The Vergecast - Apple diversifying business, face unlock for Pixel 4, and a bill banning endless scrolling

Episode Date: August 2, 2019

Stories this week:The iPhone now makes up less than half of Apple’s businessApple confirms the Apple Card is coming in AugustGoogle is asking people on the street to scan their faces for $5The Google Pixel 4 will unlock using a face scanThe less expensive Pixel 3A helped Google sell twice as many smartphones last quarterNew bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrollingThe major broadcasters are suing to shut down this app that streams ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC for freeT-Mobile CEO on 5G: Verizon is ‘clueless,’ AT&T is ‘lying, confusing’Dish confirms that it will become a major US mobile carrierVerizon says it has a secret 5G plan after T-Mobile CEO calls company ‘clueless’Verizon expands its 5G network to four more citiesVerizon’s CEO thinks half of the US will have access to 5G next yearLook upon Samsung’s new 3.5mm to USB-C dongle, ye mighty, and despairYou can already reserve the Galaxy Note 10 and it will arrive on August 23rdNew Nvidia Shield TV box shows up at FCCMophie’s iPhone XS and XR battery cases are now available for allIt’s a keyboard! It’s a trackpad! It’s almost a great iPad mouseYou can now run Android on a Nintendo Switch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Verchcast, we talk about Apple's earnings, the future of the iPhone business. Talk about Pixel 4 and its forthcoming face unlock. We get into the new Josh Holly bill that would put a timer on your social media, so this is true. We talk a little bit about Altimo, Verizon 5G, and the Galaxy No10's coming. That's the Verchcast coming up now. 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 backlog. 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 and 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 the Vox Media Empire, a growing empire, which will one day come to your city. But like benevolently, like in a fun way. Does that make you Palpatine? put in a fun way. I thought it was like a race to 5G reference. No, that's happening whether we want it to or not.

Which is also a Palpatine thing. Well, it's sort of. I don't want to get into it. I'm Eli. Hi. Deeter's here. Hello. Paul Miller's here. Hello. It's a big week.

Addie Robertson's going to join us around a halfway mark to talk about another Josh Holly bill in the Senate. This one is true. This is a true thing we're going to talk about. It's a bill that would require all social media platforms to limit your usage to 30 minutes a day by default. And then even if you change it, reset it every month to protect you from YouTube and Twitter. Which, you know, not saying it out loud. Maybe a good idea.

Anyway, it is going to come by. We're going to talk about that. There's a big trend going on with that stuff. But before we do that, there's tech company news in this world. It has been two weeks of nonstop earnings. I think last week on the show, Google earnings broke while we were taping. This week, we've waited it out. Apple earnings have happened.

Third quarter, Deeter, walk us through. So the big news is that the iPhone no longer accounts for more than half of Apple's revenue. For the first time since, I think it was 2012, they're making more money off everything else than they are on just the iPhone. And there's two ways to look at this. Oh, my God, the iPhone is failing, blah. the other way to look at it is, hey, they finally have a diversified business and not just an iPhone company. Here's the thing, though. They are still just an I-owned company.

I love you iPad. I love you Mac. Apple TV, you're fine, except for your remote. But, you know, like during the analyst calls, it came later, you know, in the back half of the financial results call, one of the analysts sort of like tiptoed up to, like, asking a question about, Hey, so all these services that you're doing, what about, you know, offering services not for the iPhone? And Tim was like, well, you know, Apple Music is on Android and the Apple TV does exist, but look. And then he went on like a three-minute tear on how much headroom there is to sell services to iPhone customers.

They've got, you know, a billion something monthly users. He talked actually quite a bit about the fact that there's a secondary market for iPhones, which means that like don't just look at our sales quarter to quarter, but also look at what like used iPhone sales look like because we can also sell to those people. And just the sense that I got at the end of it was don't expect the Apple Watch to work with Android anytime in the near future. Don't expect I message on Android ever.

And yeah, like they believe, I think pretty strongly, that they don't need to expand out beyond iPhone with their services in a really meaningful way. They've got Apple TV on, you know, a bunch of smart TVs. But beyond that, they're just sort of like, it seems ridiculous. It doesn't even enter their worldview that they would offer their services on Android. So the top line here is iPhone growth continues to slow. They still sell a lot of phones.

I feel like we always, it's easy to miss this with Apple. They sell an enormous number of phones at very high prices. Yes. The issue is they're like year over. year, they're down some like 10, 12%, right? Just for phones. Like year over year that I think their overall revenue is still increased year over year. Right.

Which means they get to say best quarter ever like they usually do. But yes, the phone revenue is decreasing. The phone revenue is decreasing. The sales are decreasing. And there's some, they don't break out how many they sell anymore. So it's hard. Phone revenue decreasing could be a function of while they put out the 10R, they're selling cheaper phones and last time around.

Right. Like there's a whole mix of things in that equation, but the very top line is phone revenue is down, which implies sales are down, and services and wearables revenue is up. So they're getting more money out of every iPhone customer. Right. But the thing is, like, you look at that graph, like the iPhone is trending down, revenue is trending up. At some point, you know, they may meet. And revenue on services is trending up. At some point they meet.

But like there's a cap to how much they can make on services in theory. and that cap is how many iPhones are there and how many people that own iPhones are willing to pay for Apple's services. And so that's why you look at the global market and Android has 85-something percent market share. So it's like, well, obviously, that's like where the real money is. But I think from Apple's perspective, you know,

when they brought the iPod to Windows, it was like, y'all, you got to do something. The Mac is like, fine, but it's not doing that great. And like, you got to do something to sell more stuff. And so it felt sort of inevitable or necessary for the company to bring the iPod to Windows because it brought in a huge customer base that they didn't have before. And I just don't think Apple feels any kind of real pressure to do that with their services business. I think they're just fine telling their shareholders to Shalax for making plenty of money selling services to iPhone users. Yeah.

So just to pull it apart, service by service. Tim Cook is saying we haven't maximized the amount of money we can make on services just with our installed base. So you're saying there's a revenue line and there's an installed base line. At some point they intersect. Great. Tim Cook is saying we're really far away from that intersection. Yep. Okay.

Well, that's fair. They don't feel pressure to go beyond what they need to do. But then in some places they obviously feel that pressure. In particular, their content businesses. So Apple Music is on Android, Apple TV plus whatever. for his iTunes movies and TV shows. It just launched on Vizio TVs. Airplay 2 is on a whole bunch of TVs, Samsung TVs, LG TVs, what have you.

So there clearly is some pressure, right, to like get the content business wide. Because I don't think you can get Oprah to just be on iPhones. Right. She wants to be on all the TVs. I don't think you can get Taylor Swift. Although Taylor Shep has a Spotify deal now. So clearly they couldn't get her anymore. But I don't think you can get, I don't know, Chance the Rapper is like a big Apple deal maker.

He doesn't want to just be on iPhones. He wants to be on all this stuff. Right. So that's the split, right? I message in other Apple, what's it called, game arcade, arcade studio plus. Apple Arcade, yeah. Max Arcade Plus 5G. Just.

We need, this is a side tension, but we need more words besides plus, plus, Max, Excel. What's the other one that we get? Go. Now. Those are all... Naming the next kid, go. Now.

Yeah. Those are the only five words you're allowed to append to the end of your product that mean that it's bigger or you have to pay a subscription for it. And we just need more words. Remember when it was extreme and it's just started with an X, there's no E? I'm just glad we're done with Ultra. Like, Ultra's gone. That's great.

No, that means it's just in hiding. It'll come back. It's just... You know, it fell out of fashion. It's like bell bottoms. Ultra's like a ground hog. If it pops up and it sees the shadow, it goes away. So Apple, Apple has services that are designed to monetize its install base.

And then they have services that seem designed to trap its install base. Would you agree? Yes. Sure. Absolutely. So IMessage is designed to trap you. But they don't charge for IMSSage. Right.

Right. Well, I mean, I don't know how many IMessage sticker packs you've bought, Paul. but I've been thoroughly monetized. Oh, I totally forgot about sticker packs. Oh, wow. I was going to say, does anybody feel trapped by Apple News? No. When I use it, I do.

I want to get out. Yeah. But I get an Apple News link and it opens up Apple News instead of a web browser. I feel very trapped. But otherwise, no. I mean, I have to make that better. But, Eli might because he pays for it and, like, you know, reads a Vogue article once a week or something.

Vanity Fair. It's always Vanity Fair. And the multi-step click process to go from Twitter to Apple News is a nightmare and certainly not worth my $10 a month, which I should immediately cancel and put into Max's college fund. What am I doing with my money? So look, I've said this before. I will say it again right now. You should not care how much money Apple makes. Unless you are a stockholder, a major stockholder, you shouldn't care.

You should only care about this discussion insofar as it affects what. kind of products Apple makes it if they make your life better or worse. And so the looming question has always been when Apple becomes a services first company and makes more money off services than it does off of selling iPhones, will that change the way that it makes products? Will they be scammier? Will they like take their eye off the ball on design? Will they do stuff that is user hostile in some way? Will, you know, I don't know, they make random deals that are stupid than annoying, but you have to live with them because that's what they offer you. Well, they set the default search to Bing.

Yeah, right. So far, the answer is, yeah, it's like it's annoying around the edges, but it doesn't seem fundamentally like they have. Neil I and Paul, you might have a different answer. But I think one thing that's worth watching, keeping a really close eye on, is the launch of the Apple Card, which, by the way, they announced,

is happening next month, or this month now in August. Because the more I think about it, the more annoyed I am with the Apple Card. Why? People seem so stoked about it. It's fine. What is it? You get 3% on Apple purchases, 2% if you use the Apple pay on the phone, and 1% if you use the card. Is that the breakdown? Something like that. The Apple purchases one to me is so funny. It's like, how much money do you spend at the Apple store on a regular basis to make that extra? Like, how many AirPods can you buy, man? What are you doing there? It's like a fine card.

The app that shows you your spending breakdown is really cool. I've been trying to pay more attention to the logging of my finances, and so I'm learning things, and so it would be cool if some of that was more automated for me. But if they start really pushing their kind of fine credit card that's actually not that much better than everything else that's out there, and in many ways it's worse because you can't use one if you don't have an iPhone, then I don't know.

that starts to feel like you're taking things that are fundamentally the same as what everybody else sells and claiming that it's better. And that worries me a tiny bit. Yeah, I think that the way I frame it is, well, Apple compromise the user experience of the phone to upsell services. And I'm happy to go on literally any cable news television program and say that out loud, which is like a thing that I do. So if you're a producer, just give me a call. I'll come on your show and say that. And I published that headline. The way I think the pressure, works. And I, Deider, I think your point about the two curves intersecting is a good one. Right now, they have a lot of room to grow that services revenue. They have a billion installed devices running iOS. They have lots of phones. They have that secondary market of refurbished devices that they and the carriers sell. They're very interested in trade-ins, all that stuff. So a lot of phones, a lot of iOS devices, a lot of Macs, what have you. That's a lot of people to just ask for some more money a month. And so that first wave of revenue, and you're already seeing it. it's pretty easy to get.

And that's where their services business is growing. Apple News Plus is not good, but some percentage of a billion people are paying for it and services revenue are going up. Some percentage of people buy AppleCare, that number is going up. They talked a lot about making more money off AppleCare, or more people are attaching to AppleCare on the earnings call. Yeah, you make it easier to get a new phone every so often. That number goes up.

Great, they're doing it. The App Store. Some percentage of a billion people do App Store stuff, the number goes up. They are so excited about App Store revenue. They're talking about it a bunch. And man, it was actually infuriating. Because when the App Store launched and like Steve Jobs got and I believe it was the

all things D-stage or maybe it was no, no, it was definitely all things. D-Stage. They're like, you're going to make money off this? He's like, nah, it's like, it's just enough to like run the thing. We're not trying to make this a profit center. Don't be crazy. And now they're like, it's a profit center. And they specifically talked about how they were really excited about how the app

store was making more money because the Chinese government changed. some rules to allow more apps that have in-app purchases in their games. Specifically games. Yeah. Like, we talk a lot about the government on the show, unfortunately. And we're like, you know, the classic line of the government is like, the government shouldn't pick winners and losers. Like, you want to see the government picking winners and losers. It's the Chinese government getting some games past the sensors with in-app purchases and Apple's revenue going up.

Yeah. Like, we're not, that's like, there it is. That's the end of the spectrum. I feel very comfortable a lot, everything that's happening. But so, right, and they're going to launch more services. So some percentage of a billion people will sign up for their TV service. Some percentage of a billion people will sign up for the game service, on and on and on it goes. That's the easy part, right?

Like that number just goes up. Apple is happy. They're monetizing more. They're folks. Great. As those lines get closer together, getting the next sort of tranche of users to pay for for stuff gets harder. And that's where like the marketing pressure has to go up.

And then the next level gets even harder. And then by the end, it's like you haven't signed up for any services. Have you heard about iCloud storage? Because we have just decided that the iPhone will now take slightly bigger photos than before. Right. Your contacts are two terabytes. Yeah. Every contact now automatically includes a 4K video for some reason to make the

the user experience better. This is literally an emoji. Like, now the animoji gets stored in the contact file. I mean, that's a nightmare conspiracy theory, but you can see it,

right? This is how I'm starting to view these companies, not like totally as like they're attacking me, but what if they decided to attack me? What if Apple, we're all out and tried to make my life worse

through its various vectors, how much effective power do they have over me right now. And I've limited that a little bit because I have a Mac, but my Mac has an ICloud account. Apple could probably right now remotely delete my Mac because I have ICloud. Absolutely. So obviously, but that's like the far worst case. So that's really far down the tail of possibility. But, you know, there's some of the other ones like a credit card. Like I told you guys earlier, like the credit card is so appealing to me and I can't even figure out why. But like Dieter said, you know, it's got your budget in there, you know?

So what if you plan your whole life around this credit card? And then they make it vastly worse for some reason. Well, you know, now what I'm going to spend three days, switching credit cards and budgeting apps and, you know. So like how vulnerable am I to this company making a bad decision and messing up my life? We got, we got a lot of stuff talking about. So we got to move on. I'm just going to say this.

Apple services are like a cat. Oh, God. When you get a cat, it jumps on your lap and you start petting it, it starts purring. you feel comforted and happy. The cat is making a ton of money because in this metaphor is its services, it's purring and happy. Everything is great.

And then after a while, the cat rolls over and shows you its belly because it thinks you might want to give it a belly rub and you're like, oh, this sounds great and then you do, and then it wrecks you. Its claws come out and it destroys your arm. Those are Apple services. Pet the cat, feel really good about it,

but just beware of the belly. I feel like an underlying thing the listener needs to know in this situation is that Dieter has long, had, I would say, a rocky relationship with his cat. And for at least a year, I would ask him how it was going, and he'd say, the cat hates me. It would be like the first words out of his mouth. But it's gotten better over time.

The cat likes me now, yeah. Because we found a routine. And that's the Apple card. But it's important to know about cats is that they can exhibit the symptoms of love without actually loving. So one more thing about Apple learnings I want to just mention, because it jumped out to both Deeter and I is Catalyst, which is the sort of technology that lets iPad apps run on the Mac. It's obviously coming with Catalina. Tim Cook mentioned Catalyst three times, if not four,

on this call. He mentioned it in his prepared remarks to the analyst on the call. He mentioned it again when he was like going through like the different lines of business. Like we're so excited about Catalyst coming to Mac. And then someone asked him a question about Mac apps. And he was like, we're so excited about Catalyst. Here's a disconnect. Coming out of WWC, everything was SwiftUI, right? Like SwiftUI is the future, whatever. The Catalyst apps that we have are bad.

Yeah. So the cadence was leading up to WWDC, I and Mini were like, you got to fix Catalyst apps. And I explicitly said Apple, you should go all in, prove that they can be good. And then WWDC happened, and they were still bad, like really bad, like troublingly bad. And so everyone's like, oh, this is a problem. But Apple also announced this thing called Swift UI,

which is a new way to make apps that work across all of its platforms and blah, blah, blah, blah, really easy to code a UI and actually pretty good, better than most cross-platform stuff. So everybody in the Mac world were like, well, I guess Catalyst is like a side show. What really matters is Swift UI. And let's just all agree together to kind of ignore Catalyst for now, or at least treat it like a stepping stone. And then Tim Cook just comes out super hard for it on the earnings. call. Yeah. And he also said iPadOS is a strategic step for the iPad when at WWC they're like,

no, it's just a different name. Yeah. So a lot of sort of like disconnect between what I would say is the inside baseball of Apple World where everyone is like, you know, doing Kremlinology to figure out what they really mean, what the real future is. And these public messages, which is like, Catalyst is going to be great for the Mac. Please ignore the apps that have already shipped. Catalyst is going to be great. We promise. And iPadOS is a strategic new direction for the iPad. When inside Apple World, everyone's like, no, it's just iOS with some stuff. And we'll just have to see.

But that is a clear disconnect in their messaging. One last thing. This is a side note, but we're recording this on August 1st. And I don't know if any of you are using any of the betas, but I got to tell you, really nervous about them launching this stuff on time. Really? Everything is really rocky. Wow.

Compared to last year especially. So we'll see. Maybe they'll just push it off the stuff of launch in October. That would be fine. Please don't launch these operating systems before they're ready. Apple, do not feel bad if you have to launch the iPhone 11 with iOS 12. Like, honestly don't. It will be fine.

It won't hurt any sales at all. Just don't launch these operating systems until they're ready. I beg you. Yeah, I mean, but they're on a deadline. They can't launch the operating, they can't launch the phone without the new operating systems. to support it. Sure they can. They've never done that before.

Yeah, but they can. What's to stop them? Putting features on the phone and then marketing the phone with its new features. It has a third camera? Cool. Like, who cares? The camera will get turned on later. This camera doesn't work.

It's like the microphone hidden inside the, you know, the nest protect whatever. I guess they launch portrait mode later. Yeah. Yeah, they're on a deadline. They got that event, that phone event is like, you know, hardware, software services all coming together. Yeah, we'll see. And maybe they'll announce the price for Apple TV Plus at that event.

Who knows? I mean, by the way, the way this should work, Paul, and I think this goes to your point of like, how can they, how do you make sure they're not cheating you or, like, flexing on you is if you have less exposure to their prices? So instead of paying nine bucks a month for Apple News and, you know, however many dollars a month for the games and however many months, how many dollars a month for the TV service, they just charge you a flat fee a year like Amazon Prime. So it's like 100 bucks a month. You get a phone, you get service. You get all these software services. That's, I think, what people want. I think that

might be why we don't know the price of the TV service and all this other stuff yet. Doesn't that, I don't know, it's weird. Amazon feels like they have in some sense no incentive to improve the offerings of Amazon Prime because it's diffuse across a bunch of things. And then at the same time, Amazon Prime seems like the only streaming service that cares about having like random old stuff to watch. Yeah. I mean, we can do an entire hour on streaming wars, but Amazon does relentlessly improve prime to make that, not just the streaming service, like the whole prime experience, because it is

so worth it to them to have everybody just pay them some money a month. And that makes you more likely to shop. But Amazon's a whole thing. So I'm very curious to see if Apple does that kind of like recurring reference. the new bundle around the new iPhone. And just, they're like, everybody gets a new iPhone every year. They cost $100 a month. The problem is what, what would you call it?

Apple PhoneCare Plus Prime. Apple, Apple, good now. Mega, Ultra. I mean, they look, they're friendly with Amazon. I can just call it Apple Prime. All right. There you go. Speaking of stuff that's coming out, there was also Google earnings.

And then Dieter, you basically, like, Google was, like, forced to respond to you. I don't know. How else to put this in there? Is there any other proof that the Pixel 3 didn't sell well and is not selling well their willingness to just tell us about the Pixel 4? Yeah, no, there's not. They're just like, yep, here you go. There's more stuff of the Pixel 4.

If you didn't see the news, they just fully announced and put up a blog post that the Pixel 4 is going to use Face Unlock. Presumably that means no fingerprint under the screen, which is fine by me. It's going to use the same sort of face-unlock technology that the iPhone uses. So it's got an infrared camera. It shoots, like, dots at your face, and then it reads the dots. all that's fine. That's why the bezel is like all the way across the top because I got to fit a bunch of stuff in there.

The other thing they have to fit in there is a tiny little radar sensor because it has projects solely. And the radar can basically detect when like your face approaches it, like the blip on a radar screen. And then it will turn on the face unlock when it detects your face is coming to check your face. And then the phone will just unlock. So like in the act of picking it up, it'll unlock, which is fine, but really not that much better than what the iPhone does. Like, it does, I don't know, we'll see. And you'll also be able to use Project Soli to wave your hand to do stuff. Soli can detect like the tiny violin gesture, right?

It can detect the tiny violin gesture, but I don't know if they're using the tiny violin gesture. So far as I know, they've only announced like waving to like go next track, last track. They've already done some like stuff with the Nest Max where you can like hold your hand up like deposit. I think that they're at a tough spot because if they get too cute, with all these gestures, they're doomed, because, like, one, you won't remember them. Two, think about how a user interface works. You do a thing, and then something happens.

And then you do that thing again, and then the same thing happens. This has been the problem with gesture interfaces since Samsung started showing commercials of people in the kitchen with their hands covered in dough, swaving their hands at a phone. It doesn't work consistently. So whatever they choose has to be easy to remember,

and it has to be rock, solid, and work. Otherwise, it will go down in history as just another gimmick phone. And Google needs the pixel to not be a gimmick phone. It needs it to be like the canonical Android phone. And if it just is another phone with a bunch more gimmicks, they might as well be LG. And hell, LG probably sells more phones than Google does. And that's a really bad spot to be in.

We're going to do weird gimmicks every year and... Google said that in their earnings of the Pixel 3 helped them sell twice. as many pixel phones though twice as many that's a number like they sold bezos pixels i mean just to put some some meat on the bones of of deeter whining the pixel three when i squeeze the pixel three i think this is a good gimmick i don't like yelling okay google you know i like to squeeze squeeze the phone and all i do is set a timer for cooking beat. That's all I ever do when I squeeze the phone. I don't ask it questions. I just set a timer. Its response time is completely random. It can't, even though I squeeze, this is a physical gesture.

I know it got the squeeze and it launches the voice thing. The time where it begins listening to me is random. and the time when it stops listening to me is completely random, even though I'm doing it in the exact same scenario, on the exact same spot in my house, you know, every time. So, and I think part of this is the symptom, like, it's kind of that conversation you guys had with the Google, with the Android executives, like there's this firewall between the pixel team and the Android team,

which is laudable in some sense and clearly detrimental in another sense because the Pixel team is not necessarily the best Android phone manufacturers on the planet. Yep, they know. They have to have that firewall because they need to not piss off Samsung too much. Sure, sure, they do. Apparently they're less worried about that

because they super announced face unlocking Pixel 4 less than three weeks or two weeks ahead of Samsung launching the Note 10, which is probably going to use an in-screen fingerprint sensor. So, womp, wompom. Well, so we haven't said why they announced it,

which is that Google employees are wandering the streets of America, offering people $5 to scan their faces. I mean, that's not why they announced it. They announced it because they've got this wacky plan to pre-announce features like their LG. But it does in fact turn out that they do have people wandering the streets handing legal forms to people sitting in the park and say, hey, can I scan your face for Google? ZDNet had the story and then Android Police confirmed it with a couple other people. and, you know, I'd like ask Google like what, what? Really?

And they're like, yeah, we're doing it. So I appreciate it, first of all. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I mean, they're saying what they're doing. Yes. They're asking permission and they're paying people. Those are all good things. There are good things in the context of the dystopia that we live in.

Yeah. A time traveler from Equifax follows the Google employee and says, here's $125, sorry in the future, we will use this face information and then leak it. So one of the things I appreciated is I was like, what are you doing with the data? And they're like, you know, some lawyer wrote the form and said we keep it for five years and that's dumb. We don't need it for that long. So we're only going to keep it for 18 months. And we were a recording location, but that's dumb, so we're going to stop doing that.

And, you know, this question about like, is it, it's never associated with a Google account. But there was one specific thing that Google said, which was like faces our. inherently not anonymous. I was like, thank you. You actually are like getting better at talking about this stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, they need a diverse set of faces so it works. Yep.

Yeah. So this is the thing is they want to, they want to test it on a wide array of faces, ethnicities, diversities, genders to make sure that it is rock solid across all of all of those things. And that's also a lot of it. It's just in the context of this moment in time, Google paying you $5 to the scan your face. It has so many different like emotions. that it causes. Yeah.

But it's fine. I'm sure Apple did the same thing in secret. You know, like... Yeah, they just brought people into a room and threatened them with death if they talked instead of getting in the form. Welcome. This anarchoic chamber is used for testing the home pod and also murdering you if you ever tell anyone about this.

That's the way it goes. All right. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. Addie's going to join us. We're going about what is going on in the government. We're right back. Support for the show comes from Framer.

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Terms and conditions apply. Addie, welcome. Hi. How are things? I'm not great in the specific capacity that I'm here. Let's just get into it. So our friend, Senator Josh Hawley, He keeps doing stuff, I think is the best way to phrase it.

Doing online stuff. He won't stop. He's very angry at tech companies. He thinks are bad. And he put out a bill this week, the Smart Act? The Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act. Oh, my God. Okay.

He's mostly issued backronym so it's maybe a little bit notable that he's started doing them now. Yeah. Yeah. What does a Smart Act do? Well, it reduces social media addiction. Okay, actually what it does is. it's really confusing. The intent of it is to take what are called dark patterns, which are things that are designed to make you engage with a website more in ways that are sort of manipulative,

like a thing that scrolls infinitely, so you'll read it forever, or those pop-ups that say, like, do you want to sign up for our newsletter or in tiny print? No, you're a horrible person. Yeah. So the idea is, among other things, to ban those. And to ban things like auto-playing videos and a bunch of stuff that people hate. But it's also just kind of an insane bill. So for one thing, it's supposed to apply to social media companies. But based on everything I've read, it sounds like social media companies are anything of any size

that is primarily user-generated content. So like, hey, you have like a stamp collector forum? Great. Now this has the exact same rules as Twitter. Yeah, that doesn't seem. So then there's that. Then there's the rules that people have actually been talking about online, like the fact that these sites will have to prominently tell you every 30 minutes that you've been on them 30 minutes, also to by default block you every 30 minutes.

And you can opt out of this, but the block will reset at the beginning of every month. That one is the most, it's across every platform. So it's to track your usage across every platform that you're on Twitter somehow. Like phone, yeah, T. And then every 30 minutes are like, you're done or even using this 30 minutes unless you go and change it. Yes. But then in the statute, it says we reset. Yes, the first of every month.

I have a better name for this bill. It's the no, no, addiction, no, yuck bill. Well, so one thing that's true. See? I got you. So one thing that's true, we've now said addiction like three times. It is not actually proven that these sites are addictive. Correct.

Right. The science on that is pretty like sketchy. It's like brand new. And I mean, the science on a lot of addiction things, like there is a fundamental disagreement about whether you should medicalize it. And this obviously doesn't engage with any of that. Other people have pointed out that there's also just a blanket rule that's like health and human services can make rules whatever it wants about things that interfere with consumers' freedom of choice. Which I was talking to Luke Stark, who's a researcher at Harvard. And he was like, yeah, no, this is also a thing that Josh Hawley introduced in a bill like two days ago that's basically we will make rules so that.

that you're not allowed to have political bias or things like that. It's just a weird, open-ended rule. So it bans Infinite Scroll. It bans autoplay. I'm not necessarily opposed to these things. Except that it does not ban autoplay for advertisements. So the auto-play you hate, actually, it's still there. Oh, good. Mostly. Let's kind of make sure the advertisers are okay. So it bans infinite scroll, it bans auto-play in some circumstances, not a fair advertiser. It puts limits on how long you can use the platforms that reset every month. It bans, this is my fair one, badges and other awards link to engagement with the platform. So if you get an award for using Twitter for too long and you don't get some extra features, that's just, again, that's just illegal. What does he

think this will actually accomplish for people that will just use social media less? It's really hard to say because, again, a lot of the standard wisdom is that none of this stuff passes, but it works the ref and moves the Overton window. So people start thinking, well, okay, this bill is not going to pass, but maybe we should have a bill that like makes you stay off Twitter. Yeah. And people sort of grab the bits of this that they like, and then it becomes a normalized thing that people will think about. So there's a part here. It's labeled neutral presentation.

And last week we talked a lot about the FTC settlement with Facebook. A lot of what the FTC found was that Facebook did dark patterns in its UI over and over and over again to get you to consent to things or not know that your permission was needed to steal data from you. Right. Like facial recognition in particular, you know, the FTC complaint is like screenshot after a screenshot of Facebook. playing interface games to get you to consent to facial recognition without you necessarily knowing it. Okay, I'm all for a law that says you can't do that stuff. But this seems to me like way too far in like directly regulating what the interfaces look like in a way that I don't even know if that's going to be effective.

Yeah, it's super specific. It's worth noting that there was also an earlier bill that was supposed to essentially ban dark patterns. It was Mark Warner and Depp Fisher and the Senate and it's called the Detour Act. I'm not going to look up the acronym for that. But its thing was we should just go to the FTC, tell the FTC, look into this, you have the authority to ban dark patterns. Like, you should make rules about this roughly similar to the way that you have rules about how you have to disclose ads. And that seems like a thing that made much more sense. So a parallel I would draw, and this is true.

So, like, you go to law school, you like study contracts law. There's a uniform commercial code. There's a bunch of consumer protection stuff, like, in every state. So if you go to rent a car, like a car rental contract is like a fairly regulated thing. And like the fonts have to be a certain size. And you have to prove that certain things were disclosed. It's a lot. Right.

And this is like you spend a lot of time. Like law school contracts exam questions often have the phrase like the following clause was printed an 18 point type, which is code for they did everything they could to make you see it. So you presumably knew it when you sign a contract. I don't think anybody reads a car rental contract. I don't think that is like an effective tool of disclosure. And so to me, saying we're going to directly regulate these interfaces so you make better choices when you click accept still doesn't get to the fundamental problem of no one's reading these contracts. No one's making choices based on privacy. No one's like picking Bose headphones over Sony headphones because Bose has a better privacy policy, which is the nightmare scenario that we're currently in.

Like, it doesn't get to the main problem. It just gets to, it seems like Josh Hawley wants to punish Google and Twitter and Facebook. Yes, and take down every side on the internet alongside it. I mean, the thing this is supposed to do isn't necessarily private, like make people aware of what's happening. It is the, based on the premise that if you erase these dark patterns, people will presumably spend less time on Facebook or less time on Twitter because they literally can't get to it or because they have to hit a button to look at the rest of their feet. and they're aware of it. I am unclear on what the science is on whether that's likely to happen. Yeah.

I mean, where would you, where would Twitter even put that button in its timeline? Right? You could load 100 tweets. Load just a finite number of tweets. I don't know. I could see this stuff actually being done.

It's just weird to imagine it being legislated. Here's another favorite part I have. Not less frequently than once every three years, the commission will submit to Congress a report on the issue of internet addiction and the processes through which social media companies and other internet companies, by exploiting human psychology and brain physiology, interfere with the free choices of individuals on the internet. That is like wild.

Like, that's truly wild that he's saying, we've lost your free will because you can infinite scroll. Yeah, we're into some sort of full-on hidden persuaders, subliminal messaging stuff here. Like, this feels so much like the ad debates from long before I was born about whether like Coca-Cola is secretly forcing you to buy it. And there's, I just want to be clear, there's not a lot of science under this, right? I would not be able to say that for sure, but it definitely doesn't seem like the kind of thing where we can tell this is going to happen.

There's a reason it resonates is because it is sort of obvious that these services are designed to be sticky. Like that's an old-timey internet word. Like people have been trying to make services that make you come back and that make you spin. more time on them. So they've been working very hard and diligently to do that. But, you know, the solution. I mean, this is like a ban on sugar. Like, I think sugar has something that you could call addictive properties or it's hard to quit sugar, you know. But a ban on sugar is probably not the solution. Yeah. So this is like the bigger point, which I have just been seeing now for months. I think we've been talking about it for months. It feels very odd that Josh Hawley, who is a

Republican, is taking the position of, I'm going to directly regulate the behavior of companies. I'm going to say what companies can and cannot do. And we're going to say this behavior is banned. And Elizabeth Warren, who's a Democratic frontrunner, is saying, actually the thing to do is break them up so there's more competition in the market and people have more choices. And that to me, feels like a total inversion of what you would expect these policies to be. And I'm watching sort of the tech policy people in D.C. Like literally last week, they were just all in a Twitter fight with each other. It was very entertaining.

Like, there's a realignment in, like, who is backing what policy that is fascinating to me. Because Republicans basically are like, we don't like Google. We're going to directly regulate what Google can do. And I think Warren is, I think, the face of this on the other side, and she's saying, the solution is antitrust. The solution is the market. And you just wouldn't expect that alignment to exist in the way that it does. At least in the first half. Although it's been really frustrating that I feel like a lot of people who think this bill is awful and ridiculous still by the framing of it that I think is flawed, which is basically that, A, the Internet is these few sites.

So when you say social media, obviously you mean these. and B, just, that the internet is a thing for wasting time on, which is maybe that's true for a lot of people. That's very sad. I work on the internet. I post fan fiction on the internet. I do all kinds of things that are not on these few sites. I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. I enjoy it a lot.

That's a user-generated content platform. It's really frustrating to sound, A, like a shill for the internet. But, B, I don't know that all of these things that have really mentally, lot to me in my life, have more or less been erased under this blanket proposition that tech is bad. Yeah. That's the other thing that gets me is to pass a bill like this, you have to assume that Twitter and Facebook and Google and YouTube are forever and that they're the only things worth carrying. Like, they're named. They're in here by name. That's very rare for a bill like this to just specifically name companies and Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are just named in the bill.

and then it's like in other companies like them. As such services existed in 2019. Yeah. So it's like very targeted towards the existence of YouTube now. And then like everything else like it. That's fairly rare. Like you don't see a lot of bills that are like, Altria Tobacco shall stop addicting children.

Like that's not allowed. Like Steve will stop mowing my law. Like get off. Like you don't see a lot of that. It's also not necessarily legal to do stuff like that. So that's the other question. So Mark Cuban, who is on. on the interview episode on Tuesday.

I tweeted this selection of the bill at the time limits, and he responded to me, this is just a marketing platform for Josh Hawley. Right? We're all get outraged about it. We all know his name. Some people will fund him. Some people will fund the other side. We'll move the Overton window

and we'll start talking about regulating tech. Is that kind of your estimate of the politics of this? It seems like an entirely reasonable estimate and also that whenever anybody dunks on this eminently dunkable bill, Ted Cruz gets to retweet them and say,

You work for Google. He did that to us. That's a real thing. Wait, what? Ted Cruz retweeted me last week. This week, last week. I don't know. It was like a thing.

Congrats. Is this the lawmaker version of trolling, right? So that's like a question. Is Josh Holly just like trolling in tech companies to like get everybody to talk about regular? Like this bill has no co-sponsors, right? You just like did it. Great.

Is it going to go anywhere? Who knows? Is his bill to make the FTC an ultra-powerful speech regulator for Twitter going to go anywhere? Like, I don't know. Is everyone talking about Josh Hawley and the fact that he keeps putting out bills that would regulate tech companies and, in particular, social media platforms in increasingly direct ways?

Yeah, we're talking about it right now. That's actually a question we had. Like, you know, Russell and McKenna and I were, like, sitting around talking about how to cover this bill. And it's, do we give it this much attention? Are you letting Josh win? Yeah, but he's a senator. There's not much more.

There's like one more place you can go. And like maybe he wants to go there, but we're not going to slow him down or speed him up. We're just going to talk about what a senator is suggesting we regulate the internet. Like this is now, in fact, the Overton window has moved. This is the outer bound of the conversation. And I'm not sure how many people understand that when someone says you propose a bill, that does not mean the bill has any likelihood to pass whatsoever. So it seems like a lot of people may have the impression that, oh, no, this is like a seriously considered thing.

the U.S. is maybe going to do this thing. This is wild. Like, this is policy. Yeah. It's weird. I just think it's, the thing I wanted to get out is, in particular, is this, what I see as an inversion or realignment of how Democrats and Republicans have talked about regulating tech companies.

Like, it is wild that Republicans are, for example, the president actively talks about how much he has deregulated the government. Like, how many regulations he's crossed off every day? Like, you know, his first week in office, he's like, I brought in the shredder. We found all the regulations and I got rid of him. And this is nothing but a set of extremely specific regulations on how a software interface should work. That's a disconnect. To be fair, Tulsi Gabbard did sue Google for sending her emails into spam.

Can you not unpack that for two seconds? All right. So during the debates, not the last debates, but the one once before, Tulsi Gabbard buys ads on Google. So when people search her name, her selected link will come. come up on top of the organic results. And after the debate, when she was very popular in searches, they suspended her account for about six hours for what appears to have been a payment processing issue. And she was upset about this, which is entirely reasonable.

She then sued Google over it for violating her free speech, which is less reasonable, eminently, and cited a lot of the same arguments that people like Holly and folks on Lent Cruise site, like just sort of took for granted that Google regularly has an extremely specific political bias that it deals with in incredibly micromanaged ways. So she sued them. Also, she claimed that her fundraising emails get disproportionately sent to spam, which would be a really difficult thing to prove. Yeah.

So just on the subject of the ads, I love the idea that not being able to buy ads from Google implicates your free speech rights. Also, Google serving up results for Gabbard's website for free. Like, they didn't stop delivering search results, which is the main thing that they do. Like, they weren't like, you search for Tulsi Gabbard, and they, because they did activated her AdWords account, then send those searches to Joe Biden, right? They were still just like serving up searches. She just wasn't allowed to buy ads next to those searches because her credit card got declined or whatever it was. I mean, I think the problem is partly that Google doesn't do itself any favors by being so gigantic that it cannot really or will not explain what's wrong when something goes wrong.

So it just gives these vague error messages or complaint responses that leave a lot of room for conspiratorial construction. Yeah, because it's genuinely bad. It's ridiculous sometimes. So I think that's like a main point. I think that Holly's like Section 230 Bill kind of gets at this. You hear this from all sides. These companies are not nearly transparent enough at all at any level. Like, no one knows how much money YouTube makes.

Like, that's like the first thing. It's like the first thing to know about any company is like, are you profitable? Do you make money? How do you make your money? Who, like, who's paying you? You can't find that out about YouTube. It's buried inside of Google's earnings, which are buried inside of Alphabet's earnings. So even at that level, you don't know that about YouTube.

Then on Twitter, it's like, how did you make this enforcement decision? And no one knows the answer, right? It's like this very opaque process. Facebook is another realm of opacity. Right. Twitch, which is Amazon, also like notoriously weird about enforcing rules. Yeah. So like I think everybody agrees on that. Like these companies are so opaque that it's very easy to come up with conspiracy theories. I just don't know that it's weird.

You know, like people always say Silicon Valley is like very libertarian. Like I tweeted out this bill. I saw the shares of our URL. And this hit the button where everyone's like, you can't tell us what to do. Right. And it's like, this will kill innovation, which is my favorite line. It's like, well, maybe innovating towards gamification was always the wrong move. But I just don't know what Holly's goal is with stopping this one in particular.

Like, is it just making everybody hate the tech companies more? Because this is a style of regulation that if you applied it to any other business, you would not have Republicans proposing this kind of legislation. Yes, probably. I can conspiratorialize a lot about maybe the 30 Minutes thing is actually just this giant thing that's supposed to be so crazy that everyone forgets about all the other ridiculous cards. Like, I don't know. I don't know how much of anything means

anything. It feels like an op-ed, and he just, he realized that his greatest distribution platform was publishing it as a proposed bill. Yeah, but that is absolutely true. Yeah. Like, he's, again, a United States senator.

Like, his greatest distribution platform is proposing laws for the country. Yeah. That's his job. The question is, like, are those laws reasonable? are they constitutional? Are they effective? I think with this bill, it's mostly what this is effective at is,

hey, there's somebody in the Senate who hates you, right? Like if you work at Twitter or Google or Facebook, like there's at least one person who hates you and you should be aware of that. And maybe that's enough. But it's just a really weird moment where that sort of vendetta against the platform companies is emerging in this stuff.

Whereas I think if I, who's the person who's a person who, proposes that we should directly regulate the companies on this show the most. It's me. Right? I'm like, net neutrality should exist. AT&D should not be allowed to do things. Some people call Delah the Josh Hawley of the Virgin. I'm just saying, me saying gamification is a little bit dangerous. Like five years ago, if I was like, gamification's super dangerous. These companies are making these things sticky, these algorithms, like, you wouldn't have been surprised if I said it.

if I had said there should be a law that says you have to quit Twitter after 30 minutes, you, Paul, would have laughed in my face. This is a bizarre moment. I would have cried first, but then I would have laughed. But it's weird to see conduct interviews like this proposed. Anyway, what happens next with this bill? Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing ever.

Yeah. He proposes a ton of bills. He had the internet censorship bill like three days ago. Yeah. If anything did happen, it is very hard for me to imagine how, this law would be constitutional in any way if it somehow managed to get through everything. Yeah. I mean, it's very much like, I think Paul had a good point.

It's like banning sugar or like forcing companies to print a bunch of like nutrition facts and things. Like those laws routinely get challenged because you can't just like step in like that, right? And it's like sugar was made of speech. If sugar was the first amendment. Well, I mean, that's another open question, right? is the software interface of a platform speech. It's also just weird to suggest that taken to its logical extreme, you should ban software being user-friendly.

Like, yes, the ultimate non-dark pattern system would be if there were 50 buttons that were identical all over everything and I couldn't use anything. I would not want to spend a lot of time on that website. I was sort of into it. Like, what if everything was required to have a series of hardware knobs that were identical and everything looked cool as shit?

Like, everything was like a giant mixing, Desk. Regulate cyberpunk. See? That's what I'm getting at. All right.

Well, I wanted to bring it up. Again, I have a sense of conflict about how much attention to pay to these things. But I think for our audience, we have to dive into it a little bit because this is,

I would say, the most extreme proposal for how to deal with Facebook and Twitter and YouTube that I've ever seen. And the dude is a senator. I'm going to try to get Holly on the show. That's the move. Yeah.

I would really like to hear what he thinks this bill would do. And I'm like, like, does he believe in, like, net neutrality? Like, it's, right? You're like, there's so little competition for YouTube that I got to cut it off every 30 minutes. Like, I'm interested if he wants to apply that to other places where there's not as much competition. Okay. Speaking of not as much competition, there's another sort of legal policy fight brewing,

which I think is really interesting. You've heard of lowcast? I read about lowcast on our site and have never used it. I think a lot of people have never used it. Paul, have you heard of lowcast? I have. So lowcast is a weird company. It's a non-profit.

That's right. Don't you forget it. It's a non-profit company that was set up to capture over-the-air broadcast from NBC, CBS, Fox, the big networks, and then restream them to people. It is what you would call a loophole startup in that there is a clause in the copyright code. that says non-profits can do this. They can retransmit broadcast signals. So they're like, all right, we're a nonprofit. You can just like donate to us however much you want.

We set it up. They exist. You can go use Lowcast. We've reviewed it. People seem to like it. Great. They were unsurprisingly sued by the big broadcast networks this week. The broadcast networks claim that LoCast is basically a conspiracy.

Shell company set up by DISH network and AT&T so that they lower the prices for, for their services. So DISH Network, AT&T, Comcast, whoever, cable companies have to pay retransmission fees to rebroadcast ABC, CBS, and Fox. This is like a whole thing. And so they're saying, well, if you set up your weird nonprofit lowcast DISH network, then when you come to us to negotiate the rate to retransmission, you can just say, we won't pay you anything because our customers can use lowcast for free. That's a wild argument. My question is like, how well run do you think Dish Network is. Like AT&T announced not one but like three TV services with the same name this week.

Yeah. That's a very sophisticated conspiracy theory. Also, it makes it sound like, or write-up of it, makes it sound like it's basically unusable unless you actually pay them. Yeah, I mean, it's right through a non-profits, so they have to skate around things. There's a big case. Do you remember, like, Aereo? Oh, boy.

I mean, Aero consumed the world for about six months, and then as soon as it was over, It just got completely memory hole and no one knows what you're talking about when you bring it up. So I had forgotten that the Aero case went all the way to the Supreme Court with a dissent written by Scalia. Like the whole thing happened with Aria. So Aria was a startup. We did a video with them. They had a warehouse in Brooklyn full of tiny little quarter-sized antennas. I still have an Aero antenna somewhere.

I should put it in Lusite and like save it forever. So Aria was this company. Their main innovation was tiny little antennas. it could pick up TV signals. You would sign into your Aereo account. They would assign an antenna to you. So now it was your antenna. And then you would tune into some broadcast network and stream it to yourself.

Right? So like an aggregation of antennas and they dynamically assign one to you. Got it. They did the work. They did the work. But they did the work of like identifying the loophole and engineering their way into a loophole. Yeah. What's the point of loopholes if they don't work?

Right. So this case, the broadcaster sue Ario. They go, and this is like the funniest thing about the, lowcast problem. The broadcaster sue Aereo. They go all the way to Supreme Court, and they lose. The Supreme Court says, yeah, we get it. You did all this work, but this looks and acts like a cable TV system. So if you're going to look and act like if it quacks a duck, like it's a duck, you got to pay the money, right? Like this is illegal, you're copier infringing. Ario went back and said, okay, the Supreme Court said we're basically a cable system.

that means you are legally required to license the content to us. So let's go. Let's do it. The broadcaster is ABC, they went back again and said, no, we're going to fight that too. And they fought it and they won in the Southern District of New York and said, and the line they drove was like, this is the definition of a cable system. This is how it works. Even though Aereo looks like it, it is not one. We're going to exclude it from the definition of a cable system.

We don't have to license them anything. They're dead. So Aero died. So they won sort of twice, the broadcasters won. They won the first time and said, this is copyright infringement. The Supreme Court said, this looks like a cable system. They're obviously infringing. And then they won again.

They said they're still not a cable system. They don't get the mandatory licensing. So now you're lowcast and you show up and you're not a cable system and you're a nonprofit. By the plain language of the copyright law, that's not even a loophole, Paul. It's like, that's what it says. Like anything that is not a cable system that is a nonprofit. that does not have direct or indirect commercial advantage gets to retransmit these signals. So the broadcasters screwed themselves because they went after Aereo too hard,

which is pretty good. This is delicious. But then, so their argument comes down to because it is a conspiracy theory of DISH in AT&T to have a free option so that they have to pay lower retransmission fees, it's indirect commercial advantage. That's their whole game. That's why it sounds like conspiracy theory. This is a good time to point out that there is a project called Puffer.

And I think it's still around, puffer. Stanford.edu. And it's, it's, so Stanford is nonprofit. Apparently schools are nonprofits. Who do? And, and this is a project by students at Stanford, and they're working on machine learning algorithms for optimizing, like streaming bit rates.

But what they happen to be streaming is, a bunch of local television stations. So there are other ways to get free local TV. I just, why can't they just give it, you know what? Why can't they just work it out with their local, like, I want to watch like local TV commercials for my local furniture store. Like, why can't ABC give that to me?

Why can't I go to ABC.com, watch ABC and also see commercials for my local furniture store? Why is that so hard? Yeah, because, uh, because, uh, because you're not paying them. I mean, that's the thing. Like, they're required, if they want the airwaves, they're required to do a bunch of stuff.

Because airwaves, as we know, are a scarce resource that the government should allocate fairly to whatever. Says the man. This says, good old Nilai. This is Josh Hawley. Right? So if you want access to the airwaves,

you have to do a bunch of stuff. One of the things they are required to do is, like, broadcast for free. Right? They can't, like, charge you, whatever. They're not required to do that on the internet. So if you're ABC and you're, like, making stuff, you would actually much rather have people pay a cable system

and then some fraction of that cable system money get paid to you. You're not super excited about your broadcast operation. You're way more excited about this direct payment you're getting from all these other folks. Well, then give back the spectrum, you jerks. So, during the area, during the area fight, some of the networks are like if area wins, and this is allowed, we will go dark.

We would prefer to be on cable and cable. alone, then have to operate these broadcast networks that Aero can, like, retransmit for free in this way. So, like, this is, like, a cold business decision for them. So they get to be these national networks, and they get to use airwaves, they get to, like, claim that role in society. But when that got threatened by area, they're like, we'll just go dark. Like, screw it, we're out.

Like, you want dancing with the stars? Like, you got to pay a cable company for it. That's a big deal. And I, like, the nonprofit exceptions, like, there's another exception for, like, hotels, right? Like, if you run a hotel and you put an antenna on the roof and you retransmit to all the TVs, like, yeah, Congress is like, yeah, that's probably fine. You don't have to, like, sign up as a cable system for your, like, days in. Like, you can do that?

Wait, can Aario rent me a two-square-inch hotel room with an antenna? See, that's what you should do. Like, a tiny little hotel room with a sling box. This is the loophole I'm looking for. Hold on, guys. I got to sign up for Airbnb. But it's weird because fundamentally these signals are being transmitted for free. Think about this. You're in your car right now. Adi, you're sitting right there. I'm sitting here.

We're in New York. My body is full of ABC programming right now, just beaming through me. Oh my God. I'm being energized by the radio waves of CBS right at this second. The only problem is my dumb brain can't decode those signals. I need some like hardware to do it. And as everyone knows, Comcast is an investor in FoxyMedia. If not for your dumb brain, being unable to decode digital television signals, you would not add this problem. All right.

Speaking of being energized by radio waves, Deere. My body is filled with the power of Verizon 5G, only it's not because it doesn't exist anywhere yet. Can you take us through this T-Mobile of Verizon Beef? So the earnings happened, T-Mobile's earnings, their earnings call got delayed because they were waiting for the DISH, you know, announcement and the Sprint merger announcement and all of that stuff to happen. So, of course, all they had to talk about in their earnings call wasn't how they did last quarter. It was like, what's going on? And it's all about 5G.

And John Ledger, CEO of T-Mobile, soon, I guess to be the CEO of the new T-Mobile, which is T-Mobile, which is T-Mobile. plus sprint. Minus boost. It's a real algebra. There it is. Someone asked him a question about like 5G something, something. And he gave, now to be clear, this is not a fair assessment. This is a pro T-Mobile assessment.

But it is also the clearest assessment of how 5G works and what carriers need to do to make a successful 5G network that any carrier executive has ever given. Yeah. It was remarkable. It was also just like hilarious. mean. He's hilarious. Yeah, super mean. He said, Verizon's strategy will not work. It was a first move of play. It'll cost $1.5 trillion to do. They're dead in the water without a strategy. AT&T at least gets the template, but they don't have the midband that they need. So AT&T gets a vision. They don't have the midband. So there's a hole in their strategy, but they at least get the template. So to sum up, Verizon, clueless, no strategy, nowhere to go. AT&T, not clueless, but lying, confusing people about 5GE, which is really. just 4G advance and there's a big hole in their template which is in the middle which was like

actually that's right yeah that's right because if you want to do 5g you can't just do millimeter wave you got to do millimeter wave and then you got to have some stuff in the midband where a bunch of these get used by a bunch of 4G stuff and then you also ideally want some low band stuff so you can like you know get distance and punch your walls and whatever else so you want all the stuff i'm playing a little bit fast and loose with talking about the spectrum because it is super complicated and if i you know it's just hard to understand. So anyway, Verizon responds. To Jake on the record.

To Jake on the record, he asks them, and they say, yeah, we have a plan. We're not, this is silly. Of course, of course we've always had a plan. We're not just depending on millimeter wave. And so Jake's like, okay, cool, what's the plan? And they're like, not going to tell you. Yeah, it's a secret plan. It's great.

It's just amazing. So I made fun of them for having a secret plan. And then people immediately accuse me of being in the bag for T-Mobile, which, have you heard the things I've said about T-Mobile over the years? It's just amazing that we're getting these catfights between these executives that T-Mobile has started because they decided to be wacky are only going to get stranger and more hilarious as they get mixed up with how complicated five. actually is. And so we're going to get these like super weird esoteric burns that you won't understand unless you know what midband spectrum is. And it's just that is where we live now.

And also John Ledger runs a big company now. Or he will, right? Like he's no longer nipping at the heels. He's like, I run a company as big as yours. Yeah. I just want I wanted to offer a helpful heuristic for people who are confused about spectrum numbers. So your Wi-Fi is 2.4. gigahertz slash five gigahertz, right? So think of your Wi-Fi range and imagine it's the same

spectrum, right? If that was on a cell phone tower, you know, it would be high up, it might have a good line of sight. So you could probably, let's say maximum get about 10x, what typical Wi-Fi range you would expect. So you have a Wi-Fi router in your house. Imagine it worked like 10x better, like best case, right? So that's the 2.4 gighertz, the 5-gHz, right? Higher than 5-GARter. gigahertz is like the millimeter wave world, right? So much shorter than Wi-Fi. And then lower than 2.4 gigahertz is the low band. So much further range, but a lot slower than Wi-Fi.

That's just like, if you're ever confused and you see some numbers, like 800 megahertz, one is 200 megahertz less than one gigahertz. You get it. Yeah. I mean, this has always been, I mean, do you remember, actually, Paul, do you remember, we were at Engadgett when this happened? There was a 700 megahertz auction. and we were like, Paul has to write an explainer about the 700 megahertz auction.

And you're like, no, I have no idea what it's on. We've gotten better. It was like 10 years ago. But 700 megahertz, it's because they shut down analog TV. And they moved everybody to digital TV and they took that spectrum back. Good old government. And they auctioned it off and Verizon won a huge chunk of it. And that's like, that was the LTE spectrum that everybody wanted because Verizon was like,

this is oceanfront real estate, which makes no sense in the context of radio spectrum. but that's what they said. And that was, we're going to take this very good chunk of spectrum that has like the right characteristics of like being able to go through walls and like range and all this stuff. We're going to reallocate it for wireless instead of analog TV. There are some other spectrum options going on right now, but there's nothing that looks quite as good as that unless you're T-Mobile and you just bought Sprint and you got a bunch of like six to 800 bang-eart spectrum.

Yeah, I mean, fundamentally the switch to 5G is starting to just look like Jenga. Like there's millimeter wave. And so like that's the cool new technology that's like actually not that great for like just using a cell phone in the world. But it's cool for short range stuff. And then everything else is a game of Spectrum Jenga. What do you have free? What do you have now that you could someday reallocate and what can you get? And so T-Mobile's whole thing is like we're buying Sprint because they've got the good spectrum and we can put together our puzzle pieces to get all the bands we want to provide 5G service and it'll be great.

So that's what T-Mobile is going to do. But what is Horizon and AT&T going to do? How are they going to play their Spectrum Jenga game to make sure that they can either transition stuff from one use to a 5G use or that they can get new spectrum to apply to 5G? And let's not forget, canny conspiracy theorist Dish Network. Yeah. Which is now going to run our nation's fourth wireless carrier because they're proven to be so good at it. Very exciting. No, I'm going to switch the dish.

It's going to be great. All right. We're going to take a break. We'll be back. We've got to talk about Samsung. Adi. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you.

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in the lives of most Americans now. What's it called? It's called, and the track point guys laugh and laugh. Okay. Sure. What on earth does that mean? So there's this new keyboard out,

the Moquibo. Wait, but I saw the word on the site and never pronounce it. Mochibo. I get it. All right. going. How would you pronounce it?

No, I just thought it. I didn't realize it was more keyboard. Oh, you're right. Okay, well, sure. Okay, so imagine a chicklet keyboard with all the chicklets crammed together, right? Creating almost an uninterrupted surface. Guess what that surface could become. It could become a touchpad.

Now your whole keyboard is a mouse, right? Yeah, okay. And you're saying, well, sometimes I like to type on my keyboard. Won't I get false mouse movements? So with the MoCibo, you put your thumb on this bar below the keyboard, and that puts you into this mouse mode. And apparently works okay as a pointer, not great for scrolling. But I just wanted, I wish I could use a trackpoint.

Have you ever tried to use a track point on a think pad? Yeah. I've never been good at it. People love it. I've never been good at it. Exactly, right? But wanting to be great to be one of those people that could love the track point? Because you'd hardly ever have to move your hands.

It's probably so much better for your wrists instead of like twisting your... I'm trying to describe the movement that is non-ergonomic that I make going from the home row to my touchpad. And it's bad for me. If only I had a touchpoint that I knew how to use or if the Moquibo was better. It just made me wistful. Do you think it is actually more keyboard? It looks like, I mean, if mo keyboard means a mouse. All right.

I mean, look, you know how I feel about wacky hardware. I'm with you. Speaking of wacky hardware, we got to go through Samsung. There's a Samsung event, right? Yeah, that's right. Note 10 already, you can already pre-order it. We already know there's going to be a headphone doll. So the event is next week on August 7th.

The Note 10 you can pre-order, and it ships August 23rd. But most importantly, we have our first images of the dongle. This is my nightmare. Is that the most important thing? Yes. I mean, of my tweets about the Note 10 is the one that got the most engagement. Yeah. I mean, my tweet was better than your tweet.

Oh. Because I ask, is there a headphone jack in this? And then I wrote, note 10, this phone. Yeah. Really what I want You know, we always think about How do we improve the Vergecast? How do we make it better?

How do we change it? I think if we get to a place where you and I are just arguing about who had a better tweet That's how you really get to the next level of audience. Look, I love that Samsung was the last holdout of the major phone makers to keep a headphone jack. That makes me happy in my heart.

I own a Samsung Galaxy S-10. I love it. I think it's a great little phone. I am disappointed that they decided to let that go, but I'm not, like, religious about it. It's a bummer, but okay, fine. If you're going to get rid of the headphone, Jack,

you've got to make a dongle. You know, at least it's USBC. Yeah, I mean, so here's one question. Is this a USBC dongle that will work in every USBC device? Or is it, right? Because USBC to headphone is not a standardized connection. That's correct. Also, there are already GalaxyBuds in this world,

but I guarantee you that Bixby buds are on their way. Right? Like that's, if you're getting rid of the headphone, Jack, what does everyone learn from Apple? You got to make the true wireless headphones that are the upsell right next to the phone. Yeah. It's coming.

I just wanted to let everybody know as far as the Dongol Life update is that I have been using my pixel 3 with USBC, the pack-in USBC headphones this whole time. And as of like a week or so ago, one side of the USBC is more finicky than the other. Of course. Of course.

Which is like, it's not just that you can't use regular headphones. That's not the only problem with this. It's not just that you can't charge your phone and listen to music with headphones at the same time. That is not the only problem. There's also the fact that you created a single point of failure, and I'm still sad. Yeah. Well, the note 10 is the one. You would think they would take it off the S.

11 first. Right. Right. Leave it on the Note 10. The Note 10 is like the muscle car of Samsung's line. It's like it has a stylus. It has a microSD card slot in it. It can like it can connect to everything.

Would you like a keyboard? It can turn into a Windows PC. Like it's that phone. Yeah. Yeah. You would think they would, and it's also gigantic. Like they cannot make the we ran out of space argument.

They're making a plus version of it, which is even more gigantic. It's so big it has a spot for the stylus inside of it. Yeah. Like, there's just a cylinder of empty space inside of the note 10. Like, this, I just assume this would be the last phone to see it go, because it's like the do-everything phone. It makes me sad that it's the first of Samsung's phones. Although it's not, Samsung has some other devices without iPhone jack, right? The new tablet that looks exactly like an iPad Pro.

Yeah. It's like, it is also sort of wild that, like, they're there, you know? So the tab is six, so it has a weird. like notch that you place the stylus into like a divot, which I think is interesting. Yeah. On the back. That's not going to work. Well, maybe it won't work, but it still seems better than Apple's solution. Like if you have the keyboard case on this, the keyboard case holds the stylus there. So it's like you can keep the stylus with the thing that uses the stylus. I like that. But also the keyboard cover, it has a touchpad now. And you can like with one button go into Dex mode. And Dex mode. And Dex mode has a Linux, an app that is Linux that runs in desks. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's basically the year of the Linux desktop. I just want to, I just, hold on. It's an Android tablet that has a secondary weird windowing system called Dex. Uh-huh. And then that has an app that is Linux. Yes. Yeah, that's all great. It's all wonderful.

Does the app actually show you Linux? or is it Linux like in another abstraction layer? I don't know. I haven't really used it. So people like it. People apparently like it. And I think you can get like different distros on it. Like it,

so it's different than what Google has done with the Chromebook is tried to completely integrate Linux with the Chrome OS desktop. And it's been a long uphill slog and it still isn't great as far as I know. But, you know, it's nice because it all, it all, seems interoperable in theory, whereas Samsung has more gone Linux is an app and if it, you know, it runs pretty well and that could be enough for a lot of people. And it would, you know, you could probably get more done with fewer bugs probably right now. Yeah, I, that's my understanding.

I am curious to see how well Dex works. I do like the idea of a tablet that has a tablet interface when you're using it as a tablet. And then you know what, screw it. I need some windows right now. I could just hit a button and get some windows. That is something that I would use on an iPad. I'm just saying. Well, I am very happy that there's still tablet competition in the world, even if it's come to the point where Samsung is just like blindly aping the iPad Pro, which is just look at a photo.

I'm not wrong. And look, the Note 10's exciting. I think we've been underplaying it because, you know, it's like the dead season and it's also the note. And like the note in my mind is like the question is still like, will it explode? that happened. We didn't forget Samsung. You made a phone that exploded and then you just moved on.

But it's exciting. I mean, I'll have a new phone. All right. I'm going to say this because if I don't, the shield people will come for me. There's a new NVIDIA shield at the FCC. I said it. You can't say I'm ignoring the Nivitia shield now.

Stop that, Josh Hawley. I'm psychologically. torturing you with my knowledge of the Nvidia Shield. Okay, that's it. That's literally all I'm going to say. There's a new one of the FCC. Maybe the same chip is the new Switch. That's what we think. By the way, you can put Android on a switch now, which is hilarious.

Which is all kind of the same thing because this is basically the version of Android that Nvidia makes for the Shield is the version of Android that runs on the Switch. So it's really all one big story. Yeah. See? Invidia Shield. We were like,

Got into it. All right. We're way over time. Thank you so much for listening. That one was all over the place. I didn't even talk about the Mofi battery cases for the iPhone 10R, which are prevented from allowing you to use the headphone dongle. Yeah. Get on that, Holly.

Look into the MFI program. Why won't anyone look into this? That's the show. Next week on the interview show, Paul Ford, who is a somewhat legendary writer about code. I mean, literally he wrote an entire issue. of Bloomberg Business Week entitled What is Code? Really great conversation. He's coming up next week.

We'll be back on Friday with this podcast. Remember, as you drive, you're being energized by millions of radio waves. It's happening. You can't stop it. Big Bang Theory is literally in your body right now. If you're listening to Sover Wi-Fi, it's not just coming out of your speakers. It's in your body. There are other podcasts you can listen to.

Maybe you'll have the same body horror reaction. Maybe you want. Why'd you push that button is great. That's out. Ashley and Caitlin are doing a great job with that show. Land of the Giants, Jason Del Rey's deep dive into Amazon. That show, it's a deep dive into Amazon. This one was all about Prime.

Go listen to that. You can listen to Kara on Recode Decode and Pivot with Scott Galloway and you listen to Peter Kafka and Recode Media. One of my favorite shows because I have a huge media. Go listen to all those things. Just think about radio waves in your body this week. That's what I want you to do. And when you have those thoughts, just tweet them in some. one. Maybe me, maybe somebody else. But just share that idea with people because it's funny.

That's it. That's what I got for you. Do you know which frequency microwaves use? It's 2.4 gigahertz. Do you know why 2.4 gigahertz was available for Wi-Fi? It's because it's a junk spectrum because it's absorbed by water. Guess what your body is made out of? Yep. Just stand right next to your router and see if this podcast can get through your body. That's what I'm saying. All right. That's what I'm saying. enough. Goodbye. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul.