of ones that look like cigarettes? That's how I got started smoking.

Oh. I was not a smoker before Enjoy. And the enjoy came out and had this looks like a cigarette, feels like a cigarette. I had a hard time regulating my intake of enjoys and became very addicted to nicotine and then switched over to cigarettes. Because they stop because you're out of cigarette. Well, I think it's an advantage. Also, you have to go outside. That's a good thing.

Yeah. Turns out. Okay. So Rachel, what happens next? Oh, what happens next? Well, I think what happens next is we see whether FDA's flavor restrictions really have a big impact. on curbing youth vaping, which is the big concern.

Those youths. Those youths. The teens. What's your favorite phrase? The nicotine's. It's just waiting. It's just sitting there for you all the time. I've been wanting to publish a headline that says,

rise of the nicotine. I have resisted this. For like months. And right, no one will let me do it. It's not okay. Rise of the nicotine. Just flash forward. Just flash forward.

It's 2040, a generation raised with nicotine straight to the brain from age 13, wanders zombie-like through the streets, upping their Nico dose on their Nico apps. It's a whole situation. All of this I had Rachel on here just to get to that. I set it up for you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Anyway, so the FDA is going to monitor nicotine's.

Yes, the FDA is going to monitor that I'm not using that word. But FDA's been very pretty clear. It's had some very strong language that it's going to keep an eye on youth vaping, basically. So the FDA's flavor restrictions basically say if you're a store that doesn't have strong age restrictions, you can't have, you can't have flavored products on your shelves. And you can't have flavored products on open shelves. You might be able to have flavored products in age restricted areas. But FDA says, you know, it's going to keep an eye on it. If they don't see a reduction in youth vaping, they're going to reconsider and maybe crack down even harder.

And so I think that right now we're sort of in a holding pattern to see what FDA's restrictions does to the youth vaping issue. Rachel, when these companies say, we're not advertising to kids, no, heavens no, we're scandalized. Do you believe them for a second? Oh, that's a good question. I mean, there's this great paper that came out of Georgia State that looked at kind of basically, why Jewell has been so successful. And it definitely was one of the first, according to this paper, to lean heavily on social media for marketing. You know, other companies used TV, others used promotions.

Part of that I kind of wonder is whether big tobacco companies have sort of been burned about their marketing. And so they were cautious about marketing in a way that would, you know, you could argue, is marketing to young people since young people are on social media. It's what the teens are doing. Those nicotine. Is that a hashtag? I'm looking at Instagram. No. Continue.

No. So, and then you look at some of Jules' early marketing campaigns, which had clearly young, good-looking people using the products. And I think that's certainly what Attorney Generals around the country, like the Massachusetts Attorney General is investigating Jule to see if it was actually marketing towards kids. 22 posts. It's not yet a phenomenon. I'm sorry.

All right. Well, Rachel, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. I know you're on the jewel beat, so as things develop, we'll definitely have you back. By the way, I do want to correct myself, FTA says 3.6, not 3.5. So 3.6 million high schoolers and middle schoolers are vaping. That's 100,000 more nicotine. No. You've walked into that, Rachel.

Oh, boy. Thank you so much. All right, there's big news in this world in the world of web browsing. And I think this is really tied into every story that we've been talking about because we've been talking with the iPad and the future computing. Yep. Microsoft, which makes the edge browser just... Does it?

Well, there's a lot here. Microsoft makes the edge browser on Windows, which has been aggressive in trying to get Windows users to switch from Chrome. Like, literally we'll pop up a dialogue box. It's like, Chrome will kill your family, switch to edge. Yep. is switching the rendering engine from Edge to Chromium, which is the Google open source project that is Chrome. This is a huge deal, right?

I could even walk that back. They're actually switching to Blink, which is the fork of web kit that Chrome uses to render the web, and then V8 the JavaScript rendering engine that Google and Chrome use as well. So it's turning Edge into a chromium browser, and they're contributing to the Chromium Open Source project. They're going all in on the rendering engine and the philosophy and the way of making a webpage happen

that Google has been working on, that they used to be friends with Apple on and now they're not quite so friendly. And it's a huge deal for lots of reasons, which I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to say, blink. So Microsoft had its own rendering engine. And there is a world,

which having three competing rendering engines, four, if you count Mozilla, but you know, these are the three big platforms, right? Chrome, Windows, iOS, which is where WebKit lives. These are the defaults. So this is a huge deal for so many people. So it's better to have more rendering engines because that makes the standards on the web more robust. But now we're coming down to two. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's tough because as a person who has purchased a Surface Go tablet, it. I cannot wait to have the default web browser that so first of all, using the default web browser, if you

use Safari on a Mac, for example, it just tends to be faster because there's other parts of the OS that do web stuff, and so you don't have two rendering engines going and it feels more optimized. So having Chrome on, having a Chromeium web browser

be the default on Windows is going to be great for me, assuming it doesn't destroy battery life, which it often does, because because Chrome just like the web works better on Chrome web browsers than it does on edge web browsers. It just does. And that is often because developers are only coding to that and WebKit. And so you can be mad about that.

You can call them lazy. You could say that they're under enormous pressure and it's too hard to code to every single different web browser out there. You can get mad at the web standards for not moving fast enough to support multiple. multiple running engines. All of that is like, but at the end of the day, when they ship this thing on Windows, Windows is going to be nicer to use,

and so I'm happy about that. I'm unhappy that the web is getting more monolithic, and people are coding to, like, these specific rendering engines instead of to, like, an abstract idea of what capabilities a web page ought to have. Yeah, the web is becoming Google's operating system

that you can run in, you know, Remember, what was it, parallels or VMware or QMU? Yeah, the web is just like your QMU to run Google's operating system. I like that you went to Linux again. It's good. What's going on over there? I switched to far completely randomly before I read the news. Today I was like, because Mojave broke Safari.

I don't know if other people have had this experience, but for me, Safari pauses all the And I don't know why and I'm just sick of it. And so I switched to Firefox. Because Chrome uses too much RAM and I don't like it. I do not like how much RAM Chrome wants to use. And I'm not going to stand for it. So Firefox is way more responsive than it's ever felt to me. I'm sorry.

I just have the visual of you downloading the Firefox like disc image file being like, I won't stand for this. That's right. That's great. So that said, as a hobby, I'm working. on an application right now, guess how I'm building that application, how I'm building the graphical user interface of that application. I'm using Electron because you know what?

The easiest way to build a cross-platform desktop application? Electron. Guess what Electron's based on? Chrome. So, you know, I can't win. By the way, Mozilla is like they've spent the past couple of years being pretty friendly with Google. And then in the past year or so, they like decided they're on a privacy kick and they're a

little bit pricklier. Chris Beard over at Mozilla has published this blog post that starts with Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google. And it just goes on and gets like more strident from there. Mozilla's going hard. They're saying this is bad for the internet and bad for privacy and bad for security. By the way, download Firefox because they Yeah, of course. I use Firefox Focus on my phone. I think everyone should use it more.

Yeah. It's great. There's like all kinds of things where I just like, they're not like devious, but like, there's all kinds of things where I'd like to enter text into the web and see what happens. And Focus is great for it. It's also very fast. So, yeah. Also uses the WebKit rendering engine, which Apple is in control of because they're not allowed to use their own Firefox.

You know, the Gecko Ultimate Quantum, Gecko Quantum rendering engine because Apple doesn't allow competing companies to run their own browser rendering engine. And, and, and neither does Microsoft on Windows S mode. You can't get anything in the Windows store unless it runs the Edge HTML rendering engine, which, by the way, they're going to stop using themselves, and they're going to let people put Chromium stuff in the web store. So that'll be a party. Okay, so here, I mentioned the iPad when we got into this conversation.

Here, it's great. Windows is going to have a better browser. No one said about it. Everyone was installing Chrome anyway. Right? at the end of the day, it doesn't matter because Chrome was already winning, and Microsoft is doing everything it can to compete with Chrome, including now adopting its browser engine.

Okay. This is fact. That's just a fact. That's what they're doing to compete with Chrome. Chrome was not a better web browser than Edge. I mean, it was, but not that much. It's that the web was not designed to work well to the way that Edge didn't work well with the web. So, like, you're right that Chrome is a better web browser and a better experience, but, like, on the merits of the technology, it wasn't that, far ahead of edge. Okay. Okay. So noted. Here's my point. We, Dieter and I have been in, I would call it a three to four week slow burn Twitter argument with folks about the iPads web browser.

Yeah. It's just every day someone else pops up. Stephen Sinovsky, bless his soul, always finds these threads, contributes. It's great. It's like a very interesting sort of long conversation. The thrust of this conversation is, I say the iPad's web browser, mobile safari and the iPad, is limited. A bunch of other people say it's limited to. The response to this, which is totally valid, is, well, no, it's websites sniff the user agent and they deliver a mobile version to the iPad instead of delivering the desktop version. You can hit request desktop version, which is a workaround because that's the way the iPad works, and you can get a more full-featured thing. But there's all kinds of stuff that doesn't work on it. So Google Docs does not work

great in Mobile Safari and the iPad. It just doesn't. And they want you to use the app, the app is more limited. And this little cycle is very descriptive of the iPad. The question is, is that Apple's problem?

Should they make the browser better? And I think one important, one answer to that is, no, you should use the apps and Google should make better apps for the iPad because that's where the people are. I think this Microsoft move is a massively important

counterpoint to that argument. Because in order for Windows to be successful, it has to have a great default browser. right it has to be great it has to do all the things you think it needs to do and even on a system where you can go and get Chrome which will doesn't might you're still using Windows Microsoft has decided that the browser is so important that they will capitulate to Google and deliver a browser that works more like you think the web should work and I think that is just an massively important data point in favor of users expectations in terms of what you who's problem it really is I think it's the platform vendor's problem versus is every app developer should do the work to capitulate to the platform vendor. So if Apple does the work to make the iPad browser do more stuff, the return on that investment is exponentially higher than every app developer doing work to make a slightly better at.

Yeah, actually, you're saying whose problem is it? I feel like you're referencing Fraser Spears's blog post. He wrote a blog post about switching from an iPad pro and a MacBook, and he makes a really, there's a really important distinction. The web not working well on Edge or on mobile Safari on the iPad. It's not Apple or Microsoft's fault. It's not their fault. It's the web's fault and people coding to specific browsers.

Chrome is the new IE6. Just because it's not their fault doesn't mean that it's not their problem. Because at the end of the day, they sell a thing to a customer that customers want to work well. Yeah. And I think that's the way to think about it. I think this is going to be better for Windows customers. They're going to launch their web browser that's installed by default, and it's going to do the things they want it to do.

It will probably still send you to Bing by default, I just realized. Oh, yeah. That'll be fun. Whatever. But it's going to do more out of the box because it'll be more compatible with the web. And then we can have this argument about whether the web should be compatible with browsers or browsers should. That's a big argument.

So I'm learning a little bit about the web standards body, just from reading too much hacker news. And as far as I understand, to become a web standard, it has to be independently implemented in at least two browsers. You have to have separate implementations. And like where we went wrong early on is they tried to make like implementation, a single implementation into a standard. And they realize that that doesn't carry well. So in a sense, everything that that Chrome puts in what it calls like a stable, like a release, like a. like a user-facing feature, right, is typically based on a standard.

The question is if a company like Microsoft or Apple can afford to put as much money as Google puts into its browser for much smaller returns, to keep up with all of the absurd feature that Chrome is adding. And Firefox keeps up with the standards fairly well, surprisingly well. Apple is really slow and Microsoft clearly just got bored of it. Yeah. I think Apple is, I mean, Apple just wants you to go to the App Store. Fundamentally, I think, if Apple can go to a place where mobile Safari is a document, if you were, and you read all your news in Apple News and you do all your work in an app that you download from the store,

they would be very happy. I mean, that's, I think that's why they don't, like Apple's developer relationship teams can reach out to Google and be like, hey, why don't you switch your user agent sniffing to make mobile Safari work on docs? And I don't think they do that. I think they're very happy to say, hey, you should make those apps better. I just think the web is so important to so many people that that is only tenable for so long, that they will get this criticism from every version of the iPad until they fix that browser. What they're going to get are more commercials like the one that Microsoft just put out

with the 10-year-old girl singing that the iPad is in a real computer, which is... Oh, God. I love it. I love it because it just makes people so mad at the same way that the iPad What's a Computer commercial made people so mad. I just, I want to see, like, young children making people who want to define what a computer is and whether a tablet counts as one. I rate, like, just nothing makes me happier. Yeah. It's the best.

All right. We're going to take a break, and then we're going to talk about Google's extreme number of communications. All right, this is a break. It's advertiser content from ZipRecruiter and The Road to Hired. Learn more about how one groundbreaking business is attracting the best talent. This is The Road to Hired, brought to you by ZipRecruiter. And their UFO crashes on this planet called Smeborg. That's Gretchen Hübner, co-founder and head of product at Codable,

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All right, Paul. Mm-hmm. Every week. Always. What's it called? It's called Nice Netbook, man. Oh, my God. Did you find a netbook? Yes. Did you see the last netbook? It could very well be the last Netbook. This is the Falcon. It's an 8-inch laptop that folds into a janky tablet, right? Sam Biford. So yeah, it's a, it's a tiny little laptop with a 1920 by 1200, 8-inch display, which is pretty bonkers. Also has USBC, regular USB, many HTML, HTML, and a headphone jack. So it's basically a MacBook killer. What kind of media tech processor is powering this delightful project? I'm trying to find the processor.

Obviously, it should run the 8cx. Yeah. But it's a Kickstarter project, but they've shipped, I believe they've shipped another product that's similar, like another, like, seven-inch laptop. This looks too small to type on, but it's just so cute. I'm sure I've told the story a million times, but I just remember being in Germany at a trade show and Asus showed. up with the EPC and the whole world was different for like two years. I used to have the specs for the standard Intel netbook memorized. I don't think I do anymore.

It was an Intel N270 processor with a 7-inch screen and like 4 gigs of RAM and a 160. I do have them memorized. There they are. And EMMC storage or whatever? Yeah, yeah. It was Microsoft. They priced Windows differently if your screen was bigger than a certain size. So every notebook had exactly the same specs.

Oh, this is running the Intel Gemini Lake Pentium Silver in 5,000. What is that mean? Apparently, it's similar to the surface go. All right. Oh, well, I can't wait. Update from Paradise. It combines everything. While we were sitting here, Sean Hollister has given us a dispatch from Maui.

He has used the arm native Firefox browser on the arm. Qualcomm prototype computer. So it's using a different rendering engine. It's on arm, compiled, blah, blah, blah. He says he got a dozen tabs going, including a couple of HD videos, had PowerPoint going, and it was fine. Bar reached. I like that that was a breaking news update.

Firefox was fine. Everything's going to be great, I promise. I like it. This is a hopeful episode. Dieter, what on earth they canceled aloe today? That's not a surprise. What has happened? Okay, so we've been waiting for Google to corral every carrier on the planet to switch over to RCS, rich communication services, aka Chat.

And we expected it to start beginning at the end of this year, right about now. And sure enough, a couple weeks ago, Verizon said they'd do it in early 2019. But then, out of nowhere, surprise, they announced that it's coming to just the Pixel 3, just on Verizon, the more phones are coming. but it's a very slow rollout. As of this recording, today, December 6, today it's supposed to be out, I still haven't gotten it yet. But at the same time, when Google announced this big, or we talked about this big switchover to focusing on RCS instead of their own texting apps, they told us that they're pausing investment in Allo, their texting app. Now the inevitable has happened.

They told everybody that they're canceling it. This comes on top of another clarification they put out that Hangouts, their older texting app, which has turned into an enterprise, Slack competitor, you know, enterprise company texting thing of a jig, whatever the hell it is, is going to, in fact, become available to consumers someday. It's not completely shutting down. But whatever. Google has reduced the number of chat apps that it makes.

It now makes Hangouts chat, which is for enterprise. But if you really, really want to use it as a consumer, you can. And then it tries, it's trying to get carriers to support RCS chat in the Android Messages app for texting. and then they've got Duo and Google Voice and some other stuff floating around there. Their cell phone network. Their cell phone network, GoogleFi, which puts all of your texts into Hangouts still by default for a lot of people. So it's real bad. Somebody said it best.

It's like, you know, the ironic thing about what's going on with all of Google's communications apps is the really bad at communicating about what's going on with Google's communication apps. Here's my dream. I have a dream. Okay. That's not, the thing that follows is not going to be his weighty. It's the last time someone said I had a dream. Sooner Perchai is going to testify in Congress next week on Wednesday. This is coming out on Friday.

That means we have four days. Call your representative in Congress and demand that they ask Sooner Per Chai about Google's messaging strategy. Right? Yeah. We've done this. We've done this for net neutrality before. What should they ask? What kind of question?

How's it going? But like the question, Nealai, is what do you want Google to do? Because they tried hangouts, that bombed. They tried Allo, which was like everything except for default encryption, that bombed. They've done the stuff. It's just none of it worked. I'm saying he's going in front of the House Judiciary Committee. Okay.

So call your member of Congress, your representative from a district. Uh-huh. Figure out who it is. And say, hey, I hear Google CEO, C. No, Pichai is coming in front of the Judiciary Committee. I, as a citizen, I would love to know about search bias. I'd love to know about what's happening on YouTube. But really, I think Congress should ask him,

why doesn't Google have a unified messaging strategy that competes with iMessage? And then if enough VergeCast listeners do that, hundreds of thousands of people, Congress will ask Sundar Pichai why Google doesn't have a proper competitor to iMessage. And then I will have won. It's very simple.

And then he will feel shame, and he'll go back to Google, and he'll say, Rick, you know, I don't think the pixel is going to do great unless we figure out some my message competitor and then someone else will like to fix it. See, but Google has such a good slam dunk Congress approved answer for that. Like we want to embrace open standards for messaging. We don't want consumer lock in. Wow, did you just make the nerd voice to disagree?

He just did the nerd voice to say lock it. All right. You just couldn't help it. When they shut down the current consumer version of Hangouts, and when they shut down Allo, I'm pretty sure that Hangouts chat doesn't support end-to-end encryption, which means that Google will not give you,

does not make a product that you can use to communicate with over text that's end-to-end encrypted. Yeah, that's available to consumers. I mean, I think this is the thing that they failed at. It is, I firmly believe that if they had a great multi-platform chat solution that was encrypted, that seemed private, that worked really well, that they could break the iMessage lock-in thing.

And that would be a true competitor and it would kick some innovation into this market because competition is good. And they just can't get there. I don't understand what it is. Like a hundred years ago, Google or Gmail had built in, what do they call it back then?

Google Talk? Google chat. Google chat, they're like XMPP. Yeah. I could use it with the IMSJ app on the Mac. It was great. The Jabber protocol, right?

Yeah. So Google had worked. working chat and presence back then. And my mom could get a hold of me in my Gmail tab, right? Google abandoned that. And then now at some point those people, I think, ended up becoming Hangout users. And now Google's killing Hangouts. Like Google is aggressively only killing its best successes, I feel like, in chat.

Right. So G-Chat took over for like AOL and some messenger. And then both of them just blew it on mobile. When the transition to mobile happened, I swear to God. If the people in charge of AOL Instant Messenger had just been like, here's a really great IM app. It's just going to move you over and it's going to replace your text client. They couldn't have.

We worked today well during that time, and it would not have. But maybe. It's like theoretically possible. Google, if they just moved G-chat over and actually said, this is that, and it worked well, it could have been a whole different story. And then encrypted it. Yeah, then it didn't do anything. Anyway, so RCS is coming.

Is it going to change everything? No, it's going to just, I mean, it'll be fine. But who knows it's going to come to iPhones, and it's not encrypted. So, I mean, it's going to continue to be messy forever. That's the answer. Android messaging is going to continue to be messy forever. And there are things that are going to get worse before they get better. So I do not think that third-party texting apps, if you use a little indie SMS app or something,

are going to work super well with RCS, if at all. They might just have to fall back to SMS or they might not work at all. And speaking of what's really interesting. about that whole situation is, I mean, I think it might be for like security of identity of the app and blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's maybe not a nefarious reason for it. But if that turns out to be the case that it's hard to make a third-party RCS app for Android, guess what that means?

The Facebook Messenger app and WhatsApp and Signal aren't going to be able to easily offer to be your default SMS client in addition to being, you know, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or Signal. And most people just use the default. So you're going to have two apps if you want to use those other apps. It's, yeah. It's great. We should all switch to WhatsApp tomorrow, except it's on my Facebook.

There's really no good answer. Signal. Signal. Keybase. Keybase. Yeah, somebody found me on Keybase after I plugged it. So I'm just going to keep plugging on plugging keybase. I'm deeply suspicious of your motivations, Paul.

Critical mass of keybase users will take over the world. We got to wrap this up. I want to tell you, go look at Andy Hawkins. video. He wrote in the Waymo One taxi, which is the functioning self-driving taxi service in Arizona. Sean O'Kane went to the Tesla Gigafactory. Go watch that video. All that stuff is incredible. Ashley and Caitlin are cranking away and Why Did You Push That button? That season is so much fun. Go listen to Why You Push That Button, Everywhere You Can Get Your Podcasts. We have a holiday gift guide up. It's that season. Go look at our cool gifts. We have a bunch of new shirts in our store. They're awesome.

They're just my favorite. Go buy a shirt from us. Give it to your loved ones. And last, this is my big plug for the week. We've talked to a lot about Foxcon on this show. And Replyall just did a huge episode about Foxcon, Wisconsin. They went to Racine in Mount Pleasant, my hometown. They interviewed a bunch of people. They met the Village President at Mount Pleasant. It's a crazy story.

You should absolutely go listen to it. Next Tuesday, Shruti, Pinnaminani, who is the reporter on Replyle, who went there, is our interview next week on Tuesday. She did an interview with Josh on the site. You can go look at that, read that. It is wild. The village president of Mount Pleasant, which is where Foxcon is going to be in Wisconsin, there's just some guy who took like a course on how to be a politician from like a Tea Party group. And the first week on the job is the village president of Mount Pleasant. He got the Foxconn RFP.

And then $10 billion of Foxcon landed on his town. And so there's audio of all the board meetings. It's just an incredible episode. Go listen to it and reply all next Tuesday. Shruti is going to join us on the interview episode. So that's super exciting. And that's it. You can check out Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can check out Pivot with Kara and Scott Galloway. And you can check out Function with the Neil Dash, which is a new show from the Box Media Podcast Network. That's it.

Thank you. Rock and roll. Paul. promo code. There it is.