The Vergecast - Big tech at Capitol Hill, Elon Musk's brain machine interface, and Macbook 2019 reviews

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

Nilay Patel invites a cavalry of experts from The Verge (Makena Kelly, Adi Robertson, Liz Lopatto, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller) to discuss the Big Tech hearings that took over Capitol Hill, Elon Musk's Neuralink brain machine interface, and the new Macbook reviews.  Stories this week: Facebook reportedly reaches $5 billion settlement with the Federal …Facebook tells Congress how it thinks Libra should be regulatedHouse Democrats are considering a bill to ban Facebook from the …Senators aren’t sold on Facebook’s Libra projectEU opens Amazon antitrust investigationThe unpredictable legal implications of Trump’s Twitter-blocking defeatElon Musk unveils Neuralink's plans for brain-reading 'threads'Boston Dynamics' robots are preparing to leave the lab — is the world ready? Apple is silently updating Macs again to remove insecure ... Apple MacBook Air (2019) review: the new normalApple MacBook Pro 13 2019 Two USB ports review: considered ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on Vurchase, we talk about the big tech hearings that took over Capitol Hill. Elon Musk, Neerlink brain machine interface, and we end on MacBook reviews. That's Vurchase coming up. 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 Verge Politics Network. It's a lot of politics. I'm just going to be very honest with everyone. A lot of stuff happened in Washington, D.C. this week.

Not all of it was smart, but we're going to talk about it all. Anyway, I'm Neelai. I'm your friend. Dieter's here. Hi, how's it going? We're kind of structuring the show a little bit differently today because we have so much going on. So first, Addy Robertson, McKenna Kelly, are going to join us. They're here. Hello? Hi. Hi.

We are going to talk about all of the hearings. There are, I think, four total hearings on Capitol Hill this week with all the big players. There's one about Libra. There's one where Eddie, basically Ted Cruz yelled at Google. I don't know how else to describe that hearing. Yes, many people yell at Google. And then there was another hearing about antitrust issues with big tech companies that mechanic covered. So we're going to talk about those. Then I'm telling you, there's a lot that went on this week. Liz Lapato is going to join us. We're going to talk about Elon Musk and Neerlink. Elon wants to put threads in your brain.

There's a USBC port involved. Dieter is very excited. Yeah, Liz was actually there for the presentation. So we're going to get like her first-hand impressions of watching them and talking to everybody afterwards. Liz has a USBC port in her brain now. It's very exciting. And then we can't have Virchcasta. Paul. Paul's going to join us at the end.

We got to talk about the new MacBooks to review the air. Dan reviewed the pro. We're going to end on some good old-fashioned laptop reviews. So we're starting it, whether Facebook should be illegal. We're going on to Elon Musk putting a USBC port in your brain, and we're going to land on Apple. Maybe he still has broken keyboards. Vergecast. It seems about right.

Okay. Let's start with these hearings. I would say in the shadow, in the background of all this, is news that broke last week that the FTC has decided after months of negotiation the appropriate penalty for Facebook's year and change of privacy scandals. It started obviously Cambridge Analytica that kicked off an investigation. They landed a three to two vote. The three Republican commissioners voted for. The two Democrats voted against three to two votes to levy a $5 billion fine on Facebook. Facebook stock went up on this news because Facebook is in telegraphing that this fine is coming for quite some time.

So it's priced into the stock. I think I put up a headline. I called it an embarrassing joke. Just a note out there for roadcast listeners who want to break into the media business. If you just call something an embarrassing joke, the radio will call you and say, hey, we want to talk about your article. So I want an NPR over the weekend. It's true. I don't do it often, but it definitely works.

My sense of it is that we should not love you. finds that increase Mark Zuckerberg's net worth, which is more or less what happened here. But McKenna, you've kind of been looking at this stuff. It's in the background of everything. What's your sense of what's going on there? Well, everybody wants structural changes, right? That's what we're hearing. We want Mark Zuckerberg off the board. We want all of these things. But it's like, it's hard to gather what actually is going to be part of the settlement here. What kind of structural changes will happen? We've heard some talk about some kind of committee.

being built inside Facebook that might have like one representative from the FTC to be like, yikes guys, maybe this one decision you're making is a bad idea. Oh my God, I would absolutely sign up to be the yikes guy. Yeah. And literally that's all it's going to be right. It's just going to be a yikes guy who's like yikes. And then that's it. Right.

And then Facebook will continue doing what they've been doing for however long now. The yikes guy is the first job to get automated at Facebook. Like just a bot that every time they submit like a new code poll, they're like, yikes. Everyone has to stop and be like, hmm. So, it's, it, McKenna, this isn't formal yet, right? It was reported in the newspapers. It very much feels to me, this is a little bit of a theory, but it feels to me like

the Democrats leak this ahead of the curve because everyone is unhappy with it. And the DOJ hasn't approved it yet, right? So there's still time. It could potentially change. Right. I mean, like the $5 billion, we've heard this from everyone. is like a parking ticket for Facebook. They get the $5 billion.

It's probably sitting around somewhere. It's like pocket change, right? So they get it done. Investors like certainty, right? So seeing that $5 billion done agreed to, I mean, certainly put the stock up. I don't know. See, the thing is, we haven't really heard much details about, like, the rest of the settlement. But regardless, the FTC got that giant fine in the headline that they wanted to be like,

look at us, guys. We are able to be in. agency with teeth, which really to most people who have been closely watching this at home hasn't really, you know, a big fine as something, but it's not enough to really keep Facebook from continuing to act the way they are with data privacy right. And I think that's the main concern from people on the left. Yeah, and $5 billion is a lot of money, but in context, Facebook made $22 billion in profits last year. And depending on how you count and who you ask, it's somewhere between two weeks and a month of revenue.

So they're not hurting, right? Like, it's not going to, they've already set it aside. They said at least $3 billion aside that was in their last earnings report. So investors have been pricing it in. And then you look at sort of their last shareholder meeting. You know, Facebook has this really weird dual-class stock structure, which basically means Mark Zuckerberg is the king. And then everyone else doesn't get to vote.

So Facebook shareholders voted. kind of with overwhelming majorities, to remove Zuckerberg as chairman of the board. Zuckerberg voted against it with his kingstock, so that got voted down. And then they voted 80-some percentage voted in favor of removing the dual-class stock structure. And Zuckerberg said no, because I think he likes it. So you see there's sort of the market, the regular market, the investor market, is trying to change Facebook structure. There's pressure from the Democrats to change how Facebook operates. and then in the middle of it there's like this parking ticket.

Now, I will say this if you follow Tony Rom on Twitter. He's a ex-recode reporter, reporter of the Washington Post. He's very loud about the fact that there's other elements of the settlement, right? They've got to attest, like Zuckerberg has to like every now again promised that he hasn't screwing with your privacy. They have to, you know, submit some plans to protect your privacy. That stuff is to me, like they were already under a 20-year consent agreement with the FTC from 2011 or on Facebook Beacon. And I'm just going to tell you it didn't work. It didn't stop anything from that from happening.

So making them make those promises again doesn't, they're just going to hire a bunch of lawyers. And that's great. You know, if you're out there, you're a young lawyer on the make, get into some data privacy compliance books. Maybe you get a job at Facebook. It seems like it's going to be very lucrative for you. But it doesn't saw that structural change from it. So anyways, that's the backdrop.

Like, everyone's mad at this coming into it. And then McKenna, the Libra hearings, these are the first set of hearings. tell us just sort of the basics of it. People who aren't really falling in the hill as close as you are. Who's holding the hearings? Who's showing up? What are they about? How do they work?

Sure. Okay. So as soon as Libra was announced, like mere hours after Facebook made the announcement, the House Finance Committee, chairwoman, Maxine Waters, and the Senate Banking chairman, Michael Crapo were like, stop. They were definitely concerned and were. immediately scheduling some kind of hearing, right, to look into what exactly Libra is, pull in somebody from Facebook.

They ended up bringing David Marcus, who was running Calibra in the Libra project. So both committees were able to get David Marcus. And basically, both hearings could basically be condensed into Mark Zuckerberg, David Marcus, Facebook, we don't trust you. Why are you trying to screw up the entire financial system? So that was basically Libra. And I think if it could be condensed down into anything, now, okay, the Libra hearings were definitely a lot better than the other hearings that we'll get to later. A lot of the members asked a lot of really good questions, pulled out a lot of information.

Like Neelai, what you were talking about before the show, about David Marcus not having a lot of plans for like what's going on in Switzerland, right? And things like that. So just to unpack that really quickly for the audience, David Marcus was asked, like, why are you headquartering this in Switzerland? And he was like, because it's a good place. They have really good chocolate. Yeah, it was like he just seemed like he wasn't ready for the heat, which Vurchase listeners, if you remember like earlier conversations we've had about it, a lot of the pushback Facebook gave to me personally when I was like, they don't seem ready for the scrutiny was,

of course we've talked to everyone. This is all just a long game of 12, dimensional regulatory chess. Like we're just moving the Overton window so everyone is over. And then this was like people from Facebook tweeting at me about this stuff. And then you see this hearing and it's like, nah, I just think you didn't do your homework. Anyway, so it was that, that was kind of the tenor of the hearing. But McKenna, what else happened real quick? So like we said, nobody trusts Facebook, right? So Brad Sherman, a member of the House Finance Committee on Wednesday's hearing, was like, you know what? Yeah, Facebook is innovative. Mark Zuckerberg's innovative.

Libra, hmm, could be innovative. But do you know who is so innovative? Osama bin Laden. No. Osama bin Laden was so innovative when he signaled for two planes to hit the World Trade Center. And he basically said that Libra was 9-11. He said it was worse than 9-11, actually. He said that Osama bin Laden was like the most innovative person.

of the 21st century. I feel like I've just been baited into having to agree or disagree with that statement. You would think that members of Congress would like learn not to compare, I don't know, cryptocurrency or a lot of things to like world atrocities. But it continues to happen time and time again. And of course, Brad Sherman, Emily Burnbaum at the Hill tweeted today, something like Brad Sherman wants you guys to know that he didn't mean it. He takes it back.

He takes it all back. A stunning day of walkbacks from that. Right. Okay. So that's Libra. I mean, basically the message from Congress was stop. Like, you're already so powerful. We don't trust you.

Will you stop on your own or are we going to have to make you stop? Right. And there's a clip of like AOC being like, you already own all of these things. Why should you own one more thing? And Marcus's answer was like, well, we just want to help people. And I just don't think Facebook gets to pull that card anymore. Like, they had that card once and they just, like, lit it on fire over and over and over again. And now, now it's gone.

Like, there's nothing left to burn. So that's, that's Libra. Like, I don't want to overdo it because we don't know what they're going to do. And it seems like the right answer from our government at least is, like, don't do anything. Right. But they've promised that they're not going to do it until everyone's happy. And we'll just have to see where that goes. And Maxine Waters wants to bring Mark Zuckerberg in to talk about Libra.

That's like the next step. It hasn't been. No letters have been sent or anything. have to see if anything comes of that. Yeah, and there's like a proposed bill to prevent Facebook from doing this at all. Right. We're just going to write a law that makes them stop. That bill seems kind of touchy because it's like any company over this size can't do financial

services. Mm-hmm. And there are lots of financial service companies, like square. Like are they just going to stop square from existing? That seems very difficult. Mm-hmm. Okay. So that was the Libre hearing.

If you're sensing a theme of chaos, I promise you that theme will be carried into. the next hearing we covered, which is Adi, you watched the sort of, explain what this hearing was. So over the last year or two, there has been a series of hearings across the House and Senate about basically political bias in big tech platforms. And some of them have been utter disasters. There was one with Diamond and Silk basically yelling at senators or at representatives. But this one was Ted Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz, talking to Google and people who study Google about essentially bias in search engines and the way that search engines can shape the way that people think. So, like... Cruz called this hearing, right? He's on the Senate judiciary. This was his hearing.

Yes. It was called Google and censorship through search engines. Oh, good. And this whole hearing was called, remember, because Google didn't show up to the last censorship hearing because they just... just didn't, I guess. Right. This is when they had the, the previous hearing, there was an empty chair, and we yelled in an empty chair for a while. You know, I got to say, if I were a member of Congress and also continued to work at the

verge, and I got mad that I wasn't ranking highly enough on, you know, reviews or whatever, I would definitely just call hearings for the heck of it. Like, that's a flex. Why not? Like, we Googled Prime Day. We weren't number one. He also spends a surprising amount of time in the hearings, talking about how they don't donate money to him.

Really? Which is the implication is you donate a bunch of money to Democrats, therefore you're biased. But as several people have pointed out, it kind of also comes off like you're shaking them down. So there was a first hearing. Google didn't show up. Everyone yelled at it. Literally there was an empty chair. They placed an empty chair to theatrically denote that Google wasn't there. Now Google shows up.

Tell us what happened at this hearing. So the first panel is all Google VP, who was a former Bush administration official, as conservative bona fides, had an op-ed in Fox News. And there are basically two lines of questioning. There are all of the Republicans who just ask over and over, you all have a lot of Democrats, aren't you secretly trying to rig the elections? And then you have Democrats who are asking, why are you failing to regulate pedophilia and keep horrible videos of shootings off of Google and YouTube and why can't you moderate anything at all? Those seem not necessarily compatible ideas. That's basically how all of the tech bias hearings go, because one side really, really doesn't want to be there and is just trying to salvage something. Because the other running theme here, especially with anything with Ted Cruz, is that half of the questions just proceed from completely wrong premises, mostly because Ted Cruz

insists on making stuff up about what Section 230 does. And so he spends all this time trying to, so just to catch everybody up, Ted Cruz keeps talking about how there is a divide between publishers and platforms. And if you're a platform, then you have to be politically neutral, but you get some kind of shield against being sued. This is not right at all, but it means that he spends a bunch of questions trying to, like, get Google into a gotcha of saying it's not neutral. Oh, I see.

So he's, he's, like, created this thing where if Google accidentally admits it's a publisher, then, like, he can, like, shoot him with a water gun or something. Like, right? Like, he's like, if I get you to admit you're a publisher, your house of cards will come crumbling down. Right. Not even if they're a publisher. Like, if they admit that they're not neutral, which isn't. But none of that actually matters. Not at all.

I mean, it certainly would be bad for Google politically, but it does not in any way matter legally. And it's just, I'm sure if at this point, every person. Cast listener knows Section 230 does not actually make a distinction between platforms and publishers. You know, loyal listener, Jackson Hayes wrote us a song about it. So show me platforms are not required to be neutral by law. There is no publisher platform distinction by law. I'm just going to keep making reference. Poor Jackson.

Thank you. I really appreciate. And Dieter, you own a domain name, correct? Yeah, that's correct. That's not 230.com. It just points to an explainer of what 230 is. So this is a pet issue for us, knowing what the law says, which for a tech site is an odd pet issue, but it's the one we've chosen.

It's our brand. But so you're saying like Ted Cruz just keeps making up more, ever more complex things that aren't real. Right. So we started off basically sort of vaguely alluding to, well, you know, there's this law that means that you are supposed to be a neutral public forum, Mark Zuckerberg. Are you a neutral public forum? And then he moved on to saying, well, that's what Section 2,000. 30 means, and now he's moved on to saying, well, in the 1990s, they passed Section 230 because

they were like the Internet shouldn't be biased, which is not remotely true and has nothing to do with what the actual bill was about, which was basically about making sure that you can moderate stuff on the Internet without getting sued for, like, hosting porn or defamatory content. What I don't understand is, like, tactically, if Ted Cruz were out there banging his fist and saying there ought to be a law, then he would be accurate. He could get momentum behind that. Instead, he's getting up there saying there is a law, but he's wrong about what that law is. And it's just like a very strange thing to do.

Except that it kind of seems to be working because it just puts Google on the defensive and they will never actually say, look, you're just making stuff up. We don't care what you say. Like they have to keep playing this game of saying, oh yeah, we don't do anything biased. We don't have a search engine that ranks things. Our search engine does not rank things whatsoever. That's not what a search engine does. Wait, really?

They don't actually say that, but they'll go in and ask questions like, so when someone searches something, will you promote Breitbart as much as the Huffington Post, which is just not how a search engine works? Because search engines are so dependent on very specific queries that people are making. I mean, the whole point of a search engine is to deliver results, right? Like, if you type a word in a search engine and it delivers unranked results, then you haven't, then you're not making a good product. Then you've, like, got, like, Yahoo from the early 90s, right? Like, here's a human directory of things that might be relevant to you.

And there was a second. That seems very confusing. It is. And there was a whole second panel that was not, that was just people who talk about Google, including a researcher Francesca Torpodi, who does really cool work. And part of her whole point and the stuff that she studies is that the actual search queries you make make just a massive difference in the results that you'll get. Like if you use an abbreviation to refer to something and it's an abbreviation that is like a pet buzzword on like Democratic or Republican-leaning sites, then you'll get a bunch of those. Or if you search for like a scandal and the scandal has a dollar amount that a bunch of people on one side of the political, spectrum want to emphasize, then you'll get those sites. If you refer to something more neutral,

you'll get sites from somewhere else. Like that everything in Google search is really, really complicated and interdependent. And so questions about whether you promote one specific source more than another are really hard to ask. And then it's all complicated by the fact that you're also trying to play this giant war with SEO spammers. And so Google is very clearly constantly downranking and like trying to stop things from appearing in search. But it can't say that because then that sounds like political bias. But that information is like readily available, right? Like Google like famously issued updates to tank some sites traffic because they were obviously gaming the algorithm. But no one was complaining that like clickbait stopped appearing

in Google search. I mean, there have been cases where people argued that Google was being anti-competitive. They're very complicated. And they're sometimes completely legitimate. But those cases tend to not have anything to do with politics. So what does Ted Cruz want? I mean, like, I will just, Ted Cruz went, he's like a Harvard Law graduate. Like, he should be able to, and he's an originalist, right? He's like a strict, strict constructionist, like, legal advocate. Like, also Ron Wyden, who co-wrote 230 is still in Congress.

Like, he can just, like, ask him, right? Like, if you want to go beyond that to, like, legislative intent, you can just, like, Ron, what was your idea here? And he's told us, like, Colin interviewed him on our pages. He's told us what he meant when he wrote 230. It seems utterly bizarre that he's starting from this, like, very deeply flawed premise. But what does he want? So a big theme of this hearing was that everybody wants Google to open their books, metaphorically speaking, like they want to understand how all of these algorithms work, which is actually really interesting. And the lack of transparency has been one of the things. things that everyone has pretty much correctly dinged tech platforms for. The problem with Google is that with search, as somebody pointed out in the hearing, they're also trying to hide stuff from SEO spammers. And so there's an extent to which they want to keep this secret.

But I would actually really love them to work with someone in Congress and try to do some kind of outside report. Yeah, I don't think the argument here is that Google is necessarily doing a good job. Right. I don't know that the argument that Google, any of the social platforms, Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, what have you, are like excellently run companies that are transparent and clear to their users. Like, no one's making that argument. So that seems like a winner from both sides, right? Like, just tell us how it works. If the collateral damages, spammers might get a little bit smarter, that doesn't, they're already out there. They're already motivated. You're not going to help them that much more, are you? It seems like probably, and also they wouldn't have to release a lot of this stuff to the public. It seems like the biggest danger would be something that's already happened a bit with Project Veritas, which is that they find some, like somebody finds something that they can take out of context, like one of the millions of sites that Google has some kind of ranking system with seems slightly political. And so therefore they will put it up and say, look, Google bans this. Like a Project Veritas leak included the idea that Google was banning, like had a blacklist around the pro-life groups when it seemed pretty clear from context that basically they had printed a list of controversial topics that Google didn't want to like run ads against or something.

And so it seems like they're giving them ammo there potentially. The other thing I'd say, Nelai, is like Google's algorithms aren't magic and they can get gamed by. by spammers. And if I would, I don't know that they should keep all this stuff secret, but if they're much more open about how their algorithms work, they are not going to be able to stop people from like impinging on the front page of Google searches and like getting crap up there. Having used Google since Alta Vista, basically like those days, like there have been periods where Google got worse and spammers got higher ranking than they should have.

And so just trusting that Google will figure it out. They're not that smart. They're the smartest people in the room maybe, but they're not magic, you know. It is actually absolutely wild to watch hearings where nobody talks about how like Google bombing used to be a tactic that everybody understood. That it used to basically just be common knowledge that you could make Google show a thing that was embarrassing. Like that there's a picture of Trump if you search idiot. Yeah. Yeah, people did that for years.

Adi, you were pointing out that like the Google search cards are like a notorious. place where Google routinely gets it wrong and they always get dinged for it. It seems like maybe this is more trouble than it's worth. Yeah. And they're the thing that provides the impression that Google is editorializing a lot. And in some cases it is, among other things, it has search cards that are just specifically its services, which Yelp has argued for several years has been, is basically anti-competitive. And it means that when you put something up there, it's like, oh, Google approved this 4chan like thread as a top story. That's ridiculous. Whereas if you get that in the sort of main page, you're like, oh, okay, so it was a weird search term, so something weird's coming up.

So I want to transition away from this because, I mean, I think that it would be great if Google was more transparent. If that's the outcome, that's great. If the outcome is, you know, this like center of Josh Hawley plan where we're going to make 230 contingent on some submission of not being biased, McKenna, which you've covered. Right. That seems much more dangerous. But that this fundamental, like, first misreading of 230 seems, it seems like you have to convince everybody that this is true so that you can change it in some serious way. Well, and it's a great campaign strategy, right, for the youth vote. Everybody, you know, the daily caller readers, people who hang out in, like, more right-wing circles online, all hate these companies. and have been hating them ever since Vice first wrote that article last summer about shadow banning

and basically legitimizing the idea that Twitter was shadow banning conservatives, right? So, I mean, it's a great campaign strategy. If you look at the tweets from Ted Cruz's Twitter about this stuff, it's like coming from his campaign Twitter account. They know what they're doing, right? So one of the things, and this is transitions in the next hearings of antitrust is this is only a problem because Google is the monopoly provider. If there are like 50 search engines and Google was just like openly promoting Democrats, like what could you complain about?

You would presumably have some other search engine that was openly promoting Republicans. But because Google is seen as having all this power and all this influence. And it does. It has like a 90% market share of search. There was that graph that like showed up the other day during the antitrust hearing and it was like Google at the very top and there was like duck, duck go at the very bottom just like trailing. barely even visible. And Google's like, these are our competitors. Yeah, that's my favorite part of every,

every sort of like tech monopoly. Like when Comcast, which disclosure is an investor in box media, Shams of Verge, but whatever, they hate me. This is just facts. When they were buying NBC, they were like, we have so many competitors for broadband internet that this will be fine.

And they were just like listing just like random fake companies, like one edge sell. provider in like Montana. It was crazy. But it's always my favorite part of these hearings when big companies have to pretend they're terrified of tiny competitors like duck, dot, go. But this is like the thing. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, that was the entirety of this antitrust hearing was Facebook and all these companies being like, we compete against Snapchat. And it's like, okay, cool. But even when, okay, so let me just kind of describe like the setup for this hearing before we get into like the craziness of it. The House Judiciary in June.

the Antitrust Subcommittee, headed by David Cicillini, Democrat from Rhode Island, said, you know what? Maybe Elizabeth Warren has something right here. We should look into these tech companies and see if maybe they're just too big. And maybe we have to break them up or have some kind of new antitrust law that addresses tech companies, right? So they put out this big announcement. They were going to do all these hearings, talk to all these experts and all these members

from companies. First hearing, they looked at the news media business. because it's bad. I think it's like the least you could say, right? But this week they finally got the companies in and to question them about anti-competitive behavior. So the first hearing. Right. So there were two panels.

The first panel was representatives from Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple. All of the companies that Elizabeth Warren basically outlined and said, yikes, these are too big. We should do something. And then the second panel was like a handful of experts. It was a really stacked panel. There was Tim Wu, who we are familiar with, right? He wrote The Curse of Bigness, has been a really big critic of tech largeness for some time.

You might say he even has a monopoly on being an academic on that. Bazzini. No, Dieter. No. Please keep going. Okay, so there were also a handful of other people, right? So Carl Zaba, who I've talked to a lot from Net Choice, was also there. He was kind of like on the conservative wing.

And then also Stacey Mitchell, who has been a fantastic source on Amazon bigness. I'm just going to refer to it as that, like the entirety of this talk. Company bigness. That's correct. These are the experts on bigness. So, yeah, basically there were these hearings. And a lot of the arguments that we heard were like the arguments that we've heard time and time again, right? We didn't hear a lot about China, which was great.

Not that we need to be big to compete against China, but there was a lot of comparing, like, Facebook being like, we are scared of TikTok. And it's like, why? Of course they're big, right? But like, I mean, they serve entirely different purposes, kind of. So, yeah, that was basically the just of the hearing. I think one of the most standout moments was probably when Joe Representative Noguza asked Facebook to name any of their competitors, and the representative from Facebook was just kind of like, uh, and like blanked out.

And Noguza was like, oh, yeah, because four of the top six companies, social media companies, are you now? So I think a lot of the hearing was really just kind of like cementing the point in public record on video so they could have all these clips on Twitter and everything being like, we get it, we understand it. A lot of the members did. Cicelini pulled out a lot of fantastic points, especially having to do with competition, targeting Amazon, especially for the same reasons that Elizabeth Warren has. You know, you can't have a platform and then sell your own products on the same thing. with all that data you have. And then, of course, the Republicans kind of were like the whole time being like,

innovation, innovation. That's been like the whole like word that they use, innovation. If you do anything, well, so long to innovation. So that was basically that. And then also there were some crazy questions like, why does my son watch YouTube Fortnite let's plays? And the Google rep is like, sir, I have no idea. Yeah, that was great. I love that exchange because it's, it is true that no one can.

adequately answer that question. Right. Why is watching video games as fun as playing video games is like an extended metaphysical? Like I don't know. Like what is the nature of entertainment, sir? I shall not answer it in this hearing. After I tweeted that, I got like so many replies from people who are like, um, soccer. People like to play it and watch it.

And I'm like, okay, I get it. I get it. I get it. So there are a lot of strong feelings out there about let's plays versus actually playing. I don't really understand it myself, but I'm happy other people seem to have very strong opinions. I would say the Sicily had this moment where he's talking to the Amazon rep, and they were arguing about Amazon's private label brands

and whether Amazon uses data from the marketplace to determine what products to make and compete with its sellers. And he reminded, he had to stop and like, you're under oath. Like, I feel like you're lying to me. I'm just going to take this moment to remind. That's crazy. Like that is about as much heat as you get in a hearing like this, right? Right.

I mean, Cicilini, obviously, he is the person heading this. He has Lena Khan, who I think you've spoken to on this podcast, right? She's been on this show, yep. Yep. So Lena Khan actually works for him now. So he has, like, all of the resources necessary to really ask targeted questions. And I think that was, like, really visible, especially from him and folks. like Noguza, who I know focus a lot on tech and spend a lot of time investigating it.

So, I mean, I guess we'll see what comes next. This is a whole series of hearings, right? There was the news media one. Now we have this one with all the tech companies. And I guess we have to wait and see what the next one is and see, since this is a whole investigation, what they determine at the end of it, right? Like what kind of legislation they plan on putting forth. But right now it's still kind of unclear.

Honestly, we spent so much time talking on the site about how Fortnite is the new social space for kids. And Facebook has made noise about how it's cutting into people's time. I really, really can't wait until we start inviting, like, Tim Sweeney and people to, like, from Epic to talk at these hearings and, like, try to explain Fortnite to people. Tim, if his Twitter presence is anything to go by, he will be delightfully spiky at a congressional hearing. What did Apple have to say here? We said they were there. They asked one question that was like, why do I have to have iCloud? Which about, right?

There was one member who was like, I think he had a second with the Apple rep. And what was he saying? He was like, why do I sometimes get a pop-up asking me to pay for I cloud? I've heard a lot from my constituents that we hate this. Okay, so first of all, I want to say that is one, a totally valid complaint. Right. I was going to say, like, yes, please answer that question. Like, if I want to like, what is the point of representative democracy?

2019. It's for somewhat elected officials to be like, yeah, what is up with these eye classes? Right. I mean, that's the whole, okay, that's the whole thing. We haven't done telecom policy in so long, and it took everybody being pissed off about robocalls to get any of that passed through this year, right?

It's always things like that. So yeah, I think most of the hearing, Apple spent a lot of time trying to differentiate themselves from like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, right? They're like, we aren't those guys. Yeah. And they spent a lot of time talking about We're the privacy guys.

And it's like, we're not talking about privacy here, guys. Like, cool. But they spent a lot of time differentiating themselves. And really, a lot of the members didn't have a lot of questions for Apple. They didn't have a lot of questions for Google. A lot of the members were more focused on Facebook and Amazon, which I guess is kind of more in their wheelhouse. It's kind of who they've been critiquing more for so long.

But they really didn't face as much heat as the other people. I mean, that makes sense to me. These are the ones that do have really clear giant financial implications. Like Apple has lawsuits against it for having a monopoly on app stores. But like if you're the number of app developers in the world is much smaller than the number of people who are affected by only having one social network. I mean, the economy is always one of the most important issues in every single election. And it's way easier to draw a line from Amazon to a local economy or even Facebook to just democracy falling apart than it is. with Google or Apple.

Yeah, but my prediction is that the only concrete legislation that comes out of this is about iCloud pop-ups. Like, that's just a home run. Who's going to get mad at that? Right. I mean, one of the things that really, like, this, like a lot of the hearing from, like, the Republican side was a little, maybe not a little, but it was misguided. Like, Sensenbrenner, who's the ranking member, basically said, you know, when Facebook

took over MySpace, um, did MySpace complain? He was basically saying MySpace didn't complain. So I think you guys are just being wusses. Like that was like basically what he said. It was like, if MySpace didn't complain, there was no anti-competitive behavior at all. I was like, okay, cool. That's not how it works. Right.

No, it's not. Like there's not a form you fill out and submit to Congress and your business is being destroyed. Right. Okay, fine. I wish there was. That'd be great. I would read those forms all day and night. Be like, we're MySpace.

We really bet heavily on our website looking like garbage. That was the wrong bet. Oh, my God. That would be great. I would be super into that. Okay, so McKenna, what was the takeaway from this year? Because the one thing I will say, you know, we had Casey on for the first set of hearings. Casey's position, and he's on vacation, so he's not here to defend himself.

so I will both speak for him and attack him in one go. Sorry, Casey. Casey's position is that these hearings are worthless theater, right? Congress will never understand anything. The companies are prone to hiding the ball, to exaggerating, to getting away with it. This is all just pointless theater, whatever, right? And to a certain extent, that has been our experience of these hearings. I would say even with the amount of mess and chaos that we have just described,

these hearings were much better than any we've been. seen in the past. Like they're, Congress is starting to like get its bearings on how to ask questions. They're not like, how does Facebook make money, right? Like that, that situation isn't happening. We sell ads, Senator. Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg is like, we saw ads. Like, they're not, they're not able to like bat away things. There are moments when the representatives from these companies seem uncomfortable or they're not able to answer. They are getting better at engineering, what you're saying. These moments on video that they get to. travel on Twitter that seem like harsh questioning. So there's an improvement. But what's the next

thing that happens? See, okay, here's the problem. I have problems, many of them. And the main one is whatever happened to privacy legislation. Yeah. So we have all the, everybody's talking about antitrust. Everybody is talking about censorship, platform bias, all of these things. And for some reason, all of this has coalesced into members wanting to put together one massive piece of legislation that addresses all of these things somehow. And it all started with privacy legislation. So it's gotten to the point where I think members are a lot more educated than they were last year when Cambridge Analytica happened. And then we had Mark Zuckerberg in and a lot of questions were asked that made zero sense. and made everyone look kind of silly.

But I think if anything, the hearings have forced members to be like, okay, it's time to learn and figure this out. Now, they've gotten, Congress is slow. We all know that. Everything moves at like a very slow pace. So, of course, we're still going to get fortnight questions and ICloud questions for a while until we have members as young as AOC throughout the entire two bodies, right? So they're not entirely worthless because they know if you make a Brad Sherman Libra's 9-11 quote, you're going to get a lot of lashback from your constituency. A lot of people are going to be really upset. I feel like this is a lot of people in kind of relative terms.

I feel like I don't know how much people outside tech are actually paying attention to a lot of these. Right. Well, the thing is, is that who is actually paying attention? And I don't know if it's really the Democratic constituencies. If anybody is paying attention, then I think it is the right-wing consideration. who are all really concerned about Facebook, Twitter, and Google, right? So when Ted Cruz has his hearings, I mean, look at his Twitter feed. It's like all that he posts the clips of.

They're very much convinced. I mean, you even see it now with like Trump having his weird little thing for you to complain about being censored, right? It's made its way up to the highest level. He's mentioning it at rallies. It's become like a really big campaign message for Republicans in a way that it hasn't been for Democrats who, for some reason, it's really crazy because Democrats have focused on Wall Street for so long and big corporate power, but now with tech companies, it hasn't been that

way. Yeah. So I don't know. I think for Republicans, it's more of a campaign issue and something that with recognizable home names like Google, Facebook, and everything to be angry at those people who are censoring your views allegedly, right? It's become more of a campaign issue in a way that it hasn't been for Democrats. So for them, it's like, that's just the way.

is unfortunately where Democrats are like unfortunately trying to, oh, I don't know, run these hearings. And all of a sudden, Ted Cruz is like, um, but actually I'm being censored. So I mean, I don't know. The main takeaway is that people are learning. I think we can say that. People are starting to learn. That's like what you say at the beginning of a sci-fi movie for the robot kills everyone. It's like it's learning.

Right. Well, so I mean, there are some concrete things, right? There is, should we have a privacy law? Right. seems obvious. Is there enough competition, particularly for Facebook and Amazon, that seems like it's moving along? Addy pointed out there are antitrust lawsuits against Apple. So it seems like on sort of parallel tracks, these things are moving, but the real problem is we keep mashing them all together. That's what you're kind of saying before the show. And I think that

we should just mention it. A good example is like this ever spiraling face app controversy, or Chuck Schumer this morning, last night. Last night. We should shut it down. Like, the FBI should investigate FASAP. And it's like, why? But it all just seems like the same sort of paranoia around tech. Right.

I mean, you get to push the Russia message a little bit further, too. Oh, yeah. The Russia thing hasn't even, like, come up and, like, it's come up in a bunch of hearings, but it was sort of more absent than usual in mine, at least. Yeah. I mean, Russia hasn't been mentioned at all. There's only, and, like, no bill addressing. Russian interference at all is not going to be passed anytime soon with Mitch McConnell

leading the Senate, unfortunately. So, I mean, we have one of the most sensible bills, like the Honest Ads Act that is like, hey, maybe we should have ads databases and make sure Russia isn't buying ads. And for some reason, that bipartisan piece of legislation isn't moving anywhere at all. Wow. Facebook, by the way, supports the Honest Act. Twitter does too. Like, there isn't even an industry post back around it. Yeah.

Right. It's just a chaotic mess. and we all just get to watch it and try not to scream. Okay. I think that's a good place to end our hearings coverage. They're learning. We're torturing McKenna. That's good.

I'm glad he joined the verge. Please endure this torture. But it really, I will say this, and I, compared to the last set, they really are learning. They're asking better questions and are being much more pointed. And it seems like these companies are in a much more defensive position than they were before, when they would just come in and be like, you don't understand technology. You don't even understand what we do. And now there's a clear level of understanding that is leading to more pointed questions,

which I think is a good thing. So there's going to be more hearings, particularly the antitrust hearings are going to keep going. Adi, I assume Ted Cruz is going to, at some point, just like stand outside Google headquarters, like holding up placards of search results and being like, why are you censoring me? That's where he's going, very obviously. Yeah. I really wish they would just start asking other prompties to come in here.

I want to get TikTok in, like, get Fortnite. I don't know. I mean, they had Snapchat today. There's a new Judiciary Tech Task Force led by Marsha Blackburn. So we'll see what comes about. All right. Well, our government is paying attention to the tech industry, and that means we have to pay attention

to it. Great. Okay. Let's take a break. Mekana, thank you so much for joining us. It was great. Always a pleasure. We'll have you back when there's more hearings. Sorry. It's okay. I'll be okay. We're going to take a break. Liz is going to join us.

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That's Grammarly.com. All right, we're back. Liz Lapato has joined us. Hello, Liz. Hey, how's it going? It's going. I think you have had a wilder a few days than anyone because you went to the Neerlink event where Elon Musk.

Correct me if I'm wrong. His plan is to put a USBC port in everyone's brains. Okay. A of all, it is eventually going to be wireless technology. It's USBC now. Okay. Eventually. Let's just be clear.

B, he was very clear at the event that this is optional, so it doesn't have to go in your brain if you don't want it. Oh, I see. Okay. Where does it go? Is it, but it's like binary? Like either you have an implant or you don't, right? Yeah.

So your choice of not having it in your brain is not having it at all. Yeah, that's right. I mean, like, to be honest, like, I know that there are folks on staff, Dieter, who might really want a USBC port in their brain, but like most of the rest of us. I don't. All right. Okay. Let's just start from the start.

I think we can all concede Dieter wants a USBC port in his brain. Yes. No further discussion necessary. Great. What is Neerlink? what is going on, where were you? Okay. So Tuesday, I was at the California Academy of Sciences where we were in the planetarium when Elon Musk told us the first sort of details of what's going on at NeurLink, which is

important because it's been pretty quiet for the last couple of years after it was announced in a long, boring, and poorly written blog post on Wait, But Why? And the thing about it is that brain machine interfaces aren't that new. Like, I keep hearing people describe it as like science fiction technology, but actually, the first person who had spinal cord paralysis who received one of these, that was like 2006. The short-term goal and probably the best use for them are restoring some kind of functionality to folks who are paralyzed, right? Because the problem is that you still have your body, but it's not really connecting with your brain. And so one of the things that you can potentially

do is allow folks a greater degree of autonomy by reading the signals from the brain and then translating that, whether that's into like movement of a cursor, which is, it sounds like where Neurilink is going right now, or movement of something like a robotic arm, which also could potentially be really interesting for prostheses. One of the neuroscientists I talked to this week told me he was using the metaphor of Luke's hand, Luke Skywalker's hand, where like, you know, his hand gets cut off, but then the prosthetic is so good. It's just like having a hand. It's just a robot hand. And so, you know, that might be potentially an avenue as well. But in order for that to happen, you basically have to insert something into the brain so that the signals that are happening there can be read.

And then they go back to a computer, which then interprets them, and that creates the movement of the cursor on the screen. Okay. Are you all still with me? Is this too much? Did I just nerd too far? No, I think we, right. Like, the brain has to be able to control something directly. So you need some sort of interface with the brain. There have been some of these in the past, right? Yes. What's exciting about this is different materials, basically. They figured out something called threads, which are flexible and less likely to damage the brain than the materials currently being used, which not only means that you can keep the implant in the brain longer and it'll still be more functional, but also, you know, not damaging the brain is good, I feel. Just general rule.

Right, step one, don't do more damage. So that's a big thing. But because they're so flexible, they're harder to implant than the older technology, which means that they developed a robot. surgeon to do it. And it looks kind of like a microscope that has a sewing machine attached to it. Pretty much, yeah. And that's what inserts the thing. So it's a very thin, stiff needle that inserts the thread, but then the flexible thread stays in your brain. So where does it go in your brain? Great question. Typically, it's inserted around the motor cortex, in part because that's like an area that we know pretty well. And also because, again, what you're trying to do is move something. So that's helpful.

but there might actually be other potential locations in the brain that could be useful, and that's still TBD. So right now it's like they're looking pretty hard at the motor cortex. I saw a photo of a rat with like a, I don't know what you would call it, like a motherboard sticking out of its head. Is that work? Is that just a mock-up? Are they actually doing this right now?

That's from their white paper. So they, at the same time that this announcement was happening, they uploaded a white paper, to bioarchive, which is a place where you put your preprints of scientific papers so that the community can give feedback. And so they really have been putting this really in rats, thank you rats, in order to work with the technology and figure out, like, what kind of signals are they getting? How do they interpret the signals? Like, what needs tweaking? Are these materials working? All of those things. They're hoping to get into humans next year. I think that timeline is a little ambitious. I mean, you can never really predict what the FDA is going to do because, The FDA is fundamentally unknowable. But it's just my feeling regarding the FDA.

It's important for me to explain to everyone. Liz has a background as a health reporter at Bloomberg. Yeah, I covered pharma and biotech for many years and just like nobody can predict the FDA, including the FDA, just so you know. So, you know, it might be a relatively quick path, but I think it's likely that the FDA is going to ask for more safety data. The thing that I really liked about it is that none of this is like a huge advance on stuff that already exists, which makes it plausible.

The thing that is interesting is that they're like incremental advances, but they've been combined in a way that I haven't seen before in academia. And that's like what the neuroscientists I've been talking to have also been most excited about. It's like, oh, they took all the smart things and put them together. Yeah, no, I'm watching the live stream. They're like, well, so you want to read the signals from the neurons as close as possible. And so you just have to get a thing there. And like, how do you solve the problem?

If you make it a tiny little thread, you can get a thing there. Okay, fine. Well, we've only been able to read a few neurons at a time, and you really want to be able to read hundreds or thousands of them. Well, how do we do that? Well, you figure out how to put multiple. Like, you just, they just solved, like, problems that, like, step by step by step. But when you get to the end of those steps,

you have a microscope sewing machine inserting threads into your brain, dodging around the blood vessels in your brain so that it can directly read and write, you know, electrical firings to and from neurons, and then it transmits wirelessly via a little chip inside your skull that's hermetically sealed to the chip outside your skull that receives a signal so that it can maximize bandwidth so that you can have a Luke Skywalker hand. Like the every, like the first step of like, oh, that's a really interesting scientific problem you solved. They claim to have like solved like eight of those in sequence and the end of it is very sci-fi. Right. Well, so the thing is like, again, in academia they've been working on different parts of that.

So the sewing machine thing like has its roots in DARPA. and like the transmission stuff is also I think I think it's DARPA it might not be DARPA I'm I hope if you are a scientist who's listening to this and you're like hey that's my work email me and I will come on the Vergecast next week and apologize so there's like you know there's like all of these incremental things that have been happening in academia throughout this time and what like they did was like they were like cool these are great incremental things let's put them all together in one thing and presto and like that's that's again what the neuroscientists are excited about They're like, well, we can't combine things in that way.

Like, in academia, it's just not a thing that we're good at. So let's see if this works. Yes, I guess that's like my big, this is an Elon Musk production. You were saying the FDA is a noble in the timeline might shift. Like, every Elon timeline might shift. Uh-huh. But I point out that in addition to putting USBC ports in people's brains next year, he also wants a fleet of one million robotaxies.

Like, we're not thinking small with Elon. this seems just based on what you and Deter are saying, much more realistic than other Elon projects we've heard about, which is a crazy thing to say about a brain machine interface. But Elon's actual version of it is really insane. And I'm curious how that affects the actual some much more practical work that the scientists are doing. Yeah. So the thing that I think is very funny about this is like Elon's like, I want to interact with an AI. And so that's why we're going to do all of this stuff. And like the near term goals to me seem eminently achieved. and really, really interesting and worth discussing in and of themselves, which is why I have been discussing them instead of the long-term goals. I was trying to just get us there.

Yeah. Man, you guys. So here's the thing. I'm just going to say a bunch of things that I think are probably true that may be wrong. But first of all, if you're talking about having an interaction with an AI and like, well, we want to, you know, be cooperative with an AI. I want to have access to this computer and, like, be able to talk to it. my first question is why and just why and you know we already have computers like they're cool

they're good I like them most of the time and one of the things that Elon was talking about was how nice it might be to just like sit and interact with the computer but I do that all the time I just use my hands and like I don't actually have a problem with that because as a writer I don't feel like when I'm writing I'm composing in my brain I feel like I'm thinking with my hands so like like removing motion for me is potentially problematic because it's an important part of how I think. But the other part of it is like, why do you need this cognitive processing? Like what is this for? Like let's say I can speed up my brain so that I can read a page every five seconds. Does that in any way change my enjoyment of the literature? Does that make me enjoy it more? I doubt it.

Does that, is that useful? And I still have to think about it, like, which is a cognitive process that you really probably can't speed up with AI. Because we don't know really how conscious thinking works, turns out. I feel like, well, I'm interested in sort of in Addie's read on this, because it feels like the dream is the sequence from the Matrix, where Keanuri was like, I know Kung Fu. Oh, they definitely made a Kung Fu reference. Oh, yeah, they did.

Yeah. Sorry. And, you know, other people have compared it to the Microsoft's from Neuromancer, where it's like, oh, you want to learn a language, you'll just plug this thing into your brain. and then you know French, the hardest language. So, Adi, you were like the Elon version of this is really out there. Explain what you mean by that.

So maybe I'm not up on the latest Elon version of it, but his impression that he has given over the last sometime is that, yeah, you will be able to learn stuff by just plugging stuff into your brain. You will also kind of made noise about being able to simulate experiences. So it's like, oh, yeah, you'll be able to eat things and taste them without actually eating them, all of this input stuff. I guess the AI thing, the idea is that you'll maybe be able to just have this thing that talks to you inside your brain and automatically helps you with things. The problem is like, it's not clear to me why any of this is worth the really tremendous risk of surgery. Thank you.

Laser eye surgery is the thing that people are comparing it to. And laser eye surgery is actually risky. And like the risk of it is underplayed. And it also solves a specific problem everyone agrees is a problem. Yes. Yes. And on top of that, it's still going to be more dangerous than laser eye surgery, even if they use a laser to do the drilling. Because every time you open a hole to your brain, you potentially create an infection risk.

And like a brain infection is way more serious than an eye infection for a very obvious reason. Like the location matters, guys. And so like, you know, again, the wireless technology. is very, very exciting and is a substantial improvement over other brain machine interfaces because what used to have to happen is you had a port in your head and a wire coming out, and that is an infection site, potentially. So, you know, like, but like elective surgery is always dangerous. So there's two wireless things to talk about.

One is the exciting part, which is wirelessly, you know, very short from a batteryless transmitter inside the skull that could be powered by the thing outside it. So that's great. That's really cool. The second wireless connection is to your phone, which is how you control this thing via Bluetooth. That seems not great. I'm sorry. That seems like a mistake, like just a flat mistake. Like, don't make Bluetooth part of your brain. Be careful, guys. If Elon listens to this, he's going to invent a Bluetooth competitor in order to solve the problem.

Maybe it'll be good. Like, what are the things Elon Musk can accomplish? The dudes really successfully privatized a chunk of the space industry. Falcon Heavy seems good. It's working. We've landed two rockets at the same time. Electric cars are popular and competitor to Bluetooth. Like all challenges at the same scale.

Liz, we've been talking about the USB C port for a while. Why is there a USBC port? Well, the wireless connection isn't up and running yet. So right now it's transmitting data via. via a wired connection, which is the USBC port. Yeah. That's where it comes from. I like that he picked a standard.

He could have gone proprietor. So in the photo of the rat with the board in the USBC, does that doing anything right now? Are they reading or writing data to the rat's brain? So right now they're only reading data. They say they have capacity to write data, but closing that feedback loop back to the brain is actually really, really hard. It's a tough problem that the scientific community has been working on with some results. You know, okay, so here's the example, and I'm going to use the example of my own hand because it's right here. If I go and I pick up like a can of Diet Coke, I know when I'm touching the can of Diet Coke and no longer need to apply any more pressure because I am getting feedback into my brain that is telling me, hey, that feels like cool aluminum.

But if you only go one way, you don't get that feedback. And so it's hard to like temper your actions. So especially for any kind of prosthetic use, you're going to want to be able to do the full connection to the brain where you can not only do stuff with your brain, but get signals from the world back. Because that is a big part of how we all operate in the world, is that there's just like this entire thing the entire time. And I am about to go full galaxy brain. I apologize to everybody. But like, the brain as an organ is a human construction and we do it because we refer to it because it's useful. Like, it's not, like, nature doesn't know what a brain is.

Nature doesn't care. The whole thing is wired together. You could, conceptually, if you really want it, call your eyes a part of your brain because they are wired directly into your brain. You could just be like, oh, yeah, eyes are my external brain. That's the external part that sees things. You could similarly refer to the rest of your, like, neural system as, like, the extended brain. There is a company that does that also. Yes.

Called Control Labs. So they're really cool. But you could just be like, the whole thing's my brain, and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong because it's all communicating with itself the entire time. Whereas on stage, Elon said, there's this thing where people talk about that, you know, just a brain is just a thing inside of that sending and receiving electrical signals. And then he said, and the brain is just in a jar getting and sending electrical signals. Like he... You are a brain and a bat. And it's like, no, you're not, actually.

Like, the brain might not be the unit. The body might be the unit. The whole thing might be the unit. So it's one of the things that does surprise me a little is like that sort of conception. It's not that that like conception isn't useful in terms of data in terms of study, all of those things. Like of course we slice things into component parts in order to like think about them. But the things that you can measure and the things that are not necessarily the same thing. So like black holes existed before we could detect them.

That's like the most obvious example I could think of. But like just because we don't necessarily know how the brain and body interact doesn't mean that that interaction isn't important. And like, you know, if you've read Oliver Sacks's a leg to stand on, you know that like if there's an injury to your body, that often really changes your entire way of thinking and like your mindset and it changes how you interact with the world because you start to think of things of like, oh, like in his case he had broken a leg skiing. So there was only so far he could walk so his world shrank, his understanding of the world shrank. And so this physical extensive part of yourself is not like a mecca suit your brain

wears, that's you. Your body's you. Addie, do you remember an argument we had? It's probably like seven years ago now where I was like the end state of every internet trolls the desire to be a brain and a vat. I just had serious flashbacks. We were like in a bar. It was very late at night.

But this is, it's funny. I'm just trying to remember why we would have argued and disagreed over that. I don't, I think we might have been like a heated agreement. Okay. That makes sense to me. It was like a very excitable, uh, we both discovered this extremely at the time, obscure thesis. I mean, Elon is like the most extremely online CEO of all time, in my opinion. Right. Like, he's like tweeting memes. He's doing it. Is he just like, I want to be a brain connected to Twitter?

Like, is that where he's going? Because that's what this feels like. It feels like he also is a huge love-hate relationship with it, though. Like, a lot of it, he seems way more scared than a lot of these people. Yeah, well, he in the space of two minutes, we'll talk about how we're getting gets surpassed by AI and it's very, very scary. And, you know, 45 seconds later say, well, it's necessary for us to have a symbiotic relationship with AI so we don't just become pets. And there is a way to, like, build that narrative that actually works. It's like, well, rather than be defeated by AI, we should integrate AI. Therefore, instead of losing, we'll just become part of whatever the next thing is. It's a very, I don't know, transhumanist way to

think about it. The resolution of the plot of the Matrix. I just want to point that out. Yeah. That is, they weren't good movies at the end because they were like, we're going to remove the conflict and worked in harmony with the machines. Uh-huh. I would also point out Elon is very interested in shipping our bodies to Mars. Yeah. That's the other thing he's working on.

The thing about brains is they weigh less than bodies. And so it's easier to ship more of them in a payload into space. Oh, my God. No, no, you scan the brains and then they weigh even less. Oh, that's a good point. This is like the near-link thing. And I'm sure many listeners are like, you don't understand Elon. And that is true because...

Much like the FDA. Elon is fundamentally unknowable. Yeah. I mean, Grimes can be getting close. You never know. Who truly knows anyone is really what I want you to get out of this episode. But you, we have this. This is very Elon, right?

Yeah. The goal is to eliminate all combustion engines. and save the earth, and that is expressed as a Model 3, right? Which is a car. And it's like the constraints on building a car are still constraints are building a car. You got to build them in a tent to build enough. And the problems there are the problems of, I need to sell $35,000 an electric car. But the goal is we're going to save the earth.

I want to move humanity beyond Earth because Earth is doomed. We need to colonize the stars. What are we doing? we're doing very, I mean, it's complicated. Don't get me wrong. But we're, we've built a private space cargo system for NASA. This seems like the same thing. Like, we're at brain and a vat. I got to communicate with AI. That's the future. What's the first thing we're doing? We're taking a bunch of existing good ideas and packaging them into can we build a superior like prosthetic interface. Is that seem about right? Liz, like that's the Elon pattern. Yeah, that's right. And like,

Actually, it goes back farther because one of the things that you might remember about PayPal is that one of the reasons he got ejected was because his ambitions for PayPal were too big, everybody thought, and we're not going to be sustainable. So I don't feel like Elon Musk has really ever had small achievable goals except as like a way to get to enormous goals. And I think the real question is like, is this a business, right? Like, I mean, that is a question honestly with Tesla at this point is less of a question, I think, with SpaceX. They seem to well. Liz, literally you host a segment for us regularly called This Week in Elon, where it's basically like, is Tesla a business or not? Like, can we survive the rigors of running

a public company at this scale in this market? And the question is like, is this a business? Is SolarCity a business definitively answered? No, we're just going to roll it into Tesla, right? Is Neurilink a business? That's actually a really hard question to answer because the biotech space is incredibly expensive. The thing to know about developing drugs and devices, for those of you who don't necessarily know it already, is that there is a pretty rigorous testing system in place, and it varies whether it's drugs or devices. But the average drug takes like 10 years to get to market. And that's 10 years of extensive testing. And there's like special stuff that's done around the patents.

So you get extra patent life to make up for the fact that you've done all the safety testing. So potentially yes, in the sense that like medical device companies definitely exist. And definitely serve the needs of people who, you know, perhaps have to go to the hospital or maybe are undergoing surgery or any of a number of other things like that. Like medicine exists and there are businesses. So maybe, yes. But it is a really, really tricky space in part because, like, you have a limited number of patients. They may be limited in what they can potentially pay to achieve this technology. you know, and you also maybe are limited, depending on how durable these threads are,

by how many times people can have brain surgery, right? Because like durability is tough. The human body is a very corrosive environment and even something like an artificial hip, your body doesn't want it there and we'll try to eject it. It'll try to wear it away. And the other thing to know is that blood is corrosive. So it is right now an open question of how long these things will last in a body. That's a hard question to answer. So it is maybe a business, but the real answer is we

probably aren't going to know until we've had larger scale human testing. They want to get to human testing by the end of next year, by the end of 2020. The other thing, towards the end in the Q&A section, they were asking about, you know, the ethics of testing on animals, and it's very unfortunate we need to test on animals. And Eon said, yeah, well, you know, like, well, we got a, we got a monkey running a computer now. The president of New Orleans was like, I guess we're announcing that now, too. Yes. It was actually a little bit funny because I would watch the scientists tense up every time Elon was going to answer a question.

And then like the thing that they were afraid of happened and they were like, well, what is the monkey doing on the computer? I don't know. Well, I have an informed guess based on previous monkey trials of this technology. To be clear, this is a guess. I don't have sourcing information. But if you work at NeroLink and you want to talk to me about this, or at UC Davis, which is their partner and you want to talk to me about this, like, eh. It's quake. He's playing quake.

So you can teach a monkey to move a cursor on a screen because monkeys love juice. Oh, okay. Juice is the best thing that has ever happened to monkeys. And if you reward them for a behavior with juice, they will do the behavior again to get more juice. So you can get them to move cursors around. They've moved artificial arms. They do all sorts of things for juice because it turns out if you want to move. motivate a monkey. That's how you do it. So the monkeys moving in Kirster through a maze to get

juice. That's my guess. I mean, to be fair, I've seen people do dumber things for juice. All right, Liz, thank you so much for joining us. You know, like this week in Elon, it comes and goes. Yeah, it does. It feels like we're in for another ride. I mean, look, there's, we go through periods where Elon is very active and periods where Elon is quiet and I get to do other things. and it looks like we're going through another Elon activity period, so you might be seeing more of me. Elon activity periods definitely sounds like something astronomers would say. Do we have a unit of measurement for Elon activity yet? The problem is that it's like tweets per hour.

Like you don't want that. That's bad. The tweets per minute are high during this Elon activity period. We should chart it. You know, like a Joy Division teacher? I'm going to stop now. But like it's a pulsar. I'm into it.

Let's get some data scientists on this. Yeah, absolutely. That's a good use of debt scientist. Okay, we've got to take a break. We're going to come back with Paul. Thank you, Liz. Oh, thank you. It's nice being here. Addie, thank you as well. It's been great having you. Yeah, thank you. Okay, we're taking a break. We'll be back. We're going to talk about these MacBooks. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

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All right, we're back. Paul Miller has joined us. Hello, friend. Hello. Paul, every week. A stunning display of consistency. You do a segment. renowned for its repeatability,

its understandability. It's coherence. What's it called? It's called, you've been a good boy. It's about Boston Dynamics. The robotics company that has never made a product for anybody ever has decided to dip its toes into commercial robotics.

It's going to sell Spot, the robot dog, which is, in a sense, like a great grandchild of, When Boston Dynamics hit the scene, it was with Big Dog. You remember Big Dog? It's like, and it had like a lawnmower engine in it. And it's like,

it was so much fun. It took the world by storm. And now we have Spot, which is cute, and nobody knows what they'll actually, I actually came up with a list. I would buy one of you. How much is it going to cost?

A million dollars. I don't know. There's still like not a lot of details. Like what, I mean, they kind of, they say this is a class. phrase in robotics because commercial robotics are not a solved problem and just because

Boston Dynamics is doing it has no bearing on whether or not this will be successful because they're calling it that they want it to be the Android of robotics like you know the Android operating system like the open platform everybody can build on which is that's that'll go great that's great except guess who else has said that every single other company that's ever built a robot It's trying to sell it to people. So I wish them the best. I think this would be great for, like, you could have racing, a horse racing tracks. I would like to have one of these at a petting zoo.

Yeah. I can imagine it for like home deliveries where you live in a walk-up and so it could go up the stairs. I can imagine it as a hallway century, just mount a gun on that head. That's a great idea. Lurking and abandoned homes waiting to terrify children. Important. I think a large, a large, version with a saddle could be an alternative to scooters in large cities.

Oh, my God. So I'm, I don't think we've told the listeners that. I'm not in New York this week. I'm in Dallas. Dallas, uh, it has scooters in it and everyone has talked to me about how much they either love

or hate the scooters. Yeah. And so, uh, because New York doesn't have them. So every time I'm in a city with them, I was talked to people about it. I,

I'm just going to tell you right now, if you dropped saddle laden spot robots on the streets of Dallas, people will just hit them with their trucks. That would be the end of it. When I was walking on the street yesterday, I saw a guy in a full suit, walk high a park scooter, and he scoffed with disgust and just knocked it over with the back of his hand. The back of his hand.

It's just like, wow. Dallas does not play. The Boston Dynamics story is really interesting to me, right? Like, they were a robotic company. Andy Rubin, when he, like, left the Android project. He and Eric Schmidt, I think, were like, we're going to robots are the next big thing that Google, going to do.

He bought a lot of robotics companies. Boston Dynamics was the highest profile one that they bought at Google. Then for a while they're like, wait, that was a mistake. And Ruben's gone. We've done with this robot side nonsense that we're doing. They tried to sell it and they couldn't. Right. And now they're like, the whole time the Boston Amics crew is like, this one can like run up five boards.

Right. Like they keep releasing the videos of the robots, even while all this turmoil is going on. And now they're like, screw, we're just going to sell spot. That's a pretty wild trajectory for this. One extra step there. They were eventually actually bought by SoftBank. Oh, I didn't realize that. And SoftBank is, uh, I mean, I don't know.

I don't know what to think about SoftBank. Sometimes it seems completely random what they invest in, but they also have some wins. So it seemed like a successful venture. Like SoftBank, for instance, is a. successful aspect. But also sprint. Yeah, there's that. So, you went some, you lose some.

That sprint investment at the time looked like a very obvious clear debt ahead by the company, turn it around, let it merge with somebody and make some cash. Like, that was very obviously what they were trying to do, I think. Well, and there's going to be a whole like home broadband play, at least what they were talking about. And now it's just in limbo. They wait for DISH network to pick up the pieces. Yeah.

not good at that, but good at SoftBank and also invest. I mean, they run the Vision Fund. We cannot possibly get in the Vision Fund, but so much tech investment is secretly softening. I just want to point out that we went from like Boston Dynamic robot dogs being sold to factories to almost getting to like Sprint Wi-Max in space of about three minutes. So, Vergecast. All right, let's talk about these MacBooks. That's the thing. We're going long this week. But we can't ignore the fact that we reviewed the two new. MacWix from Apple. So, Teter, you reviewed the Air. Dan reviewed the Pro.

It seems both extremely dead ahead and extremely complicated. Yeah, like, super complicated, actually. So everyone wants me to answer the question about the keyboards. I just can't. Just super don't know. They're still really shallow. They feel fine to me. I like the shallow keyboards, yada, yada, yada.

But who knows? Like, we've only had these, quote, unquote, new material keyboards since whatever the last MacBook Pro Rev was a couple months ago. So we just haven't had enough time to see if these end up being reliable. And then the complicated part is they reduce the price on the MacBook Air by $100. So it starts at $10.99 now. But every single upsell from there, either from the Air to the Pro, or to add more storage, because it's $1.28 at $1099, which isn't much, or to add more RAM.

they're all like 200 bucks and they're all like completely reasonable upgrades to want to make. And if you just follow the path like, oh yeah, that's a that's a reasonable upgrade. Everybody should want that. You end up at like a $1,800 laptop. And it's like, well, what the hell just happened to us here? Like that that was a mistake. So we landed Dan and I, like there's like an upgrade. Like if we want to keep this thing relatively cheap, like get the upgrade to the base pro if you can.

or if you really need the storage, you could keep the air. You end up making this entire matrix of what should you get if you don't want to spend too much money on a Mac laptop. And the fact that that happens is why I said that the new MacBook Air doesn't get to be called like the new default Mac that everybody should just go by. We don't have to discuss this anymore, goodbye. That's what they need that computer to be. They need that computer to be the thing that when my aunt or, you know,

my cousin Joe or whoever is like, what computer should I buy? You know, I want to tell them whatever computer will make them go away and not ask me again, right? That will, like, I trust it will work, and that used to be the MacBook Air. I feel like based on the voice you used for Cousin Joe and the fact that you want him to go away, there's some like trouble in the bone family. What did Joe ever do to you? Wait, wait, if the MacBook Air, and this isn't helpful because this is a dream, but if the MacBook Air, $1,100 had

256 gigabytes of SSD and 16 gigabytes of RAM. Oh, that'd be amazing. That would be the default. Yeah. Well, there's any number of things or if they would just, there's,

what are the things that are holding you back from saying, oh yeah, just go get this one? Well, it's eight gigs of RAM. It feels a little enemic, but it's fine. 128 gigs of storage, a little enemic, but maybe. The keyboard, can you really trust it? I don't know.

And the processor is, you know, last year's Core I5YC, series, and I think normal people can get it to chug in a way that doesn't happen on modern U-Series Intel chips. Now, the vast majority of people looking at this laptop are probably hanging on to their classic MacBook errors for Dear Life. And from that perspective, it's basically like, it's a one-to-one performance swap, and you get a beautiful screen, and it's thinner and lighter.

So, yeah, it's, like, pretty good upgrade. For everybody else, you know, someone's like, I want to go by a computer right now. I want to tell them to wait to see if Apple, like, fixes one. one of those four things, right? Especially the keyboard and the processor. But if you need a computer now, like me telling you to wait till next year is not helpful. So, like, I have to judge this thing as it is right now in 2019.

And as it is right now in 2019, it's a seven. It's good. Like, you will be very happy if you get this for the most part. But it's not good enough for me to just be able to tell cousin Joe to get it and then he'll leave me alone. I'll tell cousin Joe to get it and then he'll ask me about the keyboard in a month or he'll ask me about why it's slowing down because he did. open too many tabs in a month.

And I don't want that. Get out of here, Joe. Here's $200. For the record, I don't actually have any relations name, Joe, and this is not like a cipher for like an actual cousin of mine. If you're a cousin and you're listening,

this isn't about you. Here's what I know about Deeter. If you're in his family, you can roll up to him and say, I've been thinking about buying a MacBook error. You'll get so frustrated, he'll then know you $200 so that you will buy a MacBook Pro. Is that the movie?

Is that the movie? You spend the extra $2. Sorry. That's amazing. Like, that's like a family legend, right? Like, you need $200. Just go to Dieter. Say these magic words of Deter.

Is the answer to spend the $200 in the pro? Yes. I mean, I think so. I prefer the Mac. I prefer the MacBook Air, rather. I prefer carrying it around. I prefer the wedge shape. I prefer the thinness of the weight.

I prefer having a function key row instead of a touch bar. If I had to go and buy one tomorrow, I personally would probably pick a MacBook Air. but unless I thought I was ever going to need to do video editing, in which case I'd get the pro. But I would stress about it. So I prefer the physicality of the air much more to the pro, even though it's a relatively minor difference, but it really is minor.

So you can talk yourself into the pro relatively easily. The problem with saying just go get it is like I can, I feel comfortable recommending one $200 upgrade, but then there's like another $200 after that, and then maybe another $200 after that. And then it's like, well, why aren't you just buying a nicer pro? I feel like the argument for the error. Let me try to make the argument

to the error as the default laptop, because I largely agree with you, but I feel like it's instructed to try to make the argument. The argument is Apple knows that you're doing most of your computing on your phone. So you've got one of their new phones.

They're very powerful. You're doing most of the stuff that you're going to do on a phone. What you're going to do on your Mac, you're going to browse the web a bunch. You're going to run one of their great new Marsapan apps. and you're going to run it,

if you're a student, you're going to run it and maybe Microsoft work. Right. You're not gaming, and if you are, you should subscribe to Apple Games Plus or whatever it is, Apple Arcade. You're probably not consuming a bunch of video

and if you are, it's Netflix and that screen is great for it. And you're probably not making a bunch of video. Like they want you to do that on the phone, right? They made clips. It's not like they're revving eye movie on the Mac or whatever. It just seems like they know what the MacBook air is for a student, For $1,100, you get a good web browser.

It'll run Microsoft Word just great. And if you need to scroll through your photos collection, it'll sync your photos collection. But most of your life happens on a phone. And maybe you're really into it. You buy an iPad too. It feels like it's part of that matrix and not the like, this is my computer. This is where all the action happens in a way that the pro might be that thing. And certainly the Windows laptops, and it's important that we talk about them because there are lots of Windows laptops that just outclass the air.

but they happen around Windows. Yeah. Yeah. So when I say it's not the default, I don't know if I was clear enough about this, especially in the review. Like, it hasn't earned the title of the default laptop,

but the MacBook Air is going to be the default choice for a lot of people. So it's good that it's good enough to, like, become that default choice. But in terms of, like, it becomes, like, earning that, like, the crown or, like, I, like, try to distinguish between, like, lowercase default laptop and uppercase, like whatever. Like, in terms of people's actual, like, behavior, it's the default laptop. In terms of whether or not it should be the default laptop, the one that I feel comfortable recommending to Cousin Joe, poor Cousin Joe that we've been ragging on, I don't think it's

there yet. I am far away from a Verge reviews closet. So to get a vibe for the laptop market, I just have to go to Best Buy. And so recently I went to Best Buy, they have the new MacBooks there. The new keyboards, I don't know if it's just placebo or whatever. they feel 10% better to me. Yep. Which take that for what it's worth.

Because I hate the clackety clack of the... Anyways. But I went and touched every single laptop in the store. And I hate to say it, but I still kind of like the MacBooks. Except for maybe the Surface Book, the Surface laptop. Surface laptop is probably the closest. Yeah. But like the Dell's XPS 13, I think, is an amazing laptop.

It has a much better webcam and a much smaller space than they pulled off on the MacBook air. It's faster. It has a better keyboard. It's got, you know, you can log in. Like, it's got everything you want. It's very, very good. But the thing that, like, I want to, like, pick up and hold and, like, chuck in my bag and not worry about and, like, you know, carry around in one hand, like Kanye or whatever, like, I will do that with a MacBook. I would never do that with the Dell XPS 13.

Yeah. I mean, is this time to promote the conspiracy theory that Apple's. slow rolling good MacBooks that everyone just buys an iPad Pro and uses iPad OS and is happy and shuts up. They did kill the MacBook, the one-port MacBook. Yeah. Again, I think we talked about this last week. It seems like, okay, that's the sign that they're rebooting this entire strategy, that if they ever bring it back, it'll have the arm processor, and it'll be like the future Mac.

But right now, they're like, we got to get this thing right. What's interesting, I just don't understand why they didn't rev the processor in the air. I don't think that there was one to rev two. There's like, you know, coffee leg or there's like little bits above it. But in order to make that Y series work, they're really specific about the binning and a whole bunch of other stuff that's like around just like the raw, like, you know, spec of the chip. And I just, like, I don't think that Intel's doing it for them. I don't think they've got the next one ready to go in in the parameters that Apple needs it to be in. I think there's a chip that's coming to this sort of form factor.

but I think it's for the fall, the 10th gen chip, which has been shown off in laptops, but they aren't shipping yet. Right. And so I think that's for the fall. So I guess for whatever reason, Apple felt like they needed to refresh right now. Yeah, for back to school. It makes sense.

I think it's like a reasonable, like, upgrade for a bunch of people going to access to it, especially if you had one of these older Macwickairs. Yeah. I agree with you, Dieter, like that. That was such a comfortable laptop. I mean, I'm sure if you've, even with us for a while, you know that Joanna Stern famously ended every laptop review with like

for $200 more you get a MacBook Air. If you read Dieter's MacBook Air review, you will note that it ends for $200 more you can get a MacBook Pro. The only thing that's killing me is the touch bar. Yeah. Well, I don't want that thing. And I mean, Deeter, I've listened to you complain about the touchbar on your computer.

Like, it's a little bit buggy. It's not actually rock solid. Yep, that's true. Well, maybe I've got to do something. Really, all of this has been personal therapy for me because my 2015-15-inch pro is a disaster. And this 13-inch MacBook Escape Review unit that I've been, like, taking on the road with me is A, belongs to Apple, so I have to stop. And B, the keyboard pro. Yeah. So here's the thing about these refreshes.

It makes it pretty clear that you should stop holding out hope for that storied 16-inch MacBook Pro coming out this year. It seems very unlikely they're going to do that, which means that's a 2020. product and who knows when they're going to release that. And that's my other hobby horse with Max is they still don't feel predictable in their upgrade cycles. And they'll never be as predictable as the iPhone. But you still want to have a sense of like, is Apple about to do a big major rub on this? If I can wait, I should wait. Or no, this is good.

I should buy this now. You know, just like a car, you don't want to buy the first of a new generation. You want to buy the second one. Like, that's the sweet spot. It seems like we're at the tail end of the generation of these. We want to be at the tail end of the generation of these. We don't actually know that. And so you're just in a super weird limbo.

And so if you need a computer, buy a computer. If you don't, don't. And that's like standard advice. But it applies very hard right now when it comes to Max. I'm buying a $400. This one I'm going to do. All right. When is Google revving the pixel book?

Oh, my God. Dude, it's very complicated. I will say, hmm. Part of this is Intel. I really blame me. Intel for a lot of this because I seriously want a new laptop right now to put Linux on, which could be a MacBook, it could be a think pad who could be anything. And there aren't, it's not, it's not like there aren't good choices. It's just that there's no slam dunks.

There's no big wins over the past three months, which had no big wins over the past three months for, like there haven't been a big, there hasn't been a big win in laptops for seems like two years. Paul, have you considered entering the Ryzen zone? Oh my God. There was a Risen laptop of Best Buy. I clicked its quicker. There was one. It was like super cheap. It is.

It's like $400. They haven't come out with like the new gen. Risen for laptops yet. So we don't really know. So it's kind of still still TBD. What's going on with the Chromebook Pixel is there's a product that's code named Atlas that everyone assumes is it. And we're getting, you know, details trickling out about it. There have been photos of it that.

that look like they're basically Samsung Chromebook 2s, which I do not think is a design language that Google would go with, but chances are it's actually just a mule. It's like a dummy device of what they're actually making. And I'm real mad, and I don't know what the answer is. Hang on, I'm Googling. What are they doing? We're expecting a 4K screen, but beyond that, it's like kind of a mess. And these are all, this is all like reading the tea leaves from, you know, weird chromium commits.

right so there's that yeah well instead of watching this current book atlas leak i'm gonna go and watch the new trailer for top gun maverick um which i'm gonna be honest with everybody i could have talked about this entire show uh same been the thing distracting me this whole time i encourage everyone watch it it looks ridiculous we're all we should probably have some sort of party in i'll see dot com metric together records out in 2020. All right, we've gone way over. We've got to wrap this up. You can listen to why do you push that button.

That season is going amazingly. This week, Ashley Caitlin talked about sliding into DMs. A classic button. It's funny. It's really good. Go listen to that one. You can listen to Paris Wisher on Recode Decode. You can listen to Kara and Scott Galloway on Pivot. You can listen to Peter Coffman and Recode Media.

All excellent shows available on the Vox Media Network, of which I will tell you that we are the flagship A note, I especially want to underline on this today, Friday, because today is the day that an episode of The Weeds with me on it is out. We're going to be running that on the Vergecast feed next Tuesday. But yeah, it's right. I want on the weeds and I saw that.

That's a thing that happened. Enjoy that, everyone. We'll be back next week on the Vergecast, Rock and Roll. Paul. All right. Send tweet. Oh, shit. Wait, there's a typo.