The Vergecast - Bixby launches, Alexa on Android, and a new hyperloop

Episode Date: July 21, 2017

Summer editions of The Vergecast continue as Nilay and Dieter welcome Ashley Carman and Jake Kastrenakes back to the show to discuss the news that hit the site this week. Elon Musk said he got “verbal” approval from The White House to build a hyperloop on the East Coast, Comcast is back at it again with statements on net neutrality, and we’ve got a few updates in the AI department. Also, Lauren Goode updates us on the newest episode of her series Next Level once again! This week, she visited Dolby Labs to explore their experiments to track people’s emotional responses as they watch movies and TV. There’s a lot more in between that, so listen to it all and you’ll get it all.  02:52 - Pacific Rim: Uprising’s teaser 05:24 - Elon Musk says he has a green light to build a NY-Philly-Baltimore-DC hyperloop 11:47 - Bixby feels more like a return of the old Samsung than a path to the future 20:27 - Next Level episode 2 with Lauren Goode 37:21 - You’ll be able to talk to Alexa on Android phones starting this week 40:25 - Why is Comcast using self-driving cars to justify abolishing net neutrality? 44:09 - Microsoft wants to close the rural broadband gap with TV white spaces 51:58 - Ashley’s weekly segment “Let’s talk about translucent gadgets” 54:26 - Google Glass is back from the dead 58:04 - Snap’s Spectacles are now available directly from Amazon 1:00:18 - How Instagram is reshaping restaurant design 1:04:25 - Apple joined by Foxconn and others in its fight with Qualcomm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.biz. It's a new thing. Can I tell you a story? I can't tell the story because I'll docks the person. But a long time ago. I can't because it's the story about a domain name. So I have to change. I'll try to change the domain name.

A long time ago when I was a lawyer, it was up against in a case. and the other attorney, her email address was at attorney.biz, something attorney.biz. And I was like, I'm going to win. Like the second I got the first email, I was like, I got this. It was very clear. Did you win? I won. I mean, we settled.

It's technically on a winner on a settlement. By the way, the verge. com is registered. It goes to a landing site. Please don't go to the verge. com. Or, if you'd like, bone dot zone. Excellent.

Anyway, I'm Eli Patel. I'm here. You are listening to me. You've been listening to Deiter. There he is. You've also heard Ashley Carman's voice. Hello. And you've heard Jake Ashnakis' voice.

Hello. There he is. I actually don't know if I've spoken yet. I think I laughed at one point. True verge fans will be able to identify your laugh. By the story. You've heard Jake chuckle, but he's here. Paul Miller, sadly, is sick.

Also, I believe it's his birthday, so he's not here. We do not. Is Paul's birthday today? There was like a rumor floating around that it's his birthday. I've not verified this rumor. What? He's sick on his birthday. That's really sad.

It's really sad. I just want to make it clear that we do not run the sort of workplace where you have to fake being sick to take a day off on your birthday. But I'm thinking about changing our policy such that is the case. Anyway, we're here. Happy birthday, Paul, if it is indeed your birthday. Who knows? Again, I haven't checked. I'm a bad friend.

No, Paul is sick. Are you looking? I googled Paul. Miller B-Day. Can we have Paul call in just to answer this? He's sick. He's not that sick. Yeah, I actually did see Paul. Yeah, he was literally walking around. But he said, I'm not here. And I was like, you're here. All right. Again, this is all dead air. And I think we should got this part of me back to the show. I can tell you, I know that it is Paul's birthday because it is impossible to remove birthday calendars from every single calendar app on the planet.

And it is the bane of my existence. And according to the birthday calendar that I am unable to disable, it is in fact Paul Miller's birthday. Happy birthday, Paul. Everyone tweeted Paul. He's at Future Paul. He's available on Twitter. Just tweet him some wishes. And hopefully that will help him heal his sick body.

Is that a phrase? It's not a phrase. Look, there was not a lot of news this week. You may have noticed by the extended vamping that we don't have a lot to talk about. There is some stuff. First, I just want to point this out. The trailer for the next Pacific Rim movie came out. It's called Pacific Rim Uprising.

It is the most important thing in my life at this moment because it invites you to join some sort of Yeager army, and that is my dream. I'm just putting it out there. Were you not a battle-muck person? I did not see the original Pacific Room. Oh, my God. Take it out of here.

Tell me you're sick. Why should I be excited about the Pacific Rim, too? Battle Uprising. There's so many reasons. The first movie is perfect. It's like robots fighting in the ocean or something, right? One, the answer is yes, and two, the answers is an emphatic yes. Yes, it's giant robots fighting in the ocean, fighting monsters in the ocean.

That actually sounds all right. Dieter, I'm assuming you were like a battle mic person, because I was a deep battlemack person. So there's two schools of battlemecs. There is the school from when specific rim comes, which is the classic Japanese battlemec. Yeah. You know, robotech, like that line, and that's like power rangers are sort of in that zone and Voltron also honestly. belongs in that zone. So that's like the very classic line

that everybody thinks of. I am not of that lineage. I am a battle tech guy, which is a very American style of battle mechs. I had these video games. I know what's up. It involves, well, the video games came second. OG battle tech people had

hexagon maps and little tiny miniatures and turn-based things and sheets that laid out all the specs and stats and powers and guns and armor of their battle. Mex with tiny little, I kid you not, in order to, like, fill in your armor, there were little tiny bubble sheets that you had to fill in with pencils as though it were an SAT test. Yeah, I just played the video.

And it was a turn-based strategy game. Yeah. And then there was also Mech Warrior, which was the role-playing game in which you could be the character that piloted the battlemex. Mech Warrior, too, is the game I had for my Mac, and it was awesome. Yeah. Yeah. It's a canonical.

The MacG. I think it's Deter is cooler than I am. I think we've made this extremely clear. McWarri II, one of the best video games. I think actually it's the opposite. Just to be clear. Ashley, were you a Pacific room person or battle tech person? I literally have no idea what you're talking about.

Both of you need to leave this place and go watch that first movie. It is great. I vaguely remember an ocean when I saw, when I heard about the first Pacific. We're done. We're done with this whole thing because it's making me sad. Okay, there's real news to talk about. Actually, this blew up our day today. This is a real thing that happened.

Elon Musk just randomly tweeted, based on nothing specific that we can find, I just got verbal approval to build a tunnel for a hyperloop between New York, Baltimore, and D.C. New York to D.C. in 29 minutes. A lot going on here. Okay. Can I just say, love the hyperloop. Super excited.

I've noticed it continues to get longer and longer, and yet there is still zero hyperloop. Like, he went from nothing to, what if I go across multiple states? Yeah, this would be the world's longest tunnel. This is, and so he just, like, chatted with somebody in the White House, and they were like, yeah, Elon, that sounds good.

Yeah, JJ, we call him. So it seems like he just went to the White House, had a chat with Jared Kushner, and then Jared Kushner was like, yeah, sure, that sounds sweet. And now apparently this, like, that's not, The White House kind of confirmed it today, too. But, like, does the White House have the power to, like, authorize a, like, massive interstate tunnel system?

I'm not, I mean, I guess they do stuff with the highways. They made an author. Can they do, can they do underground? I think there's a lot. First of all, this is my favorite take on this. It's Matt Iglesias at Vox. And he goes, I think, because a tunnel would have to go through New Jersey, but would never stop in New Jersey. Right?

because you would just go to the two cities. He's like, I don't think New Jersey is going to be super pumped about everyone just skipping New Jersey. Like, dig up most of New Jersey so you can just get by it as fast as any human has ever traveled across New Jersey. So that's like a first problem. I don't know if the federal government... It's another Chris Christie snub. Yeah. They verbally approved the hyperloop just as screw with Chris Christie.

Yeah, no, but I'm sure Elon had a stop there and they're like, it's not happening. then there's the city so Ashley you pointed out like you're going to have to dig up New York City. Yeah I don't understand how they're going to dig up New York City Yeah like maybe Baltimore are fine Well no they're going to do it If this actually relates to the year conversation

They're going to do it by digging very very deep And that's when the monsters come out like The Elon Musk is going to discover a Balrog Yeah I mean so he's been digging up the parking lot It's SpaceX This is a true fact

With his new company the boring company. He's like an eight-year-old boy. He's just like, I'm digging a tunnel. I will say to you, there have been many reports. I'm not even, this is not a joke. I'm not exaggerating. This is not a story.

There have been many reports that parking is already quite bad at SpaceX. I've heard it from people. I think it's funny that Elon Musk was like, whatever. I'm going to dig up the parking lot just to prove I have this tunnel company called the boring company. He also doesn't really own a hyperloop company. Yeah, wait. So is the boring company supposed to be creating this tunnel slash hyperloop?

Yes. No, no. So he said he, remember, he released the hyperloop as like an open source set of, like, plans. And yet it does not actually exist. There are some test hyperloop. So like Hyperloop 1 is like running sleds in a tube in the desert. They're not. No vacuums yet.

No vacuums yet. they're just like proving that that trains and tubes They can build a train. It's fine. Okay. They've gotten that far. Elon has a hypothetical like transportation system,

a hypothetical tunnel building company and like hypothetical approval right now. I feel like tunnel building is not like tunnels exist. His claim is that he can dig a tunnel faster. He's got a tunnel in a parking lot. That's all he's done. Wait, I'm sorry.

When was last time you dug a tunnel in the parking lot? The man of a parking lot. It demands flying rockets that they're landing. The cars are driving themselves. That's completely different technology. It is, okay, fair. It's a different technology. But, you know, you've got to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I do wonder, okay, it's like, does he actually just have unlimited money? Like, who can waste money on digging tunnels in a parking lot for like a hobby? Like, he's not, is he planning on turning these things to business? It can't be like that much money. It's your own parking lot. I guess. I don't know. I'm just out there with a shovel all the time.

I'm doing this. But it's a good idea. It's a great idea. Infrastructure. Trains. Excellent. Love it. But he did tweet,

I got verbal approval, which is just not how it works for better or worse. Like getting the thumbs up from like a Trump family member is not how you embark on a giant infrastructure project. I noticed they're very good at sticking to promises. And then he like slowly walked it back. There was another tweet where he said, They're excited about it. Still many approvals to go.

Get excited. And it feels, I think he said get excited. And it feels like what he was doing was now everybody's all amped up about this project. Because the Northeast Corridor is like Amtrak's most important line. He's got everybody all amped up about it. Now people are going to want it. So he can like go, for example, to the state of New Jersey and say, no one wants to come here anyway. Just let me through because I got the tweets.

Look at all these retweets, Chris, which I believe is how politics in the Jersey works. Probably. Yeah. But I think it's exciting. It's like the most exciting thing I think that happened this week. The idea of traveling 30 minutes to D.C. from New York is exciting. Yeah. Yeah.

It's good news. I'd do that. And it's going to stop right at the Observer Building and Jared Kushner is going to get on it all by himself. That's why he wants it. Exactly. He just wants to get home. It's going to go directly from the White House to Trump Tower. I didn't even think about that.

If he just like pitches it as like, keep it exclusive to the Trump. family for a year. They have a plane. They have the best plane. They have Air Force One. Yeah. Do you think that I can do it in half an hour? I mean, Air Force One's capabilities are technically classified.

I bet they can't. I bet it's not actually a secret. Probably they have to land and go through security. I'm sure they have to do some sort of stuff. That's true. All right. We should talk about much more mundane things. There's voice assistant news in this world, Dieter.

That's your favorite. So Bixby has basically launched. Is that the long and the short of it? Yeah. The voice assistant is a thing that you can have. It's rolling out in the U.S. Samsung to all over the launch of this thing by delaying it. And then by they added like hashtags to the description of the two,

the male and female voices that you can get from Bixby. Completely unnecessary, by the way. I don't know if you need a hashtag to describe a voice to you when you're picking one. Yeah. But for the male voice, they said it was assertive. And for the female voice, I believe they said it was

chipper. Yeah. Which that's super not a good look, Samsung. That's such an unforced error. There's a totally unforced error. There's no reason. You didn't need the hashtags. Right. And then the thing itself is like kind of broken. Right. Yeah. So Dan wrote a really good piece

that it really reminds him of old Samsung. We're talking like S5 Samsung, where it makes blips and bloops and is just, it's like software for software's sake. The fact that it's not only is it tied to that button and you can't remap that button, but Samsung is actively and aggressively shutting down any attempts to circumvent the hard pairing of the Bixby button to Bixby. And so that's annoying. And it just, you know, it doesn't work. The whole point of Bixby is you can talk to your phone interface rather than tap on your

phone interface, but it can't quite get there. And I feel like it's to get a voice assistant to work, you don't have to get 100% there because nobody's there yet. But you got to get to like 60. And they're not at 60. And so it's the same thing that happened in the early days of Siri where people are like, oh, well, this doesn't work. But it's way less acceptable now because you could just go use something else like Google. assistant or, you know, Alexa. Apparently.

Alexa. I mean, if you could remap the button on the side to open the Amazon app and then talk to Alexa, that would be more useful. Yeah. But you can't. Dan had a great line that's like Samsung software bloat has now manifested in hardware bloat, which is brutal, but I love it.

I just, I don't, I don't want to just say Samsung sucks, Samsung software sucks. I do actually, because then, you know, he went to. to try and I wrote the big feature about like the scope of their ambition here. And so I want to give Samsung, even now, even when this thing is launched and is like not really that good yet, I want to give Samsung the benefit of the doubt and the space to try and innovate and create its own ecosystem and try and innovate on the idea of a human software interface through voice. Like those are all genuinely good ideas. The challenge for Samsung is how do you get those genuinely good ideas out in the world when you know the first iteration is going to be not that

great and how do you manage around that? And I feel like they've just done a pretty terrible job of setting expectations explaining to users what it can and can't do and putting it in a context that actually makes people feel delighted by it and not disappointed by it. If Bixby were like an optional thing on the button and you, you know, you'd be it. And you, you know, you could turn it on if you want or you could turn it off if you want and like you could say hey bixby whenever um and it were but it were not so core to the identity of the phone um then there they would end up building a small group of people who really were into it it wouldn't grow as fast it wouldn't be as splashy but then they could work out some bugs for a while they kind of did this with the early access

program but i don't know that they could have spent longer doing that i think is sort of my take they should have launched this thing without hard mapping it to the button. They would have had a bunch of people, like, refused to use it, and that would have sucked for them. But on the other hand, people would have put it in a context where they were happy with what they got instead of disappointed with what they got. That's true. I think Bigsby is one of those Samsung things where two years from now. It will be in a settings menu that you can turn on. But other than that, it'll be on.

And that's like the worst. Like, they got to stop doing that to people. Were you going to say something? No. No, you're just hanging out. Yeah, I'm chilling. I'm thinking about Bixby in washing machines. Yeah, that's terrifying.

They're smart fridge because they are already doing that in Korea. Yeah. And I'm like, wow, your assistant sucks, and you're forcing in upon people with their refrigerators. Yeah, the number of things Samsung wants to put Bixby in is, like, terrifying considering that Dan's experience with it, as he wrote in his piece, is it mostly gets it wrong. He gets it wrong so often that I don't want it controlling anything with the heating element. in my home. Like that seems

terrifying. Sears, but I don't know if you saw it, this is like totally adjacent news, but Sears is basically they have a line of appliances, the Kenmore line, they've only sold them in Sears stores,

selling them through Amazon now. So the idea of buying washing machine on Amazon, insane, that just seems like something you should buy in a store and not just like push a button online, but so it goes. But they're all going to be Alexa enabled, like all of the Kenmore appliances on Amazon.

So this is happening. whether or not we want it to happen. There was also the thermostat this week with Cortana. That thermostat looks like a piece of garbage. It's from the sea through. I like it. I think it looks awesome. It looks like it's made by Johnson Controls, a partnership of Microsoft. Just go look at it.

It looks like it... I don't know how to say this. I think Vurchast listeners might understand what I mean when I say this. It looks like the software is slow. You know that thing where you like touch it and nothing happens? It just, I looked at it. I was like, it's cool, it's clear, the screen's trying to. And I was like, I bet when you touch it, it's slow.

That is immediately what I thought when I saw it. I don't know why, but I encourage you to look at it. But there's a thing. Like, once you've seen enough displays. A very reputable technology journalism brand in their headline about this thermostat, called it quote unquote beautiful. And I agree with The Verge when it's, headline says that this is a beautiful thermosite.

I think it looks great. I feel like when you put that in the house. I agree it will look slow, but like. I ever feel like, like it's trying to look like kind of futuristic and I have a feeling it's going to look really tacky in a home. And be slow. I'm just going to point out again that the worst part of that is it's slow. I don't know how you were judging the slowness right now.

I mean, it just looks like it will be, first of all, it runs windows. And I don't mean to like, right, like three years from now, the thing is buggy. Customized windows for thermostat. Yeah, Windows 10T. It's literally called like Windows 10T. I'm just telling you, three years for now, you're like thermostat, it's like has ransomware on it. It's a little loaded down. That's it.

Windows is great. Everyone loves Windows. So is your washing machine going to be Bixby? Your thermostat going to be Cortana. Yeah. And your echo is your Alexa. This is the endless problem. This is why I think Amazon will slowly win because they'll have $35.

dots sitting in everyone's house and people would prefer to buy the one that works with the thing they have. Also, I think the question about where the microphones go. This is Andy Rubin's big bet is that he's going to solve this problem with Essential. That's the whole point of Essential and him making a home speaker, home, whatever the heck the thing is. I bet I could ship an Android phone faster than Andy Rubin. He's shipped an Android phone right now. We should race Andy Rubin. Let's send Dan back to China.

You can put a phone together like a day there. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll just ship it. We'll ship 5,000 Android phone. tomorrow. Go to store. Dot the verge.com.

You can pre-order now. You can back our Kickstarter. As you know, nothing is guaranteed. Just please give us some money. We've already been talking to Tier 1 manufacturers. That's how every Kickstarter video ends.

We've got all our designs done. We're talking to Tier 1 manufacturers. We just need your help. We just need your help. To beat Andy Ruben to market with a Android phone. All right. So here's what we're going to do. As you know, next level,

Lauren Good's show is going on. I talked to her about this episode, which is really interesting. It's about what Dolby is doing to measure your emotions while you watch movies and TV shows. It's wild. So I'll talk to Lauren about that's going to happen for 10 minutes. I'm going to read an ad. We'll come back. We'll talk about some other things.

Here is Lauren. Hey, Lauren. How are you? Hey, Eli. I'm good. How are you? I'm great. I'm talking to you about your show again.

So everybody is Lauren Good, the host of Next Level with Lauren Good. I like saying your name at the beginning and end of that phrase. It makes me happy. You just did your second episode. Yes, it just published earlier this week on Theverge.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and as I said before, directly into your brain. And we're really excited because this one was a little different from last week. Last week was all about planes. It was about modular planes, and it got this wild response.

And this week, we talked about Hollywood. Well, I mean, so the conceit of your show is that there's what we see, and then there's iterative development of what we see. So like every earphones get a little bit better. And we're all used to the world of iterative development. But there's stuff happening in research labs that's like next level technology. And so you're you're looking at the next level of Hollywood stuff, right? Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. We were looking to highlight some of the concepts, innovations, crazy, bizarre prototypes, things that are in beta, things that are happening that maybe you haven't heard about yet or really seen or experienced. Because like you said,

like other stuff that we cover is wonderful and we love gadgets, but sometimes can be a little bit iterative. So in this case, it's kind of a funny story. I was at Dolby months ago now, Dolby Labs in San Francisco, because they were having this kind of press tour day and it was pegged to the launch of Iron Fist. I don't know how many of you have watched the Netflix series Iron Fist. There was some controversy around it. I don't think it did very well, but there was this big like two days. I suffered through all of Iron Fist. You watched all of it. I feel like you should get a metal. It's in like HDR.

It's available. It was real pretty on my TV and I suffered through all of it. Well, that's exactly it. HDR. So it was Dolby that mastered Iron Fist after the fact. And so we were being taken on this press store through Dolby Labs a few months back. And we walked by this room and there was a woman sitting on a couch in this lab and she was wearing an EEG cap.

I don't know if you know what an EEG cap is, but it's an electroencephalogram. cap that has all these little nodes on it. And those nodes are measuring your brain activity, essentially. So this woman is sitting on a couch wearing this crazy looking cap that looks like something straight out of the matrix. She's got all kinds of sensors on galvanic skin response sensors, heart rate sensors. There's a flirt camera pointed at her. And we were like, what is happening in here? And Dolby said, this is this project that we've been working on. So for next level, we went back, by me, I mean, verge video directors. And we shot an episode inside this crazy biophysical lab at Dolby.

So what do they do? You watch videos and you measure your response? Like how does it work? Yes. So the whole idea is that as the subjects are sitting in this lab, they're watching movies and TV shows, presumably ones that Dolby has mixed and mastered, but maybe not.

And they are, the scientists at Dolby are measuring the emotional responses that people are having to this content. And the whole lab is run by this really, really smart woman named Poppy Crum. She's a neuroscientist, but, excuse me, she's actually, I think, a neurophysiologist, but, like, if she wasn't so great and smart, like, I feel like Poppy Crum would definitely be, like, a good villain name.

Like a Children's Book character. Or, like, a children's book character, yeah. But she's running the lab, and they're just, they have these subjects that are coming through, and they're trying to figure out what, at what point do people, do their heart rates, you know, increase? At what point do people start sweating? At what point do people feel aroused or excited? And they're taking all of that data and they're able to then tell their Hollywood partners that they do the mixing and mastering for, we know that people will have this

type of biophysical response to these types of scenes, color palettes, sounds, HDR. It's kind of crazy. And it's, I mean, it's not altogether surprising because the more I started digging, the more I realized that a lot of entertainment companies are starting to do this. And they want to better understand people's emotional responses to content. But it was kind of cool to just get into the lab myself and try it out. Yeah, I mean, one of the first times I ever saw Dolby Vision, which is their HDR format demoed, like two or three years ago now is it CES. And the person demoing it to me literally said, we know that we're going to play an explosion for you and your body, it's so bright, your body will perceive it as heat. And he's like, just watch. And I play the explosion. I was like,

wow, I feel warm. He's like, yeah, you're not actually warm. Like, it's just so bright that we can make you feel heat. And it seems like they've taken that idea all the way out. Yes, they know now that your body is conditioned to feel warm when it sees that level of heat. And there, I mean, there are just a few different things sort of going into play there. The first is that they have the sensors or the types of cameras now to track that, right? So in this case, they might be using the Fleur thermal imaging camera to see that your face or your cheeks or whatever is might actually be flushing. The second is that we have screens now. We're looking at things on screens that are bright enough to get even closer to reality. So I think that the metric Dolby used to describe

it as 20,000 candela per square meter in terms of how bright the screens get. And some, you know, technologists will say nits. Others will say candela's. They're like some, you know, variation of the same metric. But they're basically saying the screens we have now are so bright that it can make you feel like this is, this is reality. So you've got this hyper-realistic content. You've got these super bright screens. And you have the biometric, you know, cameras or sensors now to measure that this is actually happening, which is pretty, it's this kind of confluence of things, right? And at the verge of I feel like we're talking about sensors all the time.

We're talking about wearables. We're talking about fingerprint sensors. We're talking about facial recognition. Like, we're talking about all these things that are built into, like, all of the products that we now have. But when you think about that confluence of things, that, like, these sensors are now really accessible. They're actually pretty cheap.

The more interesting thing is actually what are people starting to do with all this data that we can gather from them? Yeah. So one of the, I don't want to give it away, but everyone should watch the video, but Pixar scientists are using this to design their movies. Yes, one of the anecdotes that a lot of people really liked in the videos is when Poppy Crum says, how she was working with the Pixar lead image scientist. And when they were doing the color for the movie Inside Out, there's a scene where a baby is born. And the baby is born and there's a, to use Poppy's where it's a diffuse white screen that sort of takes over, you know, fills the,

fills the screen, fills the frame, and that that was a very conscious choice because the image scientists said, we want people to feel physiological pain. That's what happens when a baby's born. You feel physiological pain. And so what sort of color pattern or color scheme can we use here that will make people feel that in some way, whether they are conscious of it or not? That's crazy to think about. Yeah, I mean, you know, on some level, that's what, when you're going to the movies or you're watching a show or even if you're doing something like going to some crazy VR installation on a roller coaster. I don't know. I think about like all those people sitting in that giant Samsung installation at CES who are just like being yanked around while they're

wearing VR headsets and probably getting very nauseous. But like when you participate in anything like that, you are going for entertainment. You're going for an intensive item and experience. And maybe on some level you're kind of expecting to be manipulated. You know, you're expecting like to escape in some way. But this is like, this is like next level we can use these imaging and sound tools to manipulate the way you feel. And it's just everything is, you know, can now be sort of engineered to do it. Before like the color, you know, film directors have used certain color palettes for decades now. That's like very well known. And in film school, they'll teach this stuff. And effective computing is something that's been studied for decades. But like now these companies are

getting so good at it at such a granular level that things can actually be engineered to trigger a reaction. So you got to try it, right? You wore the cap and it measured you. What was that like? That was a little bit anticlimactic, to be honest. Really? Yeah, I'm like, I'm like, go watch the video, but it was anti-climactic, that part. Because what's happening is they're showing you your data on these giant screens that are in the Dolby Lab. And so I could sit there and I could see my own thermal image. I found out that my armpits were very sweaty, by the way, because it will show, I mean, it will show things like armpit sweat and like chest sweat. It's, you know, it can be a little mortifying.

And then I could see, you know, my heart rate spiking and things like that. But that's all the raw unprocessed data. I mean, Dolby is going to take all of that data that they're getting from all the subjects that are sitting there and they're going to process it and they're going to analyze it. And so I didn't really have the chance to do that. All I could see was, okay, there's my, there's my heart rate, right? There are the spikes and the dips and like sort of the same stuff that you would see if you were just like looking at your heart rate from a wristwatch reading or something like that.

So that part was like a little bit anticlimactic. But I would love to, I mean, and what we were watching too were these kind of preformed clips, these, you know, clips of fire and things that Dolby had like determined were good for a demo. But like I would love to sit and watch an entire two-hour movie, especially if it was in some type of giant movie theater where there's a lot of sound, you know, a great sound surround sound, 3D sound. And maybe you're like, your seat is shaking. or whatever it might be

and actually have, actually understand at what points I was like, I don't know, I guess reacting for lack of a better term, having an emotional response. It feels as though part of the idea here is to figure out how the experience of being in a theater where all the Dolby stuff is happening, right?

Dolby makes the sound systems. They make the surround sound. They make the screen technologies versus being at your house with Dolby Vision in your soundbar or whatever. It feels like part of the cell here to call it a cell is that they can create more of those experiences in the theater and they're going to amplify those in a way that you can't get at home because that's like a big part of the industry. You see Christopher Nolan this week was like, I'm not going to do Netflix because I believe in the theater window and I want to put my movies in the theaters. There's like a piece of this where the technology they need to actually affect your emotions in that way like you're talking about like in the theater.

big screen, tons of speakers, versus what they can do at home is it's going to start splitting ever more, right? And I think that's fascinating. If you want to get the most intense experience, you have to go to this place that can always do something that is very hard to do at home. Yeah, absolutely. And I say this as a man with Adobe Vision TV and like 500 speakers. Right, because you're a speaker hound. Yeah, we've talked about your speaker addiction before. I'm going to watch movies at your house next time. Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of, it makes a lot of sense that any company at this point that is using biosensors to gather data that proves something, that they would want to prove something that benefits

their core competency. So for Dolby, that is, you're exactly right. It's getting people into theaters or convincing them that that intensified human experience can only happen with Dolby tools in a Dolby theater, with Dolby surround sound, right? Like that, it makes perfect sense. I mean, one of the things that we mentioned in the piece, too, is when you look at companies like Netflix and Hulu, they're also using biosensors in some capacity. But they're using eye trackers specifically when they're doing testing for their app redesigns. So they're saying,

okay, well, we see as people are looking at our app, their eyes are going over here instead of over there, or they keep having to move their eyes back and forth as they look through a menu option or look at a thumbnail. And so they're using it to inform how are people engaging with their app because at the end of the day, getting people into their app and to use their app and to stream stuff from their app is the most important thing. Whereas Dolby is using it because they're like, hey, you should really be using Dolby technology to amplify your movie or TV show experience. So all these biosensors are being used in different ways. But ultimately, it comes down to this thing where it's a little bit creepy because they are being used to

affect us in ways that we might not be fully aware of. You know, we talked about us a little bit before. Like, when you were editing the episode, I've been thinking about you saying that for a while. And it just, what strikes me is, like, the point of art is to manipulate you, right? Like, if you're the artist, you're aiming to have some people feel some way when they view your work. And I don't know how I feel about being able to quantify that. So it's less about your instincts and your expression as an artist. And it's more about, I want people to feel sad. And I can dial in these settings on the screen for maximum sadness. I think there's something really interesting there.

I don't know if we have enough time to fall down that total rabbit hole, but it's a really fascinating thing to puzzle over. After, of course, you have gone and watched next level with the internet. Yes, you should go watch it. After we've talked about it for the past 15 minutes or so, you just go watch it. Yeah, you've heard us describe the images and now go look at the images. So before we go real quick, you've got another episode coming out. give the people a tease on that one.

Oh, I love giving the people a tease. So next week of our videos, next week on Tuesday, that's going to be July 25th, we are publishing an episode that's about prescription video games. We're fascinated by this. Video games have, of course, gone a little bit of a bad rap over the past few decades since they've been mainstream. People have been concerned about their impact on potential impact. on aggressive or violent behavior, how they impact child development if someone's young and

their formative years and they're sitting there playing video games all day, all of that. There's a group of scientists here in San Francisco and actually an offshoot company in Boston that are focused entirely on developing, running trials on, and possibly pushing through for FDA approval prescription video games that would boost your cognitive abilities in some way. And so we went to their labs. We played some of the games. We interviewed a lot of people for this. for this video and we're really interested in um we're really excited to show it to you yeah i think

this episode in particular is one of the most interesting and challenging of all of the things that you've looked at and one thing that you've said repeatedly about the show is next level tech is a little bit dangerous it's a little bit challenging and i think you know in a way that iterative you know tablet software improvements just aren't but like this is like really meaningful fully challenging and potentially a little bit dangerous as well. Yes, absolutely. Especially when you see me trying to walk on one of those Omni Virtuix platforms while wearing a VR headset, you understand the danger. The actual physical danger of me possibly falling off this crazy little treadmill with a VR headset on. It was one of the few times I had to take the, I had to take

the headset off because I was feeling pretty nauseous. So. Wow. Okay, well, let's not give it all away. That's next week. It's coming out on Tuesday. Everywhere your mind can wander on the internet, just look for it and you'll find it and watch it and share it, of course. And Lauren, it was great to have you back in the show. We'll have you next week. We'll talk about prescription video games. It was great to be on the Vergecast. Thanks, everyone. See ya. This episode of The Vergecast brought to you by Squarespace. Whatever your next big idea might be, count on Squarespace to help you create an eye-catching online platform that brings it to life, where they need a portfolio to showcase your work, a store to sell your products, and

services or a blog to share your ideas, Squarespace gives you everything you need to look at an expert right from the start. You can even get a unique domain name, which strengthens your brand and makes it easiest for visitors to find you. Plus, with Squarespace's award-winning templates, creating a beautiful website is a simple and intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content with the click of a mouse, and there's nothing to install, patch, or upgrade ever. But if you have a question, there's award-winning 24-7 customer support. They can help you with any problem, no matter how technical or trivial. It's like your very own IT department. So, make your next move, start your free trial at Squarespace.com today, and the offer code is, I'm sure you know, is Verge, V-E-R-G-E.

You get 10% off your first purchase. That is Squarespace.com. The offer code is Verge. We're back. Can we talk about Alexa on Android phones real quick? We can wrap that up. I know we should have kept it in the voice assistant section. So the news you can see it. The very well-defined voice assistant section of our show today. Alexa's coming to every Android phone in the form of like a,

option inside the Amazon shopping app, which is surreal to me. Like, why isn't it a separate app? Google made Google Assistant a separate app. Maybe it makes it more likely that people use it. Maybe they just threw it in there. But it shows to me that, like, the Amazon shopping app is basically the, like, you can buy stuff equivalent of Facebook's. What do they call it?

Their big blue app. What's the, you've got some nickname for it? The big blue app. Yeah, they just throw stuff. in there. Which is funny because Android has an accommodation where you can actually choose your voice assistant on, you know, most phones that don't hide that from you. They could have done that.

Cortana has done that on a few different phones. So, yeah, I don't know. Like, am I going to open up the Amazon shopping app to use Alexa? No. Do I hang out in the Amazon shopping app enough that are like, oh, hey, Alexa's here. I can use that since I'm already here. Would you if, say you have like a whole bunch of home automation stuff set up and now you're on the go and you need to, I don't know, turn your lights on or some, for some reason.

I can't really foresee why you would need to do that. But, right, if you need to control something at home in your way, I don't know, that's your gateway to do it. I'm not, I don't actually think a lot of people are going to open up the Amazon app and use this, but. I mean, that's how it works in the iPhone. It's in the Amazon app and the iPhone. Why is it in the Amazon app? I don't think anybody opens apps to use voice assistance, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that's correct. Nobody, the Google Assistant has terrible rankings in the iPhone App Store. Yeah, this is a true thing.

It's just more likely you're going to have the Amazon app. Of course you're going to put it in there. It's Amazon's biggest facing consumer brand is Alexa. Wait, they also have an Alexa app, don't they? There's like a separate Alexa app and it doesn't have Alexa in it. It's just like for messaging or something, right? No, no, it's for controlling your Alexa stuff. Right.

You can't actually talk to Alexa. That's where you enable the skills and you name the devices and you put them on the Wi-Fi network. So Alexa is in the Amazon app. Alexis settings are in the Alexa app. Yeah. Just like on the iPhone, insanely, settings are in the settings app, even though you are currently in another app with which you would like to adjust the settings. That makes sense.

It does. Just go through it. All of this makes sense, Jake. I'm with Jake. Yeah. None of it actually makes sense. Everything should be in the same place, and that place is the Amazon app. What?

The Amazon app. What about the Alexa app? The Alexa app. It should be in the Alexa app. The Alexa app. The Alexa app should be in the Amazon app. Okay. Sure. And you're like done setting your Alexa, you're like, I need some more light bulbs.

Push the button. We need to unbundle all of this. There should be a light bulb app, washing machine app. That sounds like that. So you just described HomeKit. Brutal. Okay. Jake, I got you here.

Hello. Whenever you hear, I make you talk about in actuality. So Comcast is a thing. Just try to walk people through the thing. Yes. Okay. So this week, the first round. of net neutrality comments were due, and a bunch of companies filed their comments, including

Comcast, the one that everyone was so excited to hear from. Comcast, by the way, an investor in Box Media, which owns the verge, that's your disclosure. Yes. But just an investor. They're just out there. Yes. We took their money. And I like to think that occasionally they read our site and regret it.

It's more than occasionally. But yeah. They always do regret it. So yeah, Comcast filed it's comment, and we were looking through it. You know, it's almost entirely exactly what you'd expect from Comcast. They're like, wow, no newsrelly sure is horrible. It's just ruining our business. Things were great, and now they're terrible, and the Internet's going to be ruined.

And at the same time, they're going, you know, but we would be so cool with these rules, if only X, Y, and Z. So at some point in their filing, we notice that they're saying, you know, we actually like this no paid prioritization thing except for like a couple things here and there. And they're like one reason that you might want to allow paid prioritization is autonomous cars because it might be really helpful for autonomous cars to have, you know, a prioritized internet connection because they need to get stuff really, really fast. and we thought that was like pretty interesting and weird. We'd never heard that claim before. Yeah, usually it's like health devices. Yeah, usually it's health device. And you know, that that like certainly makes more sense

because like if it's a pacemaker or something, you know, probably it should, you know, be instant. But autonomous cars we never heard before. And then our transportation reporter, Andy Hawkins, decided to look into it. And he found out that it turns out autonomous cars don't talk to the, internet at all. So Comcast just threw this argument in there and there's absolutely nothing behind it. Either they're, they just said that like hoping that one day the internet will be part of cars and this way they can make money off of it or they just like didn't pay any attention and put that in there because I thought it sounded nice. Well, the two points anyway that I thought

were interesting were autonomous cars need to talk to each other. They need to talk to the infrastructure. but the FCC is set aside the entire 5.9 gigahertz band for that purpose. So there is like a whole separate radio set of radio spectrum that is available just for the cars. So that's what you mean by they don't talk to the internet at all. They're happening. Yeah, they have their own network somewhere else. But, and this I think was really interesting, mobile carriers want that spectrum back because mobile carriers love having spectrum and they want to make it all the internet and then have the car makers and cities pay to prioritize that.

information on the internet, which is, like, just use the thing that you have. And I think it's interesting because the FCC is so deep into, like, Ajit Pi, to his credit, is very high and more unlicensed radio usage, so things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And they've got a whole band for unlicensed radio usage where you'd expect all this innovation and standards to happen. But the carrier's like, what if we don't do that? Yeah, I've been hearing for years, you know, telecom companies being like, well, you know, what if we can like share this spectrum somehow?

And I don't entirely know how that would work out. But it definitely sounds like Comcast is hoping that one day they'll be able to get in on that. Well, I think this was last week. Microsoft announced for like the 500th time in the past decade that they're moving forward with their white space internet project. So it's this crazy idea where they will use computers to identify gags. in the TV spectrum and then send like super Wi-Fi over the gaps and they've been in fights. I'm not even kidding. They've been at it for a decade.

Like I wrote about white spaces and gadget a decade ago and every year on the dot Microsoft is like, we figured it out. Super Wi-Fi is here and it never shows up, but it's a lot of plans along those lines. Yeah, so wait, why is Microsoft doing that? Is it just because they just want to get more people connected? I think, you know, it's like they got a guy on staff. So everyone's friend. He brings the beer around on Fridays. And he's working on the white spaces.

And I'm like, yeah, just keep going. I mean, it's cool. It sounds like a good. Just keep trucking, Tom. Like, it's just doing it. I don't know. It's literally been a decade of Microsoft saying we can somehow programatically find a gap.

There was something about a billion dollars. And it sounds like maybe they just made up that number. No, I mean, I'm sure. Put some money to it. That was like their news release. They're like investing in it. they're going to, but, okay. I'm just saying, it's been a decade.

So next year, I'm sure we'll talk about white spaces on the show again. And then for the rest of my life, I will get the white spaces press release. But that is the whole like spectrum sharing game. I see. You're looking for gaps and then going in where you can. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

So, I mean, the whole Comcast thing, it was just like, this is the thing that keeps happening where we look at these arguments they're making. And on their face, they sound fairly reasonable, right? Autonomous cars, yeah, they probably should be fast. And then you look into them and you go, well, the grounding here does not make a ton of sense. And we've been doing a ton of that stuff where, like, if you look at the claims about investment into internet infrastructure, if you look at the harms on small internet providers, the stuff just isn't quite holding up the way that they're... You just talk to a bunch of, like, literally mom and pop ISPs, right?

Yeah, this is a big thing. In complete honesty, I kept, so Ajit Pai kept talking about mom and pop ISPs, and I'm like, that's not possible. What's a mom and pop ISP that's made up? But they're totally mom and pop ISPs. And like one company I spoke with is literally just this guy and his daughter in Colorado, and they have like a thousand customers. Just like they set up these wireless things and like their greatest struggle in life is trees, which get in the way of their signal. And so, yeah, I ended up speaking with a bunch of these companies to find out whether net neutrality had been hurting them or not. And it was super interesting because half the ones I spoke with were like, no, what are you talking about?

There's like literally been no harm. And the other ones were saying basically a lot of like hypotheticals. They were worried about what could happen. And, you know, it's like a little over two years on and like so far these harms haven't really come. There's one company that said they had spent like $40,000 to like come into compliance because they had to like write some open internet statement. It's just like they spent this on like legal counsel. But there wasn't anyone that had actually said they had really changed their plans or not made an investment. The one big one, EGPai had actually cited this one.

woman's testimony. She is in charge of the ISP Aristotle, and she said that they were going to triple their subscriber base, but didn't because of the net neutrality rules. And it is true that they delayed their plans because they wanted to spend some money coming into compliance with net neutrality. But they're now moving forward with those plans again. And they started that before the election, before they knew it was going to be overturned, which I think sort of goes to show that net neutrality is not just flat out killing this stuff,

even for people who write out the gate we're saying this is going to be a problem. It's going to stop investment. So what happens next, right? He just got reconfirmed. He just says hearing. He's not exactly reconfirmed yet, I don't think. But I think we've got another month about for the net neutrality comment period. Now is the reply comment period.

to now is when the more heated arguments start, I guess. The lawyers go crazy. That's going to be fun. It's not going to be fun. And then it's sort of a waiting game where, I mean, I think the FCC probably has a pretty good idea of what they want to put out for their final net neutrality proposal. But technically they're supposed to take all of these comments into consideration. So it'll probably be at least a couple months as they look through these comments. There are like over 8 million comments.

That's way more than last time, right? Yeah, last time, I think it was like 3.4 million comments or something like that in total. And right now, we're at the halfway point. Yeah. And there are already more than twice as many comments. That's crazy. Is it all bots? Because FCC's going to get it's all bots and stuff.

That's a really good question. Yeah. I don't know. But yeah, so they're going to have to somehow. look through all of those? I don't know how you look through eight million comments. They probably normally get like 10 comments. I read an insane Reddit conspiracy theory today. Oh, yes. I read this today. I'm just letting you know it's a Reddit conspiracy theory that the bot attack on the FCC came from inside the house because the FCC has not yet released an analysis. I think Gizmodo

foiled them to like ask what this hack that they claim had happened and they said they didn't have any information on the hack. So then the Redditors like went nuts. Why? Why would they have hacked themselves? So they can toss out all the comments. I mean, look, it's a Reddit conspiracy theory. And as much as we give pie crap on this show, I don't think that he set up like a rogue internal hacking operation at the FCC. Yeah, you can just ignore the comments.

But if he did, that would be cool. And I think Jason Bourne should punch him in the face. Because that is the plot of a Born movie. Is it? Comments on FCC pages? No, it's inside the house. He's hacking the government from the inside. It doesn't matter what they're actually doing.

What do the bad guy want in any Born movie? Just to leave a great comment. And Jason Borman, like, we got to do something about this. The only plot, the only thing the villain wants in a Jason Born movie is to create a government inside the government. It's just layers of internal shadow government. The goals of that government are never made clear. There's just a secret government and Boren's got to punch it in a face. Huh?

Yeah. To create more super agents. Yeah. Yeah. But it's never made clear what the purpose of those super agents are, except to wake up and realize they should stop it. All right, you got your book idea. Go for it.

Jason Bourne, the truth. All right, I'm going to read another. This episode of The Vergecast also brought to you by Qualcomm Snapdragon Gigabit LTE. With download speeds of up to seven times faster than typical home Wi-Fi, Snapdragon Gigabit LTE can turbocharge all of your connected apps. You can stream 360 to do. degree videos and 4K resolution with minimal buffering. You can access files in the cloud nearly as fast as you would if they were stored in your phone.

And you can download hours of movies or music in a matter of seconds to learn more. Go to snapdragon.com slash gigabit today. Okay, Ashley. Yes. You are the designated representative of circuit breaker on the show today. Every week, you're here. I'm always here. You do a segment.

Same place, same time. He has the same name. Yep. Let us know. So my segment, let's talk about translucent gadgets is here once again. Yeah. Love this time. You know, I got to be honest, it was kind of a slow gadget week.

Yeah. But Tivoli audio, hopefully I'm saying that right, released a limited edition summer Bluetooth radio. It's clear. And it's translucent. Wow. It's cool looking, and it lights up inside. You can adjust the LED light.

I don't know. I'm pretty into it. Is it like the old Gameboys? Yeah, it looks just like that. It's a white. It's not purple tinted. I had the purple one. Yeah, for one.

Yeah. But there's LEDs inside. The Game Boy didn't have LEDs inside. Right, this one lights up. Do you adjust them with an app? I'm assuming there's an app. That's what you want in your life. So it's $200, which seems very expensive for a radio because who even listens to the radio anymore?

It's an internet radio. It's not like a Bluetooth speaker or is it actual FM radio? You can pair with it over Bluetooth, but it's an FM radio. but it's an FM radio. So, like, you can play your Spotify or whatever. But the idea is that... But the idea is that... Yes, they already have...

It's called the pale-b-T glow. Oh, my God. The original is called the pale-b-t. Okay. Pale spelled like pale? Like, like, P-A-L. P-A-L. Yeah. Pal.

So there you have it. I'm pretty excited about Translussing Catch it. I feel like this is, like, for a summer... This is my segue into the Instagram stuff I want to talk about. But for, like, the summer... party gram? Yes. Like holding the radio.

I said in the piece, I was like, this is for your outdoor deck. Yeah. So if you, please, Vergecast readers. If you, uh, or listeners, I should say. This is an audio experience. Someone's reading this transcript and they're like, what the fuck is going on? Um, if you buy this radio, let me know and send me a picture of it on your outdoor deck because I want a deck.

No, you need the super stylish gram. Send me the gram on the deck. Like walking down the street. It's free. I just got back. from the Midwest. I saw backyards. I miss that. I'm thinking rain-slipped New York City streets. You got all the lights in the background. You're holding the radio up. It has a huge antenna, too. All right. There you have it. All right. Here's another gadget that is back. Deeter, I know you're excited about this. Google Glass.

So, this story is two years old. I don't really know how this went down. What we know now is that the Enterprise Edition of Glass is, in fact, newer. hardware with a slightly better camera and slightly longer battery life and an actual red LED light in the front to show you that it's recording and it is getting custom sold with custom software in most cases to basically factories so that people can use it while they're you know assembling parts together and stephen levy over at back channel or wired or wherever he is uh the relationship between those two is still confusing uh has a really big long feature he went to a factory in Minnesota.

And sure, it looks great. It seems like a very good use case for the thing that they made. But it has no effect on me or my life. Yeah. There's no, they maybe someday can take the stuff they put here and use it for actual AR stuff. But it seems like the make smart eyeglasses that show you things stuff, like the, the problems that glass solves are easy problems, right?

It's have an operating system. Display some stuff. Connect to a Wi-Fi if you need to. Have a battery. Have a screen. It doesn't solve the hard problem, which is make it look normal and make it feel socially appropriate,

which is a problem that, you know, the Snap Spectacle solved in a much, you know, better way than Google did with its Explorer program. So good on you for not completely destroying and spring cleaning the entire project away. but I guess I don't see this thing being I don't know I don't see this thing being anything outside of like particular things like doctors or factories am I crazy am I am I too much of a hater I don't no I think you're right it's it's not an AR device it's like they missed the window of this being useful right it's a screen that floats in front of your eye and you can ask it for things but it's not looking at stuff and showing you more information about the stuff

and it feels like Google had they had that window and they blew it basically because the product was not great and now they're they're basically like saying you don't have to look at a laptop the screens in front of your eye

but the thing that's crazy to me about it is they were doing this two years ago there's an NPR story for like two years ago it's basically the same story and the news this time is now more people more companies can buy it which I think is I think is Google

trying to drive a press cycle around like we've already got funky future health it's happening in this world. It's weird because this is supposed to be like a almost like a happy ending or something for Glass. Like, look, we were able to make something good. But on some level, I feel like just any news about Google Glass is bad news.

Like, I saw it and I was just like, ah, that's, yeah, did not work out. Like, I don't know. Are they making money off this? Why are they doing this? Like, is there a big enterprise business? I guess there were, like, I remember at CES a couple years ago. There were a handful of companies doing stuff like this. And I feel like maybe like Lenovo or something had one.

And these other ones might have been targeted like enterprise applications. I don't know, maybe there is a market there or something. It's just not that. But there's like a few of these, right? That's what you're saying. And that market is people who assemble things. Yeah. Like the number one use cases, do you make wiring harnesses?

And the answer is some people do actually make those. Okay. There's a few more things I want to talk about. Speaking of weird glasses, you can now buy Snap Spectacles directly from Amazon. Snapchat added a bunch of new features. Are you, I'm just looking at you. You're like my Snapchat guru. Are people still into spectacles?

I haven't seen a spectacles video in a thousand years. No. I don't think, I think it's, I think it's seriously one of those things. Like, if you bought it, it's like, all right, cool, I'll take it on vacation with me. If I remember ready to charge it. Yeah, but are you going to use it? Like, I just, I don't see anybody using it. Pretty sure I saw a pair when I was at the Vatican recently.

Yeah, I think we're vacations. What? Okay. I saw some at pitchfork music festival. Yeah. That's one pair. That's it. But seeing people with the hardware

versus seeing the videos it's supposed to generate. That's what bothers you about this is you see them wearing it. Like you always ring up Sheffer how he wears his but never posts it. Never.

I never see any spectacles video from Sam. Well, I think it's more like home videos. Like my friend took hers to Mexico with us and she recorded a lot of footage. She just has the footage for herself

so in three years we can look back and be like, hey, like remember this funny moment? Or whatever. Where is it stored? She keeps it on her phone. So she's just going to watch Circle videos in our phone in three years?

I guess so. It's so weird. Yeah. Well, right. That's where we are. Yeah, it's a circle. Okay, I don't know on spectacles. I need to buy a pair just so I can say I own a pair.

Should I get coral or should I get black? Black. Uh-oh. Everyone has black. It's because it's fashionable. All right. New features, right? There's all kinds of new editing in there.

There's a multi-snap recording, which is a hilarious way to describe being able to push the button more than ones. Snapchat keeps adding such cool features and like their filters still even, just the AR stuff, is better than Instagram. Like it's so obvious that Facebook's technology is just worse like it is. Just from using it. But I don't know. I feel like Snapchat keeps creating these features and it's actually really hard to use them. Like they're really specific use cases and you have to know the app so well, which I guess is always what Snapchat's thing has been is like, you're a power user.

You know how do you actually use the app? But like, I don't know, it feels like they're just kind of stunted at this point. Yeah. Like, hey, look what we can do, Facebook. No one's actually going to use this, though. I mean, so we have these other two stories here about Instagram this week, and they're way deeper stories. So Casey had a big feature on how restaurants are being designed to be Instagramable, which if you, you should read the story, but if you scroll through it, there's like this depressing moment when there's like 45 pictures of the same tile floor in a restaurant and Instagram. That made me so sad.

I read it on my phone and it was just like, if you see it on your desktop, you're like, oh, okay, there's a budge here. But when you see it on your phone, you just have to scroll through them. And it really just, by the time you get to the bottom, you're just like, well, everything is terrible in the world. No originality is left in this universe. And then Megan took a trip to L.A. and went to like a social media star summer camp where they teach teens to be good at social media, like to be influencers. It was a great story. learn how to say like, make sure to like and subscribe at the end of this.

And share. What's up, you guys? All right, try again. We're feeling. Yeah, they like did things about harassment. It was a summer camp for social media stars. Speaking of which, make sure to share this if you have enjoyed the, yeah. Smash that like button, fam.

I don't know what. I'm really good. I don't know how this works. That's good. There was a line in that story. You should read that story. It's really good. There's a line in that story where all the teens were like my favorite platform is Instagram.

They were going around the room. Those two things where Instagram is affecting design choices in the real world, and all the kids are saying Instagram is a best platform. That's the competition with Snapchat, right? And I think we've just hit a point where Instagram is so much more vital than almost any other social network that I'm on. And I can't really pinpoint why, except it's happy. I mean, yeah, it's just pure positivity.

There's like literally no, other way to I mean you have to like really try pretty hard to express something that's other than neutral or positive

yeah and like it just doesn't fit in if you're putting so I mean I think that's it though right like I go to Instagram and I enjoy myself and that is like something I can only say

about Instagram right even like you know even my favorite websites like there's going to be some depressing like news and not just like

cool stuff well also maybe the thing too is like I was going I'm going to say it's because for us, we had Facebook. We, like, friended our high school friends. This is, you know, we're in high school. And now my Facebook is just tainted.

I'm like, I don't care enough to delete all of you. Also, I just don't care what you're up to anyway. So I don't use Facebook. But the nice part about Instagram is, like, if someone follows me, I don't have to follow them back necessarily. Right. So it's like I'm only following the people I care about. Plus, it's the positivity. So you're able to actually curate, whereas Facebook, it's like, this is a mutual friendship and we must follow each other.

No, that's terrible. So give me your thoughts real quick on Instagram Snapchat, because that's the real fight, I think. Well, it's just, I think they're very different. Like Instagram, like you said with the design choices, it's like Instagram is permanent and beautiful. And I love Instagram. Snapchat's just fun. Like I use Snapchat to interact with my best friends and make silly faces. Yeah.

That's not, that's like a hard business for Snapchat to own. It is, but they're doing such cool stuff. and it's like, I don't know how to make them better. Are you going to watch the two-minute NBC News news show that they're going to stick in Snapchat? I actually like the Discover channel. So you use it. Yeah, I like the Discover channel. So that's like a whole other thing.

What do you watch? I watch like Cosmo stuff that's like really stupid. But I'm like, hey, this is enjoyable for me because I like stupid shit sometimes. It's fun. I don't like it. I'm just saying it's. Also, I think SnapMap is cool. I know there's all this privacy stuff, but that's impressive to me.

I don't know. Instagram's not doing that stuff. I open my Snapchat, my snap map, and it's like all of my friends are at home with their kids. Well, that's what's happening here. Yeah. I think there's a peak. I still think it's cool looking, though, like with bitmoji. Yeah.

I don't know. Bitmoji is like a real thing. Yeah. That was a good purchase by them. Okay. I want to talk about Apple patent stuff, but we were out of time, and it's quite frankly very boring and confusing. It just is. Global patent battle.

We need to know is Foxcon. You have to give us. Huh? Yeah, you have to give us two sentences on it. I think it is so counterintuitive that Apple buys phones from Foxcon. It is just not how you expect that business to work. Apple buys the iPhones phones from Foxcon. So now Foxcon is suing Qualcomm 2.

There's something crazy happening in there, and I hope Sarah Jong, our new reporter, can help me figure it out because I have yet to understand it completely. But Foxcon is not suing Qualcomm too. At the end of this, there might not be a Qualcomm, is basically my final thing. out. We'll figure it out. Okay, that's it. That's the show. Wow, ways to leave it on that note. We'll see. Who knows? Who knows what's going to happen? Or there might still be a Qualcomm. Everyone's favorite. Yeah, everyone's favorite. It's funny because I read a Qualcomm ad on this show just now. But those are different things. Those are different people. That was another, there was an AI.

Disclosure, I read a Qualcomm ad on the show. You may have noticed. Okay, that's the show. Please go watch Next Level with Lauren Good. Lauren also hosts a great show called Too Embarrass to Ask, which you can listen to on basically anywhere podcasts are. You can listen to other Recode podcast. Carousher host Recode Decode. Peter Cofco hosts Recode Media, which is a favorite because of Media Nerd. All that is available on iTunes. Find it, rate it, review it.

We're doing fun stuff on Anchor. Go to Anchor.fm. You can listen to little experiments that people are doing. We ran one last week that Ashley could have done. Yeah, I saw that. I was like, oh, how nice. Yeah, it's good. And you can tweet at us.

I am at Reckless. Deere's at Backlon. Jake. Jake underscore K. Ashley. Ashley R. Carmen. And we'll be back next week with more Virchcast, this show. Thanks, everybody.

Rock and roll. Paul. I'm just saying all the things myself. Orbis. God.