The Vergecast - ARM powered PCs, Google vs Amazon, and Messenger Kids

Episode Date: December 8, 2017

This week, Dieter Bohn runs the show with Paul Miller and Natt Garun, and it's been a wild week of news. Amazon and Google are basically feuding right now: Google is pulling YouTube from the FireTV so the podcast trio ponders what this frightening predicament means for the streaming and the open web. Also, Microsoft launched some ARM-powered Windows 10 PCs, so you bet these tech luminaries are going to talk about it. There’s lots more in between that, like Paul’s weekly segment (say it with me) “Color me surprised,” so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 05:00 - Microsoft launches ARM-powered Windows 10 PCs with ‘all-day’ battery life 17:44 - Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon 845 processor 22:40 - How Messenger Kids takes more from families than it gives them 30:17 - Google and Amazon are punishing their own customers in a bitter feud 40:27 - DeepMind’s AI became a superhuman chess player in a few hours, just for fun 44:21 - Major airlines are about to ban ‘smart luggage’ 49:45 - Paul’s weekly segment “Color me surprised” 52:06 - Instagram is testing Direct, a standalone messaging app that replaces the current inbox 54:57 - Apple's had a shockingly bad week of software problems 1:00:22 - Bitcoin hits $15,000 1:04:01 - CryptoKitties Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by the 8 Smart Mattress. Have you noticed how many mattress companies there are recently? They're just everywhere. But one company thinks that it's different. It's called 8. 8 is smart. It says it's the iPhone compared to flip phones for other mattresses. So there's a whole bunch of foam mattresses out there, but the 8 Smart mattress is an innovative

bed that uses real technology to help people sleep better and live healthier. Visit 8Sleep.com slash verge and use the code Verge to get $125 off of any mattress, plus free shipping and free returns. That's 8E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com slash verge and code Verge to redeem this very special offer. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast. It is the flagship podcast of the verge. Hello, and I am joined today by incredibly smart people. Paul Miller is here as usual. Hello. And Nat Garon is here. Hey, it's been a while. It has. We've been missing you. Neli is not here. He is on vacation. And I'm sorry, I missed last week. My voice was such that I couldn't

talk for more than 45 seconds without falling into a coughing fit of death. So that was super fun. Also, as long as we're talking about flagships, I want to point out that our very, very good friend, Ezra Klein, on his podcast, The Weeds, over at Vox.com, noted that we are in contention for who gets to be the flagship. And I just, I want to say that he's a very nice guy. They have a very nice podcast, but we are definitely better. Duh. So the beef is real now. The beef is real.

It's been acknowledged beef. Yeah. Also, I want to point out that Walt, Mossberg tweeted, who's at Ezra Klein, never heard him on the flagship podcast, the Vergecast. And that was liked by Ezra Klein, I think, in a concession to non-flagship status. Well, you definitely shouldn't go listen to the weeds and listen to their recent net neutrality episode. Definitely not. Yeah.

Actually, you should. So, hey, it's been kind of a busy week for news in a way that December usually. usually isn't. What's that about? I have no idea that I think they should allow us to relax and charge our batteries for CES. I blame Qualcomm. They're holding this like three-day event in Hawaii. Our intrepid reporter reviewer Dan Seafurt is out there learning about chips. Yeah, it's actually still going on right now as we podcast. And I think right today they're talking about 5G, which I still think is the biggest, I don't know. I feel like 5G is still in the

Slim-flam zone. Is there a standard that everybody's agreed on? Are they actually rolling it out anytime soon? People are like, hey, we got 5G. It's like, do you? Is it real? It's in a few cities in the U.S. from Verizon. Yeah, I feel like that's when Fios is coming out, and everyone's like, oh, snap, Fios.

And then they waited three years until it came to their address. And then they waited another year until it came on their floor in their apartment. So it's going to be a while. Yeah. Aren't we still in a stage where whatever Qualcomm decides is 5G is 5G? 5G? Not if you ask Apple. No, I'm just kidding.

Actually, I have no idea what Apple thinks of Qualcomm and 5G. I do know that they're not friends. They're trying to stop each other. Qualcomm is using Palms patents to try and block importing of the iPhone 10. I'm not going to go there. I'm not going to have too many feelings about that. I'm going to try super hard. Okay, no, except I did tweet a thing.

If you take the cards on the iPhone 10 and start, like, dragging them around, they don't do what you would expect a physical object to do. do. They just kind of float all over the place and then you let them go and they like drop into an icon. Like it seems like what they want to do is get reordered. But instead what they do is just kind of and then they fall away. I want to know I don't have an iPhone 10. Oh, well, you should get one and then you can complain about the notch just like me. Actually, Lauren Good and I have been progressively making each other hate the iPhone 10 more and more just by like pointing out little nitpicks to each other day by day. And any one of those individual nitpicks,

it's like, fine, whatever. But then, like, my nitpicks are piling on top of her knitpicks, and it's, like, snowballing into this. I don't know how I feel about this phone thing. It sounds like a super healthy relationship at work. It's really, yeah, it's really super great. Anyway, she's writing a story. I'm putting her on blast. It's going to come. Actually, hell, as long as we're talking about Lauren Good, if you haven't watched the final episode of Next Level, it is incredible. She goes and puts on like four different exoskeletons. Exoskeletons is designed for like factory work and also for, you know, people that need assistance walking. And it looks incredible. It's a really good story. Go watch next level.

Okay, Qualcomm, Hawaii. The big, big news, I think, it hasn't, it wasn't like the biggest traffic news. It isn't the biggest, like, story that everybody's definitely paying attention to. But I think it's the most important news of the week is that they finally announced a bunch of, like, real actual laptops that are really going to go on sale that are running on, on, processors. Windows on arm. What's remarkable to me is they're running on like, you know, plain old, good old bog standard Snapdragon 835s. The same thing that's like in my Android phone. I mean, this is like a real partnership with Qualcomm and Microsoft as far as I can understand.

Like their development platform was the 825 for a while. And then now they've got the 835 to put it on. But like they built this specifically with Qualcomm to make, the way I'm thinking about this is obviously Microsoft tried to do the thing or what if your phone could become your computer like you'd plug it into a dock or that you know that's been a dream forever um and this is what if your computer became a phone what if you we just took a computer and then made the insides of it phone internals and i and it turns out it's a great idea because you think so i i do too the the the problem is we know that the Apple's A, whatever, processors on the iPad Pro are completely capable of running fast enough to

handle like full-on computer stuff, even though the iPad itself has software that is like, nah, yeah, yeah. But Dan's like done some hands-ons and he's played around with these a little bit, but he hasn't had enough time to fully judge it. But I am, color me, like, skeptical that a Windows laptop running on a Snapdragon 835 is going to feel fast enough. I have a hard enough time using, you know, my, my Mac book with its M3 processor at times. And so are people willing to accept the thing that, like, theoretically could run any Windows app, but, like, the Intel stuff is going to run on that, like, extra layer of computing.

And, like, I don't know. What am I trying to say? When you have a computer and you do too much stuff, it slows down, you just get mad at the computer. And the way that phones and the way that the iPad. had solves that problem is by just not letting you do that much, right? You can't run five apps at a time. It can, the screen has a max of two or three at a time. Windows and like actually Chromebooks that run low end processors, you just use it until it's slow and then you have to figure out where that line is. How many tabs do I get to have open before this thing sucks? So it's up to you to figure

that out. And I don't know if that is going to work for Windows. Like, are people just going to get salty about the fact that this thing gets slow when they start pushing it? Well, they're going to start out with Windows 10S, right? Yeah. So the only things you can do on that are like play probably solitaire, watch Netflix, and use Edge as a browser, right? Yeah. Yeah. So that's never going to get slow.

That's great. That's not so bad. So then you pay to upgrade to actual Windows. Yep. And there's a few really interesting tricks that Microsoft did here to actually get this to work. And I find it very fascinating. So basically what Microsoft is doing is UWP apps, like the Windows Store apps, should just work. Basically, the developers still have to upload an arm version of their app.

But if they've developed it inside the UWP framework, then that should be a trivial process for them to do. So you'll get a, not a ton, a certain quantity of UWP apps that you can use. then any other app that is made for Intel will run in an emulator, an X-N-86 emulator. But the thing that's interesting that Microsoft's doing is they've taken a lot of the common DLLs. Like when you build an application, you have your core logic of your application, but then you end up relying on a lot of libraries. I need this math library to do this fast thing. I need this file system library to access files. stuff like that. And those are on Windows are DLLs. They're sort of external to the core program.

And Microsoft is recompiling some of the major ones for ARM. And obviously, it's the core kernel of the operating system is ARM. So a lot of the things the applications will rely on will be ARM native. And then the rest of it will be emulated. And so really big monolithic apps like Photoshop are probably going to be slow. But the basics, I mean, I feel like they've done, they've done better than just being like a Chromebook. Right. There's a lot more flexibility and you don't get stuck where it's like, I cannot do this thing. Well, and they also avoid, like, it's a different kind, like the Chromebook, the problem is like you sometimes are like, well, I bought a pixel book. So like, I used it over the Thanksgiving holiday. It was the only computer I brought with me. And I've already

talk about how much I love 360 hinges. I think all laptops should have 360 hinges and touch screens. But the problem is you are always, you cannot get away from, or am I going to run the Android app or the web app version of this thing. And it's got to the point where it won't every time you install an update

to an Android app, it gives you the opportunity to like set it as the default Android app. So literally every time I click a Google Doc link, I have to make sure that I don't accidentally click always and open it in the Android app of Google Drive, because Google Docs on the Android app kind of sucks, but on Chrome, it's great.

So I'm always terrified of clicking a Google Doc link on a Google Pixelbook. So that's that problem. They avoided that problem, but are they going to have the two world, the question is like, is there a two world problem of X86 apps going to be equally annoying or not? And I think that there aren't a ton of great Windows apps still. There's like the basics, but how quickly is that going to become annoying and how quickly will there be new Windows apps that run an arm that will solve that problem? The big question would be if it's just visibly sluggish whenever you're in an X-86 app.

Because Microsoft is trying to make it completely invisible to the user whether you are or are not in an X-86 app. Right. So, and the thing is, so like Slack, for instance, that runs an electron. Electron already runs on Arm. My Chromebook, I put another Linux distro on my Chromebook. Of course you have. Oh, wait, this Chromebook is, the pixel book is X-76. But there are versions of like Visual Studio code, which is based on electron, same as Slack is based on Electron, that run on Arm.

So like tons and tons of software has already been re-engineered to be cross-compileable to Arm. So I feel like a lot of developers will be able to do like a small amount of work to, get a big performance win on Windows. And then the fact that you have this release valve to possibly slow but at least completely usable programs I feel like is a big win. The big thing though is the actual hardware that this enables.

I mean, they're talking about like 25 hours of battery life, which sounds pretty absurd. 25 hours of battery life and you'll be able, they'll be able to make LTE variants without it being a huge pain. Like we've been waiting for the LTE Surface Pro for a while. right. That's a problem with every single X-86 laptop tablet device thing. They're not even making an LTE version of the pixel book, for example. They used to do that with like the old version of the

whatever that thing was called, the Chromebook pixel. So like getting LTE modems on laptops with x86 processors has always been kind of a mess because it required way too much re-architecting of the board and whatever and making sure the antennas work and blah. But these are built from jump to enable that option. And having LTE on the device itself is so much more convenient than like hitting that tether button. I know people like, eh, don't be such a baby just to hit the tether button and it's fine. But it's actually, it's legitimately so much better to just be able to know that you've got LTE on that device. You don't have to suck your phone's battery down. Well, especially if you can get like 20 hours, let's say you get 20 hours of actually using this laptop with LTE on. And then it's got like

the same sort of standby that a phone has where it's basically hardly. using any energy when it's what it's asleep and it's got instant wake up like it's actually enabling I feel like a better computer so if it's yeah tolerably fast which I think is the big remaining question I think it's tolerably fast like Nat do you think this is becomes the new de facto standard if it's tolerably fast is this would would you mean yeah I mean depends on what the price point is right like if it starts it's what like starting around like $800 that's you know I think there might be a 600, but yeah. Yeah.

If it's tolerated last, then yeah, like 600 seems reasonable. But if it's like 800 and God helps if it gets up to like the $1,000 Chromebooks and it's like, well, what's the point? I don't know. I mean, if it's, yeah, I don't know either. I'm really excited. I'm really excited to try it. The other thing that's interesting from Dan's Post, like they just look like every other Windows device. They're not doing anything radically different.

They're not making them really tiny or they're not doing like extra weird. There's already a million weird hinges anyway, but they just look like every other laptop. So the other question is, you know, they'll go and they'll be one with like the Intel inside badge on it. And they'll be one with, I don't know, snap dragon inside, whatever, some other badge on it. How are they going to market these? How hard are they going to push these? When a regular consumer goes into Best Buy, are they going to know which, like, the real consequences of these two things? I think the best marketing strategy they could do is probably to just literally work with Best Buy.

to talk to their salesperson because I feel like a lot of people go most average consumers I think that aren't as tech forward as we are probably walk into a Best Buy trying to buy a laptop and they're like I've seen a surface on the commercials and I've seen the MacBook but like my budget's about $700 what can I actually get that's good and like it's up to them to work with vendors to educate people on like here's a thing that you may not know about and it looks super boring but it fits your budget and works with whatever you want to do or get out of this laptop. I feel like it could if you're like just listing, yeah, if you're just listing the specs,

someone's going to walk up to this and it's like, okay, this gets, you're looking at two $700 laptops. One of these gets eight hours of battery. One of these gets 25 hours of battery and has LTE. It's like, why is this even a choice? Like, why is this eight hour battery laptop even on the market? Like, I don't even understand. Yeah, it's just like battery life and all that stuff is super.

easy to market, but it just doesn't sound that fun or like it's not a fun commercial to watch, especially if the laptop just looks super boring. So I think that like literally their best way is to just getting better at working with vendors to educate the people who come in to buy stuff and like not discourage them from the flashier options, but just be better at saying like, here's your budget, here's what works. It's not that exciting, but it's better bang for your buck. And they don't have the Windows RT problem, or it's like this is Windows. but it's sort of. Quote, unquote, Windows.

I don't know. I keep going back to the fact that these look just like regular, the other laptops. Like, they could have gone to a world like, yeah, we'll still give you eight hours of battery life instead of 20, but it weighs literally nothing. They could have, like, made them thinner and put smaller batteries in them, and they chose not to. I mean, I just feel like under, there's diminishing returns for, like, a laptop lighter than a certain amount, especially if it's going to have a full-size keyboard and a nice, Nice display. But maybe we'll get those cool, magical paper thin, lightweight devices. I would rather have 22 hours battery, though, personally.

Yeah, I would do. Well, man, yeah. I have problems with the way that batteries are getting talked about now. It used to be that Apple would promise eight and you could actually get 10 and it was amazing. But now everybody gave up on trying to give you real battery number. So Microsoft is just like, it lasts 16 hours of video local playback. It's like not helpful. So I never know when I get a new laptop to test.

Whatever number they give kind of doesn't matter unless you actually test it and use it. You don't actually know. That's frustrating. Anyway, the other news out of Qualcomm is the Snapdragon 845. And Paul, convinced me that I should care. I mean, it's going to be the standard on a whole bunch of Android phones. Great. What's special about this compared to 835?

Because it's the same nanometers, right? It's like the second rev of it. Yeah, it's the talk, T-O-C-K, right? TikTok is apparently still a thing in Armland. I mean, basically, it's 30% faster at the same power draw is the best that I can understand. And also there are certain cases, it seems like, where you could get like 15% more efficiency at, like, the old performance. So, I mean, that's nice. It's a nice little improvement.

It's got, you know, the faster, better LTE modem. But yeah, it's basically 30% more performance is the main thing. They're doing some AI-type chip stuff, but it's not quite as interesting. It's not quite as interesting as the Apple stuff. There's also some image processing stuff, which is similar to the image processing chip that Google has for the Pixel 2. that they just turned on. It's going to enable like 4K video on basically everything is my understanding. Oh, oh, yeah.

Well, that's for, yeah, for playback. Dude, you can get dual 2400 by 2400, 120 frames per second for VR. It's amazing. Wow. I can't believe it. But, yeah, like that 3X AI performance. But they don't have something that's like really dedicated to like a neural network processing like Apple and Google are doing. as far as I understand.

But yeah, it's faster. And the thing is, like, you'll just put it in the next flagship. And so your next flagship is probably going to have this chip. So you don't even have to think about it, right? The next flagship phone that you want to buy is probably going to have an 845. The problem with these chips, though, is, like, it says it enables all these things. But, like, I think as we found on, like, the recent Circuit Breaker Live show, the hardware could be super good, but if the software isn't that great,

Like the implementation of the actual feature is going to look drastically different and might not be that great. Like I think we talked about all the image processing from the different phones that use similar chips. And like the iPhone and the Samsung does completely different things and what the pixels are doing. So like who knows what this will look like in actuality, right? Yeah, Dieter. I don't know if you watched the Circle Breaker Live we did this week. But James and Sean had these example photos because they're working on a phone camera shootout. And yeah, like, it's like the editorial decisions of these companies for what photos should actually look like are crazy how different some of the photos end up looking.

Yeah, so like the hardware could be awesome, but then like what you actually get in terms of when it's put into your phones. Ultimately, that comes down to the manufacturers themselves. So like, this is all super exciting and stuff, but I don't know how much it'll matter in the long run if the different software that uses them kind of. basically dictates whether or not you're going to buy a device. Yeah. So the holidays, they're coming up. And, you know, we all know what that means. It means there's going to be parties and presents and ugly sweaters.

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All right. I said I want to talk about kids. I have lots of feelings about Amazon and Google and also other things, including Bitcoin. But I want to talk about kids first. Nat, what did Facebook do this week? If you're listening this, you probably know, but give us the rundown. Facebook decided that it didn't have enough spinoff apps and wanted to make another one. So now it's going to release a kid's version of its messenger app, which is designed for a kid's ages 6 to 12, and it'll have parental controls.

Parents can decide who their kids can talk to and they're contact lists, and it's not going to serve kids ads allegedly. And because the law requires that you have to be 13 years or older to sign up for a Facebook account, you don't need a Facebook account to use the messenger app. However, obviously parents are kind of concerned because it's not unthinkable that Facebook can link the parent to the kid, even if they don't have the account. And also just in general, people are kind of very distrustful of Facebook at the moment. How does it work without an account? You just type your friend's name? Yeah, I think you can sign up with like a phone number or like your name. I think in general, Facebook, I mean, Messenger as an app doesn't require a Facebook account at all.

So you can still use it as just a plain messaging app and you can use it to use, you know, filters and stickers and draw on your face and whatever. But they're making a kid-specific one, I guess, to compete with hangouts and I message because they probably think that parents are already using these types of apps to talk to their kids. So why not get into the space? Does that make sense. Parents are definitely talking to kids through messaging. And if you can, the only way you can do that messaging is having a Facebook account and you can't. have a Facebook account if you're younger than 13, then Facebook has to do something, right? Well, Facebook doesn't have to do anything. They don't have to do anything. But they figure if

you're a parent, so Casey wrote some really good stuff about this, but here's my calculus. I'm a parent. I've got a kid. I want to talk to my kid. My kid doesn't have a Facebook account. And so I'm going to talk to my kid using I message or hangouts or whatever. And then if I'm talking to my kid using I message or hangouts or whatever, I'm going to talk to other people using it because I'm already in the app. So I think from Facebook's perspective, this is, you know, Casey's, point is that this is about like getting the kid ready, getting them early so that when they turn 13, they're ready for their Facebook account. They're so excited. They can finally turn it on instead of just using the Facebook Kids Messenger app. I think from the other side of it, this is actually

about they want to make sure that parents who are talking to their kids aren't enticed to use another messaging app and it makes the parents more likely to use Messenger. So there's no ads in the kids Messenger app, but there's definitely ads in the parents Messenger app. And so anything that would tempt a parent away from using Facebook Messenger is a danger to Facebook. That 12-year-old is going to have a hard time when they turn 13. They're going to get grown-up, move on to the grown-up messenger, and they're like, wow, this sucks. Growing-up sucks.

Growing up sucks. First I have puberty, now I have this? There's a garden page. Facebook Messenger that I just have never noticed. I think they used to serve them in, like, Messenger Day, you know, like their stories version. there may be some sponsorships there and also you can talk to like bots so there's all the different companies

that you can chat with and I think those are not going to be available to talk to kids in their kids version Speaking of bots And there's like a games tab and blah Casper Matched me on Twitter

Or sorry on Tinder I'm not talking about like The Ghost? Wait, Casper the mattresses Right And I'm not talking about It's like swiping left swipe right And I swiped right on Casper

No Casper was added to the list of people who I have already matched with. And so now I had a conversation that it was already populated in Tinder with me and Casper. So I had to click on Casper and say unmatched this person. And on Tinder, unmatched this person is like, what did they do? So I said they're spam. That is disturbing. It was kind of weird.

Also, why does Tinder think that you want to have a close intimate relationship with the mattress? Well, I don't know. I mean, you spend every night on it. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Okay, we need to. That's creepy. Am I crazy for not being that worked up about the Facebook kids thing?

I don't know. Maybe it's just that I already don't trust Facebook disclosure. My wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. So much that, like, yeah, they're going to do something creepy and that's just the way of the world. But it's also true that, like, the kids today, a eight-year-old is, if an eight-year-old has a phone, they're going to find and use a messaging app. And so from Facebook's perspective, the devil's advocate argument here is if you're a parent, you want to make sure it's a messaging app that you have some sort of, I don't know, oversight on, I guess. Yeah, I guess the problem here is what Casey wrote in his piece in the fact that they're trying to get kids in early, right? I think that a lot of people are learning about, slowly learning about what Facebook is doing with their information and how they're selling it or how they're aggregating their data and how it's being used.

And a lot of people are uncomfortable about it. So those same people who are probably uncomfortable about how Facebook is using their data are going to feel uncomfortable about the fact that they're asking kids to kind of get started and get familiar with the Facebook platform and eventually become another source of minds of data for them when they're 10 years old. Well, I mean, there's no way there doesn't become a take everything that we learned from you in this Facebook kids' messengers thing and turn it into a Facebook profile button. Yeah. But I mean like – There's no way that they don't do that at some point. But I think you're right that to be fair, once these kids grow up, they're going to start signing up for Gmail. And Gmail does similar things, right?

Like they serve your targeted ads. They, you know, they track your Google searches and give you stuff that they think you might like to buy. This is just another way for to do it. I think it just seems a little more gross coming from Facebook, given that people just are starting to have a lot of reasons to not like Facebook. I mean, that's just starting. We've had a lot of reasons not like Facebook for a while. Yeah.

I've been developing this new metric about social networks based on my listening to, why did you push that button with Ashley and Caitlin? And my thinking is this. Social networks are incentivized to maximize the amount of attention you pay to them. because they monetize by eyeballs. But how useful they actually are to you is how much value they provide to you. So if I can do the thing I need to do very quickly and get on with it, I might spend less time in their app or on their website,

but I got more for my actual personal goals. this seems like a wash in that metric because they are I feel like providing something that's valuable to parents but they are also you know they are pushing their regular thing of trying to maximize the amount of time that you're using their app so I'm skeptical about it because it's a it's a time maximizer but it also does seem to provide value so I'm not I don't hate it just use text messages that's fine You can totally trust your wireless carrier. Plus, your kids should learn how to, you know, be terse and pithy in their communications. And so 160 characters should be enough to communicate any message you want.

Honestly, if my 6-year-old can type to me on a messenger app, I'd be pretty impressed. Yeah. Well, 6-year-olds are pretty smart. Okay, we got to get into this. Amazon and YouTube slash Google, this fight is the most annoying, horrible garbage, most internet ruining thing. It in itself isn't ruining the internet, but to me it's a portend of things to come. And I'm

super pissed. So here's the story. For a while, quite a while, you couldn't buy a Chromecast on Amazon. And that seemed weird. And then you could buy an Echo Show and it would show you YouTube videos in like a custom interface that didn't have any YouTube ads or YouTube suggestions or comments or thumbs up buttons or whatever. And so Google said, huh, this sucks. And so they said, you can't do that anymore. We're blocking that. And then Amazon was like, blah, that sucks. Why are you not letting us

show YouTube? So then they changed it such that the YouTube app on the Echo Show is basically just a web interface that you could like interact with via voice. And then, huh, turns out that Ness products disappeared from the Amazon store. And then, huh, now you can't even, access the YouTube webpage on the Echo Show, and YouTube is getting yanked from the Amazon Fire TV at the end of the year, and they're now just in this huge, massive fight with each other. And it's whether or not Google stuff gets in Amazon storage. It's one that YouTube gets displayed, quote, unquote, properly on the Echo Show or on the

fire TV, and, uh, ah, ah, this feels like a high school fight. Yeah. Feels like you broke up with hers, and now we can't be friends, and you're not invited to my party and you can't come with that. It's insane. It's so petty. Yeah, they're like one step away of like, Deeter, can you tell YouTube that I think it's fat? No, that's definitely happening. It's happening in the press right now.

They're issuing these dueling statements about each other, like past each other. They just need to like, I want them just get on a phone together and talk to each other. And sure, record the call and release it to the public. I don't care, but this is dumb. They should do like- Like a national tour of debates. Right. Town halls.

The worst thing to me is which one, like you, the instinct from like everybody in all these fanboy fights is to like pick aside. Oh, Google's terrible. Oh, Amazon's terrible. No, they're both terrible. Amazon saying that we're not going to sell Google products in our store is very, very petty. If you ask an echo to order you a Chromecast, she offers you a fire TV stick. come on.

I mean, it's petty, but that's kind of hilarious. Right. The thing that has to be in my bonnet is, of course, web standards. I get that Google doesn't want Amazon to use undisclosed APIs to display videos in ways that don't monetize those videos or offer the suggestions that YouTube wants, right? I get it. And no one ever said that YouTube's special APIs for directly displaying a video is part of the open web. and so if they want to preclude Amazon from doing that, fine. You should note that that's a little bit scary because a lot more of the stuff that happens to you on your phone,

on these digital assistants are happening through those APIs that are controllable by a terms of service and companies not fighting. And so this fight that Amazon and Google are happening having right now is going to happen in other contexts and other ways, either because two other big internet companies are fighting, or maybe because your very own internet service provider is fighting with. somebody. So that's like a bad sign, but whatever, those are the way that APIs work. Fine. Terrible, but fine. But then the thing that I'm really, really, really hopped up about right now is Google is saying that the Amazon Echo Show, and I guess the Fire TV, I don't know, sure, but especially

Echo Show is violating its terms of service by altering the website. I got to find the exact language here. It's like section 4B of our terms of service. Are they running like a grease monkey script on it? Yeah, you agree to not alter or modify any part of the service. And I could be wrong. If someone tells me I'm wrong about this, that's fine. But if all Amazon is doing to alter the service is put an echo show voice interface on top of the existing website, then that is very, very, very bad of Google. what they are essentially doing is saying anybody can use YouTube on the web on YouTube.com

except for people that happen to be using a browser created by a company that we're mad at, right? I mean, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what we're saying. And from my perspective, that means YouTube.com is no longer part of the web because it's not agnostic to the web browser. You should be able to use any web browser on any computer to visit a web page. That's the way it should work. Right. Well, what about a, like, say I run an ad block, right?

Am I violating terms of service? I suppose. I don't know. It gets really hard. But like the different, if you're running ad block, you're violating terms of service. So yes, I suppose if they wanted to say, is that altering the web page? I suppose. Like, it gets really fussy really quickly.

But if they want to block an individual user for running an ad block, we can have a debate about that. A lot of, you know, journalism websites like pop up a thing saying, hey, you're running an ad block. Please don't. Otherwise, we're not going to show your journalism. That's troubling, but whatever. But if they're just blocking an entire browser simply for having a voice interface, because it happens to be made by Amazon, that is terrifying. Yeah.

Right? Yes, it is terrifying in a way. I love this beef so much. I think a little bit because it's like watching like a reality show where like, you know, like kind of the worst two characters who you were never like really rooting for anyways. Of course they get into the dumbest argument. But I didn't know There's something about it

I like it when big companies like this do terrible things Because I like to believe that they are are in some sense fragile That they are in some sense because they are so large That they have a capability of doing a large dumb thing And I don't think in this case It's really going to end up really biting either of them in the ass Especially because the Echo Show is a slightly marginal product Yeah.

But the Fire TV is a huge deal. The Fire TV is a huge deal. I mean, Amazon and Apple had a beef for a long time, or Amazon wasn't selling a lot of Apple products. One that they kind of balance each other out and they keep each other from being the one world-dominant tech company. But also, I like to think that in here somewhere is the Achilles heel of a tech company,

that one of them will do something so stupid and so overtly evil. Evil to actual people, because obviously actual people own the Echo Show and bought it so that they could ask it to watch YouTube videos. Yeah. It will actually come back to bite one of these companies one day. And I think that would be great.

What's funny to me is I think both companies are acting terribly, but I'm all outraged about the web portion more so than I am. am about the Amazon portion because Amazon as a giant retailer, I just expect Amazon's going to do shady things. Like, anytime you're selling products, I expect that you're going to do something shady. And Amazon, even though their tagline is the everything store, we all know Amazon's going to do it. But Google, you don't, they claim to put themselves to a higher standard and care about the web, and they're not meeting that higher standard that they have, by whether they want to or not, set for themselves. So even though they're both equally complicit in doing equally terrible stupid things,

it's easier to get outraged at Google because Google has set itself up to don't be evil and be good for the web in a way that Amazon, Amazon never said it was nice. Amazon never said, hey, I'm a good guy. I'm helping the internet. They don't care. I also think it's bad timing on Google's part as a proponent for net neutrality. If you're going to be pushing for net neutrality and at the same time you're going to block specific devices from access to your website. It's like, hmm. Yeah. Hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and then the message that popped up on the fire TV, there's another tweet of mine. It's almost word for word, like the messages that pop up when, I don't know, direct TV or Comcast getting a fight with some random cable channel. And it's like, this cable channel's going away. Call your cable company now to yell at them. Or this channel is going away. Call, I don't know, via com and yell at Viacom.

I'm like, no one, really, that's what it's going to be. That's what we're getting on the internet now is, like, companies popping up air messages as a way to, like, throw shade on another company, which is terrible. Also hilarious. And again, Nat, when you ask for a Chromecast, it tries to sell you a fire stick. It's just amazing. Because you know they hand-coded that in, right?

Somebody's like, screw these guys and just, like, plugged it in. But overall, Nat, does this make you sad or glad? Of course I'm sad. Okay. YouTube is like, I don't have cable anymore. So YouTube is sort of my main entertainment. Like I go home and the thing I watch on TV is like YouTube, Twitch, and like maybe a little sling TV. And that's it.

Like hardly anything else. So like basically losing my like main source of like entertainment at home when I just want to go home and just literally rest my brain from everything that's going on on Twitter. Now I come home and like I open my TV and I get this like. error message. It's like, call your cable company. I'm like, oh, why? It's not relaxing. It's bad for everyone. I'm not excited about it. I also think that this fight, especially from two of the biggest tech companies in the industry, so it's a really bad president for everyone else. Meanwhile, Alpha, Google's parent company, has taken the same computer algorithm that won the Go championship and can teach it to beat literally anybody at any game invented by humans in less than a day.

This is the best, the best Freudian slip. you could have made. You called Alpha. Well, Alpha Bet, but Alpha is part of Alpha Bet. Never mind. Just Paul educate me. No, no, no, no. Let's explore this. There's a robot that is now in charge of Google. Yeah, right. His name's Alpha. So, so what I want is for Alpha Zero, the new AI, to, we should plug in. If this fight between Amazon and Google is actually just a game, like a war game, we should just plug in the wind

states of this game into this AI and just let it fight it out inside the AI and at the end they'll decide who gets to win this fight between Amazon and Google. That's what I want. Yes. Absolutely. So this is what's so scary. So Google has an AI subsidiary named DeepMind who has created AlphaGo. Does Google have it or does Alphabet have it? I think it's part of Google. Who knows anymore? Okay, keep goes. Okay. So they have, you know, they had AlphaGo, right? which what a go. It's super good a go. And what they've been working on and iterating it on is this idea, this alpha-zero idea,

is that they start with nothing. They only program in the rules of the game, and then they just have it play against itself until it reaches superhuman status. Grand master superhuman status. Yeah. It can be any human in the world. And typically each new generation of this AI, like one of the first things, that they tested on is can it beat the last generation and it can.

Right. So they were doing that with Go and they're like, oh, let's try chess. And now they have an engine that can train itself from scratch in four hours to beat the best chest AI that exists. Which is, which is just bonkers. And it's exactly like you said. Like basically the idea is that if you can take the problem that you have and distill into a relatively small set of rules, which they thought chess would be harder for it because there's a like a lack of, like in Go, most of the pieces have the same weight of value.

Right. And chess, you have pieces that have different moves and different values. So they thought it would be a lot harder, but it turns out it's not that hard. So if you can, if you have any problem in the world that can be defined with chess or go like rules, and you can write those rules down, hand them to. to AlphaGo and it can play itself turn by turn. And about a day, it will have the best possible solution. Yeah.

I'd like to see them make an AI to place Monopoly against each other and see who kills each other first. Or who gives up and kills himself first. Oh, my God. And also you have to kind of decide, is it auction first or you skip if you don't buy it? That's a big rule. Wait, auction for free parking? No, like if you land on a spot, you decide not to buy it, is it an immediate auction?

That's like the biggest fight that people get into about Monopoly. Which one is the real rule? Nobody plays the auction way. That's never happened. Nobody does that. But because you don't do that, that's why Monopoly games last three hours of your life. Every time you try to plan, everyone walks away angry. That's true.

That's the point of Monopoly. That's what it's for. This is why we should just have robots play Monopoly because Monopoly sucks. Sorry, I have a lot of Monopoly feels. Wow. It's about to be Christmas. I got to play Monopoly with family. It is not fun.

Is that like a tradition? Kind of a thing, yeah. All right, that's an FIAI. Before I read another ad, because I'm tired reading ads. Nat, this thing happened today that is, I don't know. It's weird. What's the story? Long story short.

So there's this thing called Smart Luggage. It's a new product category of things that are like. Like, you know, your luggage and it's got like an app that tells you where it is in the airport and it's on its way out to you from whatever terminal. And you can charge your phones with it when you're waiting by the gate. These things are kind of controversial. So now major airlines. They're controversial because like, really what, unless there's a cellular radio in it that you can track it across

if the luggage gets like truly lost, all it is is a battery you can plug your phone into and a bunch of like other stuff that is done. Yeah. Basically an oversized external battery. Yeah. But major airlines are kind of worried about it because I think in general they've kind of banned like some batteries from being carried on board since they explode, as we know, from the Note 7. You can't check it.

Every time I go to the airport now, so have you got any batteries whatsoever in your luggage? Which, by the way, having quit vaping makes me feel very, very good because I tell them the truth. I'm like, no, I don't. I don't have any e-cigroth batteries in my suitcase. And then I have this little moment We're like, oh, that wasn't a lie. I'm such a good person. Good for you, Deeter.

Anyway, major airlines, including American Delta, all the usual suspects are announcing that next year they're going to ban these types of smart luggage, especially if they've got battery that you can't remove, which I have a lot of feels about, because one of these luggagees include Blue Smart. I reviewed Blue Smart two years ago and literally got stopped at TSA

because they've never seen a thing like it before, and they open it up and literally just found exposed wires to it. And they're like, where are you going? And I was like, CES. And they're like, I see a solo traveler by herself going to the largest event in Vegas. Okay. And I was like, oh, crap. I am going to not go to CES.

I'm going to be arrested. I'm going to be put on some kind of list. So anyway, as you know, airline travel. You're not in jail, currently. First of all, I'm not a terrorist. Thank you very much. But airline travel, has been super complicated over the past year. There's been this laptop ban. There's this battery

ban that's kind of ongoing. So now American US-based airlines are kind of like, we don't want to deal with this battery thing either. So just don't bother buying them. And if you have one that removes the battery, great. Take them out because you can't bring them on board. Sure. I mean, look, I don't know if there's, there hasn't been any big battery exploding things since the note. Because we had hoverboards and we had note. But I'm very curious, what has the airlines be in a bonnet about lithium ion batteries all of a sudden? Like, it feels like they were worried about the note, sure. But then, like, increasingly over the past six months, they've gotten more and more terrified of lithium ion batteries.

What do the airlines know that we don't know? I don't know because I haven't heard of anything exploding on planes that's related to batteries. I guess they're just trying to be extra careful. But I've not been aware of any kind of incident where that has happened. Like, anything that's, like, the only thing that I've seen related to explosion is literally just planes crashing into each other on the runway. So it's not anything consumers did. Oh, my God, we have to stop talking about it. It's terrifying.

I would buy smart luggage, but now that you have to take the battery out, it's like, well, no, if I have to carry it with me anyway, I'm just going to buy an external battery and I'm not going to buy smart luggage. It just kills smart luggage. The nice thing about smart luggage, I guess, is some of them have those, like, built-in weight thing, which could be helpful if you're trying to check it. bag or like it needs to be a certain way to get carried on board. But, you know, that can also be mitigated by like a handheld weight thing that probably costs $5 on Amazon on Amazon. So it's not a big deal. Like, I don't think you need to. Yeah, like these smart luggage are kind of nice, but I don't know if it's like $400 nice. All right. I'm going to read an ad. And then I'm not going to forget the thing that we never forget that always happens no matter what. So,

Did you know that every year millions of people receive the gift that nobody likes? Underwear. But we still give it to our family and our loved ones who just don't want it. But the problem isn't that they're getting underwear. It's that they're getting the wrong kind of underwear. So I'm going to tell you about me undies. The only underwear that makes for an amazing gift, me undies. So here's the deal with me undies.

They have a soft, flexible weight span. They are three times softer than cotton. It's made out of a magical, softer than cotton, naturally, sustainably sourced fiber. Also, fairy dust. Maybe not the fairy dust. Miandis made underwear. It is the perfect gifts that everyone is going to love you for because you gave them underpants. And that's not weird at all.

It is a holiday miracle. So don't give underwear. Give meyundies. And if you want to do it, and I think you should, you can get 20% off the softest underwear and socks. also make socks. Sox make a really good gift. Rack.com actually had a really good article about how socks are actually a really good gift. He also got free shipping and 100% satisfaction guarantee. Go to meundies.com slash verge.

That's meundies.com slash verge. Paul. Yeah. You do a segment and we don't call attention to the fact that you do a second every week. It just happens naturally without a whole lot of weird meta-conversation about the fact that it's happening every week. Yeah. Yeah. It's called.

And it always has the same name. Yeah. Uh-huh. Color me surprised. Oh, boy. So this is a lamp called color swing that Adami wrote about. It's hard. Maybe this isn't hard to describe.

It took me a while for my brain to get really excited about it, but then I got weirdly excited about it. Okay. It's a lamp that lights up in different colors, like a Phillips Hubell, right? Yeah, that's not special at all. But the color is based on the ambient environment, like what colors are around it. So kind of like a lizard? Thank you. Or like a chameleon?

Like a chameleon. Yeah, but a light. And if you think about it, that light is... Isn't the point of a light to change the ambient light temperature around you? be like a feedback loop here. Yeah. But I don't know. I feel like I'd be disturbed if I walked home and say I was wearing a white shirt when

I left the house and it like rained on me on my way home and I walked in and also my room is now gray. I was like, wow, that's great. Thanks, light. But isn't there something weird about, like, that's like how humans work. Like someone smiles and so you like smile back at them, you know? It's like a kind of communication. I'm imagining having a party and somebody and like a weird color dress.

walks past the lamp and then the lamp is a different color and then that reflects light off of everybody else who's all wearing white for some reason and I don't know. Oh, then the whole room turns red. Yeah. That would be cool. Right? Yeah, yeah. There's something just kind of trippy about it.

Also, it's not actually a real product. It's a prototype. But you can apparently do similar things. There's a color sensing lamp on Amazon for $100. You can build your own too, right? There's like RGB sensors all over the place that you can just build. built into your lamp if you really want to create this effect. I think I want to.

Cool. I think I'm very excited about this concept. You should do a video on it. Maybe it will. Lightning Round, Nat. Instagram, an exclusive story written by Casey Newton.com, is creating a separate messaging app for Instagram direct. Like I said, Facebook loves spinning off apps because they think that your phone has all this room, this magical storage room on your phone to download yet another app.

But I guess the idea is a lot of people use these photo sharing apps. And some of these photos are intimate. And they don't want to accidentally share photos that they don't want public with private messages. So I guess the ideal of direct is that you can use this particular app to have a private chat that is photo based. Sure, I'm not super into it. I honestly don't think that Instagram direct is that popular, but I could be wrong. But like the idea is they really want to focus on the fact that you should have a private versus public persona, which I guess everybody has on the internet anyway. Yeah.

I think Instagram directs numbers have been inflated maybe artificially because they made, they built it into stories. And stories were really popular. And then if you see a story, you end up using Instagram direct because you're like tapping that message button. Yeah. But then now you're on Instagram and you're seeing these stories and you want to talk to your friend and then you're taking into a different app to talk to your friend about it. And then, like, you know, eventually Stories is going to be its own app. And yet another thing I have to download on my phone, which has not enough storage already. Can you tell that I have a problem with storage on my phone?

Yeah. So here's my thing. Like, I am using Messenger most often because I can trust that 90% of the people I want to talk to are there. And it works better across multiple phones than SMS or whatever else. WhatsApp even is a pain because you've got to re-log in when you switch your SIM card. So that's, I use Instagram or I use Messenger for that. But Messenger sucks because Facebook has like thrown too much crap into it. But I kind of trust Instagram to not make a crappy messaging app because they have done a pretty good job not making Instagram itself crap up with stuff.

They've done okay. They've done okay. And so I can trust that most people have an Instagram account. And so I could see myself making this my main messaging app because the other thing that's nice about it is if I'm, I should be using Instagram more and like Twitter less and Facebook less because Instagram is a nice calming app. And so if I have a messaging app that happens to push me into Instagram every now and then or vice versa, I'll have a calmer, chiller life because I'll be looking at pictures of the beach instead of Donald Trump tweeting or my crazy uncle on Facebook. It seems like like a nice thing. It's like the chill messaging app option. I just can't believe how many messaging gaps there are.

I just I just if you ask me five years ago it's like oh something will be ultimately like Windows phone where you just have an integrated messaging experience of course of course that's where the future is going no that was wrong okay this is not lightning but whatever why is Apple everything Apple makes software wise garbage this past two weeks everything is broken you tell me you own the iPhone 10 oh it took forever for me to get the iPhone 10 I mean do we have the list of bugs here. Okay. There was the, you can type root into the login screen on High Sierra and just get root access. That's literally how I used to hack into, like, when I was growing up, my parents or my uncle put a software on our computer that's like, you could only use the internet for two hours a day. And I literally just type in admin, admin, and just overrode the whole thing and like, unlimited internet every day. So it's kind of crazy that like between 2004 and 2017, things have not changed. In 1998, I worked at a photo lab at a grocery store, and they had this computer terminal

that was like the, it ran lockdown software, but it was technically connected to the internet, but you couldn't do anything. And it didn't even have a graphical user interface. It like ran DOS, but it was designed to like scan the bag, the barcode and like put their customer information in the system, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you like, if you were very very, you were very, very, you were very, you. very, very clever, you could bring up a terminal window. And then I used that and I knew it was connected to the internet.

And then I would spend all day, every day, browsing the internet with links. Like the text-only internet browser in 1998. It was incredible. Okay. Apple fixed that bug by releasing an update, which then broke file sharing. iOS had yet another date crashing bug where if you, it was like this whole thing where like you had a recurring, a location alarm thing that would like set your phone into a boot loop. And yeah, they released a thing to fix that, but it also got, they had to release iOS 11.2

early on like a Saturday to fix that bug because it was like rolling up on people. What's going on? I feel like I said on this podcast like maybe six months to a year ago, the Apple has kind of forgotten how to make software. And it's, the way I see these things, like from a developer perspective, right, Apple lets you target their platforms with their tools,

Xcode, right? Xcode, like, over the weekend or something, or earlier this week was broken. Like, you updated the newest version of Xcode, but then you couldn't upload to the actual app store anymore because they said there's a version mismatch. Like Apple is very controlling of the

sorts of tools they give you to make software. And if Apple doesn't know how to make secure good stuff, Apple? with those tools, what chance do you have? And it makes me feel like the whole foundation is shaky, which is just a terrifying place to be with software because why would I build software on this shaky foundation? Yeah, I don't think it's like that dire. I mean, all these things could be chalked up to like, oh, that was really dumb. You got to fix the thing that allowed that

bug to happen or fix the thing that allowed that problem to happen. You missed it. Oh, well. But I think for me it's just iOS 11. The more, you know, I reviewed it. I think it's pretty good. But it's starting to feel just a little bit all over the place. And this goes back to the nitpicks with iPhone 10. Like my biggest nitpick is if you turn on Do Not Disturb mode, there's no visual indication unless you go into control center that Do Not Disturb mode is on.

And so it's very easy to turn it on, forget about it, and then not know why you're not getting notifications later on. It just seems like all this entire like product season for them. it's, you know, like, there were a lot of rumors earlier on about production issues, right? Like, it seems like everything is super last minute for them, which is like, they're kind of like, oh, crap, we said this is going to launch at this time, we got to rush it out, and then this is what happens. They got super ambitious, and this is what we get instead.

But I will say that they've done a better job making and releasing iPhone 10s than we were worried about. Like, they're getting them out the door. Yeah, but who cares if you get the iPhone 10D don't work that well? Well, the iPhone 10s are working fine. It's the software that's bad. Yeah, that's true. But, like, yeah. I mean, I'm just saying, like, I'm willing to give Apple a little bit of hardware credit on these early production issues.

And, like, are they going to get them done? Because they, they worked through them pretty well as compared to Google, which has just had, like, rolling disasters with its hardware launches. But they're not hiring, quote, quote, high school interns that help make them, right? Well. I mean, who knows? Yeah. It just looks like the sort of symptoms that you get in software when its complexity is beyond your understanding. So it becomes like a bug whackable.

Like you obviously have plenty of smart engineers on staff who can go and fix bugs. But if you have a bad overall architecture, then when they fix a bug, they make another bug. And that can be a real problem. And possibly they're in a similar state with their design. where the complexity of the design of their software is to a point where it's getting inconsistent and like no one has it all in their head or they're not driven by a single vision somehow. It's just unsettling. All right. Last lightning around, last thing is we don't have a ton of time because we got to end this,

but like we got to talk about Bitcoin. It went from like 7,000 to 15,000 and then some other thing is messy because of that and who knows where it's at right now as we're recording this thing. What the hell is going on? I'm super dumb about Bitcoin. Coinbase is like flailing right now because Bitcoin prices are flying around.

I just think that any sort of just like huge demand, like they're not expecting that like level of traffic. Like like I think Coinbase, as far as I understand, the traffic that they're experiencing is like is growing exponentially. Yeah. As Bitcoin price continues to skyrocket. I mean, let's look.

This morning, it was 15,000. Let me pull up my Coinbase app. See, the price. Right now it's 17,000. It's just, it is huge. And like, you know, let's see. A month ago, it was $5,000. Right.

Like, Bitcoin has really exploded. I mean, I have overall, I don't have any, like, good explanation for why Bitcoin specifically right now is exploding, but I have, like, overall, like, philosophical reasons why I think is a big fan of the blockchain? A big fan of the blockchain. I think the product of Bitcoin, or the backing value of Bitcoin is this ledger. It's this history of trust. And for any currency, you know, how much it's worth is sort of based on how much you think you can buy with it in the future.

And you make that decision based on how much, how useful it was in the past. And Bitcoin, unlike any other currency or any, like non-cryptocurrencies, has a perfect, ledger all the way to its absolute origin. So like paper currencies, you know, sort of get away from their origin. And, you know, like, yeah, it was kind of used to be based on gold. And now we just kind of make it up. Yeah, based on trust. So, yeah, trust is super valuable for a currency.

And that is the exact product that Bitcoin is so good at is maintaining this trust. And the thing, I think why it continues to grow is because, it keeps on succeeding at being trustworthy. If somebody hacked Bitcoin, it would destroy that trust, and tons of value would obviously disappear. But as long as the core part of Bitcoin continues to be trustworthy, it just sort of seems to build on itself. I don't know how much it's actually worth, worth,

but that also is almost a nonsensical question. I don't know. It's pretty exciting to me. Also, I sold my Bitcoin. Good. Yeah. By the way, before we had this conversation, I believe it's a VIRG policy. I've never written about it for the verge.

Well, the policy is people who work for the verge need to sell their Bitcoin because it's fluctuating so wildly. And it is so, it seems to be so, I don't know, sensitive to like crazy market shifts that in theory, we would be able to affect the price of Bitcoin by writing what on the verge and the way that if we were to write about the price of the dollar. nobody would care because, you know, whatever. Can you maybe Paul describe to me what the deal is with CryptoKitties? Yeah, I think this is a really interesting flip side to Bitcoin. So something that's happened recently with Bitcoin is they tried to fork it to make it more useful for transactions. Because right now it takes a long time to make a Bitcoin transaction and it's relatively expensive. And so Bitcoin is becoming, some people think, almost like the digital gold, where it's something that you kind of keep in a vault,

but you don't like make a lot of regular transactions with it. There are a lot of other currencies. One of them is Ethereum, which is trying to make like a world computer is what they call it. So instead of the blockchain just being a record of transactions, it's a record of transactions, but also code for modifying those transactions. And some of the code that someone recently put on Ethereum's blockchain is this thing called Cryptokitties. Which basically, at a regular interval, new cryptocurrencies are created, which you can buy. You buy the crypto kitty based on the average price of the last five crypto kitties sold. What you are actually buying on the Ethereum blockchain, you are taking ownership of a 256-bit number.

So it's just a very long number. and you own that number. And then what's interesting about CryptoKitties is that it's paired with a startup that made this Ethereum app, but this startup has just regular web software that they use. And they look at your 256 number, and that number includes basically genetic information about this kitty. And so, and then it renders an image on the website that they're basically like, like beanie babies, but with jeans. So, like, I was looking at a Gen Zero Crypto Kitty that had, like, a dolly mustache, like, solidly.

And then you could, like, look at the children of this kitty. And some of them didn't have the mustache, but most of them had that. And I was like, well, if I was going to get into crypto kitties, I feel like I would want to invest in mustache kitties because I think it's a nice. And so, and then, like, you can breed the kitties and make more. So it's like, it's this combination of like Beanie babies, Pokemon, and cryptocurrency. And it's, and also the thing about it, though, is that it's not quite grinding Ethereum to a halt, but it's like it's a lot more activity than Ethereum was really built to handle.

And it's something that Ethereum knows it has to solve. So the Ethereum community is basically stoked. It's like, okay, we have this completely non-mission critical app that is hammering, our system so we can practice scaling our system so that if someone ever makes a really useful thing with Ethereum, we'll be able to run it. We'll be ready. So the cats are preparing them for the coming blockchain apocalypse. This is just so complex if you want a cute kitty, just get a real one.

So complex. Yeah, but what's the resale value of that kitty? Some loving parent will pay good money for it. And then if you want to put a mustache on it, put a mustache on it. I get, I don't understand Bitcoin at deep levels I would like to. And I think most people don't. What is hilarious to me is we spent the past 20 years in the financial system, especially in the U.S. on Wall Street, like let's try and make as complicated a financial product as possible.

And let's make it even more complicated. And then let's find derivatives on top of those complications. And then let's, you know, all this stuff. They built this entire weird, insane industry of finance. that was impossible to parse. And maybe we've backed down a little bit from that, but not much. And it's like, well, yeah, okay. Now let's just do that with the concept of money itself.

We're tired of making complicated, weird, crazy systems to do stuff with money. We just want to do it with the idea of money itself. And that, to me, is what Bitcoin is and what, you know, Ethereum is. The best explanation I've ever seen in my life of cryptocurrency, it's, was it three blue one brown. This guy does math and like physics explainers on YouTube. He explains cryptocurrency and he starts out like with the bare bones, the idea of a ledger. Like just like what if you just started with an IOU system between friends?

And he builds from there and explains how they actually work. And while it is, it's a technical explanation, not a philosophical explanation. I feel like it gives you a much better vibe for why this might be valuable. All right, that is going to be our show. If you like this show, there are other shows. The best show is this show, but probably the actual best show is why did you push that button? It is incredible. The episode this week about sending nudes is, it's just so good.

And you need to listen to it because you will understand the context of how the Internet actually works without a whole lot of, like, hair and fire judgment. It's great. You should definitely listen to it. If you haven't watched that episode of Next Level with Lauren Good that I talked about with the exoskeletons, go do it. It is incredible. She also has a great podcast called Too Embarrass to Ask on Recode. Also on Recode is Recode Decode with Kara Swisher and Recode Media with Peter Kafka. We do not speak about the podcast on Vox.com, but they exist.

If you'd like to follow us, we are, of course, Verge on Twitter. We're Verge on Instagram. We're Verge on Snapchat. You should review us on Apple Podcasts because those seem to be the reviews that matter. If you want to follow us on Twitter, I am at Backlon. Paul is Future Paul. And that is Nat Garan. Two T's. Yes. Two T's. N-A-T-G-R-U-N.

Thanks so much for listening. We'll catch you next week. And Nelai will be back. And so it will be chaotic and terrible. Don't tell them I said that. Rock and roll.