The Vergecast - Amazon HQ2 cancelled and Apple's rumored March 25th event

Episode Date: February 15, 2019

Nilay, Dieter, Casey, and Paul react to Amazon cancelling plans for their second headquarters in NYC, Apple's rumored spring event and announcements, and some new Android phones hitting the market soon.  Stories featured in this episode: Amazon cancels HQ2 in New York after backlashAmazon HQ2 defeat is a win for Queens activists but a ‘facepalm’ for tech leadersAmazon is buying mesh router company EeroJeff Bezos says National Enquirer is threatening to publish his nude …Apple’s Netflix competitor will reportedly be unveiled in March... or maybe AprilApple is reportedly planning a March 25th event for its subscriptionApple just made it easier to find and manage subscriptions in iOS …Apple's video service may launch without HBO and Netflix support …Apple reportedly demanding a staggering 50 percent of revenue with ...Apple's new deal for journalism should send publishers runningEarth is dying and this couple is crowdfunding a sex buttonNorth Focals glasses review: a $600 smartwatch for your facePhone makers aren’t even trying to keep their secrets secret anymoreGoogle launching Pixel 3 Lite and Pixel Watch in 2019, says Nikkei …The LG G8 has a vibrating OLED screen for a speaker Thanks to Microsoft Azure for sponsoring this episode. Get started with a free account and 12 months of popular free services at Azure.com/trial today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this episode of Vergecast, a bunch of Amazon news. They're pulling out of New York. They're buying Ero. Jeff Bezos is involved in a whole bunch of scandals. We're pulling Casey Newton in and talk about that. We've also got to talk about the Apple event that's rumored to be happening on March 25th. And we're going to end on some gadget news. Support for the show comes from Retool.

Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlestone. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data.

And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all?

I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.mobi of phone optimized system of web sites.

I'm Neal. I'm your friend. Deider Bone is here. Hey, hey, hey. Paul Miller is here. Hello. And we got Casey Newton. How's it going, Casey? I'm doing great. Great to be on with y'all.

Casey, the host of the interface. You're a host, right? That's the thing you do. You host a newsletter. That's right. The interface has taken over my body, and we now have a symbiotic relationship. I'm worried about you. Just letting that one go.

We have a lot to talk about today. There's a bunch of Amazon news, like an unrelenting amount of Amazon news this week. But there's two things I want to plug. First, if you noticed, Bill Gates was on the verge cast this week on Tuesday. The deepest 33 minutes of my life with Bill Gates. We talked about having to collect better data about the lives of women and girls. We talked about building better toilets. We talked about anger management.

We talked about billionaire tax rates. Phil is like a hard guy to interview. Casey, I think you've said this to me, right? He's like a challenging interview. He's a very challenging interview. I mean, obviously, one of the smartest people in the entire world. I would suggest he maybe scans your question for keywords more than really try to wrestle with the meat of it sometimes. But I think he was there.

with us. So listen to that. Tell me if I did a good job. But I enjoy talking to Bill. That was on Tuesday. Last week I did an emergency episode of The Vergecast, which people seem to have liked with Sprint's lawyer who is suing AT&T over the use of 5G. Got into it.

He says it's textbook false advertising. The Sprint T-Mobile merger right now is there was a hearing in the House about whether it should happen. It seems like it's under attack from the Democrats. It seems like it's a little bit under attack from the Republicans. And John Ledger, the CEO of T-Mobile.

It's a true fact. Because it's under this weird political pressure, John Ledger has deleted all of his mean tweets about President Trump, which is a truly insane thing to do. There's a bunch of T-Mobile and Sprintz up. It's very boring. It's in the weeds. You can go read on the site.

But go listen to that episode about why Sprint is suing 18-T over 5G that's available to. And then I want to, before we begin the show, just say, Better Worlds, our hopeful science fiction project. It's all done. You can binge listen to all of it. You can watch all the videos on YouTube. You can read all the stories at verge.com slash spreader worlds. Huge project.

Want to give a shout out to everybody who worked on it because it's great. But now, I think we have to talk about Amazon. Today, as we're coming to air, Amazon has decided not to build HQ2 in New York City. So if you will remember, Amazon held a public competition for cities across North America to bid on where it would build its second headquarters outside of Seattle. This competition started great. And then immediately everyone's like, this is stupid. Cities are promising to change. their names. All it did really was give a lot of people a lot of time to think about whether or not

they like the idea of tax breaks. Yeah. And the answer is they're a pretty medium idea. And then, so there's this huge competition, you know, like cities across Midwest are like this will revitalize the economy. It's like lots of excitement, lots of criticism. In the end, Amazon says, okay, there's two winners. Drummerer, please. We've picked New York and Washington, D.C., which is like, we picked the heart. Harlem Globetrotters and all the rest of you are in Washington. So they pick, you know, the two big cities where the tech talent is, their reasons are sound. Deli, are you suggesting that trying to build a big tech hub in like a, I don't know, rural Wisconsin is a bad idea?

It's not going great. Can you explain the Harlem Globetrotters, Washington General's aspect? I understand that there's a sports thing going on. So the Harlem Goldtrotters are a world famous trick basketball team. I don't know how you would describe them. Right. Like a non-competitive stunt basketball. Right. And they always play the generals who always lose. Oh, I didn't know that part.

Yeah. That's like the thing. You know, I don't know what other sports matter for you. There are cities like New York and D.C. in this world. And then there are cities like Omaha, which like wanted to be part of this. And it's like, what are they? How dare you? Right. And so Amazon says, well, we wanted to go where the town. talent was. And it's like, well, you should have just said New York

from the beginning. So in Virginia, in the, in the spot they're going in Virginia, that seems to be going swimmingly. They said they're going to put 25,000 jobs there. They're going to put, they were going to put 25,000 jobs in Long Island City in Queens, which is part of New York City. And the sort of Queens community said, well, hold up. We're already here, right? Like New York State, why are you offering $3 billion of tax incentives to Amazon to like redevelop this community that we live in? And I think that's like a, reasonable question to ask your lawmaker. And so in Virginia, it seems to be going fine.

Like, it's a pretty corporate part of Virginia. But in New York, the backlash was we weren't involved. Like the local community wasn't involved. So you see the city council starts, you know, three months ago, this goes down. Over that three months, the city council starts asking very hard questions of Amazon. New York has full of very powerful labor unions. They're asking Amazon very pointed questions about their workforce. Amazon saying we don't, we don't really want to have unions.

you see lots of local organizations participate. On the other side, actually Nat Garen wrote a great piece about this for it today, which I recommend to go read. On the other side, you have New York's tech and business communities who are saying this is great. This is awesome. We're so excited to have, you know, Google's in New York. We're excited to have Amazon in New York. This is going to revitalize this startup ecosystem.

It's going to put more money in it. We're going to do more business development. So there's a deep sense of excitement. Amazon's consistently pointing to public polling. It's like 70% of New Yorkers are excited about this deal. The problem is the 30% of New Yorkers who weren't were in Long Island City and Queens. So today Amazon announces it pulls out. Mayor de Blasio put out a statement, it's like, New York is, you have to be tough to make it New York, which is kind of an amazing shot at Amazon.

And I think what we're just seeing now is, to Deeter's point, Foxxon's in Wisconsin, they got a massive amount of subsidies to go into Wisconsin. That project seems real shaky. Amazon and New York, they were lured in by a $3 billion subsidy package. Governor Cuomo said he would change his name to Amazon if they came to New York. He did not do that. But you see this like appeal to the big tech companies. And I think here in New York, there's just there's literally enough people at sort of the grassroots level to say, hey, we need to actually think about these deals way harder. Like we're in New York. We don't have to, we don't have to just take the terms of the big tech companies. And what's super interesting to me, Mark Bergen at Bloomberg pointed this out today. He covers Google for Bloomberg. Google is buying like half of the city at the same time. They just announced a deal to buy like most of the west side of Manhattan's buildings like just like two weeks ago. And so Google has this massive presence in the city. They're buying more real estate. They're going to own more buildings. They're going to put in more employees. But because they didn't hold this public competition and they didn't ask for these tax

breaks, that's actually seen as a sign of success. Whereas Amazon is like you're, you're a monopoly and you're trying to extract monopoly rents for asking for tax breaks to build to build buildings in Queens and put in $25,000 job or $25,000 jobs. So it's a lot. It is unclear. The funniest thing about this to me is that Amazon has was basically like, well, turns out we don't need a second site anyway. Yeah. They're just like, yeah, we're done. We're not going to do this again. Yeah. So it just seems like this reality show they put on completely backfired on them. Casey, is that kind of your read too? Yeah, they really expose themselves to be completely disingenuous here because they're still going to hire 25,000 people.

They're just going to spread them across the country and apparently into Canada as well, which means that you get a lot of high-paying tech jobs dispersed into a bunch of cities that need them, but that can also absorb them. And those cities don't have to front billions of dollars and incentives in order to get them. So, you know, my read on this is this seems like it's actually a very good outcome, not just for the city of New York, but for the country at large. But, you know, the thing that this has been making me think about is what a shock it must be, not just to Amazon, but also to local politicians.

I used to cover local politics. And when you're running for city council or mayor or state rep, the thing you talk about more than anything else is the economy and the jobs that you're going to bring. And that has been a winning argument for decades. But what has happened is that we now have these examples of these cities that have essentially zero unemployment where people make very high wages and they've become weirdly unlivable because no one can afford to buy a house. The restaurants are all shutting down because they can't source the cooks. And so even if you can make the case that Amazon was going to get this amazing number of high-paying jobs, the average New Yorker already has a job. and the only thing this thing was going to mean for them is that their rent was going to go up.

So it really has kind of scrambled the equation of being a local politician and being a company that wants economic incentives. And it's funny because New York is not, I would say, a perfectly well-run city. Also, I think by law, no New Yorker is allowed to say the city is well-run. So compared to San Francisco, compared to Seattle, which are both facing enormous questions about where people will even live, New York has like a sort of a different set of problems. And even if you're priced out of Manhattan, which most people are, you can go live in Queens and you can go live in Brooklyn. And the idea that you suddenly would not be like real estate prices in Queens were skyrocketing. So the idea that you would put a big tech company there and then you would displace that population, I think, just did not fly.

Yeah. So I just want to read some quotes. So that's like the, that's the one side, right, which is the city planning side of it. Once the people on the ground got involved, the questions came fast and furious. But on the tech side, Julie Samuels, who I have spoken to for years, she used to be part of the EFF, now she runs Tech NYC, which is a nonprofit advocacy group for tech companies. Her quote, to Nat, this is terrible for New York. They're talking about tens of thousands of jobs that we're going to be in New York City that now aren't. General Assembly, which is sort of a tech training organization here.

Their CEO, Jake Swartz, said, Amazon's as a departure is a face palm hurt around the world and is self-owned by the entire NYC ecosystem. Wow. Can you hear a face palm? Yeah. The problem is, and then you die, is like, really. I just tried to make an audible face palm and forgot that I'm wearing glasses and not contacts, and I may have just broke my glasses. That is an audible face palm. One of my very favorite organizations in the city is called Pursuit.

It used to be called Code for Queens. They taught sort of underemployed people how to code. They actually had this track record of taking average salaries from like $14,000 a year to $7,000. $80,000 a year through their program. Very fond of them. Jukesu, who's the leader of that pursuit, he says, we had just met with the chair of economic development in Amazon yesterday. This was meant to be a long-term process of investment.

We were just at the start, and I don't know what happens now. So you see the tech ecosystem in New York was like gearing up to staff Amazon, to take Amazon investment. Whereas I think the other part of the ecosystem, which is the people who live in New York, were like, you made this deal without involving us in any way. So this is a big break. I think it's going to lead to a lot of questions about how many subsidies you really need to give some of the largest and wealthiest corporations in the world. Which is such a great an overdue conversation to have, right?

Like I think the burden of proof should be on both the companies and on the governments that are going to offer these incentives to really prove to residents of these towns that not just that jobs are going to materialize in the ether around them, but that their quality of life will improve. That should be the whole discussion. If you want billions of dollars, tell me how my life is going to improve. Casey, on your podcast that was like a quiz show, it was really fun, I listened to every episode. One of the episodes was about a startup founder in New York. Do you feel like these people that Neely is talking about, are there enough tech jobs in New York? Or is there like a shortage there? Everyone that I've talked to over the past year in New York has said the tech,

and the city has never been better. New York is a magnet for talent, period, and there are more and more places where people can work. If they're in the tech industry, Amazon included, right? There are already Amazon offices in New York, let us not forget. Google is the other big example, which Nilai already mentioned. And, you know, as always happens, some of those people are cycling out of the big companies. They want to start something smaller. They're raising money from a growing number of New York-based venture capitalists. So, you know, I do not see this as a death blow to the New York tech economy, right? I see it as, you know, a bunch of industry and lobbying groups aren't going to get quite as much money from Amazon now that it doesn't have quite as large a presence there.

If, indeed, it doesn't wind up building just as big a presence as it already intended to, right? Like, the company has no credibility on this subject. Minus the overt sweetheart deal aspect. Yeah, right. Maybe a covert deal. It is very hard to think about these sweetheart deals. Dieter brought it up for me not to think about Foxcon, which last I heard, like, literally people in Wisconsin have been sending me emails. Like, they don't appear to be building anything.

They're just pushing dirt around to, like, get tax breaks. Wait a bit. Every construction project looks like that for, like, the first six months. Every major big building. Yeah, I mean, there's like that huge Bloomberg story where it's like, all Foxxon has succeeded in doing right now is building a test bed where people are making 60 TVs like a year. Like, what are you doing? If you're going to make 8K 5G AI, you need a deep foundation. You got to take all the way down.

You need 1,000 feet for each K. I'm dying right now. Foxxon, by the way, in order to collect their first tax break, had to hire like 250 people. They missed the target by 80%. And the people there that I've talked to are like, they could have literally just hired like 80 people to sit in a room. And they would have gotten this like first set of tax breaks and they couldn't do it. it. Anyway, all right, so that was one piece of Amazon. But speaking of, like, the giants in Amazon being a giant, Deeter, I think you had as many feelings about this as I did, and you wrote a

great piece about it. Amazon bought Eero this week. Another company that we really like. I mean, I have Eero routers. Deere, I think you have Eero routers. Walt Bosberg has Eero router. Like, these were great products. I even subscribe to ERO Plus, which I really like, which is a service It's a subscription to ERO that gives you access to one password, a VPN. They've got like a beta of an ad blocker if you want it. They've got like a malware blocker. Eero tells you what's on your network. So, okay, you know how on the Vergecast I like have a half-bake story idea and then I expound upon my half-bake story idea?

And Neil I says, well, now you have to write that. And then I get real mad and then sometimes I write it. Same thing happened with this. Like I emailed Amazon right away with like eight questions. And then I will, we won't, we won't you talk to you about. but here's answers to your questions. And then I was like, well, okay, I've got these answers. They don't, it's not much.

I don't know. I guess I'll write something. And then at like eight at night, I text Neelai. And I'm like, I can't, I don't. I just don't know how, uh, feelings. And he's just like, just write the story. And then I wrote the story. Yeah.

It was true. I was like, just write down everything you've said to me. Just stop overthinking it. It really struck a chord, though. Like normally when a little tech startup gets bought, up until relatively recently, People are like, hooray, it's going to be so good. They're going to get all these resources. It's going to get integrated with this other ecosystem that I already love.

And think of all the possibilities of what they'll be able to make now, that they're connected to this larger company, and think of how it's going to be able to connect to all these other gadgets. And, you know, it's not going to go away in a puff of smoke when they run out of money. And everyone just maybe not, like, enthusiastic, but everyone's like, cool, good on you. This is good news. But overwhelmingly, the reaction to Eero getting through. purchased by Amazon was just, bleh, just people were just, I mean, I tried to sum it up in like, you know, three words

and blah, blah, blah, but like, people were just felt exhausted by it. And I don't even think it was necessarily because people hated Amazon, particularly, although there is a little bit of concern about their, you know, data privacy and stuff. But it was, it was more like, well, I guess, I guess we're only going to get to use things that are made by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. That's just, that's the world we live in, the end. Although the CEO of Sonos keeps tweeting at us saying, we're still here. I have a tweet that I have not sent in reply to Patrick Spence.

It's been in my drafts all day that says you'll make more money if you update the playbar. And I just like a little too rude. I'll say it here. So my comparison, I think Casey you'll enjoy this, is to Google and Nest. Do you remember how excited people were when Google bought Nest? So it was like for a couple billion dollars, I think it was three. Tony Fidel was going to ride into Google and build them into a hardware powerhouse. They're going to compete with the.

And like, there has not been a more disastrous acquisition that I can think of at that profile. No. Can you? Not at all. It's Google's worst acquisition. Like, I have a Ness thermostat. It's very good. Yeah.

But like, that's it. Like, that's the thing that they do. They're like, they turn my heat on and off. They didn't build out that ecosystem of products they thought they were going to. They bought Drop Cam and just, I mean, that is one of the most spectacular flame outs ever. They bought some little company that made like a, I forget what it's called, they made a hub with all these wireless radios in it, and they shut down the hub and killed

the service. And those 400 people were extraordinarily mad, and they've never put out another product to replace it. Actually, speaking of wacky wireless standards, I know you want to finish the nest thought, but I also need, this is, the Vergecast is a perfect place for you to talk about thread. Thread? Yeah. Okay.

I'll get to thread. Okay. But anyway, so, like, there's been that acquisition. I think we see Apple buy companies, little companies, all the time, and, like, their features just kind of get rolled into apps you don't want to use. And, like, now you're part of another ecosystem. Google just, like, buys things and they disappear into the Google Ether. Yeah. Microsoft buys WonderList, and now every day, I'm like, is this the day that WonderList stops working?

It's just that. I think that's the exhaustion, right? These are not seen as victories. Now these products are going to be stable and on a good course. it's how fast will the big company starve this into oblivion? Or screw it up or whatever, yeah. Part of that sensation for me is that most of these companies feel like, or give off this vibe that every time you use something that's not made by them,

that's a personal failing. Like the fact that they didn't make your light switch or your car or your door handle or your kitchen faucet or your email app, like they have failed and they're sad about that. are working very hard and eagerly to win your business so that they can have your whole entire life inside of their ecosystem. Maybe that's why people are nicer to Microsoft nowadays, because Microsoft realized it lost some of that dominance in people's lives. And so now it feels like it has to play nice. Yeah, it turns out that the less power that companies have over you, the better

you feel about them. It's really interesting how these companies, as they grow and grow and grow to sort of wind up playing themselves, right? Like growth winds up causing problems for them faster that they can solve the problems created by growth, but growth is the only logic that a company knows. And so, you know, it just sort of like plays out until disaster strikes. And, you know, with the Eero acquisition, this is exactly the way that I felt, you know. Like I, the ERO founder is a super nice guy and he built a great product. You know, we have ERO at my house too, and I think it does a really nice job.

but with the flip of a switch, all of a sudden, that's all Amazon data now. I will have no say in how that data gets used, and I will likely not even know how that data gets used, right? And that doesn't matter when it's a tiny startup, although arguably there might even be more security concerns there, right? But when it's a really big company and it has access to all of your data, there is just this point of exasperation. And the last thing I would say is that just last week, Kashmir Hill at Gizmoto finished up an amazing series in which she tried to, to live without using products from each of the big five tech companies and then in the final stud try to spend a week living without any of them from all five. And guess what? It is basically impossible, right? You almost cannot touch the internet without touching Amazon Web Services.

And so there really is no longer any meaningful choice for consumers for most of the major services that we now rely on to live our lives. So that's a bad thing. Yeah. And I think when there is competition, so my favorite, this is a total tangent, Casey, but just follow me on this. My favorite thing that the Verge covers in a great detail for no reason. IRBR Blaster.

Is insane. No, I hate you so much. Is insane party speakers. Yeah. Totally. Right? And like, it's just a, right, like, we've got Amazon, we've got the, like, Jeff Bezos accusing Saudi Arabia of hacking his texts. Like, there's all this huge stuff we cover.

And then, you know, we, like, make a point of covering Sony put out it's like fifth generation light up party speaker. And one, I think they're hilarious and we should cover them. But two, there's like actual competition in that market. And it's proof that no one actually knows anything. Right? Like you don't know what consumers want.

Like you think everyone wants to live in a totally minimal Instagram house with like one home pod. But it turns out they're actually out there buying speakers with built in air horns that light up. Yeah. And like Sony makes one and LG makes one. And there's like this massive, vibrant competition. And I think that makes people feel good. Totally. Neely, there's a perfect software analog to this, dating apps, right?

None of the Big Five makes a dating app, although Facebook is working on one right now. And dating apps are a true design playground where almost every year someone figures out some new behavior, some new mechanics, some new design. Yeah, but then the next year that dating app gets bought by the dating act conglomerate. There is a dating app conglomerate. Yeah, you're right. But even that is not owned by Facebook, right? And so it is one spot in the economy where there is legitimate innovation. And the fact that IAC, which owns all the dating apps, is not itself owned by Facebook, is the reason why that's the case.

So where we do find competition, consumers are almost always better off. So we can move on for this. I'm trying to get Nick Weaver, who's the CEO of ERO on our interview episode. I'm pushing real hard. I think this deal's got to close before he's like into it. But the one thing he did say to me very briefly, literally one way. word. I asked him how long he was working on it, and he said years. So I don't think this is like they ran out of money and they were desperation selling. I'm going to try to get him on the show

and we'll push him on it a little bit more. I'd also like to know how much they sold for. So when he's ready to talk. But I do think there's this narrative that like you run too fast, you run out of cash and you're like desperation and sell yourself to one of the big companies. But I know that like the big companies have been looking at ERO for years because it is a great product and a good team. And this is, this is apparently what they chose. So I would love to get more details on this. But, you know, Sonos, like, stay strong, buddy. Update that play bar. Just one thing in my life that is not owned by Google or Apple. The perversity of all this is I'm scared of investing in Sonos because they aren't owned by a big company. So who knows how long they'll be around? It's sick and

wrong for me to think and say that. But that's sometimes how I feel. about like a non-megag company. Yeah, no, I think that's, I mean, how many cloud-enabled devices have, like, gone belly up, like, stopped working because the cloud service goes away. Sonos is at least a public company, right? Like, they're not, they're not like a VC disaster way to happen. Yeah, you can check to see how long it'll be to relay until they go down.

I think it'll be a while. I'm reviewing the Sonos amp right now, by the way. It's great. Yeah. Just to wrap up the joke I made earlier, Ero was talking like it was going to bet big on the iot home smart gadget smart home standard thread and literally nobody else was like you go for it man we believe in you everyone yeah that that's going to be the one and then didn't bother um and uh i can't imagine amazon cares about that at all and so that's just i don't know well no so when they put out

the second generation year i did forget to talk about this i received many lectures about thread and how thread was going to be everywhere. And thread is the thing. And by the way, speaking of Nest, Google versus Nest on thread, like rent the company asunder. Yeah. Because no one wants to use thread. Are you saying we need a thread dead redemption?

Wow. Yes. So anyway, so Erobet on this smart room wireless standard called thread. Amazon is all in on like Zigby or Z wave. I think it's Z wave. It's got a Z in it. Yeah, it's one of the two. Oh, we've made a lot of jokes about the Zer.

Z Wave Alliance on this show. That's all I remember. Like, I don't remember which one it is. I just remember the idea of the Z wave alliance being very funny. But anyway, so Amazon's all in on this other standard, and I bet Eero has to drop its heretofore unused thread support completely because who cares? It's just very, they're the one team that was like all in. Okay.

Last Amazon story. Casey, and I'll let you drive this one. This is truly at the nexus of social media democracy. And medium, which I believe you enjoy dunking on. Tell me what is going on with Jeff Bezos. and his dirty photos. I can't imagine one person is listening to this show that doesn't know the outlines of it. The literal outlines of it?

And when I say the outlines of it. No. This story hit as we were trying to wrap up the Vergecast last week. So if you listen to the end of the Vergecast and we seemed a little distracted, it's because we were reading graphic descriptions of what was going on. We were reading the greatest medium post of all time by Jeffrey P. Bezos, who is the founder of Amazon.com. and also has been going through a divorce and also is an enemy of the president of the United States and also an enemy of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

So he's got a lot going on. And when recently he learned that his intimate messages, including both text and photos, were hacked off of his phone or off of somebody's phone, he hired the best investigator in the world and gave him an unlimited budget and said, you know, go go find out who my enemies are. And so what he recounts in the blog post, as you now know, is that it appears that American Media Incorporated AMI, which is run by a guy named David Pecker, improbably, were extorting him saying, you need to get out there and put out a statement saying that there is no political motivation to the fact that we are publishing your text messages.

And if you don't, then we will publish more intimate messages that we have from you, including some nudes. So Bezos wrote about it in a sort of incredible way. Like, he wrote about it with almost this calm amusement and clearly an air of self-satisfaction that he had gotten these goons to out themselves in writing. And he was just sort of able to publish all of their emails. and now AMI is scrambling. It says it's going to investigate.

It's in a very precarious position, both financially and legally, financially because it's losing money and legally because it cut a deal with federal prosecutors over some, you know, Trump-related corruption. So the whole thing is just one of the wildest stories I've seen in nine years of writing about tech. But the deal they cut with prosecutors was a promise to not do more crimes. Oh, yes. which is an incredible deal to make. We promise to not commit more crimes,

which I feel is like the deal you always make with a prosecutor. But with these Trump associates, you never know. You always want to get him on the record saying they won't do more crimes. And then they might have done another crime, which is incredible. So it turns out it's the brother, right? I mean, CNN has it, the Daily Beast had it. But there's this like, there was a whole news cycle. where there's a lot going on with Saudi Arabia and Jamal Khashoggi, their ability to hack iPhones

was in the news. I think Bezos was trying to make that link, and he hasn't provided any proof of that link, because he mentioned Saudi Arabia in his letter. Right. But I think now we're conclusively on it. The brother leaked it. But what do we know about the brother's motivation? He's a MAGA.

So it's just like he's going to help out his guy Trump. I mean, who knows? But that's the state of play as we record this. By the time we, you listen to this episode, 15 more Amazon stories that shake the world will have happened. So don't blame us. It turns out the brother is going to sell his Wi-Fi company to Amazon, too. The deal gone wrong, you never heard of it. Yeah, I mean, look, at this moment in time, I think, you know, if you listen to this show,

what we talk about Apple and Google and Microsoft and Facebook all the time, I think we have undercovered Amazon. I think to a large extent, the tech press is somewhat undercovered Amazon. And I think this is a moment, you can just see it coming. And I think we're going to spend some more time thinking very critically about Amazon. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work.

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You can visit Upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UP-W-R-K.com. Upwork.com. So it's like Apple Event Rumor Time, which is very excited. Yeah. Some conflicting reports out there. I can run this down. So John Poshowski over at BuzzFeed who has like years, years has been one of the people who has nailed the date for Apple events, came out and said, hey, there's going to be an Apple event, March 25th. But it's not what you think. Don't expect this rumored iPad Mini. We may not even know. There may not even be hardware, who knows, probably not the AirPods 2's, AirPods 2, whatever. But it's going to be focused on, it's going to be focused on. It's going to be focused. on, you know, services some kind of subscription business. And then Reuters was like,

oh, we're here in April for an event that's going to have, like, you know, Hollywood celebrities in it. So Jennifer Aniston will be on stage and maybe it'll be April. So a little bit of conflicting. And but on top of that, like in the lead up to this, instead of getting a bunch of like phone leaks, we're getting a bunch of leaks about what's going on with two subscription services.

Apple is, you know, wanting to roll out. And the first one, and I think the one that, I mean, actually, they both need a ton of explanation, but I think the one that I still don't understand is the video subscription, the TV service thing. But we're starting to get a little bit more clarity about that, right? Yeah. And then there's the newspaper, the publisher one, the Apple News one, which is built off a product that exists called texture.

So I think we kind of have a feel for it. Yeah. But start of the video one. because I'm sure no listener is confused about how near and dear this is to my heart. It's going to support Atmos. Oh, my God. I actually don't know if it is.

Just go with me. So Apple has not been shy about the fact that it's spending like a billion dollars on content. Right? On the last yearnings call, Kim Cook was like, we have a deal with Oprah. They hired two executives from Sony Pictures to like go do more development deals.

They're buying shows. And unusually for Apple, they put out press releases when they make these deals. Right. So we get press releases sort of on the regular. Apple buys another show from so-and-so. So we know one thing, which is whatever Apple premium video service is coming,

it will have a bunch of shows for a bunch of people on it, Oprah included. Yeah. So that's, we know there's content. So that makes you think, oh, it's kind of like Netflix. Right? It's got this like Netflix vibe to it.

But then there's this whole other set of Apple services that they're really interested in selling, right? There's iCloud storage, which Casey will rant about given any opportunity. There's shared photo streams. There's, you know, this forthcoming premium news product. There's like just a bunch of stuff that you can pay Apple as a service to get. So then it's like, well, is this going to be more like Amazon Prime where you pay Apple just one chunk of money and you get all this Apple stuff including some video content?

But there's a whole other video part to this. right, where they get a cut and... Yeah. So then the third thing that they've talked about, Tim Cook talked about on the last earning call, is the fact that they take a cut when you subscribe to stuff in their stores. Right.

So if you sign up for HBO on the Apple TV, Apple gets a cut of that. Right. Right. And some streaming companies are very unhappy about this. So Netflix won't let you sign up for Netflix in the Apple TV or on your phone. They want you to go to the web and sign up

because they don't want to pay Apple. it's 30% cut. Spotify has been very angry about this for a very long time. But if you're not Netflix, right, if you're TNT, right, like it's very hard for you to demand people go elsewhere to sign up individually and people don't want to sign up individually if they don't have a cable company. So Apple is like, we're just going to bundle premium channels into our video offering. We'll take a cut and that will become services revenue on top of our big content thing.

That looks like what Amazon. does with the fire TV. So now you've got like a third option for what this video service looks like. So we know there's some premium content. Yep. We know what Apple's TV app looks like. Do we?

Does anybody really... Apple's TV app is a confusing dumpster. It's... And if it's any indication of the coherency and quality of what their upcoming video services are, we're doomed. Yeah, I think that's right. I'm just saying you can go look at it.

Like, we know what it looks like. Deeter, I think you're much more. existentially referring to the fact that no one can comprehend it. No one can truly see this because it is such a mess. Your brain cannot fully understand what's happening. But you can look at some pixels on a screen that Apple's ships that are called, it's called the TV. Apple's TV app is like a, it's like the software design equivalent of a magic eye poster.

You have to be very special to see it and see it for what it is. And then once you do, it's just a really bad drawing of a whale. The user flow of searching for something in Siri on the Apple TV and then watching that thing is bonkers. Yeah. Right. So you're like, play American Gods. And it's like, I found American Gods. I'm going to open the TV app.

The TV app will ask you if you want to open stars. Stars will open and then it will start playing. And it's like, why did this thing happen in the middle? Like just because Eddie Q is like, I need more TV app opens. So this like horrible thing happens in the middle. Anyway, you have this sense of what Apple kind of. kind of wants to do. They want to funnel you.

They have been open. I think Eddie Q has actually said this to me that eventually a TV app will be the home screen of the Apple TV. Right. And they just haven't gotten there yet. So now you still have this app grid. But eventually you're going to open the, you're going to turn on your Apple TV and it's going to show you the TV app with a bunch of content you can watch and suggestions and all

this stuff, which by the way Apple can use to drive demand to its own shows if you don't pay for the service, which is a thing they will almost certainly do. They can take paid. They can take money to advertise its show higher in the list. All of this stuff cable boxes do, right? So this all kind of lands at Apple is going to turn this Apple TV into a cable box. It's going to have its own content, right? Like just instead of Comcast, which promotes NBC, which it owns, Disclosure, Comcast is an investor in BoxMedia, which owns BoxMedia.

You get it. But instead of Comcast, which owns NBC and promotes NBC content and then takes cuts of everybody else's content, it's Apple, which owns this interface, which has its own content, which takes its own content, which takes cuts of everybody else. So they're basically building, to me, what sounds like a replacement cable box, like a unified interface. And in this moment,

when all these cases, I literally were talking about this yesterday, when everyone is asking you for a subscription fee, it actually doesn't sound so bad to be like, a bundle is better. I'll just pay one provider, some money, and they will deliver everything to me. But the big questions are who will sign up to be in that bundle?

So I find this entire thing exasperating. for the exact reasons we've been talking about the whole show, which is just the concentration of power into four companies, right? It's not enough that Apple provides us with our phone and our cloud storage and our tablet and our computer. It now also needs to own our entire media diet. And what I'm interested in seeing is whether at this next event, Apple sort of at least either introduces or signals

that it's going to introduce what M.G. Sigler has been calling Apple, Prime, right, which is sort of, is there sort of one price that you pay and you get your cloud storage and your Apple music and their garbage publisher offering and, you know, the season six of Planet of the Apps? Like, because I imagine that many people would find that compelling, you know, if Apple priced it at, you know, $100 a year. It would be more like Apple to price it at $400 a year. But to me, that's like sort of the next interesting turn of this group. my feeling with all of this is yes i i'm terrified and scared of apple yeah or not i don't i'm not

scared of apple but just i'm exhausted by apple wanting to own my whole media diet but also i'm at a point with this whole this narrative with apple apple starting a tv thing it's like it's sorry sorry to be a little blue but shit or get off the pot like stop work working on your beautiful pie in the sky. Like start delivering value to anybody in the world. Like start presenting actually like good, like make a really good TV show and put it on your service and make us wish we had your service instead of like pretending like, oh, well, I'm still working on, you know, it's like a, I don't know.

Yeah. It's frustrating as a tech story. They made Planet of the apps, Paul. I know, I know. That didn't make you want more Apple content. I will say they've hired these executives, they're signing all these deals. There are these rumors that Tim Cook is like editing all these shows. And he's pulling everything back to be like family friendly.

Like he personally, I think the Wall Street Journal reported, Tim Cook personally spiked a Dr. Dre like biography show. Because it involved Dr. Dre's biography. Right. Like there's this notion that he's trying to protect Apple's, brand, which is in start contrast to Disney, which is launching Disney Plus, and Julia Alexander on a team is obsessed with Disney Plus and tells me about it every day. They're launching the same time frame. Every part of Disney is making content for Disney Plus.

They invested in Bamtech, which is the streaming company started by Major League Baseball. It's like power of the underlying thing. They're going to present the interface at Disney Investors Day in April. They're like going at it with Disney Plus to compete with Netflix. If you'll notice right now, Netflix is promoting the shit out of the internet. Disney movies. Yeah. Because I think they want you to watch Frozen one last time before it goes away to Disney Plus. But like, wait, hold on.

But they bought Fox, right? And so, you know, Bob I, you're the CEO of Disney is like, we're going to let Deadpool 3 be R-rated. We understand there's a place for that. And their Disney brand won't get destroyed by R-rated Marvel movies. Apple, I don't think, is in that position because they're not a content company. Yeah. Right?

So the first Apple R-rated show. show, people are going to be like, at outrage, and Apple, like, iPhone sales might be affected. And that's, like, too much of a risk for them. Whereas, you know, Disney is like, yeah, you know, we understand. Yeah. That's going to be just really hard for them to manage. So I have two thoughts. To Casey's point about, will people just want to bundle?

Like, how many people do you know? I suspect it's more than you expect. We'll just watch garbage on Netflix because they're already paying for it instead of, like, spending $3.99 to rent a movie, right? Yeah, and it's like, Crackdown just came out. the Xbox and like a bunch of a game but it's not that great of a game but it's going to play because it's part of X you know Xbox Live there's just people will like go to watch the mediocre stuff because they've already paid for the bundle rather than just you know spent you know a

latteate and rent the movie that they might actually want to watch totally so there's that so I think Apple could actually have an advantage there and that maybe the content doesn't have to be that good but two with regard to the point I was making people like a HBO. People love Disney. People love Apple. Nobody likes Comcast. Nobody likes Time Warner. Very few people like, I don't know, Spectrum, whatever. And so if Apple's going to be in the business of selling you a bundle, the risk to them isn't just that they're going to put out something R-rated and they're worried that, you know, moms are going to get mad at the iPhone because their kids watch something dirty on Apple service. It's like people might love the company less because like they'll think of them as a cable subscriber. You know? Like the same thing that we were just talking about earlier with Amazon. And like Amazon by Eero and everyone's like, ugh. Like at some point, Apple's going to cross some invisible line and nobody's going to know when they've done it until like something else happens after they've crossed that line. And a bunch of people are going to go, ugh, Apple. Like I feel it. Yeah. I agree with you. That line is so much farther away for Apple than it is for any of the companies that like make money on data. Right. Like Casey literally writes a newsletter every day about how far over the line Facebook is today.

Right? And like the line is ever in the distance. Casey, as we record this right now, Disclosure My Wife, Works Reckless, and Vision Facebook, how far over the line is Facebook right now? Well, Facebook had a pretty bad over the line day because it turned out that they used their access to all data about all of our whereabouts at all times to identify threats to their platform. and so when they're worried that somebody might come do something violent at a Facebook office,

they will just monitor that person's location in real time. They also use this data with their employees. So according to this report, which was from Sal Rodriguez at CNBC, one time a group of interns didn't show up for work. And they said they were going camping or something, and Facebook couldn't reach them. So they just used their location data to figure out that the interns had been lying and were just playing hooky. So in case you wondered what the future of.

work is going to be like Facebook had a really nice glimpse for all of us today. Facebook spits on your lines. Yeah. All right. Well, I don't even know what to do with that. That's like the nightmare situation for Facebook. Facebook is never, ever going to be able to convince people that it doesn't listen to them. Yep.

Right? Even if they don't, and I fully believe that they don't because it's just like too hard to accomplish and also they can just do that. They can just figure out where you are and be like, do you want to see an ad for this store? And everyone's like, they're listening to me. But it turns out they're just secretly recording you because your brother was a contractor five years ago.

They're never going to get the goodwill back to convince anyone. That's correct. This is all making me very angry. And I just realized, have we said anything nice about a technology? I guess we complimented ERO's products pre-acquisition. Can we all just go around in a circle and say something nice about a publicly traded tech company? I don't want to get a reputation of being like a negative show. Yeah, it's fair.

I'm looking at the rest of our rundown. I think this is a good idea, Paul. I will say this, Amazon is beloved. Even though they take a lot of heat and rightfully so, whenever people go do surveys out in the world about how people feel about the tech companies, Amazon is consistently one of the most beloved. Even our own survey, which we did last year, and we're going to do again soon, showed us, like, people love Amazon.

And I think that says a lot about, you know, I think it's kind of hokey, but they insist that they're a customer-focused company, and I think the customers actually feel that way about Amazon. I have one. I learned this actually yesterday from a newsletter reader, so I write a lot about misinformation, and there were some stories yesterday

about how Facebook was, how Facebook algorithms were promoting anti-vaccination groups and presumably, you know, helping them find a lot of people who they wouldn't find otherwise. And one of my readers works at Pinterest, and she informed me that Pinterest actually has an anti-misinformation policy, and you cannot post pins that say that, you know, vaccinations will kill your baby or something like that. And I thought, one, I was really surprised to learn that Facebook had, I'm sorry, that Pinterest had a misinformation policy.

I hadn't heard of. But I think those kinds of policies are good because that kind of information actively harms people. I got a two-fer. Google just updated G-board for iOS. I like Google software a lot and it tracks me or whatever, but they make some nice software, and I think the G-board is a very good keyboard, minus some bugs that are kind of inevitable because they don't have access problem. Anyway, the point is they added haptic feedback to their software keyboard, and the combination of Google's nice software with Apple's incredibly nice hardware which has the best haptics I've ever felt

on a phone. There may be some Android phones that are close, but whatever, was great. I had this moment where literally for the first time in 15 years of using touchscreens on phones, 10 years, however long it's been, I turned on haptic feedback on a keyboard because it's so nice. That's just nice.

I like it too. I wish they would dial it down one tick. Oh, come on. I wish the thunks were one tick less thunkier. Okay. But I have it on too. I just We're saying nice things, Deli. It isn't a... Give me a thunk slider, that's all I'm saying.

Paul, what was the keyboard metric? We came... Kotar. Do you remember this? We came up for a metric for how laptop keyboards felt like ages ago. Uh-huh.

Okay, Paul, what's your nice thing? I should have thought of this before I came up with this exercise. Because we got to go, we got to let Casey talk about Apple News, which is going to take us down. I really like deep mind. They're doing StarCron.

craft two now. They're kind of at like that early stage where they're showing off their work, but they're not like out there necessarily beating the best in the world in fair matches. But Google's deep mind stuff is really cool, really interesting artificial intelligence. There you go. All right. Everyone took a break. Palet cleansed.

They're still good in this world. The Verge celebrates effort and innovation. That's a true thing that we do. We do not, I think, celebrate charging 50% taxes to already destroyed media companies. Burt it all down. Can you walk me through this one?

Yeah. From the kick-em-while-while-they're-down school of tech company partnerships. So right after the industry lost more than a thousand jog, why am I laughing? Like, what a fucking nightmare. So the media industry loses a thousand jobs, more than a thousand jobs since the start of the year. That's a real number. and Apple wants to put together a sort of souped-up version of Apple news that people pay them to read.

And so they've been making deals with publishers. And the deal was leaked by someone to the Wall Street Journal. And as the journal reported it, the way that it will work is that you'll pay Apple something like 10 bucks a month. Apple will just keep five of those dollars. And then the remaining $5 will be divided. among every media company that is in that bundle participating in the program, but based on some kind of engagement numbers. So, you know, if you read like 60% Verge stories and the Verge had a subscription, then like the Verge would get $3 or something like that. But in reality, you're probably

going to be reading stories from dozens of publishers, or at least more than a dozen publishers. And so, you know, we're talking about a few cents per user per month going to, going to the actual outlets that are producing this journalism. And the reason that I find it so infuriating is that Apple has more than $200 billion in cash and marketable securities. It literally has more money than it knows what to do with. And a lot of people are saying, oh, Casey, like, this is just an opening bid. They're playing wizard chess.

Like, I'm sure they're going to come down eventually. I am honestly almost as offended by a 30% cut, a publisher. revenue in this stupid program as I am by 50%. This is not a program that is going to meaningfully support the journalism that we need to have a healthy democracy. And for all of the humanitarian speeches that Tim Cook gives around the world about privacy being a human right and the great and good country that is America, I wish he would take more of an interest in the health of our media ecosystem. And rather than starve it of revenue, try to find a way to promote these companies. Tell the world you're taking a zero percent cut and see if that doesn't buy you some goodwill

in the world. And that's why IMSN should be on Android. Well, so Casey, you made this point, and some people got into with you on Twitter. I agree with you, but I'm going to push you on it. Sure. You said this is extortion, right? Because Apple controls this massive amount of demand. Yeah. And so, if you want to play, you have to be there. And so you're, you know, I read a theory that, you know, they're negotiating in the press. Right. They're leaking 50% so that when they offer 30% people take it and that's still too high.

But you think that's, it's just like this use of the market is unfair. Well, I will cop to have probably legally misusing the term extortion. People explain to me that extortion has some very specific requirements. So this is probably just not meat. It generally involves pictures taken from Jeff Bezos' phone. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God.

So set that aside, right? But, you know, the market share number that I found suggests that about 60% of Americans have an iPhone. And we know that Americans get more and more news of their, more and more news each year from their phone, right? And so the only way for publishers to reach a huge number of their constituents, is through the iPhone, right? So again, because we have no meaningful competition in this country, you know, our industry is once again dependent on the whims of a platform

to see whether it can survive or not. And, you know, less this sound like a bunch of media navel gazing, Lord knows we do it, these problems are coming for your industries, folks. If you're in a commerce business and Amazon exists, has this much power, like, you are under threat. If you wanted to build a social network and you can't find any customers and Facebook clones you the minute that you launch, you are under threat, right? So if you're listening to me sounding, wow, like Casey sounds incredibly disturbed right now,

and I hope he's in therapy. I just want you to consider what, look at the big five tech companies, look at the industries that they're in now and look at the industries that they could easily get into. and then ask yourself how safe your job is and how you feel about it. Because the stuff that the media industry is going through, this headache is coming to a lot more folks and it's coming really quickly. You know, what gets me about that in particular is that the media just went through this whole cycle with Facebook. Totally.

Right? And it literally destroyed media companies in its wake. Like, Mike does not exist. Say what you will about Mike.com. If you find me in the street and buy me some beers, I will say what I will about Mike.com. But it's just gone. Like, they just had to fire everybody because I made this huge bet on Facebook. And the metrics Facebook was using for success kind of feel like Apple's metrics, right?

Very much so. Get more engagement on our platform and money will appear. And if you're like, well, in Apple News, we have to get engagement to get more money specifically. Those incentives get out of whack. Like, that is how you get into the clickbait hellhole. Yes. It's saying there's money tied to engagement. Also, also, just like, how transparent is Apple?

in this moment about what stories it promotes? Not at all, right? And we don't know who the editor of Apple News is, or maybe we know who's the number one editor, but it's not as if, you know, like they're all on Twitter saying what they think about the news of the day. So it's completely opaque. But, you know, to me, the bigger point here is if you're a publisher

and you're going to participate in this program, this is likely going to diminish your brand, right? Like, you are not going to get some big lift because you're a premium publisher in Apple News. you are going to be scrapping for views along with whoever else is in that program. You have become just one more modular widget that has been stuffed into this Apple ecosystem. And for the most part, your readers aren't even going to know what they're reading. Apple might say, well, no, they will because, you know, they're paying a subscription,

and so they're going to be paying more attention. But I honestly believe that the more people participate in that program, the more kinds of publishers that you're reading. It all just becomes one undifferentiated slurry of content. and the only thing that you know is that you read Apple News. And when people say, how do you get your news? You're going to say Apple News. And what that does is it means that readers have no relationship with their publishers. They have less and less reason to just go and subscribe to, let's say, The New York Times

and pay the New York Times $15 a month. And again, the bargain is totally unfair because Apple is doing almost none of the work in exchange for 50% of the revenue. Well, they've designed Apple News. Yeah. And they bought texture. I don't know if you've looked at that. They built an RSS reader.

Congratulations. I wish that were true, but it's not. By the way, I took Facebook and Twitter are well off my home screen, and I replaced them with Feedly, and I have never been happening. Nice. Just shout out Feedly. I don't think they're publicly traded, but Paul, there you go.

I use Feedly as my source, but I actually use Newsify because I like its interface better on iPhone. The next episode of Veritcash should just be us arguing about RSS readers. Yeah. Why is RSS? I mean, I know the Google Reader thing, I mean, even when Google Reader existed and so many people lamented the death of Google Reader, but like the reason it died is because people weren't using it very much. Like messaging is kind of actually a difficult thing to do, but aggregating news turns out it was solved a long time ago. Somebody made this RSS.XML file and it works really well.

and you can subscribe to the publications you find interesting. But I guess that's just not as interesting as an algorithm that finds stories for you. No, I think it's that. And we have to move on. So I'm going to say one deep thought and then we're going to move on. I think it's that. But I think fundamentally people want to be where people are. The reason people liked Google Reader is not that it was an RSS reader.

It was an RSS reader with a really rich social component. Right? Like people are having discussions about stories. They were recommending stories. Like, it was a more social RSS trader than just feedly. Like, Feedly to me is only great because I have a slack room full of the verge to talk about every link that makes me interested in Feedly. But if I didn't have that, it would just be kind of like lonely.

And I think Facebook has a, you know, it's a social network. All your people are there. Twitter, you're like, I want to see what anyone is thinking about any story. And dozens of bots later, I can see what some human beings are saying about a story. Like, I think there's that element. And, you know, the biggest apps on the home screen of any phone, the most popular apps are all social networks. And I think there's a reason for that. But Apple News isn't a social network.

Apple News is preloaded by one of the richest companies in the world on some of the most premium and most popular phones in the world. That's their strategy, is to preload shit and get you to pay for it. That's why Apple Music is a success, and title is not. This is the little mermaid theory of app success. You want to be where the people are. Oh, my God. You know, they're going to make a live action Little Mermaidians fucking horrifying. I just want to put that out there.

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Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.

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com. That's cloud.aI. slash vergecast. AI slash Vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. com. Paul. Yeah. Every week, you're a shining ray of light because you do a segment about gadgets.

Has the same name. What's it called? It's called, why didn't you push that button? Oh, no, I know where this is going. I don't want to talk about this. I don't want to talk about it either. I don't want to talk about it. I'm contractually obligated to talk about this Kickstarter called LoveSink, which is a button to express your interest in having sex.

But like one person, not to the world. Do one person. Okay, so just in case someone missed the news cycle, I don't want them to feel like this is going over their head. So there's a Kickstarter. It's a button. It's called LoveSink. You and your partner each have a button called LoveSync. sync and you can push it and quote unquote anonymously.

And so it means that you're interested in having sex. If your partner doesn't push the button, nothing happens. If your partner also pushes the button, that means you both won't have sex. And then it's really, it's up to you. What happens next? This is, this is Tinder for monogamists. It's Tinder for the same room. You can just say words.

I keep on thinking that there has to be like a game theoretical aspect to this. But the more I consider it, I don't think there's anything to it. The more I consider it, Paul, the more I desperately want to move on. That was Paul's gadget segment. We'll see if we do it again next week if this continues. That might be where it ends. You know we're from the Midwest, right? It's suspicious.

All right. Let's talk about some gadgets. That's what we're here for. Yeah. Dieter, you want to tell me about the North Focal? So it dropped a ton in price after you know? They cut them almost in half in price. They're like $5.99.

Although, so if you know what these are, they are smart eyeglasses that use like a laser, the VEMS laser to like shine a little thing. They're like the vaunt thing that I tried, but they're like actually a real product. But they drop the price to $600. But if you want to get prescription, that's extra. If you want to get tortoise shell, that's extra. You have to spend more money. So you can get yourself back up to $1,000 pretty easily.

But Ashley reviewed him, and the result is exactly what you think. It's a resounding seven. It's a resounding seven. Actually, we have an inside joke at the verge. What if it's a world of no sevens where you're not allowed to give it a seven? You have to give it a higher or lower score. and she was willing to go. If I can't give it a 7, I might give it a 7.5.

If you want this specific thing, a smart watch on your face. That's what it is. It's a smart watch that you can look at with your eyeball. With poor eye message integration. With horrific eye message integration. I just want to, and I suspect the Vergecast audience is going to want me to go on this. Yeah. In a world of no sevens, only the integer 7 doesn't exist.

Right. but floating point sevens exist. Yes, for sure. Yeah. I completely disagree with this. No, no, no. In the world of no seven, it's like, it's like imaginary numbers. Like, imaginary numbers don't exist in the world, but we can conceive of them and we can do real operations with them that have real world results.

Therefore, if the number seven doesn't exist, that does not mean that the number 7.5 does not. I mean, you say imaginary numbers don't really exist in the world, but do the integers really exist? Does any number really exist if you think about it? But the loophole you have created is that I can give it a 7.1. Yes. I can give it a 7.001. Yes.

I can give it a 7.000-0-0-1. Yes. It's slightly better than 7, which doesn't exist. I think I'm with Dieter on this because egg on your face, you're being an obvious 7-a-voider in that, you know? Yeah. The goal of the world of no-sevins is not to shame

the seven avoiders. It is to force them to make another decision. Right. And by picking 7.001, you haven't made another decision. So you failed our test. You've made a decision. You've said it's slightly better than

the seven, which doesn't exist. So that's an eight. No. It's not. Slightly better than the seven. I promised gadgets and we're doing math instead. That's where we are. We got the confirmation from NECA that Google's going to make a pixel three light, and going to make a pixel 4, obviously, and they're also working on the Pixel Watch.

Very curious to see what kind of processes are going to put in that thing. I don't have much else to say. Good luck, Google. So, Smartwatch sales, I think we saw were up, like 80%. Right. And Google managed to spike. Yeah, they managed to hang on to like 10% of the market with WearOS, which is shocking. So, yeah, like, it's a real market, and it's maybe not entirely an Apple Watch market for once.

Because, like, people are buying some other stuff. but it's, I don't know, it's, I would say the burden of proof that they can make a good smartwatch is on Google, not on, you know, yeah, that's what I would say there. They got a lot to prove. To me, it's all about the redesign and where I know everyone's focused on the processor. Yeah. But I think there's just some inherent modular design stuff happening there where like one company makes the hardware, another company makes the software. You can't tie the performance together. You're extremely constrained, right? Like, Maybe Google can solve that problem and they can get more out of that processor. Who knows? Yeah. But the fundamentals of where OS to me are still just messy. Well, the fundamentals of like the architecture of it are potentially messy. The fundamentals of it being laggy is really bad.

And I see that as a process of problem. And I also potentially see it as a software problem. But I actually think the fundamentals of like the software design are just as good as anything else. You know, like you've got the four swipes in the four cardinal directions and they do coherent, consistent things. they have an architecture for complications that actually makes sense if they can get anybody to do it. It's a design problem and they need good watch faces and it's a design problem that they need a hardware for a watch that isn't a big hulking weighty thing on my wrist. Well, so what you're saying is that they should put fuchsia on a watch. It all comes back to fuchsia.

No, I actually think that that is a thing. A lightweight responsive or theoretically responsive operating system. And they have been tested on smart displays. I also have been using the Apple Watch and I really like it, but I remembered for the first time by accident yesterday that it has a button. Oh, wow. Yeah. Because, you know, the button is like flush and you never think about it and it doesn't do anything.

Yeah. Like it just opens a list of apps in case you want to multitask on your watch. And I, like, the baby pressed it by accident. I was like, oh, this thing has a button. Yeah. I've been wearing it for two months. I forgot. Just forgot about the hardware button.

We like know everything about the S-10. We know everything about everything. Like Vlad wrote a really great piece that no one's like hiding their smartphone announcements anymore. So like companies are putting out teasers. You can pre-order the S-10 right now. LG has been putting out press releases for individual features of the G8 think QG8 for like three weeks. It's going to have a vibrating OLED screen and that's going to be a speaker, which is cool, I guess. We'll have to hear it.

I'm super. There's a thing. happening with vibrating screens and speakers. Yeah. Like the TV makers are all doing it. I have a Sony TV that does it. We saw LG do on it CES. Like, it's the last thing on the face of the phone you got to get rid of, right?

You got to get rid of the front. I'm super into the idea that we've all decided that our screen should make sound in this way. Like, it is very futuristic. I think my Sony TV actually sounds very good. I didn't buy a soundbar for it. I just bought a suburb for it. It sounds great. I love, and LG is like pretty committed to make.

things sound good. That's kind of their brand for these phones. I'm super into the idea that all screens will just be speakers as well. I think that's super neat. Yeah. At the same time, do we learn about the S-10 that it's going to have an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor that you might not be able to put a screen protector on?

Yeah, there was a leak and there was a screen protector that had a big giant hole in the screen protector, which is amazing. Anyway, that's... Every part of your screen is protected except for that. That's the thing-you. Next is the Vivo V-15, which is they're continuing the trend of doing a pop-up camera, which I love, that they're not giving up on that after just one iteration.

Like, they're just, they're sticking to it. It's a good brand. Yeah. I mean, like, I kind of want one. Plus, it's got to be one of the few phones on the planet that you can be relatively confident. It's not recording your face at all times. It's true.

Anyway, MWC is coming. We're live blogging Samsung on the 20th. It'll be fun. Can I ask you guys to prognosticate about, so I'm kind of pretty happy with being on Android right now. I'm not crazy about the pixel, and I thought I'd be really into the pixel because of the camera. It just turns out I just don't like taking photos, so it doesn't matter that much. The main thing is call screening, because I screen like 10 calls a day. So is that going to become a mainstream Android feature, you think?

Are you screening calls from real people or from bots? No, it's all, all, everybody wants to sell me health care and they come from everywhere and they want to sell me health care so bad. Just like doctors finding you in the street. I guess so shame if something happened to you. I don't know. Yeah, basically. So it's bots.

You're getting calls. Yeah, robots are calling me trying to sell me health care from all sorts of different phone numbers all the time and I block everyone, but they keep on popping up. Yeah. So I'm pretty reliant on it. But, you know, that's turned into my like killer feature. of this phone, but I feel like I could, I could maybe live without, you can get that feature from a carrier. You have to pay for it. Yeah. Like, I have call protect from AT&T. It's free.

So, um, the free version is amazing. Yeah, it does, but my phone still rings and it just says spam risk in huge letters on it. And I'm like, well, if you know. Right. Yeah. Right. There's no chance I'm going to end. But if you pay them some money, then that won't get through, which is a real, real kick. I have not seen any, I don't remember seeing any rumors that it's like, going to become a generalized Android feature. The phone app in Android is actually, like, technically, like, a carrier app on most Android phones in, like, this weird way. Like, the carrier gets some say in how the phone app works, and it used to be how messages work, although they seem to fix that problem a little bit. So it's caught up in, like, the messy

threads of carrier interactions with Google and with, like, their services. And so I wouldn't hold your breath. Sorry. I will say that Ajit Pie, the Verge Khabi, the Verge favorite cartoon villain. He actually put out an FCC letter this week saying my number one priority as chairman of the FCC is stopping robocalls. And if the industry doesn't act, I'll be forced to take regulatory action. What? And the thing that there's a specific, this is actually great.

There's a specific protocol that the industry has been like working on, caller ID authentication. It's a thing to stop these spoof numbers. The name of the protocol, it's an acronym. This is true. Shaken slash stir. No. True fact. Go look it up. It is incredible. What I was hoping is that there's an old-timey railroad regulation that has some parallels to spam calling.

Yeah. What we're talking about here is the regulation of common carriers, and I just want to point out that it is perfectly acceptable for the chairman of the FCC to say, hey, I'd like the market to figure this out. And if you don't, I'll regulate you. Which is the actually what they should do with the internet. All I'm saying is my plan is next phone. I'm aiming like four. or $500 and I think I'm going to be really happy. If there's a lot of great stuff coming out. If camera's not your priority, I would keep a very close eye on what's coming next from Oneplus. Historically, One Plus phones are really great.

They don't degrade and get Krifty as much as Samsung phones do and they're relatively cheap. I think that might be your next. Ooh. Good place to end it. We're going to find out in Paul's gadget segment next week, which I, again, once again, that's your only warning. I'm never doing that again.

We're never doing that again. All right, that's the Vergecast. I want to end the same place I started talking on Better Worlds, our hopeful science fiction project. It is great. It has come to an end. You can now go read all of the stories, theverge.com slash Better Worlds.

That's also where you're going to find all of the videos, which are incredible. And you can listen to all of the podcasts. It's Friday. The show comes out on a Friday. You're probably listening to it on a Friday in your car. The next thing you should listen to, You should binge listen to all of better worlds.

There's a collection of basically radio dramas about hopeful futures. Pull over. Search for Verge Extras in your podcast feed. Listen to that. Watch all the stories. Feel some hope. Paul's right. We were a little down on this episode.

Get some hope back in your life for Better Worlds. It's so good. I mean, it's so, so so good. And so many people worked on it at the verge. I can't list them all. But it was a huge team effort. Amazing. I want you to go check it out.

You can also tweet at us, which is the opposite of being hopeful. I'm at Reckless. Paul's the future Paul. Dieter's a backline. Casey, where you at? I'm at Casey Newton or at the verge.com slash interface. There it is.

That's the plug I was looking for. You can read the interface every day. Casey on social media and democracy. There's also a fair number of jokes in there. I'm just going to tell you. A lot of jokes. We have fun. It's the way you got to deal with it.

We'll be back next week. The Vergecast. We'll back next Tuesday with an interview episode. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. Paul. Promo code.