The Vergecast - Live from Code Conference

Episode Date: June 3, 2016

This week on a late night, sleep-deprived Vergecast, Nilay and Dieter reunite in Los Angeles to attend Recode's Code Conference and meet up with Lauren Goode and Casey Newton to give their take on the interviews and throw in a few anecdotes from the night. Things get silly. Also, Paul Miller updates us on new PC backpacks on this week's Gadget of the Week/Gadget Corner (we're still working on the name). 04:26 - Jeff Bezos 34:56 - Paul’s Gadget of the Week 37:32 - Casey reads an ad for Squarespace 39:35 - Twitter talk 48:07 - Facebook talk 55:01 - Sundar Pichai 1:10:55 - Elon Musk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to this, the Vergecast. It's weird without the music. I just realized. I don't know that. Will you sing the little song? Did, do, do, do, do, do, do. That just sounds like you sang your name over. Yeah, dear, dear, dear, dear.

All right. Hello and welcome to this, the Vergecast, the flagship podcast to the verge. I'm the United States. I'm going to tell. I'm the editor-in-chief of the Verge. And I got to say, we're at the Code Conference. It's very late. I'm joined here by Dieter Bone.

Hello. Lauren Good. Hi. Casey Newton. What's up? All-Star Verge West panel. We, I'm just going to be honest with the audience.

It's 11.38 p.m. It's unfathomably late. Which is actually not that late, but we've been up since really early. I've been working since six. Yeah. And on only a few hours sleep. And we have spent the past hour and a half

listening to news and information about cyborgs and AI. And like I'm so slap happy. I can't even. Literally anything could happen on this podcast. Well, mostly what's going to happen is you're going to hear the tinkle of ice cubes. Hello, bourbon. Or is it bourbon? Or is it, I got to, so I didn't do a fake Cizzer Vodka ad last week. Yeah, it was real bad.

Angry mail about it. So this episode of The Vortcast is brought to you by Cizzer Vodka. A fake vodka that I made up that I'm going to keep plugging until somebody pays me for it. Presumably somebody here. There's billionaires everywhere. Yeah, right? I got to go out some of Elon money. Cizzer vodka.

Raise your glasses. Your ice-filled blast to our producer, audio producer Andrew Marino, who's going to deal with the garbage that I'm going to send him at the end of this. Thanks, Andrew. It's not good. Andrew, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're just a good guy. You're a, you're just a good, trusting, caring man

who sent us to L.A. to Ranchos Pallas Verdez with a bunch of microphones and a dream. And here we are making the verge cast. So we should describe both the code conferences for people that don't know. It's, uh, you know. Some say, It is the premier tech conference in America. Yeah.

It used to be the All Things. It was the D conference for a long time. Yeah. Prior to this when Recode was All Things D. Then they retired the D. It started and they retired the D. It's really late. You can't do that.

Sorry. Deaconference actually started before the website All Things D started. This was years ago over a decade ago. Yeah. There will be a quiz on this at the end of the podcast. But yeah, we've had. Speakers in recent years like Elon Musk, you know, Bill Gates, Cheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey, Jenny Remedy. I mean, the list goes on and on. And then back in the day when it was the

DeConference, people like Steve Jobs would actually come and speak on stage, which was pretty remarkable because he did not do many non-Apple event appearances. Right. I mean, the co-conference is amazing. And to be here is amazing. And to watch Walt and Kara pull together their incredible network of like everyone powerful in tech to basically like prove themselves on stage is amazing. But today was a very long day. We just came from Elon Musk, which we will talk about in depth later on in the show. But I think it's safe to say that all of us had to take a 20 minute break after Elon being like, we all live in a simulation. I'm going to inject neural lace into your jugular veins.

and my company is not entirely dependent on something called Earth-based revenue, which Lauren has just been giggling about that quietly for, like, literally an hour. As opposed to that old Martian money. I mean, it was just wild. So we'll do that in depth a little bit. But it actually started, Code started yesterday

with a barn burner. I mean, there's tons of speakers are only going to focus on a few, but barn burner opening, Lauren's still laughing at Earth-based revenue. like she's melting in front of my eyes right now. When she's three serious? No, we don't know.

It's look. This audience knows what we're doing. Right. Like take the normal verge cast, push it into much more tired and a little more drunk than here we are at code. I'm not drunk at all. Get to work to work. That's a Zavakia.

I won't cut through the night by itself. Anyhow, so we're at code. It's been amazing. There's one more session tomorrow. of which the highlight, I think, is going to be Nick Denton of Gawker. But the main, the big tech players are all over and done. And like I said, it started yesterday with, I think, one of the best opening sessions I've seen at Code.

Jeff Bezos spoke. And he kind of started a little bit slow. Yep. And then Walt asked him about space. And then, like, his mind expanded. And he said incredible things about what he wants Blue Origin to accomplish. And then he got really expansive about Amazon. So let's go.

through that a little bit. What did you think of Bezos? Lauren, and looking at you, Lauren, she literally just fried out. Like, I watched the light blink out from behind her eyes. Well, we talked a lot about AI. Artificial intelligence has been a recurring theme throughout the conference, and Walton Care are making a point to ask

pretty much every single guest on stage what their thoughts are on AI. And one of the things that Bezos said is that, that I found notable, is that he thinks you can't possibly overstate how much impact artificial intelligence is going to have on society over the next 20 years, which you can either interpret as like, wow, that's great.

Like robots are going to make our lives better, but it could also sound somewhat ominous, I guess, if you decide to look at it that way. So I found that to be pretty, pretty interesting. I also thought, well, I know that Amazon has apparently been doing this education program for people in its distribution centers for a while now, but he really made a point to talk about that, which I kind of see is, I don't know, maybe in some ways, a counter to the reports that have been coming out in recent months about Amazon's treatment of workers. And then he offered me a job in this really indirect way,

which was really bizarre. It wasn't indirect. It was very direct. By indirect, you mean by, like, shady? No. He basically, Lauren asked a question about wearables, which is great. Yes, I asked three questions about wearables. And then she used all of the pieces.

that Buffalo and wrote like it reported about it now. Jeff Bezos dodged the question on wearables which you should read. It's amazing. But Lauren asked the question about wearables and pushed him and asked to follow up and then what was his line? He's like, it sounds like you want a job and product. Come see me after the show. Come see me. Come see me. Come talk to me.

Did you? And both my hiss to Jeff Bezos for coming after our time. I mean, come on. I'm still I'm all in on, I'm doubling down on journalism guys. That's what money is. That is where the money is. Snapchat. Okay.

Sorry, Jeff. I'm busy making content. Sorry we've been making. Lauren has been forced to make an endless series of Facebook live videos all day long. So the 10 minute death marches for the rest of your life, Lauren. But I want to hear what you guys thought about the basis session. The overall consensus on his thing was like he like had the reality distortion field in the room. Everybody, everybody was like, whoa, like I am in love with you right now.

even though you were saying things that when you just look at them out of context are like patently dumb. So he got asked the, you know, Peter Thiel versus Gawker question. And he led with like quoting Confucius or the apocryphal Confucius that, you know,

like, oh, if you seek revenge and you shall dig two graves, one for yourself. And like, I don't know, he had a bunch of like one liners that were really like, huh. But in the room they totally played. Yeah. And so, commanding presence.

And so, like, everybody at this conference is like, oh, look at this. The Steve Jobs mantle, he might be, he might be going to Bezos. And I have feelings about that. Well, so that's a thing at code. I talked about this with a couple people today. The history of the DeConference was, I mean, it's an astounding history, right? Like the highlight performance of the DeConference, I think, was D-10 when, Jobs and Gates were on stage together.

This was famously the only conference jobs would do, and he would say amazing things and be off the cuff. He was really He was Steve Jobs. And I think the history of the stage and like being on stage with Walt for this opening session is very much can you perform

at this level. And I think three years ago, Elon Musk's had that kind of moment. He absolutely did. Yeah. Everyone left the room that year with an Elon Musk man crush. Yeah. It was just incredible. And this year, Bezos had that moment and owned the room. And I think we were saying he had these like, he was prepared, right?

He had things he wanted to talk about in a way he wanted to talk about them. He, he, I disagree that the things were patently dumb. I think is what I'm saying. Like, well, they weren't patently dumb. That's far. His answer, like, he gave this, you know, Bezos is a wild person. He runs Amazon. He runs Blue Origin of Space Company and he owns the Washington Post.

Yeah. You could spend an hour talking about any one of those things. Or AWS. Yeah. Or, yeah, you could just. drill into some Amazon thing. Like, let's talk about delivery logistics. Right.

Clearly capable of doing that. Or AWS, right? Let's talk about your server business. But his answer, I think, about Peter Thiel. Was actually, like, I called it savvy because he didn't get into, does he agree with Teal and he hates Gawker? He didn't get into, he got a little bit into, like, First Amendment stuff. And, like, you know, beautiful speech is easy to defend.

You have to be able to defend the hateful, the hard speech or the ugly speech. But his basic answer to that question was like, yo, you're a billionaire. Don't waste your time on this. Like suck it up. Suck it up, get a thick skin. Right. Which is like, yeah.

Right. I thought that was great. And I thought his line, you know, he got asked about Donald Trump, who's attacked Amazon and several times, obviously, has a contentious relationship with every newspaper, but particularly Washington Post. And what do you say? He's like my predecessor, K. was like during the Watergate hearings was threatened.

I think I'll put your ass the ringer, but Bezos wouldn't say ass on stage. I don't think it was ass. Really? That's not the thing that gets put in a ringer. Hmm. Google's what? If only there's an AI in this room,

they could tell me what body. Anyway, while Lauren looks up that quote, Bezos is like, I own the post, I believe in journalism, and I am willing to have whatever one of my body parts put to the ringer. It's tit, by the way. And so he doesn't have that.

And so that's why his body part line played so well because he had something else. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Got it. The man tit. Yeah. I don't think that's what it's called.

Why, I hate to drag us away from this particular point, but it's notable to me that we've avoided talking about what I thought was the best part of the Bezos presentation, which was everything that he had. to say about space, including that he thought that the Earth in the future would likely be, quote, zoned residential. Yes. Yeah. Light industrial.

Yeah, light industrial. And that we would move all of our heavy industry off world. And there was sort of this moment where you were like, Jeff Bezos is literally talking about how this planet will be zoned like 300 years from now. And it's probably not wrong. Right.

This is where Earth-based No, Earth-Based Earth-Based, no, Earth-Pestrother, no, never mind. Well, if you really look at we should really talk about Bezos in space because there's a lot of things unpack with him talking about that. But it's funny the two themes, the big themes here, one is AI, which

is eventually all human consciousness, we augmented by machines. And the other one is we have to leave the planet. Yeah. And it's just like right before Musk, Nathan Mervold spoke and his whole thing was basically like, I have done the

intensive research to prove that asteroids will destroy us all. And isn't it so hilarious? Yeah. There's a lot of jokes in that presentation. But in the meantime, here's a video of an asteroid. Yeah. In the meantime, I've cut a grill in half and taken beautiful photos of a burger.

It's so confusing. But in terms of the unexpected themes, yes. That's a deep cookbook reference. And if you didn't get it, I'm saying you need to do some work. Like, go study the cookbook reference. It's really good. Have you seen the photography? It's pretty amazing.

The cookbook weighs like 50. pounds, right? Yeah. That are... Yeah, we have about 40 pounds. It's 2,500 page book. Yeah. Isn't it called the modernist cuisine?

The modernist. It's not often called a good book, but it is a very long. It's a science and food book. Well, no, at one point he was a... We talked about Murveld all night too. At one point, Nathan Merbold was explaining Kirchfield. He was explaining some... Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation.

Right, and he was explaining... Wow, Casey Newton. Look at this guy. My master's thesis was about... it so it was just a crazy coincidence. He's like, this is why toast burns. I'm writing a 2,500 page book on bread. And just like threw that out there.

And here's a video of an asteroid exploding. It broke a million windows. It's hilarious. Just a very strange. I'm making you realize all of good conferences about humanity is doomed. Yeah. And also this T.O. Tinder is speaking tomorrow. So it's like a real, just a lot of themes.

Anyhow. So Bezos, he's got blue origin. Yeah. I think there is an extreme temptation. to talk about Blue Origin as though it was in the same category as SpaceX. And I think Bezos took full advantage of that yesterday. So Blue Origin is, I watched Lauren Grush react to this video in real time and Slack today because I sent her the Bezos video.

I was like, there's a story here somewhere for you. Lauren's a wonderful space reporter. And she got back to me and she was like, he sounds like a complete tool. Because they're doing different types of exploration, right? Some are orbital versus suborbital. is that the oversimplifying it probably. Bezos is doing space tourism and plus some other stuff that'll get to

and Musk is like putting a rocket into space every two weeks. Yeah. So there's like a huge difference. And he's delivering cargo to the International Space Station. He's got a rocket the Falcon Heavy, which presumably can get him into Mars. Bezos can get to suborbital space.

The rocket that looks hilarious in my mind. Again, it's very late. And then it comes down. It's a giant fire TV stick. It looks like. The fire TV stick, I have to say, an extraordinarily sexual TV streaming product. Why isn't it just, why don't we just call it the fire dangle if we're going to?

No, we can't make, no, that's not allowed. The word has been excommunicated with the technology community. Cruising right into the midnight hour. Yeah, anyway. Here we are. No, Blue Origin does something far less complicated and their rocket engines are refurbished 60-year-old Russian rocket engines. But because he's got a rocket company,

shooting him in a space and landed him, it's easy for him to start doing the expansive view of space, right? We're going to move all heavy manufacturing off the Earth. His line was, Elon Musk and I are very like-minded, but I don't believe in Elon's like Plan B. We have to be a multi-planetary species. The best planet is Earth, and we can go other places and do other things there,

but Earth is like plan A is, or plan B is, let's make sure plan A works. I don't want a plan B for Earth. This is the best planet in the solar system, I guarantee it or something to that effect. That, to me, was another theme that I saw throughout the conference, which is if you dip your toe in the water of something, you get to start making expansive statements about the future,

which is, to me, the real theme of all the AI conversation. So Cheryl Sandberg and Mike Schroenberg, Shrep. Shrepfer. Mike Shrepfer. Shrepfer. Shrepfer. Shrepfer.

Shrepher short. Let's just call them Shrep. Like we're friends. But we're not. We don't really know you. But thanks for coming to Mike. Shrepfer. The CTO of Facebook.

We're on stage talking about their AI products. And Shrepfer was like, soon we'll put auto braking in every car. And that will solve 70,000 car crash in the United States. And it's like, that's great. You run Facebook M, which is like, literally monkeys with typewriters. answering text-based queries, and I have no idea how you're going to put AI brakes on my car. And the connection between I've got a toe in the water here

and this grand future here is pretty shaky. And I thought that was the thing about the space conversation with Bezos. It was really shaky to me. It was, yeah, you're launching the rocket in private space flight. You're another billionaire in space. But I also think, like, the conference is designed to get people to think expansively, right? It would be boring if they're like, well, here are all of our capabilities these today. As for tomorrow, who can say?

That would be a very dull code. Only time we'll tell. That's my conference. The only time we'll tell. I know we're trying not to get into Musk, but all the crazy shit that he said about space and like going to Mars and what should the government on Mars be

and all the stuff you're like, oh man, you're just a nutbag. But then well then again somebody should be thinking about this. If technology, like the difference between what our lives are like now because of tech compared to 20 years ago. Like if you just extrapolate that progression like in 80 or 100 years, things are going to be nuts and somebody should be preparing. And so when I see these like billionaire titans of industry like expounding on like crazy ideas like, you know, becoming a cyborg by sticking an implant in your jugular, which by the way is safer than like cracking your skull open. I'm like, oh my God, you're just a crazy person.

This is hilarious. But then I step back and I go, huh. Yeah. Actually. Well, at some point, everybody's ideas were crazy. Right. I mean, anyone who really advanced anything. And by the way, like, it's been the past five years, like, reading this constant criticism in the tech press, it's like, oh, Silicon Valley, like, all they do is make photo sharing apps, right?

It's just all, like, likes and hearts and faves and retweets. And when somebody's going to tackle something ambitious. So I don't think you can say that on the one hand and then come back and be like, but you want to. but you want to go to Mars, well, that's just crazy. You want to say, planet Earth? What's wrong with you? My only point is Bezos took advantage of his moment and his ability to own the crowd

to say really broad, expansive things that allied the truth in certain ways, right? So the space one, he can go up only so high and come straight back down and he can't actually deliver any cargo, right? So his thing was,

I built Amazon on top of all this existing infrastructure, like credit cards in the internet, and now it's my responsibility to build the next generation of infrastructure. And he actually has a direct infrastructure. He has two. He's three, right? He's got the United Launch Alliance, and he actually has NASA exists, and SpaceX exist. And there's a lot of them, and they're equally trying to build the infrastructure. But because he's in the zone, he gets to say those things.

Yeah, I mean, but he also has this amazing track record. like why why bet against Jeff Bezos? Like this man is incredibly patient. He's incredibly smart. He assembles amazing teams and he just relentlessly iterates. Yeah. So that actually gets me to the next one. Oh,

I would know. We can't leave Bezos. I was going to talk about work life harmony and the Apple TV. Those are the things I'll talk about. So that gets me to the next one, which was he got asked a hard question by Walt, I think. That was,

well, of course it was by Walt. Amazon gets criticized for its culture a lot and being really hard. And he gave all these really, again, expansive answers. He's like, we are bringing training centers into our warehouses so that if you want to be a nurse, we're going to train you be a nurse. And it's a glass wall. So other people who work in the warehouse know these opportunities are available to them. He said this amazing thing. Actually, one of my favorite phrases of code so far, which is he knows how to give up an idea when the last high judgment champion gives up on it.

Yeah. Or until he begins to question his own high judgment. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, if anyone ever makes a movie, like a martial arts movie about me, I wanted to be called the last high judgment champion. Oh, I thought you were going to say, if anyone ever makes a movie about Jeff Bezos, it'll be all sork and ask with people talking really quickly about high judgment.

Yeah, otherwise you might kill that. But it's also true that Amazon's still a very cruel place to work. And it was just that moment, right? It's like the reality distortion field was in full effect where it seemed like in that room, what you really wanted to do is work at Amazon because it was led by a charismatic visionary leader. And he was just able to say, like, here's my vision. Here's how I make decisions. Here's how I think about everything.

He talked about work-life harmony instead of work-life balance. But he did also say that, listen, if your work is not your passion, like you probably shouldn't work here. I'm paraphrasing, but he doesn't want people. He doesn't want employees that are looking at the clock and thinking, can I go home at five o'clock today? Yeah. And it's just, it's not their culture. And a lot of companies are like that.

And maybe some other executives wouldn't be so blunt about that. Right. I'm like super curious about people who like maybe is they're getting ready to graduate from college are just obsessed with the idea of working for Amazon because I'm sure they're out there, but they're also in Seattle. So I have like zero exposure to these people. And I think, I mean, there are people who've been tremendously successful at Amazon, and obviously Amazon does a lot of

great stuff, but, you know, I also believe that their culture is, like, kind of, like, militaristic and brutal in the same way that Apple's is, but that you could very much contrast with, say, Googles or Facebooks, which are much more cuddly by contrast, and where most of what you hear is about, like, the perks as opposed to, I cried every day at my desk. Right. Or to get into, to start a meeting, we all had to write six-page memos and sit there quietly reading them before we were allowed to speak, which is my favorite Amazon story. Just how we started this podcast. Actually, that's literally true.

Lauren, your memo is late. Although I'm going to go cry at my gosh town. It's actually my dream is to make everybody start. Anyway, here's what I'm saying. I'm going to start driving the verge ever harder because I watched Jeff Bezos speak. And then the last thing we talked about, I asked him a question about the Apple TV. Because he said this amazing thing, Walt asked him about Prime Video. And he's like we monetize Prime Video in another way, which is if we win an Emmy Award that actually helps us sell more shoes.

Because it gets people to sign up for Prime because they want to watch these Emmy Award winning shows. And then once you have Prime, we know we have the data that says you're more likely to buy more things than non-prime members. So the thing is they don't have Amazon Prime Video on the Apple TV. And they don't even sell the Apple TV in their store. They don't sell the Apple TV in their store, and they don't sell the Chromecast. And getting Amazon Prime Video on a Chromecast, it works on Android, but not elsewhere. It's like a thing. Yeah.

And his quote was, well, there are two quotes that are really important. He kept on talking about acceptable business terms. We will sell the stuff if we can reach acceptable business terms. And then he also kept on saying over and over again that private business discussions should remain. private. Right. And I'm going to leave it at that. Yeah.

And like, it's just blindingly obvious to steal Neely's phrase. Blindingly obvious. Blindingly obvious. That he doesn't want to pay Apple's cut of 30% on, you know, software signups. And so because Apple won't budge on that, he's like, screw this. Right. Kicking out of the store. And I have to say, like, like, man, would it be fun to be a fly on the wall of those

negotiations, right? Because you have like, like, by reputation, you. have two of the most like brutal negotiators of all time in Apple and Amazon. And so I'm just super curious. Like what is the tenor of those discussions? Yeah. Does it end with slammed doors? They're cutthroat.

But no, like they're absolutely cutthroat. Literally today in Bill Gates session, he recommended a book. And I was like, oh, I'm going to read that book. It was about AI because that's what everybody's talking about. And I went, I did what you do and you want to buy something. You open the Amazon app. I'm like, oh, it's the Amazon app. Oh, there's a Kindle edition.

Great. I want to read it on a Kindle. Where's the buy button? Yeah. I can add it to a wish list, but I can't put the, uh, uh, oh. Yeah. Right. And then I open up the web page because that's what you do because the web apps are way better.

So prime is what? $99 a year? Yeah. Like it's been 79. It's 99. I don't know it is now. Yeah. Maybe your grandfathered in?

I actually don't know. I should check. I should be more careful. I'm getting charged for. This is not a useful. Whatever. Literally Google is not. If you know how much Amazon Prime Clause, please tweet it at Nelai.

That's at Reckless on Twitter.com. Days from now, I will learn how much Amazon. Also, if you think that Google Play Music is superior to Spotify, please tweet at Recklace. Amazon, when you send your Prime membership renewal notices, you don't include the price in that email, so you really should probably start doing that. But, like, here's a question about the... Wait, let me finish the Prime. Let me finish the prime thing.

Presumably what they, Spotify costs $10 a month. Yep. If you buy it on the web. Yep. And it costs $12.99 if you sign up to the Apple. Presumably Apple could just pass along the tax. So if Prime is $99 a year, let's say, they could just charge, you could open the Prime app on the Apple TV and it would say sign up for Prime will bill you $129 a year. Right.

Well, I think it's Amazon that has. to choose to like increase the price on it. No, that's what I'm saying. Amazon could do it that way. Yeah, yeah. And they would just pass on the tax. Pass the tax on to Apple is the 30%. And I just don't think they want to do that.

No, I don't think they want to do that. No, I think Apple is just firm. Like this is the price. Yep. That's an annual. Oh, I see what you're saying. And then for each and app purchase. But they're not so clear.

Every year. No, but there wouldn't be any, there are no more in app purchases. Well, I guess you can sound like cable stuff, right? No, Prime you can actually buy, you know, al-a-cart episodes for like $1.99 an episode in Prime Video. Not all of it is free streaming. I mean, you check out some of the content and you still have to buy it from within the application.

Right. So the 30% tax to be there for all that stuff. And you can buy like C-So or whatever the hell it is through Prime. I swear to God. NBC's failed comedy service. Peter Kafka had some story. The Go-90 of comedy streaming services. Didn't like HBO or didn't somebody manage to convince Apple to like trim down or not be so rigorous on the 30%?

And it was like HBO or somebody like, I swear to got to. Peter Koff got a story about this. Can I relay a piece of wonderful Code Conference gossip that I heard today? Yes. Go 90. Yes. Oh God. Go 90. Share it. I don't know if this is true. This is complete Code Conference gossip.

Just pure code conference gossip. I do not know if this is true. I desperately want it to be true. Verizon is considering rebranding all of its video offerings, including the TV shit, is Go 90, which is hilarious because Go 90 is all about turning your phone 90 degrees.

And your TV is already fucking turn 90 degrees. I'm melting. What greater way to capitalize on the amazing success of Go 90? I mean, already an entire generation is growing up, turning their phones a different way, and watching these Verizon exclusives, and it's shaping their childhoods. And now they will turn their television and turn their TV sideways.

I mean, this is brilliant. I do not know if this. I'm 100%. I don't know if it's true. Let me ask this question. I just. What are. Verizon's other TV services. Fios.

Oh, Fios. Okay. I don't know if it's true. I'm just saying, don't you want it to be true? Oh, very much so. No, 90. I mean, let's face it,

Fios, not a great brand. Like, no, like, fiber optics, outside self. Yeah, it's like VoIP. Fiber in outside. If you know what Fios stands for, tweet at Reckless on Twitter.com.

I think it's like, I think it actually just stands for fiber optic service. Like, they didn't get very far. Maybe it's an operating system, fiber optic operating system. No, like Comcasts. It's got its... No, because then it's like fiber in operating system. It definitely seems like... This is the worst conversation we've ever had in the purchase.

Anyway, but the Apple TV, he was very clear. Yep. But the answer about Apple TV is right. That makes sense. I don't want to pay their tax. so we're staying out. And many, many, many people have made that decision. So they're staying out of putting their app in the Apple TV.

Fine. But to not sell it on Amazon, like, Amazon is such a, like, universal thing. It's becoming, like, the thing you'd use to buy stuff on the internet. In the same way of the store. But in the same way, Google is where you use to find stuff. And Google has been pressured into maintaining at least a patina of, like, neutrality towards the services that it links to. And do we need to get to a place

where Amazon needs to have that same sense of neutrality with the stuff that they... It's not actually enforced. I mean, you can look at it in one of two ways. You can look at it and say, yeah, they're not being very nice, first of all. And second of all, it's, you know, it feels...

There's something about it that feels anti-competitive. But at the same time, like we talk about this a lot with Apple. When Apple phases products out of its store that may be in some way competitive to a core Apple. Apple product. Right.

You know, and sometimes we write about it. And I'll say, hey, Apple just got rid of all these fitness trackers in its store because they're about to introduce the Apple Watch. They own their retail stores and they can put whatever in their, they can sell whatever they want in their retail stores. And that's why Amazon's doing the same. Yeah, I agree. I don't think Amazon is the universal retailer the way that Google's a universal resource

looking. I buy a lot of crap on Amazon. I'd say, yes, I do it. Like at the end of the day, you type Apple.com in a browser, you buy your Apple TV. No one asked in my URL joke, and I'm very disappointed by it. I tried to buy a TV from Amazon, and it wasn't available on Amazon, and I, like, literally didn't know what to do. Yeah, do you buy it from, like, Tom's or whatever? I tried to go to Vizio, and they refused to sell it to me because they couldn't figure out how my credit card worked.

Data has diners club. No, I just changed addresses because I moved to California. So anyway, but that's... We just talk about my TV for the rest of the podcast. Yeah, let's get into the specs. You turn to 90. Spex. I'm going to mount it in portrait.

Have you gone vertical video with your television? It's a second screen for Snapchat. It's going to be great. No, so, but it makes sense with the Apple thing, right? We don't pay the tax. Everybody has the argument with the tax. Spotify is like going to Congress to talk about how the tax is unfair versus Apple.

Like, well, that's the issue. Yeah. Why would you not support Chromecast, which is charging you no tax? Yep. Which is just here's the, we're still in your app on a phone. So basically is. I'm going to push the button and send it to a TV in the simple as possible way. I don't have it for it.

But he, like, we want the app to run with the right experience on your thing. But, like, that's insane because you just put it in your app on the tablet. My. It works on their Android stuff. And by the way, the Amazon Prime Video app is not that amazing of an experience. Right. Anyway. So, you know, ensuring that it's, go ahead.

They're super rigorous about, I think you can only store like 12 episodes of show maybe somebody's going to correct me and it'll be great uh tweet it at back long yeah but no i like i'm like oh i'm gonna like be away from internet for like a while so i'm gonna just store all the stuff offline because amazon prime lets you do that and that's amazing and then like i wanted to store a whole season of a tv show and i couldn't store the last two episodes of a season so i like oh so i'm just going to be left hanging this is the least sad thing i've ever heard it's the worst thing that's ever happened to me in my entire life. My theory is that Amazon is pissed about Google Play Services. Yeah. And how not functional FireOS is because they can't, right? And they are,

oh, because Google is putting more and more into Google Play Services instead of into core Android. Yeah. Yeah. So that they are, they're shackled by their reliance on Android for Firebase, which is a fork. And they are punishing Google by not supporting the rest of the Google ecosystem. Yeah. So if you make the Chromecast stronger, you strengthen the Google ecosystem. I think that's right. And yet also like these seem like essentially empty gestures. Like do we really think that they're like that they're costing Apple or Google a material amount of revenue with these things?

Yes. Okay. Yes. Actually, I do. I think it's really interesting to me that the Amazon video apps support Airplay because they know that the Apple TV is the most popular of these devices. Yeah. They support the Roku because it's one of the most popular of these devices. No, they support the Roku because Roku.

will do anything with anybody in any time. Look, here's a good. Well, Roku also shares, they share ad revenue based on ads that are running against the different apps and their plot and their, uh, to me it's interesting primarily insofar as Amazon never stops patting itself on the back for how much it loves its customers and how it will do anything for its customers. And they start from the customer's needs and they work backwards. But then you see stuff like this and you're like, but when we have any sort of minor

competitive skirmish, we will absolutely ruin the customer. experience. Right. Yeah. Okay. We've gone very long. We've got to go way long. Here's what's going to happen next.

Paul is going to tell us about a gadget. Ooh. Then I'm going to read some advertising. Then we're going to come back. Casey's going to say two or three extremely cutting precise sentences about Twitter and Facebook because Jack Dorsey spoke. Cheryl Sandberg spoke. Then we got to get into Sundar.

Yeah. We got to get into Elon. Yeah. All right. Paul, take it away. So my gadget of the week is HP made a backpack or they're making a backpack. It's a VR backpack and I'm very excited. So we already knew that there was going to be a VR backpack by Zotak,

which is one of these like many companies that like makes like gaming PC kind of components and like motherboards and graphics cards and stuff. We knew they were going to make a VR backpack. Then this week we've got to make a VR backpack. week we found out that MSI, another one of those companies, is going to make a gaming backpack. But now HP is going to make a gaming backpack, a VR backpack. And I don't know what, I guess maybe I do know why. I know exactly why I love this.

And sure, it's partly because I want VR like untethered. If you played with like Oculus or Vibe, no matter how great the experiences, you're always going to like, you're a little worried about this cable that is. plugged into a very expensive PC and you don't want to get all tangled in it. So, you know, getting rid of that worry would be great. But that's not what I'm stoked about the most. I'm stoked about a truly wearable, hardcore PC. I think there's so many crazy, awesome things that you could do with this.

And I know people have put laptops and backpacks and attached them to themselves and done this. But now this is going to be like a product you can buy in a store. And I think there's going to be a lot. of awesome stuff done with this like basically like you could think of these components as the same sort of components that are in self-driving cars you have GPU and a ton of processing power and all these sensors and stuff so if you just plugged a bunch of awesome sensors into this then you could like you can basically create the wearable computer of the future of my dreams where it's recognizing faces and and and prompting you on some sort of I don't know some

sort of heads-up display that you have also magically gotten from somewhere. I don't know. Look, it's not all come together yet. Right now, these are just like renders basically. We haven't even seen one in action, but it's just this fun new arms race of VR backpacks. And I am going to be there every step of the way telling you how cool backpacks are. That's what, that's the circle breaker promise. So thanks for listening to Gadget Corner with your friend, Paul Miller. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog, or an online store for your dame. It's all included with your SpareSquace website. Squarespace. Can I tell you about some of these product features? Number one, easy. Creating your

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That's the ad, Squarespace.com. Thank you for your support of the Late Night Vergecast. But let me tell you this, people. You can start your free trial today at Squarespace.com and enter the offer code verge to get 10% off your first purchase. SquareSpace. Set your website apart, you filthy animal. Okay, so let's very quickly talk about Twitter and Facebook.

Dorsey was here. He brought to Durey McKesson, who is, I think, most prominent for doing Black Lives Matter. Yes. I talked to Doree for five minutes. You did a Facebook Live with him, right? I did. My five minutes with Doree was incredible. Like he's a shining star and he is just like, I think Ezra said to me, his clarity of thought is like astounding.

What was your experience with him like? He's incredibly charismatic and he's one of these people that is really active in a lot of sort of different roles. It's funny because he doesn't work for Twitter. And I asked him whether he was going to and he was sort of not, whether Jack has ever offered him a job, he's sort of not committed. But his ideas for Twitter, are really interesting in terms of how to improve things around like harassment tools. He even said something like, I really wish I said this on stage too. I really wish they would bring back the star instead of the heart.

And that's a small thing. But he just has these great ideas for what Twitter is as a product and as a platform. And that's just Twitter. I mean, that's not even sort of... He's like running for the mayor of Baltimore. He was running for the mayor of Baltimore. His campaign has now ended. But, you know, he's still a very...

prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter movement and is a very outspoken person when it comes to things like police brutality. And he's just a, yeah, he's just a really, really interesting person. And he's not a super hardcore techie like the people here. And this is a really tough crowd. And I feel like he, you know, he was as charismatic, if not more so than a lot of people that we heard speak today. So this is like an interesting, and I know Casey has a thought about this even though he's literally falling asleep in his microphone. It's, again, very late here. But his knowledge of what Twitter is and could be

is informed by the fact that he created a massive social movement using a platform. Using a hashtag on a platform. Using a hashtag on a platform. And he completely

gets the power of that platform to create this movement and write technology and culture. He changed the culture, a piece of technology. And he gets the product. What he said to me was, Jack understands a product, and I have product conversations with him.

And then I talk to other people at Twitter, and the leadership of Twitter doesn't use Twitter. And then he very self-effacing, I was like, I know I'm a super user. And it's like, yeah, but you're the person that makes Twitter vital. And like, that's their problem as far as I can tell, is Twitter is very unclear about what makes it vital.

This is an audio podcast. But just if you heard that intake of breath, know that it came with a set of dramatic eye rolls and hand motions. Well, it's not really... Unparalleled in human society. I mean, you know, I've worked at the first three years and we've spent the entire time asking ourselves, like, what should we do with Twitter? And today was more of the same. Like, why I expect anything different? You know, what I thought was unusual about this particular appearance on stage by Jack Doris.

Dorsey who brought Dorey MacKesson on stage with him was that it seemed like the reason Dorsey wanted to bring Dorey on stage with him was to sort of show off the way that Twitter has launched social movements in a way that other social platforms, primarily Facebook, have not. They have led to these incredible communities organizing themselves, whether it's the Arab Spring or Black Lives Matter. I didn't feel, though, that Dorsey really sold Twitter as a unique enabler of that. Like, I don't doubt that Twitter has done that uniquely, but it was sort of a weird, like, venue to try to make that case.

And what made it awkward, at least for me, was that D'Rae spent much of the time kind of second-guessing Dorsey's product decisions. Like, you know, he said, they never should have changed. favorites to likes. They've got to do something about the abuse that everyone feels on this platform. I happen to agree with Derey on both of those points, but if I'm the CEO of Twitter, I don't want to use my moment at the code conference to be second-guessed about my major product decisions.

So it was just sort of a very odd discussion. Yeah. Can I offer just like this, I don't want to call it perspective here, but I mean, it must have been 2009 when I was at the All Things D conference. and Biz and Ev were speaking for Twitter that year because Jack was not a part of the company then. And everyone kept saying to, this is Evan Williams and Biz Stone, kept saying, how are you guys going to make money? What's the future?

How is Twitter going to survive? What's the future of Twitter? And then I think it was about three years ago now that Jack was at Code Conference and Kara interviewed him on stage. And it was the same because Jack was back at Twitter at this point. And it was what's going on with Twitter? How are you going to save Twitter? How is Twitter going to make money? right. And so like fast forward to now, right? And everyone is still saying what the hell is going on with Twitter? Is Twitter going to survive? What's going to happen to Twitter? And they know, I mean, they've gone their public company. They have 310 million monthly active users and claim like a billion monthly unique visits, right? So they're a balloon to a pretty large social network.

If you, pretty large, if you define them on the terms I want to be defined on, but like not. large at all if you compare them to Facebook. No, of course. Twitter absolutely doesn't want to have happened to them. No, and we don't know how many of those monthly active users, quote, unquote, are actually that active, right? And how many of them are bots and all of that? But it's like Twitter just keeps on

keeping on. And it's, I don't know. I mean, I love Twitter, so as a user, so I feel like I'm kind of partial to it and I'm not, I'm not closely examining their advertising revenue the way that maybe some media reporters are. But I mean, I just, I just admire that Twitter is still here.

after people have been doubting it for so many years. The thing that's different to me this year is in the previous years, like it's been all the same questions the whole time, but the questions are always like, so someday you're going to need to figure this out. And if Twitter's ever in trouble or like some people say that Twitter is like, needs to fix this thing. And if so, what do you think?

But now it's just like, how are you going to save Twitter? Just flat out on stage. No, like, couching it in like something to soften the question. Just Peter Kauf is saying, so you have to save Twitter. Twitter needs saving.

And Jack Dorsey's like, yep. Yeah. That is just way starker than it's ever been for them. I think it's, and they've done all but no product innovation. I mean, Casey's written this story

a thousand times, but we get a, hold on, I'm going to say a thing. I'm going to try to transition us. All right. Do you know the only company they didn't talk about AI on stage was Twitter? They didn't talk about any of it.

And they got bots. different kinds of bots. There are racist bots on Twitter and they follow all of us. I'm going to blow up your transition just because we have to say one thing on this podcast before we move on to Facebook,

which is, I don't know that the Jack Dorsey should have wore a stay woke t-shirt. You absolutely should not have wore it. Well, but they gave one, I was really helping all of the billionaires in the audience were a stay-wark t-shirt. Yeah, I mean, like,

but he had Doree with it, that's why. He had, yeah, that's why. But when they asked, when the question was asked to Jack Dorsey directly, what does stay woke mean to you? He gave like a completely like timid answer. Like it means pay attention. I think what Dorsey would say is that shirt was made by Blackbirds, which is Twitter's group of black employees. And I think Dorsey probably viewed wearing that shirt as a sign that he is an ally, both of his employees and that movement.

Yeah, I agree. Except that he didn't just say that. He was too timid to just say that. Yeah. I wish that he had, I would have, I would have cheered. Well, I think it would have been amazing if Dorsey had said something like, Black Twitter is a real force in our society. Yeah. And I marched in Ferguson because the power of Black Twitter, like, taught me something. He said all of those things by implication. Right.

But he didn't just say that explicitly. It was really interesting, right? Because he's wearing this, he's wearing the Saywalk shirt. He's got to Ray with him. He's all about the power of social change. And then that was bookended by, Facebook and that conversation

was how much power do you have and is it too much power and it's all about the algorithm it's about the fact that they have a board member that's trying to sue Gawker into oblivion that and that's a weird set of challenges

if on the one hand your issue is Facebook as a platform is run by liberals and the algorithm suppresses conservative news and on the other side you've got a power of a billionaire board member who is a Trump delegate and he is trying to sue a liberal news outlet into oblivion. But you've just messed up across the board. And it would, I don't know.

Or are you just proving that you truly are a platform for all ideas? Yeah, everyone hates us. We can't possibly be biased. That's usually the- Shrepfer. Shrepfer, that's CTO. Shrepfer. Shrep. He had, I think, maybe the worst answer to our algorithms biased I've ever heard.

Because the only correct answer is, well, the question was, can algorithms be biased? The only correct answer is yes, and his answer was, no. And Cheryl Sandberg was like, the best way to improve the newsfeed is for you to give us more information. Yeah. I know. I know. No, she actually said, she didn't say share more. She said, give us more information, which, you know, and she clarified the next sentence was, you know, your likes and your shares and your recommendations all help us understand.

but more information of Facebook it's like the only way to save the village is to burn it completely to the ground. I don't know. What did you think

of Facebook today? So I have to be honest I was doing a bunch of different things during the conference today so I missed the part about trending topics and how, and Shreps answers

for how that actually works. I did hear Cheryl say that you should share more and that's great. I heard some type of analogy like, well, just like you sign on to Facebook and you see a different news

feed from the person next to you, it might make sense that the trending topics you see are also different because of the various things that are informing those. But I want to go back and listen to that again. But I thought it was more interesting was with Cheryl Sandberg's just sort of relinquishing of any kind of responsibility on the part of Facebook for having Peter Thiel as a board member and sort of refusing to really participate in that conversation about it. She just kept saying, you know, he acted on his own. He's his own person. He's an independent person, independent of Facebook. And he made these decisions on his own.

And it's, you know, we are not treating Gawker any differently in terms of our relationship with publishers and distributing content. And that was sort of it. Like that was it. And then actually, Josh Topolski stood up and asked a question and said, so just to confirm. And then again after that. And so is he still on the board? Is he still on the board?

And we finally get the answer. Yes, Peter Thiel is going to remain on the board. we got that answer. But that was sort of, I don't know, maybe it just all felt a little too neat and tidy. But that's the right answer, right? I mean, he didn't do anything illegal. Like, he did something that maybe you disagree with and you think is classless. Casey has a good thought on this.

And this is the part where I disclosed that my wife works for Facebook, but I'm not. Your wife works for Facebook? Yeah. She works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. Your wife, when did that? Yeah. I'm just talking with you. It's late.

It's very late. When are you moving back to New York? I miss you. We're in the same room. So I think the issue for Facebook is it creates this optics problem where, trust me, there is going to be another case where Facebook's news judgment comes into question for one reason or another, whether it's trending topics or something else. And as long as Teal is on the board, there are those who will turn and look and say, well, look, Peter Teal's meddling with the news. And it won't be literally true and it won't matter. it's going to eat away at Facebook's credibility with the public.

So I think if he was planning on stepping down from the Facebook board within the next couple of years anyway, this would be a good time for him to transition off the board just to save Facebook the headache. And if he doesn't, you can just expect us to keep having this conversation indefinitely. Yeah. But doesn't that give too much credit to board members? I mean, do you think that? I mean, like, it gets such credit to board members. But on the other hand, like, you forget how powerful the board is.

Like, like, Nick Bilton put up a Twitter story on Vanity Fair just ahead of Jack Dorsey appearing on stage. And he, like, gave us another turn of the screw of the mechanations that have happened inside Twitter. And it's all about the board. Like, Ed Williams, like, tried to convince them to buy medium for, you know, an insane amount of money. So the board, like, doesn't matter until it matters. and then it really matters. Right. I mean, it's hard to imagine.

It really is like Peter Thiel coming in and saying, you know, to news editors on Facebook's news staff. Like, I really don't think you should promote this Gawker live video today because I've got a problem with Gawker, right? You should promote this Verge live video. Sorry, Lauren Good. Instead, please. All box media properties. No, just the version. But I think somebody did ask the question.

And I'm not quite sure who it was that asked the question. maybe it was to Pulski, maybe it was someone else, but someone did ask the question, like, well, so how does this impact other publishers? What if, what if another sort of, I don't know, fracas arises between one of your board members and another publisher? I mean, you just, I don't know. Anyway, I'm probably not articulating this properly because it's very late. And I'm not even the one drinking, guys. I've, like, Desani water here. The bourbon water is stronger. Super alcoholic. It's like 10%. Yeah. Yeah, it's really strong. I'm going to have to take a It's a car home. I'm going to have to take an Uber home. The Vurchas, sponsored by Desani Boozwater. Yeah.

Got through the night. In other case, Cheryl Sandberg is cool as a cucumber. Everything she answers is on point, is on message, and she's unruffled, and she was that today. She knows how to, like, end of sentence. Yeah. Or than anybody else have ever seen. She, like, she says what she's going to say, and she just stops.

And you're like, oh, you're done. Oh, that was good. Yeah. Every time. All right. we're doing a thing, and then I promise you, we're going to talk about Sundar and Elon for the four minutes remaining in this hour. Let me introduce you to our sponsor, Centrify Corporation.

The Centrify Identity Platform is the next-generation identity management solution that protects organizations against cyber threats. Check out the white paper or sign up for a 330 trial at Centrify.com slash identity. All right, we're running a little long. We're going to do it. We're going to go long. There's no way around it. I want you to talk about Sundar.

Yeah. And I want you talk about Google. So I got to say he was on stage. Yep. And just kind of... Sundar is not... He's not... He's not designed for this kind of thing.

Like, Bezos came up and owned the room. Sundar is like, you know, he's like famously like the nice guy and like the relatively quiet and laid back guy. But like obviously very powerful. He's the CEO of the company and he got there through like doing really good work. But he, his charisma is very quiet and not. not the kind of thing that, like, commands the attention of, like, thousands, like, unless it's on the stage of Google I.O. So, I think Walt did a really good job interviewing him.

Actually, like, got him to be expressive in a way that unless, if you understand Sundar's, like, base personality, you would, like, he, like, was, like, up and in it. But if you didn't, you're like, oh, this is, like, a really sleepy, straightforward sort of, whatever. But, you know, he really wants to talk about machine intelligence. He really wants to get the message out there that Google has been doing machine learning and AI for a long time, which is like a pretty standard message from Google at this point. And I don't know, like there wasn't, up until like it came to like Q&A time, there wasn't like a whole lot of like straight product news. It was like, this is Google's idea what AI should be. And it's like not that different

everybody else's except that is Google saying it and like we believe that Google can pull it off. because they've done search really well. And they've actually done a pretty good job of building their, you know, Google named AI. Yeah. But the big news was Walt pressed him really hard on like, yo, what's going on with phone hardware? Yeah. You don't make phones except the RO phone, which is like a different experimental thing. You're still partnered with Nexus phones.

When are you going to start making your own? And the thing he said was, we're going to start being more. opinionated about nexus phones, which means opinionated in terms of hardware and in terms of software. And it's really interesting for Android nerds, which I can get into,

but I don't want to just hold the court for like a half an hour here. That's why the people are here. They're not here for the first and then Peter Thiel talking to that. So the way I read that was we're just going to start telling HTC exactly what to do. Like where HTC is going to go back to being the

OEM they were for Verizon. Right. And Google is going to design the phone and HECC is going to build it and they're going to sell that phone. And then he said something else that was really interesting, which is right now, Nexus phones ship with stock Android, but we think that we should start layering in other software experiences to further differentiate them. Right.

Which is wild. It's wild, but it's also like it's been happening for a while. Nexus phones haven't been, like, when you think, like, so I tweeted this, like, when you think stock Android, which you should really think as like the shit that's on GitHub, right? You should be thinking about like the bare bones, no Google services, like no like not what you think of Android. When people think of stock Android, they think

of what Nexus phones are. It's got the Google launcher. It's got Google now. It doesn't have extra carrier crap on it. It doesn't have extra OEM crap on it. But it does have a bunch of extra Google stuff on it. It so happens that most of that Google stuff gets to get put on all the other, you know, ruined, you know, carrier phones, right? But a Nexus phone

is like the Google version of Android. It's not just stock Android. And what he said by saying we're going to be more opinionated about these phones is that that distinction is going to get even more clear so that when you get a Nexus phone, you are getting the Google version of

Android, which is going to be like it's going to have not just their Google Play service everybody gets, it's going to have their vision of the launcher, it's going to have their vision of what VR is supposed to look like and who knows what in addition to they're just going to be pushing around, you know, HTC, because HTCC loves to be pushed around. I think HC would love to be pushed around right now.

Or LG or whoever, right? They're going to turn. Well, though, but everybody knows that HTC is making the Nexus phones. Right. Everybody knows. Right. Because it's just, we decided together. Yeah.

All of us on the Internet. Android blogs decided together. Yeah. Any idea how many Nexus phones sell in a year? Is it a material business? I didn't get to ask my question, but my question was going to be like, oh, by the way, you do make hardware now because you've got a whole new harder division under former Motorola guy, Rick Ostrillo, and like you're making RF phones.

Are you actually going to push them? And like, if Google's going to be more opinionated about Nexus phones, the question is, are you going to make that opinion matter and start selling the freaking things or not? Because they're like, you can buy them at the Google store. They're not really trying and carry your channels anymore. And so the Nexus phones have always been like, fan favorites that don't get huge sales.

And everybody's just sort of waiting. Like this question of why doesn't Google just go ahead and make its own hardware? Like I'm with Walt that I'd like them to try it and see what happens. But to me, the more important question is, when is Google going to say, yo, we're like, we're not sorry Samsung. We're not sorry. And that was the other thing that sooner said. We're just going to go for it. Android needs a strong Samsung.

He said it very clearly because Walt pushed him really. really hard. Well, he tried to say, uh, no, like the dream of Android, like, what we want is like a really big carrier or really big ecosystem of lots different manufacturers, not all of them are huge. So like when Walt pushed him on Samsung, he like immediately pivoted to like rando tiny, uh, Android manufacturers in India. Right. But like that doesn't, hasn't worked. And I don't know that it's going to work. Well, it's worked in the sense that India is dominated by Android. Yeah, but it's downed but Android one

has been basically an object failure like it hasn't become like the standard like base version of Android that everybody thought of like Google definitely thought

but isn't it but that's like oh man we're if you were ready to get deep in the weeds on Android that's because it's Android 1 is the same mistake right as Nokia saying

we're going to put Series 40 in the developing world and transition into Mamo like what people wanted was actually fucking Android and then a bunch of cheap phone makers delivered actual Android in those countries. What's interesting is the discussion we're having right now,

the discussion we're about to have messaging apps, is core to Google's big problem, which is they want to talk about Google as like Google search and the Google Assistant and Google machine learning. And telling that story, like, it's like, yeah, it's like IBM, right? Like IBM and they got their CEO on stage. She talked about Watson and everybody was like, yeah, great, Watson. Okay, whatever.

But like that's where Google is going with like their core product of like becoming basically like a like underlying service of the internet. And the thing that we all actually want to talk about our products and like until that underlying service of their machine learning hits a product like Google Home, we're all like, yeah, sure, great. And I don't think they figured out how to like get around that. Yeah. Well, so Lauren, you hung out with Sundar today. Yet another of your many, many, many, many Facebook lives. We hung out. Yeah.

Lauren's dying. Here's, here's the thing about Facebook Live. They're all stunts. They all need to last 10 minutes. And I would encourage you to listen to this podcast for the next 10 minutes to see if Lauren literally dissolves into a puddle. Lauren and Sundar, Lauren rapper bands around Sundar's head. It's what he explains.

No, I mean, you know how a Sunderer today. And what did you think? Well, I mean, I've spoken with Sondar before, and he does have a reputation for being a very nice guy, which is something I asked about, whether or not that's something that bothers him. What did you say? He punched her right in the mouth. He said, you watch your tongue, Missy. Wow, Casey. Yeah, and then he tore shit up in the green room.

Yeah, Shudor trashed the green room. Totally. It was like seeing some 90s rock band, like in the hotel room after the fact. It was just a mess. No, actually, for some reason, I was, like, just thinking of, like, the Eagles, but that's not... That's not... Lauren, again, floating through space and time right now. I was like, Joe Walsh, not in the 90s.

Don Henley was with Sundar today. Just fucking ripping shit up at the Code Conference. Oh, my God. I absolutely don't even know what's happening right now. So I asked Sundar the really, really hard-hitting question that Walt didn't get to ask on stage, which is what is morning routine? So first I asked him how he felt about having this reputation as a Silicon Valley nice guy. And he, like, worked as a Jedi mind tricks and was like, I was, you know, any other guys. And he said, he basically, he takes a long-term view.

And that, I think that was a very- To his morning routine? No, to his, well, why? Eventually he'll be the afternoon. I begin by eating dinner. So Google has this thing where they always say it's early days. So he wakes up the one and it's, oh, it's early days. Literally, that's where that comes from.

We're in the first inning of this morning. This morning is only 1% penetrated. I think there's a lot of opportunity. We can't wait for the ecosystem to develop today. Yeah, so he takes a long-term view on his omelets. You really? You know what? I'll tell you what.

I'll tell you what. You guys go to our verge. You can do it. Go to our verge. Whatever you do, it's very important. There's a message waiting for you at our verge. I just want to point out that we still have to talk about you almost. I would also.

I would also like a torture. Like I'm a medieval torture. I'm like, you have to stay awake until we can talk about the man. T. T. I don't have it this bad. I would just like to say for the record that I am not drunk and not drinking. This is just my very, very tired state.

I'm going to check, go to the verge. Just go there. Everything I think about Sundar is in that place. We put the video on the site of my brief little interview with Sundar Pachaya about Google home, why doesn't keep prototypes in the home. He tests things at work, his morning routine and Mr. Nice Guy and all that stuff. It's a fun conversation and check it out. But Dieter really, I think, offered more.

Lauren's like my album is coming out on May 31st I believe was yesterday it dropped yesterday it's funny she's doing a two-handed piece sign right now she's like check out my new record it's exclusive to Rdeo on the verge.com wait what's our table

which is no longer running you know the Vergecast is getting really bad when we're just doing Rdeo burns all right I don't know I like Yeah, okay. It's gone.

I said things about messaging. There were, they were, no, we're not going to get into it because just read the article. Read Dieter's piece. Basically,

they don't have an answer. They have, also getting real bad when we're just like, you know, some stuff happened, but what you should do is turn off this podcast

and begin reading our articles in your car. Okay, so I'll just do it really quick. Steve Lee from Backchannel said, hey, what's the deal with Allo? Like, are you going to, like, are you going to, like,

are you going to, and Sundar was like, well, you know, So he said more clearly than he ever has before that Android is going to support rich communication services, which is the next generation SMS, which is going to be a dumpster fire, except that if Google builds it in Android,

all the carriers are going to have to fall in line. So that's a little, tiny ray of hope. There's also Allo, which is a little tiny ray of hope because it's a mobile first thing. It's a good app, but who knows if anybody's going to actually use it, but it's better than Hangouts, which, by the way, like this empty, bottle of bourbon is also better than hangouts.

They're both so sad. Right? And then the third thing is he like had this like really like plaintive thing. Like it would be so nice if everybody interoperated. Yeah. Right. It's not going to happen. But like that's always like I hate to say it, but it's totally true. The losers always say wouldn't it be great if there were an open standard we could all participate in?

Right. WebOS did it, Microsoft did it when it was losing in mobile, and now Google's doing it with messaging, and like, it's not going to happen. But Google can't not at least try to play in the messaging space, even though they just got completely pantsed

by WhatsApp and Messenger and chat. And I message is like a weird one. I don't think I message is a weird one. Well, they got pantsed in the U.S. on I message. Not so much than the rest of the world, But in terms of like mind share for people for people in the U.S., they got passed. Yeah, but WhatsApp got pants by iMessage in the U.S., right?

Like, it's just, it's the dominant one here. Right. But like, I don't know where Google is going to be dominant, regionally speaking. The bottom line is that Google doesn't have like the answer because the answer is to just take the iMessage model and apply it to Android, but they can't do that for a bunch of reasons. the main one is if they start Googlifying Android then it won't play in China because they're not, they can't

Googleify Android in China yet and I didn't like get the China thing into my story. So this is like a bonus thing that's your because you're a purgecast. You're welcome. You don't just have to read the article in your car. You can hear Dieter talk about the mistakes he made with the article. Yeah, no, but like

they can't go full Google into Android. They have to keep Android relatively pure and Google free, which means they can, and also, like, there's hardware fragmentation. So they can't just follow the iMessage model. So their hands are really tied in terms of, like, directly taking on all these other messaging apps, but they can't just bow out and say, no, you know, we don't care about messaging because that's like the next thing. And so what they've done is they basically, like, it's a horse race, and they've bet on like three horses that are like way behind. And they're like,

maybe one of them will catch up. Who knows? Well, they got to be there somewhere. Where I totally disagree with you is their hands were not tied three years ago they introduced hangouts it was going to be the one messenger to rule them all you sign in with your google account you could message your other friends on hangouts it was a smart approach they totally underinvested in it and it went nowhere and now they've decided to try to to make people use four different messaging services at once hangouts for business alo for uh... messaging plus a i duo for facetime and then messenger they actually have google messenger just for SMS but their hands are tied now the fact that their hands are tied by themselves from failing to execute on hangouts for three straight years is like, I can't stop that. But they're not going to give up on messaging. I mean, they have to do something, right? Well, what they're doing is,

hello. They're throwing a lot of mud of the wall. And RCS and like, please, please interrupt. All right. We have to get onto the last one. Yeah. Casey, I'm not even looking at you. He's looking at me. He's looking at me. I'm staring. I haven't laughing so much. My eyes are running.

My nose is running. I have never seen so many tired people in my life. That's not sure. at CES. That's true. I did I did ruin everybody at CES too with sleeping ass, but we got to do it. Here we go. Casey. Casey. Tell me about Elon Musk. Elon Musk gave

the most insane and delightful presentation at the Code Conference. But he did it in this tone of voice. Well, you know the thing is, you could just stick the implant in your jugular. He's a very soft-spoken man and he said

first of all, he began the presentation with a 10 minute lecture about nuclear physics that scientists are still trying to parse through. Maybe by the time you hear this, the code will have been cracked. We're not going to get into the physics. They weren't nuclear physics. It was orbital space. It was rocket science. It was rocket science.

But you know what? It was a brain surgery, folks. So maybe you can figure it out. It was all about horizontal velocity. He got to brain surgery later. Yeah, that sort of came in later. There were sort of I guess two major takeaways for the Elon Musk is a crazy fun person crowd who just sort of enjoys a mad scientist introducing crazy concepts into the mainstream.

And the first of those was how we would all become true cyborgs through jugular implants of neural lace, which is a machine-to-brain interface in which a superhuman intelligence augments your abilities. That's coming soon. I have so much to say about that, but we'll see. Well, don't worry. Lauren's not dead yet, so we're just going to keep going until she dies. And the second crazy idea that he introduced, as we reference at the start of the show,

is that the intense likelihood that you and I and everyone at this table and everyone listening to the Vergecast at home is living in a simulation. And we talked about that at the go to conference a great length. So those were kind of the two big, crazy ideas that Elon shared with us today. That was on top of government on Mars. It was on top of, eh, if nobody else builds a hyperloop right,

I'll just do it. On top of, no, really, I swear to you, I'm actually going to make enough electric cars for the entire planet. On top of, we're going to launch a rocket into space every two weeks. And that's a way higher rate. that anybody's been doing for the past 30 years.

Tesla 3 design, going to be done in six weeks. Right? On top of, like, hinting that they're, like, the Tesla three would be fully autonomous. On top of teasing a huge Tesla announcement later on this year, like, all, like, the normal stuff, he, like, normal.

All, like, he had, like, a whole slew of, like, crazy hints and teases about actual things that he's doing. But that was, later on top of that was, like, cyborg theory and, Yeah. Like insane AI simulation shit. Yeah. I mean,

somebody can offer you a vignette. So I asked him a question that was basically Chris and Lauren Grush asked me, Chris Sigler and Lauren Rush asked me hard questions. They suggested hard questions. And the one theme they both hit on was Elon's great, offers aggressive schedules for his things that he never hits. Yeah. Never hits him.

so I said are you going to be able to be over a model three and the numbers that you're probably people are paying him yeah they're paying him a lot of fucking money right Dieter Bone not not me my my wife my wife you but you guys are it's like a you're married now it's a whole thing that's right now because I just spent $2,000 at a TV and I don't want to get into it because I'm going to get into it. Dieter sent his TV to Elon Musk's a pre-border anyway it doesn't matter uh Dieter's family as a unit, pre-ordered a Model 3. So he's just got his money.

It's like an interest-pre-loan against the production of this car. And he has a lot of people's money because it's a big consumer product. Super aggressive timeline for delivering it, right? The car is not designed yet. It's a month and a half way from being designed.

Elon's phrase was literally, we're going to go pencils down. Pencils down. If that's not a euphemism, I don't know what is. Well, his landing, by the way, Elon Musk was late to the code con. conference today because his private jet the landing I'm making quotes with my fingers the landing gear was stuck in the I don't know if that requires quotes it might be true but it's way more fun to think about with quotes

landing gear stuck down is a down position yeah no it was just the plane had to fly super slow because I mean like what a great if you're a billionaire that is the excuse that you should use for all things yeah like my landing gear was stuck a little wonky today I'm not I'm not I'm not late. Anyway, but he's got a lot of people's money now. He has a really aggressive delivery schedule and a really aggressive ramp-up schedule. And he's going to make a lot of cars. And he said, we're going to pencil down six weeks.

We think we're going to hit it. Neelai, hang on. Neelai, for the entire conference, has been the guy to go up to the microphone and ask the hard question. Not a hard question. Like the straightforward question, but like everybody sees it as hard because not a Like, not, like, just there's like the thing where people don't expect the microphone. People expect cranks at the microphone.

And then also a journalist comes to the microphone and asks a real journalism question. I'm like, oh, oh, this is happening. So the thing I want to point out is that I'm in the same room with Nilai and I moved to California and I miss him. It's so sad. But what's weird is that I'm looking at him and his skin is white and his eyes. are like ice, ice blue because he was murdering by Elon Musk's death glare at him

when he asked him, are you going to be late on the Model 3? So, no, I mean, literally death stare. No, the question that you wanted to murder me for, I asked him, are you going to be laid on Model 3? Yeah. Delivered this insane answer. I was fine.

No, it was. Which is that he doesn't just make up deadlines and that when he makes them, he truly believes he's going to hit that. And maybe he's delusional, He's not just in, you know, he's not in the business. No, like that was big cars is so hard. His fine answer was that when he made the Model S and the Model X, he built him on top of a Lotus platform.

It was like, well, we got to use this thing. What the hell? No, no, no. The roadster is, he's like, we built the roadster on the Lotus platform. Yeah, okay. The Model S, we had to invent from scratch. It was really hard. The Model X, we tried too hard because we built these Falcon doors, blah, blah, blah.

It was too much stuff at once. The Model 3, it's like, we understand I make a car now. But we're at the mercy of our suppliers. And here's a laundry list. Give them credit for saying, with the Model 3, every time we make a thing on the Model 3, we are making it with manufacturability, which, by the way,

manufacturingability, hard freaking thing to write in a live blog. Yeah. In mind. And also, oh, but by the way, like the weakest link, like... Yeah, it's our supplies. But no big car company blames their supply. Like, I mean, it was like a laundry. He's like, one of them was supposed to buy a tornado.

There's been a hurricane. There's a flood. We had a shoot at the Mexican border. And I just wanted my trunk carpet. But these are excuses that Ford can't give. Yeah. Right. If he wants to play, like, anyway.

Can you imagine when he's late for dinner? He's like, my landing gear was stuck in the down position, and there was a shootout in the sky. How? It was nonsense, right? Musk had a lot of excuses today. Yeah. So then, and he said the thing about pencils down. And earlier in that, in the session, Walt and Kara pushed him really hard on whether

the Model 3 would have autonomous driving. Yeah. And he said, we're going to do the obvious thing. Yeah, he said they're going to have an event later this year. And we're going to do the obvious thing. And he said, we're going to do the obvious thing, which is obviously they're going to offer some type of lebrate. So are you going to add the best line. Carrey's line is, oh, so cup holders.

Yeah. Right. So my follow-up question after, are you going to be on top of the model three? He said, we're pencils out in six weeks and then we're ready to go. And there will be no features added after six weeks. My follow up question was when six weeks are going to hold an event where you announce autonomous driving from model three. And he killed me. Yeah.

He just, he looked at me. Spoilers. Do you know the scene from a couple weeks ago on Game of Thrones with the guy who was tied to the tree and the children of the forest? Yeah. That was his stare was dragon glass. He just looked at me dead silence. He blinked one time and then continued looking at me. And then I could see the wheels turning.

And he said, we do not have an event planned for six weeks from now. And he growled at me. It was strange. It was amazing. I don't know. That was like a whole second. of the thing. But again, he's just like, I would say he has the most expansive view and he got away with it. Right. He doesn't, like it was the same as Bezos, to me in a lot of the same ways, right?

There's the reality of what their companies are doing. Then there's this expansive view of what the tech industry should provide. And his view is that we should colonize. He said we should be an interplanetary species. Well, so he said a lot of things. So he, what's this, what's this consortium that he's trying to form to like Oh my God. Open AI. Open AI. So he like when you're saying they're listening to him,

you're struggling to keep up with the technical stuff. And he's really good at laying out a lot of technical stuff on you. But if you keep up with that, you're like your brain is so busy trying to think through his cyborg theory. They're like, oh, okay. Well, I get what he's saying. Oh, then I must be on board with his opinions. And his opinions are like interesting.

weird, but like I don't know if I'm on board, but like he talked about like defending ourselves from being, becoming pets and his method for keeping us from becoming cats for a supercomputer is we need to become one with the supercomputer and have it be the third level. So there's the digital level, then there's archivary level, then there's like the limbic system. And as the limbic system is to your frontal lobe, your frontal lobe will be to, the digital AI that you're going to become a symbiote with. Yeah. And we're all cyborgs now.

Well, we're all cyborgs already. So he said we're already cyborgs, and I got pretty excited because I fundamentally believe that we're all cyborgs. Because the definition of a cyborgs, the person that augments their humanity with technology, and I believe that our humanity is defined by the creation of technology to augment our humanity.

That's what humanity is. And so when he said, we're all cybergments. Technology is an instrument thing right now. What's that? Technology is an instrument. Technology is an instrument, right? And if you want to go for another half hour, this is one. Also, keep going.

Do you want to talk about web versus apps? Bottom line, when Elon Musk said, we are all cyborgs already, I was like, well, I mean, I'm just going to buy another, like, three model threes right now because you are just the best human. Doesn't I sometimes kind of feel like we're in these last stages of actually having some type of semblance of control over these gadgets? Yes. I listened to the creator of the Headspace app talk today. Why does the Headspace app cost like $15 a month?

By the way. I don't know. I guess that's what you have to pay for this piece of mind meditation. He's up there saying I've created an app that will help you meditate. I'm providing the service to humanity. I went to Tibet, wherever he went, India and became a monk. And now I've come back and I'm going to turn it into an app for everybody. I was like, oh, that's great.

Why am I paying you $15? a month for this. Yeah. You can meditate for free. You can meditate for free. You can find videos on YouTube and other apps that will help guide you through it. Right. I don't know. It just becomes the thing, but he made a really great point about our relationships with our relationship with our devices. And I'm totally paraphrasing at this point, but my interpretation of this is like your device, like your phone is just like a piece of metal and glass. It's not anything greater than that. Your phone expects nothing of you. We have these relationships with our devices right now where we're like, oh, I have to check my phone.

Like, I have to check my computer. But that's actually coming from us, from within us, it is not our devices that are demanding that we check them. And the relationship that you have with your computing device is ultimately the type of content that you put on it and the type of content you decide to interact with. And so we still have that control. Like, I can still look at my phone right now

and I still have some element of control. Like, I have to use Slack for work and I have to, you know. But like I, but if you're listening to this, you have to respond to Facebook Live notifications. and then watch the Facebook lines. You also have to go it's five stars on iTunes, which is the only rating system for podcasts. But if I want to delete all of the apps

except for Apple's and crappy native apps right now, I could do that and I could never check those. And then I could just use the device how I want to use it when I want to use it. But it feels like based on everything everybody said, from Bill Gates to Bezos to Ginny Remedy to Elon Musk, like AI is like super intelligent AI is actually imminent and imminent within the next 10 to 20 years.

And, like, I am wondering about that control. So, Junior Medi, she said, she said, she said, COVM. A IBM, yes. She said within five years, we will not make decisions without the benefit of AI, which is incredible to think about. Also, an incredibly privileged thing to say because you have to have access to all this stuff. But that's great.

What Lauren's saying is right now we have the choice to, like, throw the phone in the ocean, like walk away and, like, live some semblance of a normal life. if everyone around you is augmented, you can't participate unless you also choose to be augmented. And so that was the open AI thing, which Must talked about at length and then through just insane shade at Google.

So Musk's point was AI is great. I think it's cool because he thinks everything is cool, basically. But we have to democratize it, so everybody has their own AI and they're all augmented equally and we're all making equivalent kinds of decisions. so one person can't have control. And Walt said, do you think anyone's scary?

And Musk said, there's one company. He stared dramatically into space. He said, just one. Yeah. And then Walt asked to follow up, which was, are they making a car that will compete with you? Which is very much, is a Google. And Musk was like, wink. There's just one.

He actually said the word wink out loud, which I thought was weird. That's not I'm going to start doing. And then, start pronouncing emojis. And then smirk, smirk, smirk. He pulled a sword out from behind the red chair and cut off Carol's head and said there could be only one. And then he was immortal forever. We've got to wrap this up. Here are some things I know.

It's very, very late. Casey is melting next to me. Lauren has just been staring at me with the hate eyes for like 20 minutes. All I want to do is talk about web apps now. I know. I'm aware. Dieter and I are going to do a special post-Vorgecast. Web versus app two hour.

It's going to be great. If you want to hear two people get drunk and make increasingly less sense about the death of the open web, stay tuned for Verge extras. Anyway, I'd, uh, please, God, let's all just thank Centrify. Thank you. Thank you. Centrify. Centrise the best.

Whatever is they do. Make a fucking, just make a website with whatever. but just you centrifi. While the version of like 90 social platforms, but I'm just, I'm just, this is a plea to the listener from the bottom of my heart. Lauren Good gave her soul to Facebook Live today.

I've never seen anyone have to turn it on for at least 10 minutes at a time, except for Lauren. And Ryan is your cameraman? Yes, he's great. And Allison's the producer. And they're running around with this like massive,

backpack that has all the tech in it that they need to get because Facebook is obviously not running natively on a camera and so they're oh it's just it's but it's been really fun and also I mean that and also be sure to check out the Facebook Live where I shave my head yes well no so I don't think you can find all this at facebookcom here's what's going to happen on that Facebook live recode.net spell yeah Lauren Lauren um moonlighting is that the right phrase so now I am Moon letting it. We let me re-cut this week. But Lauren, it's been really fun to work with the RICO team this week.

That's, like, actually a thing that I have completely enjoyed is, like, our little Verge team and the big RICO team all coming together to cover this conference. So Lauren's Facebook Labs are all on the RICO page. You'll see other videos. There's coverage. Literally every sentence Elon Musk said has now been turned into a story on the birch.com. Yeah. So if this preceding conversation made no sense, please God, get out of your car. Stop driving the car or let the robot drive the car.

Let God take the wheel. Start reading. We're on every social platform, but the only one that matters is wherever Lauren is on Facebook Live. Go there to those things. Go to iTunes. Do whatever the fuck is. You do with iTunes. Listen to What Stack with Chris Plant.

Lauren's got a great podcast called Too Embarrass to Ask. Casey just stands on street corners in San Francisco and yells at people. Looking for fame. Mind is. Control-walt delete is off this week, as you may have noticed. While it's back next week, he wants to talk about code, we're going to get into it. And Emily and Liz do Virg-JSP, which is wonderful as well. I think that's it.

Let's do another 30. Let's just do a quick 30. Let's just do it, guys. Let's just power through. What are we going to talk about? And if you were worried the Vergecast would become pre-taped and not be as insane, I trust that you believe that we, the spirit continues. We're out of bourbon, so I'm just going to wander the streets looking for booze now.

Rock. Roll. Yeah. Paul.