The Vergecast - iPad review, Facebook drama, and Apple drama

Episode Date: April 6, 2018

It is episode 300 of The Vergecast! To celebrate, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul start the show by explaining inside jokes that have been stamped into the show over the past few years. Don’t understand what Scissor Vodka is? Are you wondering why Bixby is a dog? Do you need to know why Paul says his name at the end of each episode? Well, we took the time to answer that. Also, there’s some news that came out this week. We have an iPad review, some Mark Zuckerberg updates, and a little bit of Apple drama. There’s a lot more in between that — like Paul’s segment he does every week with the same name “Lonely Alone” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 03:14 - Joke explainer 16:13 - Mark Zuckerberg calls Tim Cook’s comments on Facebook ‘extremely glib’ 21:54 - Apple Music had a better Weeknd than Spotify 24:03 - Apple hires Google’s former AI boss to help improve Siri 31:16 - Apple iPad (2018) review 35:50 - Apple’s redesigned Mac Pro is coming in 2019 46:30 - Paul’s weekly segment compilation 49:38 - Paul’s weekly segment “Lonely Alone” 52:18 - Facebook wants a social media supreme court so it can avoid hard questions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by IBM. 16 million new collar jobs will be created by 2024 and to help fill them. IBM's new education model gives high school students, workplace experience, and an associate's degree. 90 P-Tech schools are already preparing graduates for tomorrow's STEM careers. Let's put Smart to Work. Find out how at IBM.com slash P-Tech. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship. I'm just going to, greetings, mobile accomplishers. I'm just biting Deter from the jump.

Greetings, mobile accomplishing. So this is a special. Do it, do it right. Do it right. Do it right. Greetings mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge Empire. I am your host, Dieter Bone.

This is the 300th episode. I'm taking over the show because I'm way better at intros than Nilai. It's true. Can I say my catchphrase now? Yeah. Hello. This is our whole, I like your catchphrase is just a name. This is our 300 episode.

I'm here. I'm Neelai. Paul's here. Hello. Deeter's here. This is somehow good catch race. In classic Vergecast fashion, we started planning for this 20 minutes ago. Andrew tried to get us to start planning for this like three months ago. Andrew Marino, our long-suffering producer. But no, we said no. We only want to start five minutes before the show.

And so that's what we did. So a couple of weeks ago, my good friend and colleague, Haim Gartenberg, pulled me aside. He said, did you know, episode 300 is a lie. And he pulled up a spreadsheet. At some point, when he was an intern, he was tasked with listing every single verge cast. And it turns out there have been two historical skipped verge casts. Yeah. 69 is one.

And it's like 117 is the other, something like that. I don't think that we actually skipped them. I think we've lost them. Did we lose them or like misnumber them? No. Who knows? This is not. If you tuned in looking for technology news, we're going to.

get to it. But first, we're going to talk about how podcast RSS feeds work. And a little bit about counting. A little bit about, no, there's a whole, I think, I think they're lost to history. If you've got, if you have a virtual has 16 on your phone, send it to us, because we don't have it. But yeah, this is 300. It's a big one. And to celebrate, we thought that we would do the funniest thing that any person can do, which is explain our own jokes. So this is true. This is a fact. This is a service.

It's a service. This is service journalism. But Paul and I have been doing basically this podcast for almost a decade now because we were doing the Engadgetter podcast before. Dieter had his own podcast when he was at Smart Phone Experts. What was called? Which started, I'm going to point out in 2001. How is it? The Trio Professional Show.

A podcast for TrioCast. The TrioCast. Which had the best stock music ever. It was called Hot Sacks on a platter. Was it just called Internet Radio back then? Yeah. They were podcasts. Anyway.

So it just means that we've been doing this. We've been doing the Vergecast for six years, six and change. It started as this is my next pot. Like we've just accumulated 10 years of inside jokes. Right. And we never explain them or tell people why we're laughing. So the audience has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and people are just hopelessly confused all of the time. And they tweeted us and we do nothing.

We refuse to acknowledge that the Vodcast is an impenetrable. We do chuckle silently to ourselves. Yeah. But for this our 300 episode, we thought it would be good if we just explain some of the things. Yeah. Yeah. So here's the first one we're going to explain. At the end of the show, we obviously.

We often say snip, snip. Yes. And Vergecast fans know that our official beverage is scissor vodka, which is not real. Right. The tagline of scissor vodka is cut through the night. And it's funny after that to say snip, snip. Yeah. So that's the whole joke.

It's like fully work for the tagline of a made-up beverage. It's so funny. And if you don't know, Cizzer vodka will never exist because the, The trademark for applying the word scissor to an alcoholic beverage belongs to, who is it, Nelai? Francis Ford Coppola. But the trademark's in Spanish. It's very confusing. But we have some, so this all came about because of the song like G6.

Mm. Because LG was putting out the G6. This got so out of hand. Well, we have the clip, right, Andrew? Let's run the clip. There's a lyric in there that she's like, I'm drinking scissor. but for years my friends and I totally misheard it and we thought she said she was drinking scissors which is in my opinion if you're listening to the show and you maybe have too much money

you don't know how to spend it you want to make an investment I have a complete business plan for a vodka brand called scissor vodka does it involve the song it doesn't involve the song although I think having a famous song in which people appear to be saying drinking scissors in the club is a good look I just want to do an entire print billboard campaign physical media campaign of like hot people and they just they're looking at you with their fingers like this and it just says cut through the night this is a radio show people are in the car what are your fingers doing they're making scissors man what do you think you're doing i'm just giving it back to you because you're always if you're in the car right now here's what i want you to do i want you to look at the

car next to you it's sort of a piece sign it's a piece sign it's a little thing right it's a piece look at the person in the car next to you no you're alone but this is not safe you're on the road because you're commuting places people are people are always drive their cars alone. No, but in the car, the other cars around you, a slight scissor shape, and then just mouth the words, cut through the night. And that, people are going to do that. Cut through the night is good. For scissor vodka. I would. So, again, I'm seeking directly to through your heart now. This is a beautiful app. If you have more money than sense, and you would like to make this happen for me. I mean, that's just the worst thing I've

ever heard my life. I have a second one for a trampoline vodka, which is just the word bounce. It's just, it's endless TV ads of people leaving clubs. Cut through the night, it's great. Cut through the night is great. Bounce is awful. Cut through the night is great. No, cut through the night is fantastic. Okay.

Yeah. And there's already a song that everybody's... I already want to cut through that. You're drinking a scissor in the club. Now I'm feeling so fly. I did not remember bounce. I did not remember how desperately I was trying to keep that from going off the rails. I like just how much...

I like that at this point in the show we've just given it. Okay, so that's... That's where it came from. It's going to be in our heart forever. Okay, at the end of the show, Paul. Yes. We just, everyone says your name. We did the show live, and at the end of the show, the whole crowd just chanted your name.

That was a really special moment for me. Do you want to explain why this has started happening? Yeah, apparently, I can't remember even if it was In Gadget or The Verge or this is my next, but at some point, I admitted that I have a hard time saying my name, pronouncing my name. And your name is Paul. It's Paul, which is not. hard to say. A lot of times I kind of swall the L. Anyways, there's a problem saying my name. And so it was Josh, Neely, and I at that time, and we just all tried to say my name a bunch of times.

Yeah. And then it was funny to say it at the end of the show. This is before they were a professional podcasts we had to compete with. We're like, good radio. Five minutes of us saying Paul over and over. This is pre-serial content. It was before cereal. We didn't know what you're doing. We were like, we're not going to solve this murder. We're going to say Paul. Paul's name. Because it's so far removed from the context and like why would anybody find it funny, I've thought about retiring Paul as a catchphrase. Well, now we just re-upped it.

I guess we re-upped it. So anyways, maybe I'll run a Twitter poll. I've been thinking a lot about it. I think having your own name is your catchphrase is really strong. It's pretty strong. It's kind of incredible. Okay, we also say promo code at the end of the show. This is, I don't know why we're not, we should explain that one because that's just a good deal.

Yeah. The promo code for the Verge merch store is promo code. Just go there and type it in. You get like some percentage of things off, money, some percentage of money off. While also sort of commenting on modern podcast media. Yeah, the promo code is promo code. Yeah. All right.

Deider, do you want to explain greetings, mobile accompliceers, the way that you began the show? Oh, it's, it comes from the launch. of the Palm Trio 680, which was the Palm OS device designed for consumers. It was the thing that came out right around the time of the iPhone. So it was like, all right, so the iPhone, now we've got the Trio 680, and its big innovation is that it came in four different colors,

and they got rid of the external antenna nubbin. And Palm's market demographic for this, they accidentally told all of us, was mobile accomplishers. And I thought that was the funniest thing on planet Earth. Then CEO Ed Colligan wanted us all to know what a mobile accomplisher was. They're like a professional, but they're really mobile. They're not really just a – it's not just for professionals, though.

That's like the wrong word because it was Palm OS, and so it was bad. So it's not so much people that work. It's people that accomplish things. Is there a modern-day term for this? Every company does this. I think what we have learned – Yeah, no, it's a really standard. thing. They just told it to the wrong audience. It was like an internal marketing deck.

Yeah. And it turned into a like actual thing that he thought was appropriate to say while standing on stage announcing a phone. Microsoft used to do this all the time. Remember the kin? When the kin came out, they showed us like their target audience and they had like invented hip kids. Yeah. And they're like this hip kid. They hadn't existed before. Cool kids that never get bullied. Yeah, exactly. Microsoft got really mad at me because I took all the kin ads. and I like remix them to Dead Kennedy's songs.

They didn't like that. They should have loved that. They sent me an email. They're like, please, please take these down. I think they're still, they're up somewhere. All right, this one's easy. Bixby the dog. Bixby the dog.

We mentioned Bixby all the time, and we suggest that it's a dog. I don't think we ever explain why we keep saying that. But it's because- When we did the first time. Right. And then have failed to say it ever. Bixby is a dog with shoes.

Bixby, every time I hear the word Bixby, I think of a dog wearing shoes. It's just like a word association thing. Yeah, I can't not think of it. And now it is my quest. Like I say Bixby, you say, a dog with shoes. Yeah. And people on Cirquebraker Live, they sent us fan art of dogs wearing shoes, which is great.

And my goal is to have it be so common that, you know, when Samsung puts out its next phone, the Bixby logo is actually a cartoon dog wearing shoes. They should be all in. Isn't it a dog, isn't it a dog butler with shoes? It's a butler dog. Yeah, that's like the classic dog butler trope. but I think just like an anthropomorphic dog wearing shoes that could be a butler it's like a casual butler you know it's not like Mr.

He's a butler but it doesn't define him He's a butler in a polo shirt All right speak by the way Deeter speaking of Creo this is true we do hire you because of your webOS expertise at a time when that seemed I'd like to think you hired me because I ran a multi-site network of smartphone communities that had more traffic than Engadget at the time

That's true that's what you thought That's what I thought. No, no, you hired me for WebOS. Well, if you listen to the show a lot, you know that we often bemoan the death of the web and the death of open technologies. Dieter brings up Palm every five minutes. He can't help it. But there was, we have a clip here of just how deep in the game Deeter was. This is what, from when Palm was dying.

Yeah, this is from August 2011 when they killed, like two months after they had just announced the pre-3 and the touchpad and the veer. Then CEO Leo Apatiker. like blew up WebOS and canceled everything. And then they sold all the touchpads for $100. It was a whole thing. Let's listen to... Here's another yes or no question. We ostensibly brought on Deeter because of his WebOS expertise.

And now that WebOS is irrelevant, is Deeter irrelevant? A year for now. Is Deeter alive? Deeter, I have some unfortunate news. Yeah, I saw this coming on. We're going to have to license you. Do you think HTC could make use of Deeter? I think Deeter, I think the thing is, is that we are going to explore options.

Yeah. Okay. Have I worked with you guys for 49 days? Because you got to at least give me 49 days. Paul, I'm going to say you are extremely rude to Deeter. Deeter. It was hard. I'm so sorry.

I didn't know you guys. I was brand new. I couldn't tell if you were joking. I had no recollection of that. But apparently that was a fresh wound in Deeter's mind. We just never got over it. That's why literally every time WebOS Palm or the. web comes up, Dieter just sounds sadder.

It's because he's reliving the trauma. I'm remembering almost getting fired. I'm remembering almost getting fired. But he was reliving the trauma of the time I recommended when he loses his job. All right. And then the last one that we're going to explain. We start every show by saying we're the flagship podcast. I will say this joke is potentially gotten out of control. Like it's left

my ability to contain it. So the other day, our CEO Jim Bankoff was tweeting, with obvious and deserved pride because Tim Cook we're going to talk about the story Tim Cook had told Kara Swisher on her MSNBC show he like threw some shade

at Mark Zuckerberg and then Zuckerberg was on Ezra Klein's show and he like fired back and Backoff was like great day for Vox Media watch this show and listen to this podcast

it's like that's where the news happens and people were responding to him like flagship podcast only bro I was like, Don't do that. I was like, this is getting a little out of hand. So this is true. We were at one time,

one of the only podcasts at Vox Media. We obviously launched the Verge with the Vergecast. Now there are lots of them. The company, as it's grown, very smartly decided to like call that a podcast network and like have ads and like a sales team and produce. Like there's an infrastructure.

structure. And one of the things you do in a podcast network is you promote one of our shows. But I had been, for a while, we had a bunch of podcasts. So I was saying the Vergecast was the flagship podcast of the Verge. But now are part of this network. And I decided that we should have a beef with the weeds. The weeds has yet to acknowledge that this beef exists or that the Verge cast exists. We're going to get there.

Right. But I will say, that's why we say it. Because we want to be the flagship of the podcast. Where does this the word flagship come from? I don't know. I've always assumed you just have like an affinity for boats. I love boats. That's my internal narrative.

In an armada, there is a, there is a ship that carries the flag of the country, which it is killing people for. And that flagship is the ship that houses the admiral that's in charge. Which is clearly me of all of Fox Media's podcasts. Wait, if Jim Benkoff or CEO... The flagship doesn't kill the other ships in the Armada. Friends, they'll work together. Like, we're a team. But our fans have interpreted it.

A team of rivals. A team of rivals, yes. Jim Mankoff is Abraham Lincoln. All right, that's as much a joke explaining we're going to do. If there's other ones, let us know. But that brings us to the conclusion of our 300th episode celebration. Congratulations to us. Yeah, we did great.

Good job. We'll do it again in two episodes. All right, let's talk about some news. There's actually a lot of Apple, like, news. And the news happened in the form of various dramas, some which are hilariously low stakes, some which are obviously more important. So we should just talk about the Zuckerberg one. So Tim Cook really did go on Revolution, which airs this Friday, the day that the Vergecast comes out, April 6th. Yep.

So today for the people listening. So pull over your car and get on, watch some TV. Kara Swisher and Chris Hayes interviewed Tim Cook in Chicago. Dieter was there. We talked about on the show last week. So Kara and Chris Hayes asked Tim Cook. what would you do if you were running Facebook? And he said, I wouldn't be in the situation.

And then he made some comments about how Apple values data, they don't sell your data, they don't, you know, ads for to businesses. Fast forward. Zuckerberg goes in the Ezra Klein Show. They talk for an hour. Ezra asks him about these comments. And Zuck replies, you know, I find that argument that if you're not paying somehow we don't care about you to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. And Zuck said Facebook is free to use because it's focused on connecting people. and people can't afford to pay.

So having advertising, sporting models, the only rational model can support building service to reach people. And then he basically implied that Apple's giving us all Stockholm syndrome, which is incredible. To the contrary, I think it's important that we don't all get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more, convince you that they actually care more about you because that sounds ridiculous to me.

Which is kind of funny in the context of the phone that I found out of being $1,000 this year. But that's like, that's two big CEOs, just like head to head. like Apple saying Facebook's business model incentivizes them to not care about you. Disclosure. My wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. Done. So Cook was like, I would not be in that situation. It was like a whole long thing at the end of like talking about a whole bunch of privacy stuff. And it was like the wrap up of like, what would you do if you were Zuckerberg? I wouldn't be Zuckerberg. It was hilarious. I do want to say that calling it glib saying like not calling it a lie, but like in not not the same as a truth, whatever Zuckerberg's phrase was, whatever. going so far as to like take pot shots about Apple only being for rich people also whatever.

But like the core of that is Apple doesn't have a monopoly on caring about customers. And just the only way you're allowed to care about customers is if you charge them money, like he's not, he's not wrong. I don't think he's wrong. Well, there's different kinds of caring. There's how much you love your customers in your heart. And then there is how do you want your, users, your customers to use your platform. And Facebook, I've talked about this on the VirchCats, I feel like Facebook's problem

and Instagram's problem and kind of Twitter's problem is that as free services, they are trying to maximize how much time and attention you give them instead of maximizing how much satisfaction you derive. But Zuckerberg's changing his whole thing. His whole thing now is time well spent. He wants that to be Facebook's core metric. He's way out in front saying people are spending less time on Facebook. We think that's fine.

We want to improve the quality of that time. But Facebook as a business model doesn't have an intrinsic motivation in that direction, which is possibly how they got so wrong. Facebook is making a lot of changes. New privacy policy, new tools, they're going at. They're doing stuff now. It's very clear that Mark Zuckerberg commanded this company. need to like change its ways.

Yeah. And I say that specifically because yesterday there was a call with reporters, Casey was on it, and Zuck just repeatedly said on the call, look, I created Facebook. I run it. This is my responsibility. And when he says I run it, he has the ownership structure of Facebook as such that he can't be ousted. Yeah. He owns a controlling share.

It's like he is the dictator of Facebook. That's how he has constructed the company. So shareholders can't show up and hey, stop giving you. users quality time, we want more time. I mean, that's the argument he's making. Now, whether or not, you know, there's some arrangement by which shareholders can get together, who knows.

But the way Facebook is constructed, he's very much shielded from the way that would normally happen. So I'm with Deeter. Facebook wants to say they care about people, but the entire evidence is they didn't care about people enough until this scandal broke, and now they're making this huge public show. of care. And that's a long way back. Whereas Apple is like, I don't know, there are stores

around the country where like Apple people will like physically care for you. Like you show with like a broken product and Apple's like, we're going to, I don't know, ask you a bunch of, they'll put a wet cloth on your forehead. Yeah, but like that's their business is to sell you things in exchange for money. And when you have that relationship, Amazon like famously is customer oriented because they sell you things for money. And they're like, they know that If they don't treat you well, they'll stop getting money from you. Facebook doesn't have that. They have to treat their advertisers very well.

That's just like a different. It's like, look, we're an ad-supported business. I get what he's coming before he's coming from. I think more about our audience than our advertisers. But we are actually structured such that it is not only inappropriate, it's hard for me to care about the advertisers. The company has a wall between us and that side of the business. It's my job to care about the audience.

I don't know how you do that for a software product like Facebook. I mean, especially, again, he's not in charge of user experience. He's in charge of Facebook. Right. Anyway, so that's Drama 1, where I come back to Facebook later. Drama 2, when I said very small, is super funny to me. So the weekend just put a new EP. He was like two exclusive videos on Spotify, promoted Spotify.

Like the weekend was like, listen to my new thing on Spotify. and then the numbers came out and Apple was super excited because the label said more more streams happen on Apple Music. So the lead single... Which is interesting because Spotify has

like, what is it, 120 million subs and Apple Music is like half that? So Michael wrote a great piece about it. Spotify has 120 million more users, had two exclusive videos from the EP and was like where the weekend did it. And the lead single, call out my name,

did 6 million streams on Apple Music and 3.5 million streams on Spotify in the first 25th period. But then Spotify came back and were like, these numbers are wrong. Spotify said it initially gave the wrong numbers to Republic Records and it was actually streamed 7.5 million times so obviously more than Apple.

But Micah went and checked with the label and the label said 6.5 million and the label then directed Micah to Spotify's public tracker which also says 6.5 million. So counting is really hard. And now Apple Music and Spotify are literally in a war about counting streams,

which seems like an extremely basic thing for these services. I said it at the top of the show. Counting is a thing. Counting is very hard. Up until like, I don't know, a year ago, your views on YouTube videos were always 301 for like the first six hours. And they're like, oh wait, now we can count.

We know it's more than 300, but that's all we know. But no, YouTube did it on purpose to prevent some kind of gaming that was going on. Yeah, there's a really good explainer video about that. Just search for YouTube 301. Yeah. Counting is hard. Well, it's funny because Spotify keeps getting sued. We had Sarah on to talk about, like, royalties.

Like, if you can't count how many streets, you're never going to be able to pay these people the right amount of money. You know, one of the keep getting sued. All right. That's drama two. Drama three with Apple, which is actually, I think, a great move for the money. them. They hired Google's former head of search and AI to

come run Siri. John Gianandria is his name. Head of Google search and AI. Now run Siri. Dieter, is this is a good thing? It's a great move for Apple. He clearly knows what he's doing.

I mean, the big questions for Syria are the big questions that they've always been. There was that information story that internally the team was confused to know what it was doing. there's the perennial question of whether or not Apple's privacy models prevent them from getting enough data to build up an AI model. I kind of think that it doesn't, that they're going to be fine there.

You know, it's going to take a while for him to suss it out. But, I mean, I guess my takeaway is as like a person who's like a manager, the idea, like if series like management structure and the teams aren't getting along and it's all confusing, if that's like a problem, I have to believe that problem is, tidly wings compared to the organizational structure at Google, which is just like a million people doing whatever the heck they feel like all the time. So he's got a good shot. What's weird, and this is not about AI, but I read somewhere, correct me if I'm wrong,

he's reporting directly to Tim Cook. Good. The AI person should report directly to Tim Cook. But I'm pretty sure somebody said that he's like the 26th person to report directly. 16th person. That's too many people to report to a CEO. Yeah, that's a lot. Right?

Yeah. That's just a lot of people. You're supposed to actually pay attention to the people that report to you, and 16 people is a lot of people to pay attention to. Yeah. Like our HR department gets real antsy when somebody here has more than 10 people reporting to them. Oh, really? They think you'll be a bad manager if you have more than 10.

They're right. So this makes me, it reminds me of the, you know, the Microsoft Reorg has like five different AI divisions, but there's definitely this vibe I'm seeing from companies where, like, There's multiple ways to do AI. You can have a product and you can add AI to it as a value ad. Or you can have AI as like an IBM style, almost like an operating system within your company. And the applications you build can go to that AI for augmentation.

Yeah. Like, does that make sense? So in one scenario, each team that's building an app is add. adding AI functionality or machine learning functionality to their app. And the other sense, the company has a huge AI division that is the additional smarts for any app in their company. And I think that's how Google kind of does it. That's where Microsoft appears to be going. I don't think that's how Amazon does because they also run a store.

I'm pretty sure the Kindle team isn't like adding AI to the bookstore. So Google promoted this guy named Jeff Dean to run it. He did Google Brain. To run search and AI. To run search and AI. Over at Apple, Gian Andrea, the thing that's interesting about him, if you're not familiar, is he used to work for this company called MetaWeb way back in the day. But he was the guy who was behind Google's knowledge graph so that the Google search could understand, like, entities and things in their relation to each other. And if he's going to bring that sort of capability to Siri or improve that sort of capability in Syria, I think that could actually be a really important piece.

for fixing series problems. It knows that there are things and they relate to other things. That is what allows you to ask follow-up questions, which Siri can kind of do. But every time Siri gets something wrong, I often feel like it's making a category mistake. Like it's just reading the text,

trying to figure out what the text means, and then going out and finding something. It doesn't realize you're asking for like a specific piece of information and that information has relation to other pieces of information. And I think that him going to Apple might mean that Siri is going to get smarter in that way. There's a really good tweet I saw this week.

Someone asked Siri, how long can a lobster survive out of water? So Siri went to Wolfram Alpha and took the maximum recorded lifespan of a lobster and divided that by the world's water area. So the answer is, this is Siri's literal answer. The answer is 3.23 times 10 to the negative 7 years per mile square. That's great.

Ready to go, Siri. Here's the question, though. What you just described is Siri doesn't have a built-in search engine functionality. Google's very good at this because they have a knowledge graph. They have a search engine. Search engine is designed to answer questions. You just sort of add some voice recognition to that or voice input to that. You've got Google Assistant, right?

And then you can build from there, but you start with this very strong foundation. Siri relies on Bing to its great detriment. Siri lies on Wolfram Out. Do they want this dude to build a new search engine? Because that's like fundamentally the thing you have to do if you want to own this experience. Now I'm trying to, man, this would be way better if I could remember any of the old names of old search engines. Alta Vista. Altavista.

Lake Coast. Ask Jeeves. What was the first one that was? One that was called like a web crawler. It had like a spider as its like logo. SpiderTron. There was like HotBot. Oh, HotBot was good.

They're all dead now. Hotbot was my go-to. Okay. You know what? Does Apple Buy Duck Duck. Go? It's like that. Right?

You know what? Do you're saying? Webcrawler, by the way. is the one you're thinking of. Web crawler was called Webcrawler. Nailed it. Excite. Are you just listing old search engines?

Oh, excite. Yeah, dude. Talk about the death of the web, man. All right. I'm going to read an ad. AOL. The AOL is great. Theverge.com slash search.

That's not, I don't think that actually works. It's also not great. All right. I'm going to read an ad. And we're going to come back. We're talking about Dieter's iPad review. And what's going on with this MacPro situation. This episode of Vergecast brought to you by SimplySafe.

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And you'll protect your home and family. That's simply safe.com slash verge. All right, Dieter, you reviewed the, what is there to say? You reviewed the new iPad. You know, you really cut yourself off. Here's the problem that you had. Last year, you wrote an entire review of the iPad. They just said, it's an iPad over and over again.

I did. And you thought you were so clever. Because you assumed that they would do something else. The next year. Paying yourself into a quarter. I really, like, I applaud you for the effort. Yeah. And then this year you just block-quoted yourself.

I did. And what else is I going to do? Like, it's the same thing. The processors faster. It adds pencil support. The end. I actually, I do want to say one thing. I stand by the score.

I stand by everything I wrote about it. But I am kicking myself a lot, actually, for not having a couple of paragraphs, once again complaining about the biggest problem with the iPad, which is there's no multi-user support on it. So sharing it with your kids or sharing it with the family is a huge pain. Yeah. What do you think a world would look like?

Because something that you were saying near the end was the complete lack of competition that Apple has is probably slowing things down. We're going to review the Huawei tab pad whatever the heck. It's Android tablet. There's the

Samsung Galaxy tab S3, whatever the heck it is. But Android is bad on tablets still. That's always been the story. I'm willing to give another shot, but I've used that Samsung tablet. It's not good. What would a world look like with actual competition?

God, I just don't know. But please tell me, other than a Chromebook, what you can buy for less than 500 bucks that is as good as an iPad. You can get a Windows laptop that's pretty good. There are a couple Windows tablets, but I don't think they're very good at that price. Sorry.

If you want a touchscreen device under 500 bucks, what else is there? A 2013 Nexus 7. Right. I have a 2013 Nexus 7. It's kind of, dying and I don't know what to do. Yeah. Yeah, I don't

disagree with you at all. It's just there's nothing. It's so weird. No, the thing is that there's a lot. There is a lot. Like, Samsung makes a lot of very nice tablets. No one gives a shit. Like, you can buy... I guess if you

want to watch Netflix. If you just want to watch Netflix, the world is your oyster. Yeah. No, Dieter very... Go buy an Amazon fire tablet. Say that again, Nealai? They all have different letters. I can never tell them apart.

Like, Samsung Tab Q, like any random, you know, like $200-ish-dollar Samsung tablet, they're basically clones of the iPad Mini. Yeah. They're nice. What's going on with the iPad Mini, by the way? Apple continues to sell it. Harsh neglect is what I like to call.

I like that it costs more than the new iPad. It's $3.99. It's very confusing. Do we use the iPad Mini a lot on the Circapr? breaker show. It's nice to have a tiny little iPad. It's like a nice little media control device. Yeah. I wish it had wireless charging.

I'd like to just keep it on a stand. That's why I use it. That's why you have the Nexus 7. The only tablet with wireless charging ever made. Because I just like leave it on a stand and that's like a little Sonos thing and a boop, boop, boop. And it works. It's like, it's like the world just isn't like complete without like real competition in this space.

Competition. That's the theme of the Vergecast. That's what we do on the flagship. I will say I bought an iPad specifically because there were so many cool music apps. Yeah. And Linux actually has a famously bad real-time audio stack. And that, like, it's just like obviously Max have a history of music production. Windows is now great for music production. And iOS is awesome for music stuff.

but you just don't see a lot of music stuff on Linux because it's just been historically and still apparently, as far as I know, very bad at real-time audio. Yeah. So we even talk about the least interesting iPad stuff, we should talk about the more interesting Apple stuff. Yeah.

Do you want to do this? I had one in my mind, but I want to hear yours. No, let's do yours. Mine was bad. Let's do it. This is like a thing. So that history of like audio production on Macs, is really

because they're like professional computers and do audio well. But Apple, Mark German had a big scoop in Bloomberg. Apple is thinking about moving Macs to a different processor.

He didn't specify which. I think everybody assumes it will be a series processors, which are very fast. And then Apple did a sort of tech crunch today. Matt Panzerino went to Apple and they told them

the new Mac Pro which they promised last year would be coming out in 2019. But the arm rumor is Apple will be switching to arm in 2020. Yeah. So I don't know if these are really... Well, German's story says the Mac Pro might have

an arm co-processor. Like the IMac Pro has. Yeah. But it's unclear... But that's used just for like security stuff and encryption. Yeah. Because Apple's moving all their like bootloader and stuff. But my dream is...

is Apple could make like a pro hardware that is just completely, just forget that anything else other than Final Cut Pro and logic exists. Yeah. And just make a computer with like, oh, we have, get the Mac Pro video edition. It's got a great like workstation graphics card. It's got really fast RAM. It's got a really fast like Xion processor. Also, it has this dedicated chip just for like improving your.

video transcoding in File Cut. Like, we just, like, added a couple of random, extra application-specific chips to just make our Pro Apps just the fastest thing in the world. So, they should just, they should ship the, the trash can again and just have one of those little Elgado USB sticks plugged into the back of it.

That'd be amazing. No, when I was, when I was like a kid, my family owned the shortest live Mac in history, the Centress 660 AV, It was, I think, on the market for 57 days, like some insanely short period of time. Wait, you mean the Quadra? No, no. That's why it was just sort of, they changed the name to Quadra 660AV later.

Oh. But like in the middle of its lifespan. That computer, it's true, had a dedicated AT&T DSP chip in it for transcoding video. That's why it was a AV. I had the 6100 AV. I made like, I had Adobe Premiere that I installed with floppy disks. And I made stop motion movies on a Mac 100 years ago. Yeah.

And it had little RCA video out. It was a hilarious computer. I think this potential move to Arm, Dieter, when you're talking about iPads, you've got the iPad Pro, which is the, it's a computer, right? The future of computing, whatever Deeter thinks about it happens over there. And then you've got this other iPad without a keyboard connector, a slightly smaller processor, worse screen.

like it seems like they're going in different directions. Does that seem right to you? Yeah, I don't know what direction they're going with the iPad. Like it was the bare minimum. They did the minimum possible amount of work. And it almost feels like they didn't put in a smart connector just because they wanted to keep differentiating the iPad Pro. But again, we're all assuming the iPad Pro is going to be upgraded later this year

and they're going to pull out the home button and put face ID on it. So that seems silly. I don't know. I have no idea what's going on. Like the iPad, They just put on another one because they wanted all the iPads to support the Apple Pencil, except the iPad Mini, which still exists. That's as near as I can tell. The question for the Mac is, like, we're assuming it's going to be an arm-based processor, but that's actually going to be pretty hard.

They went through one processor transition already back in the misty midst of time from the, you know, whatever was the Motorola-based stuff to Intel. I feel like the transition from Intel to Arm on the Mac in 2019, 2020 is going to be a little bit rocky for existing Mac apps. I think that it's just going to end up being like a harder shift. It's like, well, there'll be an emulation mode, but it'll be really, really bad. And everyone is just going to pour it over their iOS apps to some sort of Mac style interface. I don't see any other way to do it. And because it's not like there's a great, like the Mac App Store is not a good, not a good place to hang out, I'll say. But like Mac apps are still good, but there's so many more electron apps.

That's like where all the excitement is. And there's like lots of reasons that electron apps are bad. And yeah, I don't know how they pull this transition off as smoothly as they did with the transition to Intel. I think the transition would be easier than it was to Intel. You think so? Because the compilers have gotten so much better at being able to. target because any code that you're writing in C

or C++ you want it to be able to run on Arm and you want it to be able to run an X86. But then if anything that you make with Apple's own tools like with Swift or X code in X code with Swift or Objective C is obviously totally

able to compile to Arm. Right. Because the iOS is a target. So you think it'll be easier not because there'll be a really good like emulation mode like Rosetta. You think it'll be easier because everybody will just be able to make arm versions of their apps really quickly and easily with the tools that are out there right now. Right. So as long as it's not abandonedware and someone just still has access to their own source code, they can just recompile the app for Arm and fix any little warnings that come up and then redistribute it. And that was...

And Electron apps obviously move right over. That's no problem at all because it's a wrapper. Because unless, of course, the Mac is locked down like the iPad and you're not allowed to install anything except what's in the XI. Well, then I will... I don't know. I'm going to be... angry and I'll be mad and I'll yell. I think that's like a really... And I'll abandon Apple. So it's true. Deider pointed out, Apple obviously moved from

PowerPC processors to Intel. First they moved from 68K processors to PowerPC. That was a whole shift. Then they moved from PowerPC to Intel. And then, I think we forget this all the time. They moved the entire Mac operating system. Right? They had OS9, the classic Mac OSOS. And they

just sort of like, here's OS10. And now we've had that for so. long. Carbon was like the intermediate. Yeah, so they had all these like carbon in cocoa and then they promised that carbon apps would like live in the new world and then they kind of like went back on it and they moved over ready to cocoa.

It was like a whole thing. And all the boxes had colors. There was the blue box and the yellow box. Remember all this? It was crazy. The boxes had colors? Yeah, because the original next step environment was called. It was like a whole thing. There's like managers before. My point is all of the people that did all of that are gone.

Right? That was A. B. Tavian and Scott Forstall, all the old next people, but they don't worry at Apple anymore. So like, they've got to do it again. They have these great playbooks, but the people who ran the playbooks are gone. Steve Jobs, a little known figure in Apple history. He was, like, in charge at the time.

And he, you know, he had the juice to be like, we're throwing all this away. We're starting over. It's Apple's still Apple. They could do it again. Linux runs completely similar, like you're going to run Linux on the Raspberry Pi. It's just like different.

pile target. Yeah. Like switching architectures nowadays, I feel like is so almost trivial. It's not actually trivial, but it's close to trivial. Yeah. So if the performance is there, I mean, that's still kind of the question. Like at the high end, you know, Intel just came out with six core four gigahertz laptop chips that you can still have a laptop that gets like 10 hours of battery life.

you know, does Apple have something that competes at that speed in general computing? So this is, I think the two stories coming out together are super interesting to me. So like Apple, you know,

the tech country is great. You read it. But Apple's all about like, we hired our own pro users so we could watch them work and design a system for them, which is like insane. But that's what they did.

And they, you know, they're like, it's Apple. They're like, the London Symphony Orchestra works here now. Like we just did it. I love it when they do

stuff like that and then there's another story about that moving the architecture but you can't tell Adobe Creative Cloud not asked around a serious processor like you can't promise

a new computer coming out next year and the rumors are switching architectures you're like you need to have a roadmap to make all that stuff work over time

so presumably this coprocessor thing could happen or you know I think the little MacBook is a great target for a faster arm processor

yeah because that thing is just woefully underpowered like maybe that maybe they'd dual track it for a while. But that's a lot. Also, I have no idea why the Mac Pro is coming out in a year.

Yeah, seems like it's been a while. Well, the last one was 2013. Well, it's just like, does it take a year to build a tower PC? Did Apple completely wind down MacPro as a concept within the company, and they were just selling off old stock? And then at some point, like last year, they finally realized that they should make another one. And then they had to make a whole new team to remember how to make a company.

to remember how to make a computer? It's just like, I don't know, like a lot of people build PCs in a weekend. Like, I don't know. What are you doing? Someone sent Tim Cook a link to PC Part Picker right now. Like, well, that's what people want, right? They want a modular tower PC. And Apple's like, it's going to take us over, it's going to take us two years to build this thing, which is bonkers.

And I, you know, they're obviously going to be a beautiful design. but like main gear is like here's another design today Raser's like there's more LEDs more LEDs that you can think about I hope Apple puts LEDs on it

and they go hard for Razor like Tim Cook's on stage like you don't have the problem with all these LEDs are they're not controlled by Siri yeah they're all the whole surface of the computer does that weird melty color thing

that the home pod does that'd be great I would be super into that all right I'm gonna read one more ad then we're gonna be honest who we're going to dunk on Facebook and then the show. All right, this episode of our chat brought to you by IBM. By 2050, the world population will reach nearly 10 billion in food production

will lead to grow by 70%. Farmers are going to IBM and Watson to help increase their crop yields. Let's put Smart to Work, find out how, at IBM.com slash smart. All right, there's a lot of Facebook, but before that, Paul, every week, you do a segment. It always has the same name. And so to verify that they all have the same name. Some people think I'm lying.

Andrew, in honor of episode 300, has put together a short audio clip of you saying the same words in a row. Andrew. Paul. Every week, buddy. You do a thing. What's it called? It's called Gadget of the Week. Yet this week it's called Gadget Surprise.

Games are gadgets too. Gadget Secret. It's called Gadget Guys. It's called Pokemon Go. Tips and Tricks Review. called gadget secrets. Gadget flavor. The gadgets have eyes.

Kobo hype. It's called Let Me Touch You with Science. Costco cool. Medium format in the moonlight. Having a Coke with you. Cookie pods. Plugs for pros. Speaking of things that you can't buy.

Well, the West, still exists, Dieter, are you sad? Put this computer in that computer. It's called Dry Your Sweaty Palms. It's called Please Don't Talk to Me. Can't You See I'm Busy. It's called Deeter Wanted Let Me Make a Slurping Noise. Hey, look at me now. It's called Friendship is like a Cruel. It's called Stronger Together.

Guess he's got a birthday coming up. Not so far away, it may be possible for me to think in Mandarin and for you to feel instantly in Spanish. 4-4-4-4-4s. Four-Four's. Yeah, it's called four-fours. Room, Vroom goes to the car. Let me hug your robot heart. Gates, all around, all around.

I see seed, semicolon, so much C. I like to call my dinner with Andre. It's called Spin Safety. Toothpaste Pah. Mezoo. Me too. smalt you later. Proyopods.

It's called, you say surveillance. I say sousvalence. Yoda phone three still Yoda ingot. Who will let me out of this yarn prison? It's called Untitled. Is there a refrigerator in this thing? Dog food pods. Kitch in the cloud.

A cloud is spelled with a K. Micro is more many than many. You know, Dan, the duck face is no longer cool. Smells like a competitive foothold in the machine. learning water pods can form an emotional bond with members of the household while providing them with love affection and the joy of nurturing and raising a companion it's called one to one and you spell out one then it's the number two and then you could say W-O-N or just O-E robot dogs are people too whiskey pods no color me surprise the internet of claps robots teach me how to breathe

mustard back off win or lose two the sequel to winning. A kin for your wrist. Not my editor's choice. USB secrets. Fingers are round if you think about it. Warm robot hugs. Bounce shot.

Shoes. You've got them because this one's called on title. Swag for me. Swag for you too. The little robot that could. I know it got boring after a while when I was just saying the same thing over and over. But anyways. Yeah, it's three minutes of dull repetition.

Whiskey pies. All right, what you got? This week, like every week, it's called Lonely Alone. And I wanted to introduce you to Freebo. That's F-R-I-B-O, a robot built for lonely young people, specifically Koreans. This robot, it's, there's actually, like, they've actually done research about this robot. I think this robot was, like, invented by, like, researchers. It's not like, it's not necessarily a product.

It's based on a raspberry pie. But the idea is you put this robot in your home and your buddies put this robot in their home as well. And then like you get home and the robot will tell your friends like, hey, Paul just got home. Or like you like open the fridge. I don't know. Other things.

The idea is that to make people who live alone have like ambient notifications about what their friends are doing and their friends are notified about what they're doing so that they're more connected with other people. And some of the people who were studied, they did it like a month trial, felt more connected. They ended up calling each other more. Because you know, like, if you know your friends just getting home for work, like maybe that's a good time to call and catch up.

One person mentioned that, like, they had a hard time wake up in the morning, but all their friends were waking up early, so they started waking up early too. I thought that's really cool. I know some people who, they live alone, or with like roommates they don't really know and the way they stay in touch with people is Discord.

Like basically at night, they're at their computer all night and they just have Discord open with an open audio channel. And it doesn't mean they're always talking, but they just have like that ambient companionship. I think it's really interesting. Yeah. So I think this is incredibly sweet and nice.

This thing isn't for me because it's meant for young people, apparently. So I don't have that. Also, what if you don't have, friends, then the robot can't help you? Yeah. Okay. We did a story this week.

Sorry, Dieter. Same. No, we did a story this week about lots of people and young people in South Korea bought Bitcoin. Bitcoin fluctuations are causing depression in South Korea among millennials, which is just a

wild thing to connect. But maybe they should all have little robots. Yeah, what if you, maybe here's the thing. Set of a little corner store that sells freebo's and also monitors in-person bitcoin exchanges. So you can meet someone with similar interests, and now you can both go home with freeboes separately and keep tabs on each other like spies.

I like it. All right. Let's talk about Facebook real quick. It's dominated the news week. It's not like, it's very wonky. If you're really interested in it, I highly recommend you sign up for Casey Newton's daily Facebook and Democracy Newsletter,

the interface is a very good, obviously you all know Casey is a very funny writer. He's really deep in it. He's pulling out all the, he's basically synthesizing all the coverage. It happens every day about Facebook, which is almost impossible to keep up with. And what we're talking about is the Tinder apocalypse. Well, so Facebook changed their data policies this week. That immediately broke Tinder, which logs in over Facebook and shares a bunch of Facebook. That's hilarious.

I tried to log into Tinder, and it's like, oh, well, you got to authorize with Facebook. And then you get more like, granular. It's more explicit about like what you're actually granting Facebook. So, but you're like, okay, I'll go to the Facebook app.

Yes, I authorized Tinder, even though I have authorized Tinder before. It kicks you back to Tinder. And Tinder's like, hey, you got to authorize with Facebook. And you're just stuck in a loop.

Or like, that's what it was yesterday. So that's that. Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg also on an iPhone call of reporters described himself as a power user of the internet, which is my favorite, phrase in the world.

Slates, Will Aramis said, would you use apps like this? How do you protect yourself? His response was, I certainly use a lot of apps. I'm a power user of the internet. And then suggested that everybody turns on two-factor. We're going to make that a shirt.

Just like, give us another... I'm a power user of the internet? Yeah. Our designers today, they literally got so excited about designing shirts and having a competition that at one point, our art director, Will Joel, who's wonderful. Slack to me and was like, this is really distracting us. Like, we're going to stop doing this.

But that call was really interesting. The Zuckerberg interview with Ezra is really interesting. A thing that strikes me is Zuckerberg is saying a lot of big ideas about how he's going to change Facebook without a lot of, like, sense of how complicated it is. So his biggest idea is basically like Facebook is a government, right? Like, he, they talk about Facebook like it's a government.

And he's like, I don't want to be the person in California deciding what's acceptable on Facebook and all the places Facebook serves. We're going to like find a way for communities to do it themselves, which is a lot of authority to handoff. Also, no one's ever figured out how to do that in history. Including Facebook, which has tried to do it. They used to have a voting system and nobody voted. I mean, like hundreds of thousands of people voted, but they wanted at least 30% of all its user base to vote, which was an impossible task. So they never never never never passed what was this voting system so we we did uh we did a story about it today um i think adi did so yeah so they're in the late i don't know it was oh nine i think they had a system where they like wanted to propose rule changes and so then they put out two different terms of service giant you know legal documents and they're like okay users we will do whatever you tell us to do whichever one you vote for the rules are uh it's binding if 30 percent of you vote and And let us know.

So people had to see the thing, read the thing, understand the thing, and then vote on the thing. And they got, you know, like the first time they did the ballot, it was, I don't know, 600,000 people, which seems like a lot. But it worked out to like, you know, a tenth of a percent, one percent of their user base. And it only wanted it to be binding if it was 30 percent. So their first cut at doing something like the community leads it was like crazy town. And so whatever community-based standards he wants to create, the problem is that moderating is hard and people won't do it for free. Yeah. And it's different from place to place.

And so you can't apply the same rules across all 2 billion people because you can't get a big enough percentage of those people to agree on anything or even engage with the process in the first place. So this is what I mean. Like his ideas for the future of Facebook are huge ideas. They're super interesting. And then you pull the thread and they like fall apart. So he pointed out that in surveys, when you ask millennials around the world how they identify themselves or what their most like core sense of identity is. Power users of the internet? Users of the internet.

Yeah, they're just like typing in the Reddit handles. No, they say they identify citizens of the world, not ethnicity, not nationality. They're citizens of the world. And he's like, we got to do something to reflect that. about that to me is if anybody like, it's very scary to me that millennials are identifying as citizens of the world when they get asked that question

because aren't they getting punched in the face for it all the time just for being, you know, insufferable? I don't know. They're just taking an online poll. I don't think they're like running around me like, I'm a citizen of the world. I mean, I don't know what the kids are doing these days. But it strikes me that I don't see many teens or anything. Anyway, my point is

there's no such thing as a citizen in the world. You can idealize and then create policy for. There's no such thing as a citizen of the United States that you can idealize and create a policy for it. We run massive, messy elections,

people are disagreeing, that's Twitter's entire business. You can't do it for a citizen of Chicago. You can't idealize the citizen of Chicago and build a policy

that makes sense for that person. There's no generic citizen. Yeah, there's no generic citizen of the world. Like that thing, it's fun to think about, but when you actually try to build what Zuckerberg

literally says, a good functionation, democratic system is what he wants Facebook to be. You can't just like make rules. You have to let people participate in those rules. And you have to very clearly define the communities. And he hasn't done that. Like that is where this idealistic idea just grinds into the reality of politics.

This, I mean, this, I think it kind of works on Reddit where you have a, a general Reddit terms of service. And then every subreddit is run by a group of dictators, basically. Yeah. And then some subreddits have a process for modifying the moderation team. But Facebook, you aren't always in the umbrella of a specific community. Sometimes you're just out there on Facebook in a general sense. So what does that mean?

Who runs that? I, something, I mean, this is probably a real tangent. I'm sorry. But a really interesting governance model that I have been. seeing is called the RFC process. And Rust uses it. The Rust programming language, which Mozilla started, uses it. And now a lot of other big open source projects, I believe Facebook's React uses it. And the idea, it's a request for comment or request for change, something like that. So it's like, right now, the rules are this or the programming language is this. Here's what I think

would be a good change, then community members can pile in and comment on that change. And the stakeholders of that specific part of the, like, the Rust compiler or the Rust Standard Library, some aspect of the Rust programming language, those stakeholders have like a stronger voice. But ultimately, because it works better, because they're going towards a technical solution that ultimately people end up agreeing one is. Right. And there's like probably some objective. And you have people who care and the thing is small and it's not scaled to two billion. And you also do have people with firm authority who can in some sense like be voted out if they are doing bad at having that authority. I think that's great. That's great when you have these small things that are organized around a goal.

When you're trying to run Facebook as a government. So another one of Zuckerberg's ideas is that you will appeal. If you think a post has been taken out unfairly. And if you don't like the ruling, you can then appeal to an independent third party that doesn't work for Facebook. And he says, kind of like a Supreme Court. Hmm. And I'm like, that is the dumbest thing

I've ever heard in my entire life. Is it? It is so, like, it sounds really. Why is it dumb? What's that so dumb about? The second you pull on that, it completely falls apart. So if you want to build a court system,

we got to decide who is on the court step one who's on the court can you imagine Facebook appointing just think you want a generic

like they're the first person they appoint is some extremely generic middle of the road like lawyer right who's like done a lot of speech work that person gets

immediately attacked by everyone left and right because now they have this power right and every decision they've ever does that court set so that's stuff

Step one. You just got to staff it. How many people are on the court? Because you know what you have? You have an infinite volume of appeals. So do they get to reject some appeals? Or are you just going to have infinity people on the court to deal with their infinity problems? Who knows? Do their decisions create precedent? Are there going to be Facebook Supreme Court lawyers? Like the second you pull on this thread, you're like, oh shit. You know what took a really long time and was really hard? Building the government of the United States. When did we get so far away from this concept that what people do on the internet using platforms and like forums, for instance, and like Napster, they are ultimately liable for their own actions. And if you make a system, let's say Napster, that is entirely predicated on people doing something illegal, then maybe you'll get shut down for that. But otherwise, you aren't super liable for what your users do. I feel like that was like a principle of the early Internet that we have slowly and almost entirely backed away from it. No, no, no, not even a little bit. So what you're describing is this part of the Communications Decency Act, CDA 230.

Lawyers and policymakers are talking about it all the time. And it basically says you're not liable for what users do on your platform. And it gives platforms permission to exert a bunch of moderation. control and still remain and still maintain that shield against liability. So you're allowed to moderate, but it doesn't make you liable for everything. Yeah, it's like a weird misconception. It keeps you from turning into a media company that's responsible for the things that happen. Right. And this has been around for 20 years, right? That thing is what allows Facebook and Reddit and

YouTube to exist. The verge. The verge. Like, we have comments. Like, I'm not liable for people doing our comments. We heavily moderate the comments because we want to have a good community. But if you post you know, some, if you post the entire text of some copyrighted book in our comments, like I'm not liable for it, I should probably take it down. So it's that shield, CDA 230. It's a really important shield. There's a lot of debate around what should break the shield. So child porn breaks the shield.

If people are posting child porn in your user-generated content platform and you don't do anything about it, you're liable because you should do something about it. There's a new law called Sesta that just passed. If people are using your platform, Craigslist, to do something. sex trafficking, you're liable. Craigslist and all the other ones reacted by changing what kinds of ads they do entirely. They don't even want to touch it. Well, didn't Microsoft change its policy and reaction to that too?

Yeah, a bunch of platforms reacted to Sesta by saying we're not doing this other thing. And that CESTA was to prevent sex trafficking. It was to break the shield of CD-230 by preventing sex trafficking. So that conversation on CD-230 is- that makes you liable. It makes you liable if people are using your platform for sex trafficking. So don't you need to monitor your platform entirely now? Or just not allow those kinds of things, which is what Craigslist did.

We're just not doing these kinds of ads. That whole genre. The whole genre of ads. We're shutting it down because we can't appropriately monitor. So like the contours of CDA 230. I was actually just talking about this with Sarah John today because she's really interested in that. She knows way more about it than I do. But the contours of it are people are rethinking the contours of it.

And one of the things that's interesting is the argument for they shouldn't be liable. One of the arguments for CDA 230 existing is it allows companies like Facebook Google, Reddit, YouTube, AOL to exist. Just flat out. They can exist because they're not liable and they can exercise some control over the platform. Now you have a company like Facebook. It exists. It was allowed to exist free of this liability.

It has fundamentally a monopoly over the kinds of things. It doesn't have a lot of competitors. The competitors have it just purchased. So should our rethinking of this industry change because it's no longer in the we need to nurture it phase. It's in the, these are giants that control information flow phase. And should we ask them to accept more liability? Should we change the contours of 230?

I don't know how you can make a platform with a billion-ish people on it. And that platform is around those people communicating or whatever, connecting with each other. And have no, have any guarantee from that platform that no one's going to use that to harm anybody. I think that's like a really reductive way to think about it, right? So Zuckerberg also in his interview with Ezra Klein, Klein asked him about what's happening in Myanmar, where Facebook was being used to like basically incite ethnic cleansing. And Zuckerberg was like, yeah, we noticed these messages are being sent on Messenger.

We detected them and we stopped them from going through because we have this responsibility to do it. So they just did that, right? That's Facebook's choice. The question of how they detected the messages is kind of interesting. like was there an AI farm doing it? And we asked Facebook, Facebook got back to us and they said people were reporting them. So that once we figure out that they were being reported, we took some action. That's them doing it out there out.

The question is just like, do you impose a duty for them to do it by law? So instead of voluntarily doing that, do you say you have to do these kinds of things? And if you don't, now you're liable. That's like, that's the more like sophisticated approach to modifying 230. It's out there. Like, when people talk about regulating Facebook, that in addition to the don't sell our data, be better about privacy, kind of GDPR stuff, there's also the, we know you're spreading hate messages. You can detect them, people can report them.

Do you have a duty to stop it or will hold you liable for them? Like, that's a much narrower cut at it. Just like, I don't know, it's illegal to show liquor ads during the day. and if you do it, you need to stop it, and if you don't, they'll find you. Like, it's the same kind of idea. On TV, I mean, anything, you could watch liquor ads yourself

or any time you want. Yeah, and it seems easier to make laws around, like, specific transactions, but just covering what people are saying to each other and expecting a company to have a better definition of what is okay to say than, like you said, the American government's been around for a while building up this nice.

Nice cocktail law. It took the founders, like, a long time to figure out. They had a convention. They were all in Philadelphia. They argued about how the court should be structured. That's what I mean. Like, you pull the thread on some of these things Facebook, because Zuckerberg is saying about how Facebook will run,

and it just falls apart into insanity. And the way he talks about it is like, you know what a neat idea would be? A Supreme Court for Facebook. And it's like, dude, you are one of the richest and most powerful people on the planet. Like, maybe you should have, more than like neat ideas, right? Like you should, you should be communicating effectively about how you might actually implement

your world government idea. Let me ask a question about that. Facebook has been on an insane media blitz. They've thrown all of their executives out into the slurry of Twitter. Sometimes that goes well, sometimes not so well. Zuckerberg has done, he did a bunch of interviews, did one with Recode, New York Times, and Wired. He did Ezra Klein show. He just did this hour-long conference call with reporters.

In fact, it was supposed to stop. And he said, no, no, no, I want to take some more questions. He's been on this insane media. He's going to testify in front of Congress now. He's going to testify in front of Congress. The thing is, the question, and like Neelai and I talked about this a little bit earlier, when he says, what if there was a Supreme Court that was independent from Facebook could arbitrate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

The question is, is he, does that as far as the idea goes? And that's all he's got. and he's just being radically transparent? Or does he actually have a plan and he's not telling us? Or is it some third option? Like, I don't know, he's super naive. I don't know. Maybe that's the first option.

My sense is, that's all he's got. He doesn't actually know what the solution is. So if you're in his position, you know you need to fix it, but you don't actually have the fix. What do you do? And so I'm not defending any of these half-cocked ideas. I'm certainly not defending a lot of things about Facebook. But I guess if the alternative is he just continues to be a weird, emotionless robot who issues press releases and clams up and barely says anything at all, I guess I'd rather him be out there saying, yeah, no, we got to fix it.

I don't know what to do. The thing he's not saying is, I don't know, here's an idea. I haven't gotten anywhere with it. He's like proposing a bunch of interesting thought experiments for fixing Facebook. But like what he needs to do is finish that thought and say, we are way behind. We have to deal with it. We don't know what to do. I just have a few ideas.

We're going to work on it. Instead, he presents them without clarifying whether or not there's anything behind them. And the thing that I think just drives me insane is like, what was he thinking about before? He was thinking about how to shut corn in Iowa. Did he just really wake up today? Well, okay. So I think part of the problem here is that because there are multiple sides. People disagree.

There's no generic citizen, right? Yeah. People disagree. And a big part of the disagreement is. right now people disagree on what fixed looks like. So to get rid of the idea of we're going to figure out what the solution is, there's a huge disagreement, at least in America, of what the outcome should look like. So on a conservative side, you have a lot of people complaining about being censored on Facebook

or censored on Twitter or censored on YouTube. And meanwhile, what I hear more from the left is we're being harassed, we don't feel safe, you know, there is hate speech on these platforms. And so that's what they want to get rid of. And so the picture of what a fixed Facebook or any of these platforms looks like is different for the two different sides. And so I don't know if you have to come to an agreement. Is it a bin diagram? So you're saying we haven't even defined the problems.

But, right, look at. We haven't defined an ideal. We haven't defined a paradise. Sure. But some of the problems are like, well, you know what you shouldn't do? There shouldn't be like Russian bot farms seating Facebook with misinformation during our election. It seems like just no one wants that. There shouldn't be Cambridge Analytica hoovering up data outside of the terms of service and then using it for whatever they use it for.

We know that shouldn't happen. But I feel like we've heard some proactive things from Facebook on it. He's not just riffing on those things. Yeah. And then the things that he is riffing about is what you are describing, which is I'm not going to, make a decision about what is and is not allowed on Facebook. Right. Because that walks me into, you're censoring me or you're allowing hate speech.

We're going to let these communities decide. And that, honestly, is, like, I get where he's coming from because that is how we literally define, like, speech laws in our country in a lot of ways. Like, the best legal definition of pornography comes down to I know it when I see it in the community. And, like, different communities can have different standards. And, like, that's literally how we do it. but he's not running a government man he's running a company and like if he hadn't thought about the problems of running Facebook at this scale in the form of a government before I think that's why I read these answers and they all just seem like neat ideas that he's having to have as he thinks to read out loud in public but it's like what what were you thinking about before like through all of 2017 when all this was happening where is your like you know blue ribbon commission to figure out how a Facebook

Supreme Court might work. Where was the big public thing about a good functioning democratic system for post removal? Like, that's what you should have been doing before. And the idea that this media blitz is going to rehabilitate him, it might. You know, he's doing the work. He's out there. He's taking the questions. He's going in front of Congress. But the gulf in trust is because they didn't do the work before. Also, his ideas were insane. Have you guys seen the film starring Emma Watson?

called The Circle. Oh my God. Oh, my God. No. It is suggested to me all the time by content suggestion algorithms. It's a social network and they start a government. I read the book. The book is a fun little YAA novel.

The movie, I hate watched it. I'm like, I'm going to watch this. I know it's going to be bad, but I'm going to watch it. And you can't even hate watch it. You can't even like watch it knowing that you're watching a bad movie. It is horrific. I made it all the way through. All right.

That's an accomplishment. Were you mobile? Did you accomplish this for mobile? Mobile? All right. Are you a mobile accomplisher? Oh, gosh. All right.

We're done. That was Vergecast 300. It highs, lows. There was a montage. There was some deep Facebook stuff. It's a classic Vergecast because Neil, I forgot to do the thing you were supposed to, which was promote my new YouTube show.

Oh. Do you to promote your new YouTube show? Just a mess. I don't know why people have been listening to a show for as long as they've listened to it. And more people keep listening to it. If you're new, it's never been better than this. Maybe people have just been coming back hoping we would explain all of our jokes.

And now their father's satisfied. Deeter, promote your show. There's a new show on YouTube called Processer. Technically, it's called Processer with Deeter Bone, which I'm really happy about because before there was a title for it, I had this period where I didn't want to give it a title. And so everybody just started calling it the Deeter Show, which was very awkward for me. I like it. Yeah, it's going to be a show where, like, we try and do, like, little, little video essays about tech topics.

So the, one of the episodes we're working on right now is about the, what's a computer ad and why everybody got so mad about it. I don't want to give away all my ideas. But it'll be, it'll be a little bit more YouTube-y to what we usually do. So that means, like, it'll be, I don't know, a little bit, a little bit rougher, I hope. But that should be a little bit more fun. And, yeah, just a lot of, I don't know, deeper thoughts about tech than you usually get from. from like your standard hands-on. I'll talk about specs, but that's like not the point.

I'm excited. It'll be fun. In my privileged position, I've already seen some episodes. Very good. Let me tell you. Wait, when's the first episode go up? Well, in theory, the first episode is going to premiere on Wednesday, April 11th. It is possible that I might actually do something sooner because I am going to have a piece

of exclusive news at some point in the near future. and when I'm able to publish it as an episode of processor, I will. Little hints. Little tease. Little tease. We also have other shows. Why just push that button?

Season two continues. This week, they did a whole thing on Finstagrams. You know what Instagram is? Finsda's, yes. Yeah. Fences are... I have a FINsta. Our secondary fake Instagram.

What? Yeah. I really want to get a Finsta. I mean, it's easy to do. But they did an whole episode on what fintagrams are, why people have them with the very excellent

Taylor Lawrence, who is one of the, I think, the sharpest sort of internet culture reporters out there. So listen to that. That's great. You can listen to Recode Decode with Carus Fisher. You can listen to Recode Media, Peter Kafka, both excellent shows. Casey Newton was supposed to be on this show today. It helps talk about Facebook.

He's not here because he was reporting an episode of his forthcoming podcast, Converged. What? That's going to be a thing. So keep an eye for that. And you can just, like, go on the socials and find us. I believe it when I see it, Casey. You won't see it. You'll hear it. I want it in my iTunes or sorry, Apple Podcasts. It's called Apple Podcasts now.

Yeah, you know that. Anyway, yeah, rate review, do all the good stuff. That was Vergecast 300. We've either done 298 or 300 episodes of this show. Thank you. Here's to another 300. Here's to another number in that area. But thank you, everybody, for listening for all this time.

It's wild that we've been doing the show for this long. It's wild that the verge exists. It's wild that we have an audience. We thank you for it. Rock and roll. Paul. Probably using the internet. This episode of the Vergecast was brought to you by IBM.

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