The Vergecast - OnlyFans' back and forth on adult content ban / Tim Cook’s Apple, ten years later

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex, Cranz, and Adi Robertson discuss why OnlyFans planned to prohibit sexually explicit content on their platform and why it reversed its position days later. Second half of the show, the crew discuss Tim Cook's ten years as Apple CEO, iPhone 13 rumors, and the whole bunch of tech news you may have missed. Further reading: Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine gets full FDA approval US COVID-19 data has never been good enough VidCon cancels its 2021 event, says next one will be in June 2022 The Pfizer vaccine will be officially called Comirnaty, for some reason OnlyFans to prohibit sexually explicit content beginning Sex workers made OnlyFans valuable — then it sold them out OnlyFans pushes SFW app on iOS and Android as it tries OnlyFans' inexplicable ban on porn might be explained OnlyFans CEO on why it banned adult content OnlyFans says never mind, it actually won’t ban porn on October 1st Joe Biden reportedly hosting cybersecurity meeting with Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, and Andy Jassy attending Google and Microsoft promise billions to help bolster US cybersecurity Facebook is reportedly forming an election commission that it will announce in the fall Tim Cook’s Apple, ten years later Apple will take a smaller cut of publishers’ sales if they join Apple News S.Korea parliament committee votes to curb Google, Apple …, Higher-end Mac Mini reportedly landing ‘in the next several months’ 'iPhone 13' Name Emerges on Alleged Packaging Stickers Apple Watch Series 7: Leaked images show 41mm and 45mm bands TSMC is raising chip prices as supply shortages continue Apple to Release iOS 15 iCloud Private Relay as a Public Beta iCloud+'s New Custom Email Domain Feature Now Available in Beta Kanye West’s new Donda Stem Player will apparently let you ‘customize any song’ Snapchat’s new AR features can identify the world around you The manual for Facebook’s Project Aria AR glasses shows what it’s like to wear them Fitbit’s new Charge 5 has a rounded design and a color screen Microsoft’s Panos Panay now directly advises CEO Satya Nadella  Microsoft announces $549 Halo-themed Xbox Series X console Xbox consoles are getting xCloud this holiday so you can stream before you download Elon Musk says Tesla is working on humanoid robots Don’t overthink it: Elon Musk’s Tesla Bot is a joke Alaska Airlines evacuated a plane after a phone burst into flame Samsung will let you unlock your Z Fold 3’s bootloader, but at the cost of your cameras Joe Rogan, confined to Spotify, is losing influence  Making it work 2021 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Addy Robertson and Alex Cranes joined the show. We talk about what on earth happened with OnlyFans. Lots of iPhone rumors and other Apple product rumors heating up as September comes closer and a grab bag for the ages. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in.

Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Passion Economy. Wow. That was the thing. The VCs were trying to call the creator economy the Passion Economy for like 48 hours. I'm Neal.

I'm your friend, the proprietor of the passion economy. economy. The Atlanta's newest nightclub experience. That's what that sounds like to me every time I hear. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm your battery containment bag. Ooh, is that an airplane thing? Yeah, it's a, it's a phone's lighting on fire joke. Oh boy. This is going all over the place already. Alex Cranz is here. I am the dongle I will one day buy to make my webcam work. Wow. I'm excited for you. I think everyone is. It's going to be great. And Addie Robertson is here. Hi, I am a quickly reversed policy position. That's good.

Speaking that, we got to talk about only fans. There's a bunch of Apple rumors to talk about all this stuff. I want to start where we always start with COVID. Big news, the Pfizer vaccine was given full FDA approval. I didn't actually know what FDA approval really meant. And Liz and Marybeth explained it to me. It means that they're allowed to start marketing the drug. Yeah.

The fundamental thing that that means. besides overcoming vaccine hesitancy with the stamp of government approval, is that they're allowed to start marketing. They're allowed to do ads. They're allowed to start marketing because the thing is safe for the uses it's been approved for. And that means that we learned its name. Yeah. It had the name for a long time, but they weren't allowed to market it.

So they never said the name out loud. And then they got this approval that everyone was waiting for. And the Biden administration had been like teasing. The approval is coming. We can start doing the mandates. And they're like, and it's called, Kerminati. Komenade is the official name of the vaccine.

Isn't it Komeranity? It's supposed to sound like community and R&A. Wait, wait, is that it? Is it supposed to sound like community? Yes, it's supposed to sound community with MR&A in the middle. Yeah. Oh, no. I've been pronouncing it comer nati because I think they should market it as Nadi boost

and like give it away at frat parties. I support that. I support that way more. Comerity. Can we just, actually, hang on. Comerity is an anagram for Manic Tori, which makes me think it's named after the prime minister of the UK. It's also an anagram for tiny macro, which I personally love, because if you think about the way a vaccine works, it's like a little macro. It repeats the same thing over and over in.

What else we got here? Oh, omit Carney. So if you think of the coronavirus, that's racist. That's a carni. That's a carni. That's racist. Roman City is the last one there, which is pretty good. That's actually good.

An army tonic. Americans love anything that's vaguely European. Yeah, yeah. We have to mention that the Moderna vaccine is called Spike Vax, by the way, right? Spike Vax is very good. Also amazing. Not as good as Natty Boost, though. Natty Boost isn't like, just go with it.

It's sitting there for you. All these names were come up. They were generated by a company called the Brand Institute, which like all these companies paid the brand institute and you can tell that like moderna just paid them more money yeah because they got spike fax and vice it was like but they can't they can't use the name spike vaccine and i'd say that because it's not approved right so i can't get my spike fax tattoo yet yeah you got to wait and for the official approval meanwhile my johnson johnson vaccine is i think officially going to be named womp womp uh the astrozenica vaccine is named vexzevria uh which it sounds like

in a max pain game. That's my full Vexeverea. Like, you have to go there. It's my favorite JRPG. Anyway, the point of this is it, the Pfizer vaccine is approved the United States by the FTA. It means they can start marketing it. It means that Pfizer's going to run ads for it, which is interesting. And that's going to happen next to a bunch of mandates, which will hopefully bring this thing to an end. In the meantime, though, Delta continues to rage. Many things are being canceled. VidCon was canceled. this week. They're saying the next one will be in June. Right now is supposed to be the New York Auto Show that has canceled. I will tell you that car companies are all scrambling to figure out

how they're going to announce. If you've noticed there's a lot of car CEOs on Decoder lately. It's like they just like, there's just car COs just wandering the streets looking for a home. And we just take them in. And then there's like the general, okay, we want people to get vaccinated. There's mandates. We have to store and have apps for that stuff. So Samsung pays It's not going to let you store a digital version of your COVID vaccine card. I was telling you, New York State has something called the Excelsior Pass. I love it. There's also something called the Excelsior Pass Plus.

No. I couldn't get that one. Could you get yours? I was like, do I have to, is it a streaming service? It's very confusing. But it's all, like the response to Delta is a higher push for vaccines and what will eventually be a push towards boosters. but now that you see that the FDA approval coming and the marketing approval coming, I think we're going to enter another phase of conversation with these vaccines

because they will be marketed as products, which if you're a Vergecast listener, you know that once something becomes a product, all kinds of wacky things start happening. So we'll see. But if you haven't been vaccinated it, please go do it. It will hopefully bring this thing to an end sooner rather than later. Okay. Speaking of things that began and ended very quickly. It was a good segue.

It did it. Addie, by the time people listen to this, you were explaining about what on earth happened with OnlyFans will be up. There's a mystery at the heart of it, but try to explain what happened here. So technically nothing happened here. But if something were to have happened here, it would have started last week when OnlyFans, which if you're not familiar with it, it's a sort of subscription-based kind of crowdfunding, creator economy app, except that it is also, it is overwhelmingly popular with and sort of synonymous with sex work. it announced that it was going to ban explicit sexual content.

And it was not immediately clear why it was doing this, except that it was saying there was sort of general pressure from payment processors and banks, which could mean a lot of things, obviously. And eventually their CEO said, it's because banks wouldn't work with us. They named three banks. Then about 24 hours later, they said,

okay, wait, actually, no, we're not banning this. We're cool. We signed agreements with people. we can support our entire class of creators. Nothing's happening. Never mind. This policy is not going into place October 1st as it was before. Every step of that involved an enormous amount of confusion and chaos.

And I would just, I'll just say it, guessing from everyone around. Because OnlyFans has not said enough about why they made this decision, who pushed them into making it and why they walked it back. Like, we just don't know a bunch of stuff. but the sort of like dot connecting that has happened all around us has been furious. And I would say that the actual creators on OnlyFans are rightfully pissed off. Like this is their livelihood. And OnlyFans is like, we're shutting a lot of you off. And they were not clear about what they were actually banning.

Yes. So they were, yeah, they banned referring to or advertising or posting their air quotes, explicit sexual content, which included like most of the things you would think. of as pornography, it did not necessarily include nudity. Nudity was technically still allowed if it was consistent with the rest of the policy, but there was an email where they suggested that maybe anything that was like too salacious would still violate that policy, like if you were zooming in too much. I mean, these platforms are always, they're incredibly unclear often, and they're often really frustrating for creators no matter what they do. And then you take that and you add on top

of it the whole huge mess that is paying for porn online. So that's the shape of it and kind of the problem. Let's take it sort of beat by beat. So first only fans announced a regular app for iOS and Android that complies with Apple and Google's relatively prudish rules. And they're like, this is just an app to discover non-porn on these platforms. Everyone thought, that's pretty weird. But okay. Like, they're not like, I think one of the big questions, there are two giant categories of new tech things.

that are not expressed in the app store. OnlyFans is one of them. It's legitimately a huge business. It cannot have an app because of Apple's rules and Google's rules. The other one is like crypto and NFTs. Like OpenC is the big NFT marketplace. They can't have an app because it's digital goods and they don't want to pay the fee to Apple. So we're always kind of paying attention on a creator's test.

Like how are they going to get on the app store? It's a big market for them to get into. So they announced this Safe for Work app on iOS and Android. Like, that's weird. And then there's a story in Axios, I think, that's like they're having trouble getting investors. And the guy wants to cash out. And that was like, huh, that's weird.

Like, it's a good business. Like, abstract away what they're selling. Like, it's a good business. And you can see people pay it. They take a cut. Taking a cut of transactions, a very good business on the internet. They have a good business. Then, like, minutes later, it feels like minutes later, there was, they're going to ban explicit

content. and all they've pointed to is the banks. They haven't messaged that to anyone. Their own support channel on Twitter was DMing people saying it was a lie. Yeah. Not great. Not great. Then, like, later that night, there was, like, the BBC puts out a story that's like, this is because of us,

because we have this investigation into their content moderation policies. Addy, what was going on there? That one, to me, was the hardest one to unpack. Yeah, so their content, the BBC report was basically saying that OnlyFans, which, by the way, is a UK-based company. It had this policy that doesn't sound incredibly unusual for a platform in general, which is that they were more lenient with big accounts, that they had this sort of three-strikes policy if you posted illegal content and you were a really big user on OnlyFans, except that because OnlyFans is in large part a sex site, that was illegal content that was, say,

related to, like, prostitution or related to other, like, sort of they had many, mention bestiality and incest, like things that are just really much more distasteful than a lot of the illegal content you would find on other platforms. So the BBC says, we've got that we had this investigation and it was going to publish an only fans know about it and their reaction to was to shut down all sexually explicit content. When I say there's like a lot of dot connecting here, like the BBC was like, check out this dot connecting we've done. Right.

Like they were like taking credit for it, which is a strange look, but they, I get it. I get why they would think that. So, and then the last thing that happened at the end of last week, a bunch of people connected another dot, which was that MasterCard had announced in April that there would be new requirements for adult content providers that would start on October 15th. When I say there's a lot of dot connecting, like MasterCard hadn't said this, Onlyfans hadn't said this, they said payment providers. And there's like a mad rush to blame MasterCard. Addy, have we learned anything about that relationship? So a lot of the next sort of big dot that you have to be getting to is. is that all of this kind of came to a head when OnlyFans CEO, Tim Stokely, did an interview with the Financial Times.

And his answer is, no, it has nothing to do with MasterCard. No, it has nothing to do with us seeking outside investors. That's not an issue. It is because there were banks. And those banks, they would reject transfers or they closed our accounts without warning or they refused to work with us. And they were threatening our business. And we had no choice but to shut down our adult content service. So here is a very basic question.

What is the difference between MasterCard and a bank? So I've been trying to push this out. But basically, when you're starting a service like OnlyFans really, really at a super broad high level, you have to work with a bank or payment gateway, someone that's going to sort of handle the money that you make. And those companies have to work with MasterCard and Visa, which are the things that it's like the little hook that allows someone to put in their credit card. and pay you and transfer that money over into whatever bank or through whatever portal you want to use. And Visa and MasterCard have roles that are technically for the banks, but are basically requirements for the services because a bank is not going to give up working with Visa and MasterCard to serve your site. And so a really key thing about this is that it's all really muddled, that there's this sort of, reportedly this sort of feedback loop where if one party like Visa or MasterCard,

MasterCard implement these roles, then a bank or a payment, like another payment processing service, they have to sort of interpret these rules. There's a chance they're going to try to err on the side of caution and end up being more conservative than Visa and MasterCard, that there is this whole very tangled mess of payment services. But the really key point is, so MasterCard's new rules are these sort of specific, okay, you have to verify people's ages, you have to verify that these people consented to upload this content. They were, we haven't touched this really, but they were largely a response

to a controversy over porn hub that OnlyFans said, look, we were already compliant with all of those. That's not an issue for us. The issue for us is that these banks felt like they were, like we were damaging their reputation. And it's not necessarily that they were worried about specific things we were doing. It's that they just thought we were a bad look. And this is like the heart of the whole matter, right, that we talk a lot about content moderation on the show and like the layers of the internet and who gets to turn things on and off. And one that we rarely touch upon and is even rarely discussed is the power of the banking industry to say your business can't exist anymore, which is big, and that gets reflected

into a content policy, which is more or less what it appears happened to only fans here. One really additionally weird, Frankl, is that there was also, there was also, there There's one specific thing that might help explain a little bit why banks particularly were freaked out, which is that in March there were some reports that I cannot comment on the accuracy of, that there were banks were flagging transactions related to OnlyFans as being some kind of money laundering scheme. And that those things in particular, they singled out banks. And they were like, hey, look, it's banks.

And they're working with this company that's terrible. And that that might have been a factor in it. But that's just another dot that it's really hard to connect up. I mean, with all of these dots, it seems like the temptation, and I think it's the right one, is you connect them up where they end up closest at the gatekeeping funnels that exist in every ecosystem. So, I mean, we've talked about the App Store already. That's one gatekeeper. And now there's banks.

In a, I don't know, another domain, I would assume, like, I don't know, business screws up. Another business rises to compete with it and fix the problem. But there's really not. And part of me wants to, like, I don't know, say that if it weren't for Fossa Sesta, maybe there would be a viable competitor to only fans. But it just seems like there's constantly just surprising bottlenecks of control that we're not paying attention to. Yeah, I think so like organizations like the EFF have been pointing out that payment processing is, it's this huge bottleneck that gets deployed not necessarily just against sex work. It's also it's cut off donations to WikiLeaks, that it's this really huge point of where somebody can just cut off money and make it really, really hard for someone to do business. The sort of weird complication to this is that there are lots of services that compete with only fans.

There are a ton of them. There are a lot of subscription services. One of the things, I've talked to a couple of them, one thing that they tend to point out is that, look, obviously people sell porn outside only fans. there are services that will work with porn. But the issue is they tend to charge really, really high fees. That one of OnlyFans' secret sauce is sort of that it gets to say that it's a generic provider. And so it gets to enjoy much, much lower fees if that's accurate than a service like, say, just for fans, which is like an OnlyFans competitor that is explicitly sex work focused. And so when a big part of the creator economy is based around what kind of commission splits you can offer the people on your service, being able to have like one estimate is like it costs them maybe half as much, being able to have all of that extra money is a really huge deal.

So it's not necessarily like it's not necessarily as simple as there are these points of censorship and they are like an on-off spigot that people turn and they will completely ban porn from the internet. but there are these friction points and only fans ran into a friction point. So you mentioned porn hub before. It's useful to talk about porn hub. They will obviously take your money in a variety of ways. What was the controversy around porn hub and how did it bleed into this? So the controversy around porn hub is, first we have to, there's lots of good reporting from other reporters on this, but that there are these anti-porn groups that have been fighting this battle to,

basically take down really big porn providers. And their justification is that this is an anti-trafficking battle. And they've pointed out genuinely really bad stuff on Porn Hub, that there are videos that were uploaded non-consensually. There are videos that involve children. I mean, a lot of these things, to be clear, they get taken down. But they found a lot of really terrible stuff. And there's lots of criticism of Porn Hub within the adult industry. It facilitates piracy. I just want to be clear, there's a lot of bad stuff with Pornhound. hilariously, it also is a monopoly. Right, yeah, it's owned by Mindgeek, which also owns, like, I think, basically any other

porn tube site you can name. It's this huge company, and so there was this big report about Porn Hub, and then that got Visa and MasterCard to cut off service to it, saying, look, you just, you have this giant sites like YouTube for porn, and you don't vet anything. And Pornhub ended up announcing changes because of this. They added this sort of vetting program, but it was this really. big moment for changing how Visa and MasterCard, which again are just absolutely massive bottlenecks, like if they won't work with anyone you can work with, that is actually a massive issue for you,

that it was this huge change that then has ended up bleeding into OnlyFans just because, like, it changed how the financial service worked, how financial services worked for porn. And OnlyFans, it works really differently from Porn Hub in a lot of ways, but it's another really big service that's receiving a lot of scrutiny. Do you think that the banks decided to make this deal and back off because they are like, screw it. Well, look, take the hit here, but we don't want ongoing scrutiny of our control over content moderation schemes.

Because if I was a cynic, which obviously I am not, I would say they took the L here because they do not want the additional attention of regulators and Internet community focused on their power and how it's expressed. For a cynic, you have a really strong faith in the idea that there was going to be any oversight of this. I feel like I have been in this field for a really long time, and I've seen very, very little sustained scrutiny of FISA or MasterCard or Banks. Like, this stuff kind of glides off them. I'm really not convinced that banks would have been scared, especially because we didn't, like, they named banks that had refused to work with them. they did not name the banks they were working with. So we don't even necessarily know who's involved here.

It is very strange that we, after all this conversation, we have like the shape of something, but we actually have no details. Like it is fundamentally a mystery why they announced the change in such a hurry, why they backed off and what they are, what terms were reached such that they could back off. Like we just don't know that information.

If you want to go like opposite direction, cynicism chess master. OnlyFans was preempting the possibility that banks were going to protest because I had banking partners that worked and they were negotiating. And then OnlyFans was, okay, look, you are going to try to charge us higher rates or you're going to try to not work with us. We're going to go public and show you just how much support we can get. And then we're going to go and say, look at these banks, they suck. And then you are going to sign a deal with us. I don't know that that's necessarily particularly likely, but it's another story you could tell. Yeah, I just feel like that when we've heard stories like that, there's a little more planning, right?

They would have like put out a video, like, Epic is like, we screwed over Apple and they're like told people what they were doing and why. I'm just imagining the only fans version of the 1984 commercial. Please don't make one of those and send it to me. Just don't do that. And then here's my last question, which is the wild card. I will tell you, I've asked this question in every editor's meeting that we've had this week. And I think Russell, Brandon, our policy, he might jump through Zoom and kill me if I ask it again.

Why didn't they just like start taking Bitcoin? Like, isn't that the solution? Like, finally, something to buy with Bitcoin. They could also have had you attach your money to carrier pigeons. And they could send you a carrier pigeon. And you could send the carrier pigeon over to your favorite creator. No, I'm being snarky. And like there are other people who have gone into attempts to use cryptocurrency.

or NFTs around sex work. There are sites that take cryptocurrency. It's just when we're talking about the volume that only fans just billions of dollars pass through it, it's just not a replacement for Visa and MasterCard at this point if you want to have a mainstream service. How quickly would the world explode from like the energy use if OnlyFans went exclusively to Bitcoin?

Can I tell you there's an obvious reason I know this? porn hub takes a cryptocurrency and the reason I know it is because that cryptocurrency is called Verge and there's just a lot of confused people around me all the time. I'm like, I don't run a Bitcoin, y'all. Like, it's not my thing. It's a crypto company called Polygon that's really been confusing me. Yes. It's like they're coming for all the Vox Media sites.

If you're running a crypto coin, you just call it eater. See what happens. New York Magazine, the coin. You can do it. It's available to you. Okay, Addy, what happens next here? Is there a next turn or is this thing done? I mean, OnlyFans has, like, very reasonably upset a bunch of people. And there is every reason to believe that some of those people will think I should diversify. I should move out this platform, this platform. There's nothing stopping it from just going back on its word again. But then that's going to just be fighting with the fact that big platforms have a lot of inertia, that it's really hard to move off of something if you are really any kind of creator, let alone one that fails. is the added challenges that folks who do sex work do often.

And so there's one world where there are a bunch of other sites that have been kind of advertising off of OnlyFans decisions. And they've been saying they've seen a huge bump in signups. But it's obviously way too early to tell if those people stick around. And I feel like online it is very easy to bet on inertia in the current app economy, especially with users. but this was also a really huge sudden change that they announced and they handled it not necessarily great. And it would be entirely justifiable if there were people who felt like they couldn't trust the platform anymore.

A bunch of creators not able to trust the platform that they build their careers on, no matter where you look. That is the overwhelming story of the passion economy. Okay. Last few policy bits before we let you go. there's been some cyber security meeting at the White House. Deter, what came out of this? Google promised to train a bunch of people and spend some money. Microsoft did.

Apple said that it would like shore up the supply chain, which is... That's shocking to me. Yeah, I thought they had that handled, I guess. I mean, my initial, we were talking right before we started, my initial reaction was, oh, look, like a bunch of companies met with a president and then like something tangible is happening as a result. But you all immediately told me I was wrong because it's like there's a bunch of promises happened.

But we don't know precisely like what's actually going to net out of all of this. Amazon's going to give us all two-factor authentication. Yeah. I mean, I'll take it. I just feel like that cynicism is born deeply out of covering the Trump administration's tech policy efforts for years. Like, yeah. Maybe they mean it.

I don't know. They told me they're going to build a fucking website. They never did that. Yeah. Remember when Microsoft was going to buy TikTok? That never happened. I've heard a bunch of meetings, man. I don't care anymore.

I mean, I guess I'm excited for, you know, CEOs to meet with the, you know, the administration and have it be really boring. Like, that's fun. Yeah. That's nice. Let's have more of that. I like that I didn't pay any attention at all to the meeting except for like, I was like, oh, it's happening. And the last one I remember, like, when everybody went to Trump and they went to the gold tower and we watched everybody come in. And this time, I was just like, oh, yeah, it's happening.

Okay, cool. And then they came out and they're like, oh, yeah, I thought. Apple already did that. Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, so to be clear, the news, you know, read on our site is they're all going to push towards multifactor off, two factor off. Every AWS account holder is going to get a two factor device, which, by the way, if you're like running your business on AWS and you haven't gotten yourself to two factor yet, I don't know what you're doing. Like, what are you doing? Google said it would spend 10 billion. Microsoft said it would spend 20 billion over five years.

to lock things down in the supply chain. Do you think any of Google's billions of dollars will be spent on making its Titan security keys actually available? They announced a new one that's the one I've been waiting for for five years. That's USBC and NFC. None of this janky Bluetooth stuff,

no little lightning port, just NFC for stuff that won't take USBC and USBC for everything else, you know, the right good plug. They announced it and I was like, cool. And then it was sold out and they won't even let me line up. It's just not there.

Just spend some money making those available. If there's one thing President Biden cares about, it's the tight of security key. And he was like, look, I need to be able to use both guys. We could get him interested. Just like make it the ignition key for a Corvette. That actually great. Last two little bits, Facebook loves to form commissions to tell it what to do and then not listen

to those commissions. So in addition to the oversight board, they are now forming a lot. election commission addie. Is there any, any color there? Or is this just more academics that are allowed to yell at Facebook on Facebook's time? I mean, Facebook will not confirm it, so who knows? But I think that, yes, the attitude to everything should be sort of caution and skepticism for Facebook. The main thing, it just, it seems like it's a version of the oversight board that's just kind of going to start splitting into topics. Yeah, they've got like subreddits. theoretically the oversight board could cover election content.

It's going to be especially weird if they end up just coming to opposite decisions. Well, the oversight board, if you're going to grant them the benefit of debt, the oversight board is like inherently reactionary. So content goes on Facebook and then they take it down or leave it up and then the oversight board says that was the right decision. Here's what your new rule should be. And then Facebook is like, well, they're partially reactionary. They're also like Facebook can just ask them for guidance on stuff. that doesn't actually necessarily involve takedons or leave-ups at this point. It's just that Facebook doesn't have to actually follow their guidance if it's a suggestion.

Yeah, we'll see. We'll see what this thing is. I just love that Facebook keeps forming external committees to be like, what should we do? And then they reserve the right to not listen. It's very good. And then lastly, we're tracking this pretty closely. We're already talking about crypto a bit. A lot of the big infrastructure bill is effectively paid for by various taxes on crypto.

the crypto companies that community are very unhappy about this. They've been lobbying furiously. I kind of had a great piece about how this lobbying activity just came together, like, out of the blue. Like it just like blinked into existence. And now it's like a furious and powerful lobby. However, the infrastructure bill passed the Senate with the crypto rules in it, passed a first vote in the House with the crypto rules in it. So as this thing marches towards being the law, we'll see if they actually knock out. out the rules that would impose some rules and regulation on cryptocurrencies.

I should be clear when I made the carrier pigeon joke. I think we should take cryptocurrency seriously and like these regulations, they're a really interesting development. I am just saying that at this moment, you cannot run a gigantic platform on cryptocurrency transactions. I don't think you can run anything on cryptocurrency transactions. I'm much more cynical about it than everybody else. You can try to run a town, but it doesn't go well. We could solve the environmental problem. And we can make the proof of work how quickly you can create a lobbyist. And it's just like, clearly they could do it so fast. There's like lobbyists with full sleeve tattoos and like just giant crypto strings up and on their arms.

Yeah, I'll take it. What I mean is that I think most people who are buying cryptocurrencies, they're buying it because they go up in value and that value is expressed in dollars. And that means like if you want to take it as payment, you have to convince people. they'll, like, give you their appreciating asset in exchange for whatever you have, which will not appreciate as fast as a crypto in almost every case. So if you have a Bitcoin, spending that Bitcoin is a worse investment than just hanging onto it for a while. And I just don't know how anyone breaks that cycle.

I thought about this a lot. There's an entire Decoder episode where I, like, argue with Bitcoin people about this, including one very curmudgeonly Bitcoin skeptic. It's just to go listen to that. All my thoughts are in there. But that's why I'm like, you can't just take it. He's like, why would you trade in... That's why they all buy Lambos.

The end. You need something that's at least as crazy as just having the Bitcoin. Okay. Adi, thank you so much. We're going to take a break. We'll come back. We got a lot of Apple stuff to talk about. Thanks, Adi.

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Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. We're back. A lot of little Apple News. That's a little rumor. It's like we're getting close to iPhone season. Yeah. Like lots of dribs and drabs.

I mean, we're theoretically less than a month away. Yeah. I feel like we're less than a couple of weeks away. I feel like it's tomorrow. It's, yeah. Oh, my God. Surprise. It's right now.

Hello and welcome to Apple Park. And just contextually, some big news. This week marks 10 years of Tim Cook as CEO of Apple. He had some runs as interim CEO. Right. But 10 years ago, this week, Steve Jobs officially stepped down. handed over the title of full CEO to Tim Cook. And then six weeks later, obviously Steve Jobs died.

Very sad. He was too young. But this is a decade of Tim Cook. So Sean also wrote a great piece just looking over the course of that. One thing we noticed that piece, which I think is really interesting, we kind of don't know anything about Tim Cook's personality. Yeah. Like I feel like I know a lot about Steve Jobs' personality. Yeah.

There's books. There's the fact that he was just like the least guarded personality. history. But like, you know, how much do you know about any tech CEO's personality outside of the, you know, the thing that's been crafted for you? He's just not interested in sharing his personality. I don't think he owes that to us at all. I don't think he owes that to us at all. I mean, and I think this is true of, to a certain extent, the entire new class of non-founder's CEOs. Satcha Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, they're not the founders of the companies. The companies are not imbued with their personalities. They are all ciphers. They are all media,

train to the hill. It's like very hard to break through. But I think Cook is still, it's just like when we are doing this piece, it just occurred to me that there are not that many stories about Tim Cook the way they are endless stories about Steve Jobs as a person. Yeah. You know how this, I would express to this is I don't know what Tim Cook deeply cares about beyond, I suppose, privacy and health and how it's expressed in some of their products. But, you know, we were, you know, looking through like what is his, does he have a dent in the universe? breakthrough product. And the answer is no. He has a dent in the universe that was caused by the amount of cash on hand that Apple has. That has a gravitational pull. Light bends around Apple's

cash. Yeah. You know, by any reasonable metric, he is an unbelievably successful CEO already and has been for a while. But we tend to have a different metric of measurement for success at Apple, and that is what products have been like, oh, my God, this changes things for me. Yeah. And the reason I started with, it's 10 years of Tim Cook, really the only way to tell that story is by talking about Apple's products and its financial performance. There's not some other through line that, like, there's stuff we cut out. Like, he turned over a bunch of executives. Johnny Ive doesn't work at Apple anymore. He brought in Angela Arrence to be what everyone assumed was his successor and she left. Like that didn't work. Like, they're all just kind of like side notes to also they continued making. the iPhone. Like the iPhone is a massively successful product and the whole world organized itself around it. So that's just like the context here. How much of like though is us not knowing about him also because he's been the CEO the entire time and very successful the entire time, whereas Steve like left for a while. So everybody trash talked it because he was running like his other sites starting

Pixar and all this stuff. And so they're like, oh, whatever that guy. So we can like talk about all the terrible things he did or the not terrible things he did. And then he came back into power and it kind of tightened up a little bit. Yeah. I mean, maybe. Like there's that long journey of Steve going, like leaving and coming back and starting his thing and he worked with all these people. Like, there are books about his involvement in Pixar and like, like, yes, he did all the things. All I meant is there's this video of Steve Jobs that I think about all the time where he describes like why Apple failed the first time. And he's like, we hired a bunch of managers and they're all bozos.

And then the bozos hired more bozos and we had a bozo explosion. And like that is just unguarded. Like you cannot imagine Tim Cook being like, so the problem is there's a bozo explosion. Yeah. Right? And like, you know, I like a total fanboy early on, I would watch jobs on stage with Walt and Kara at the conference. Like I was invited. I was a young journalist.

I was like wild to be in those spaces. And like he was like utterly relaxed. He's like, here's, he kept calling cable companies orifices. Yep. Right? And the company is smaller and the stakes were lower. Like fundamentally he's like selling iPods and now Apple's like, there's a child porn economy that goes through our devices.

Like the stakes are very different, right? So like all that's different. But it was just striking to me as we did the story. There's only one way to do it. There's not another approach of what 10 years of Tim Cook looks like at Apple because no one knows. It's telling that we're trying to talk about Tim. cook, we inevitably keep talking about Steve Jobs.

I was watching one of those early. I think it might have been all things D. Maybe it was code. It was Steve Jobs demoing podcasts in iTunes for the first time and explaining what a podcast is, which is amazing. And just, but just like a very casual explaining of a product and then doing a product demo, not on their own stage that they own, not surrounded, not made into an infomercial for the pandemic, just the CEO talking about a product, you know, on.

somebody else's stage for the first time. I don't know. It was remarkable. And just how far we've come from having that be a normal occurrence, Tim Cook or any actually tech CEO being that unguarded and like handing over, you know, a little bit of control of their product unveil to some other thing. Just I don't see it happening. Like it barely happens at CES anymore. And even their companies control everything. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a very different environment. And doing the story kind of made me realize how different. And you are right, it's telling we're talking about jobs. Like, even a full decade later, with unimaginable success, what is, what do we think of is this company? We think of the iPhone keynote. And that's just not the case anymore. Like,

they're not doing that at that scale anymore. They've had two products that are important, category defining, culture defining, and they are fundamentally accessories to the iPhone, right? It's the Apple Watch and AirPods. And they are, you can talk about both of those things. in all kinds of ways, but they are fundamentally accessories to the iPhone. And they haven't had the next thing. And sure, you can talk about Apple's ecosystem and not all place together. But they haven't built the next paradigm of computing, really. And I think that's whatever this era ends, like, that will be the knock on the Cook era, I think.

Unless the next thing is success, right? Maybe the AR glasses will do it. I mean, AR is like the next paradigm of computing. Or maybe, like, they'll figure out something like a little bit more. or with the Apple watch and health that will actually feel like an inflection point? Yeah, I mean, we don't eat, we should talk about the actual like rumors, but like, go read this piece. Just like keep that in the back here, man.

Like, Sean did a great job, but keep that in the back here, your mind. Like, AR might be the next paradigm, but Apple spent the first year or so after Jobs died. Like, Tim Cook would, like, walk around and be like, we're going to do the TV thing. We're like, we're in it. Because Jobs said we cracked it. And, like, they did not do that. Cook has said many times Apple's greatest contribution in the health. The timeline is ongoing, but like right now, it's kind of not.

You know, like right now Apple's greatest contribution in society is they're going to stream Donda from Soldier Field and Apple Music. Facts. There's just like a lot of stuff. Like AR, he talks about AR a lot, right? It's all gimmicks on the iPhone. And maybe that's all just laying the foundation. But it's like interesting to see what the company looks like. It's they're getting more money out of the iPhone more than any.

anything else. So speaking of the iPhone. We're expecting them. They will make another iPhone this year. Although, I mean, that wasn't necessarily a sure thing given the chip shortage. But there's rumors that it'll be called the iPhone 13. We've seen rumors that the notch will be smaller. I don't know. It'll be an iPhone. It's actually kind of surprising how sort of little hype there is around it this year. We think it'll be a little bit more expensive because of the chip shortage. Maybe it'll come a little bit later. and yeah. I mean, honestly, it's weird, right?

Like a new iPhone, we should have a little bit more to say. And it seems like the rumors are kind of pointing at sort of a shruggy year for it. This is kind of like a talk year too for them, right? Like if you do the TikTok CPU kind of thing, where last year they had a big redesign and then the year is just like perfecting that, tweaking it. So it's really, really good. I think they're over the S cadence. I mean, they have to be because nobody's buying phones on that.

cadence anymore. Yeah, I just think it matters to them. And they, you know, this year they sold so many phones, right? So like, one of the weird things about Apple is like, you know, if they sell all the phones now, like you, that's, you just subtract that many people from the total number of people in the world. And that is your remaining market for phone sales because everybody has a phone. So, like, they know, like, they do, they, they've done all the sales now. There's only so many people left to convert into a thousand dollar premium iPhone owners, which, you know, that forecasting is very, who's the best at forecasting, Tim Cook? Like, they're good at it.

Yeah. But what we're hearing, what, smaller notch, slightly better camera, maybe some sort of better way to deal with your mask, but it still doesn't look like we're going to get an under-display fingerprint sensor. Yeah, HDR and video potentially. Yep. No folding. No, sorry.

Not this year. There's a lot of other stuff besides the iPhone that feels like it's stacking up. I don't know how many events Apple's going to do, but we've got new AirPods waiting for MacBook pros desperately. There's apparently an M1X chip for the Mac Mini Apple Watches. It looks like there's a new design for the Apple Watch finally. There's an iPad Mini floating around somewhere. There's a bunch of stuff.

Yeah, like I'm kind of excited about everything. I've seen so, so, so much about the watch and how they're kind of. of making it flatter and taking that kind of curve we're used to possibly away. And I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about that. Like, is it going to make the little green light that checks my blood brighter or less bright? It's so time for them to change the fundamental design and the watch. Yeah. Right. But this is the same thing. Like, the total number of people who can buy an Apple watch are the total number of iPhone owners. Right? Yeah. It's just, It's just a fact.

Like, that's the only, if you don't have an Apple, if you don't have an iPhone, buying Apple Watch is one of the silliest decisions you can make. I don't know what you do. It's like, you're just Loggerfeld against all day. Alex, do you know about Loggerfeld? I don't know if I do. So this is just the dumbest for chest inside joke. So when the Apple Watch first came out, they gave it to all these celebrities.

They gave the edition. Yeah. And there's this photo of Carl Lagerfeld. And he's wearing, he's so happy. And it's on the setup screen. Like it's the blue dots swirling. And I'm like, that dude never, he's never going to set up this watch. Like, especially the first one took so long.

Yeah. And I'm like, that dude is going to wear this thing. He's just Lagerfeld in that watch. And then we kept seeing other pictures of celebrities wearing watches that hadn't been set up. Just that little green, the little blue. They're just Lagerfeld then. It's very pretty. Set it up for him.

Just zoom in. Just pair his thing. Like, go to your local private airfield and wait for a car. Lagerfeld to arrive Harris Apple Watch. Anyhow, so you just know, like the math is there, right? Like total number of iPhone owners,

total number of people who have bought the last X generations of this watch, what do we absolutely know? Making it look different prompts an upgrade cycle. So I just think about that. Like, it's way beyond time for them to make it look different. And it's like a really well-sold watch.

Like it does better than, I think Fitbit, Samsung, everybody else combined. It's selling. all of the watches. And I personally, I'm on like a four and I'm ready to go. I'm ready to upgrade. Yeah.

So you bought it with the bigger screen. Yeah. There's the four of the bigger screen. That was the thing that made me buy a new one. What was the battery life for me? It was like, okay, it's going to last a little longer. Yeah. It's going to be nice.

I hate that I have to go to 40 millimeter from 38 because I have tiny, tiny hands and I don't need like a giant watch reminding everyone. But so I'm a little terrified. Some of the rumors we've heard this time is they might go up and size again, and I'm like, please don't. I think the screens will go up in size, but the bezels might get smaller. I don't think they're going to make the cases significantly bigger.

Yeah. I mean, that's one of the nice things about the Apple Watch is there's actually a relatively small one. Like, you look at the, even the new 40-millimeter Samsung Galaxy Watch 4. You're making a statement when you wear that. Well, the big one is huge. The 44 classic, but like the small regular is still, like,

it's about the same size as a big Apple Watch in terms of, like, volume and, like, feel on your wrist. I mean, I normally, like, when I wear a dumb watch, I'm usually like in the mid-30 millimeter range. So these going like, this creep has me going into these much more like statement watch territories, which I think is part of the point of it, right? Like Apple's always wanted to make this like a statement piece like kind of. And like I think this whole design thing is going to be really interesting for them because

this is their other, their next foray into like fashion and thinking about the fashion element of it. So are they going to do it well? But it looks kind of cool. I think they're going to do just fine. Yeah, they'll do fine. But, like, we'll have the same impact as that original watch. But I would connect that idea exactly to what we were talking about before with Tim Cook. Like, the iPhone 4 had as much or more impact than the first iPhone.

The iPhone 6 had that impact, right? Because these are, like, industry-defining devices. Right. The new Apple Watch were like, yeah, they, like, created a category of one. that Google and Samsung are like, screw it, we got a Voltron this thing to even get in the game. Right? Like, they are the winners, but that the winning has not done much. It's increased prices.

Yeah, it's increased prices. It's like everything's gotten more expensive if you want to wear it on your wrist, and that's about it. But, I know. I mean, it's a great product. I don't mean to identify. It's just funny that we're talking about a new Apple Watch and, like, what it could do, and we're definitely focused on what it looks like. Yeah.

Because I think the capabilities of the watch are like fully explored. Well, the big thing is like being able to test blood sugar. Like that's the big thing. Can we use sweat? Can we use body fluids to figure this out? And I don't know if the science is caught up to the desire to do that. Apple is like super invested in it, right? We've heard a lot of rumors that they want this.

They desperately want to do it because that's like, boom, that's a game changer. You go from being like, we're kind of a health. device, which is like they say it all the time, they're like, we're health, and they kind of are. And that takes it to, no, you're a health device. Like, I can find out if I'm pre-diabetic with one of these. Like, that's a huge deal, especially with, you know, diabetes in this country. So, like, massive, massive thing, but it's, the science is still lingering. Yeah.

We should also talk about software a little bit. iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, all that stuff is coming. They appear to have fully backtracked on Safari tabs. They're letting us make them normal on all the devices. Hooray. So I'm glad about that. And then their custom email domain features in beta, but it looks like the private cloud relay, which is they're not a VPN, but kind of sort of works like a VPN and not really

thing. Apple has so many features that are not quite the thing that they look like. Yeah. Like the photo scanning thing, they're like, it's not photo scanning. It just leads the exact same result as photo scanning. And then they're iCloud private relay. They're like, it's not a VPN, but it leads to the exact same result as me. You think they're just bored?

It's like, ah, it's too simple. It's making harder. But apparently that's not going to launch with, it's going to like continue to be a beta for a while. So I don't know. I'm excited to have Safari tabs back to normal is like for me the main thing. Yeah. I was excited about the stupid bottom of the screen Safari tabs. I don't know if I was going to use them because I refuse to put it on my phone right now.

I've got it on like another phone that I shattered and I'll mess with it sometimes. But I don't know. I might tweet, like, because you can do both now, right? Like that's the idea with 15, with these fixes they put in place that you'll be able to choose. Yep. So that's fine. Yeah. It's real Samsung move to like give more settings in there, more options.

Yeah. I love it. Just putting that out there. I guess the last Apple thing I wanted to talk about brief. this happened just today, is that Apple treats all developers the same unless you happen to know about their secret video program that lets you only get a 15% cut. Or if you apply to their small business program and therefore you can not have a bigger cut. Or now, if you are a news publisher and you're willing to play ball and reformat your articles for Apple News and participate in the Apple News ecosystem, then your app can also only have a 15% cut. It sounds like doing my taxes.

Yeah. I mean, the list of requirements for the Apple News. We need to disclose the Verge publishes to Apple News and so does the rest of Ox Media. But we don't, we're not in the programs. Like, you can't subscribe to the Verge at all. If you can find a way to pay us in Apple News, I will happily pay the 30% cut to Apple. That's free money. Like, go figure that out. That's great. But yes, our companies in Apple News. But it's interesting. Apple News does not appear to be a success. What they wanted was like. Well, Apple News Plus, right? Like the subscription side of it. Yeah, but like they're not running a free service because they think it's fun. You know, like they're trying to get you to plus, which is the very reductive Netflix for magazine. Right. Like that's what they wanted to be. You pay Apple a subscription. You get access to all this stuff. Everybody's reforminating their articles for Apple News, which, by the way, if you're like a web publisher, like we are, the fact that you have to publish to the web Apple News and AMP is fully ridiculous.

And I want them all to die with fire. For a brief period, we also had it published separately to a Facebook special format. That went away. Disclosure. My wife works for a Reucus, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, no, the publishing in multiple formats, not fun. Yeah. Like, what if you want to make it cool, interactive?

Guess what happens? Someone whispers the word amp at your creative director, and he just stares out the window crying. That's not an experience I've had ever. Anyhow, but what's interesting here is, like, we don't perceive Apple News Plus to be a success, right? It's not driving massive revenue to publishers that we've heard about Apple is break out. It's services revenue and any detail that would allow us to evaluate it. Nobody is pivoting to Apple News Plus. Yeah. Right. Like people, that's not be horrible. Did you imagine? So publishers, in fact, are leaving the platform over time. Like, we've heard

a lot of other big publishers leaving this platform. It's not worth it to publish in multiple formats. They're not seeing the return, especially when there's a 30% cut on every subscriber. So, right, like, one of the things here is, like, Apple sees that. They're lowering the cut. to try to get people to participate to grow this business. Gosh, that feels like competition, right? That feels like a market that is operating in some rational way, as opposed to everything else where they're like, well, there's no other, like, if you're a publisher,

if you're New York Times, Condi Nast, whatever it is, you're like, well, people can just sign up on our website. We've got an app, and you can just pay for it there. That's fine. Why do we have to go through your system and pay you a cut? App developers don't have that out. And I think that's actually like Apple's like learning that less. and in different ways, and this is like a pretty good example of it.

Speaking of this, two little bits of App Store policy news. One, there was a great Politico piece by Emily Burnbaum this week. She, like, dove deep into how Apple's lobbyists have descended on Georgia, the state of Georgia. There's an App Store bill there. They, like, immediately hired five lobbyists. And they, the lobbyists, they don't work for Apple. There's a lot of, there's a lot of cover in your butt along the chain here. But the lobbyist basically said Apple's going to spend all this money in Georgia,

including funding for historically black colleges and universities for software development, they will take it back if you pass this bill allowing an opinion for a router or an app store. That's gross. That's just gross. That's not good. And then there's another bill in South Korea that would do the same thing. Apple and Google are furiously lobbying in South Korea to the point where they've asked the Biden administration to intervene, which is hilarious. Because the Biden administration is like here, like break him up.

Like it's like, what are you doing? But that vote has been delayed in the South Korean Parliament. So we'll find out what happens there. But it's happening all over the world. Yeah. By the way, you know who is very powerful in South Korea. Oh, who? Samsung.

Oh. He's a guy. But obviously, it's like, you know, one of the dynamics here is that Samsung is very powerful in South Korea. And so if they can find ways to break the app store restrictions from Apple and Google, there's like a benefit they have. Yeah. they would love that. They would make so much more money. So we'll see. All this stuff is just like in process. It's like to be clear, one of the best compliments you can pay to Tim Cook about the Tim Cook era is that Apple has gotten so big and they are involved in so many very complex policy fights and everyone is still laser focused on the products.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. To the customers, the company, the executives, they're still like, are the products good? And I think that is a fair compliment to cook, even if some of the policy stuff is frankly outrageous. He's just really good at business. He's just, yeah, you know, like the boring stuff, the boring parts of business that I don't ever care about. He's like nailed it.

He's just perfected it. And he's like, and I can keep bringing a phone out that's just good enough. You're going to love it. And I'm like, yeah, I am. Thanks. I was going to say, get that man a celebratory. briefcase because he's still good a business, but I'm pretty sure he's getting a celebratory selling of billions of dollars at stock.

Yeah, he's going to be a guy. He's got a super yacht. It's funny because I just watched the Lego movie with Max. It's like he's president of business. That's who he is. All right. We're going to say on that extremely strange note, we're going to take a break. We'll be right back. There's a bunch of other stuff talking about. Support for this show comes from whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the

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That's W-H-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies.

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Deeter, this segment is, you've labeled it MISC. MISC. It's really, it's a wild ride. Why don't you take us on it? I mean, the most important gadget, I think, to talk about is you discovered a USB-powered

multimeter, and I would like you to discuss this smartphone, looking thing that measures voltage and perhaps resistance. Okay, I've moved on from Instagram and pulse purchases. Okay. Instagram's dead to me now. Yeah. TikTok is my new best friend.

And the number of dumb gadgets that are shown to me on TikTok, like, it is an excellent marketing platform for dumb gadgets. Yeah. Especially dumb gadgets that are of questionable legality in the United States. Uh-huh. So our friend and co-founder, Joanna Stern and I, both have. toddlers. We are both gadget reviewers and our toddlers like bubble machines. So we spend an inordinate amount of time buying and then reviewing for one another bubble machines. This is just a

real thing that happens in the background of my life all the time. And so TikTok, whatever algorithm showed me, I have a bubble gun that is outrageous. It came from China. It is not, I don't think it was like licensed or vetted by any authority in the United States. It is kind of just a giant computer fan in a thing that looks like a bazooka. And I bought one for me and I bought one for Joanna. And that like opened the door to TikTok knowing it could sell me things. Yeah. So now the product flood is fully underway.

So this one is, it's so dumb. It looks exactly like a smartphone. It has a curved glass screen. It's a multimeter. And I have a nice one. But this one looks like a smartphone. It looks cool. And it tries a lithium ion battery that charges over USBC.

And I bought it just so I could take a picture of it and send it to Hymn. And he immediately bought one. And he slacked me and he was like, I've been needing a new multimeter. And then like 30 seconds later he's like, that's what I'm telling myself. But it appears to work. It hasn't blown anything up yet. I don't know. I've measured the current coming out of many coin cell batteries.

Yeah. My takeaway here is you pronounce it multimeter. And I've only ever heard it multimeter in my life. And I don't want to know if everybody that I've talked to is wrong or if you're wrong. I'm almost certainly wrong. This is a word that I've only seen on a screen or in packaging. I'm not like running out, not like at the bar being like got any multimitter news. Fair, fair enough.

I mean, that's what I do. Maybe that explains why the bartender never pays attention to me. Dude, I was a political science major. I'm sure like the engineering students are all like, dude, multimeter stuff. Speaking of dumb gadgets that don't have much use, but Nelai is weirdly obsessed with, Can we please talk about the Donda STEM player? I would love to talk about the Donda stem player. So first of all, there are Vergecast fans who are working on this product.

Okay. I know it. Tell your bosses to send me one. I specifically mean Kanye West. So this thing has been leaking in various forms all over the place. So Kanye West with the release of his new album Donda, which, by the way, has been just like a multimedia experience. For a while, he took over the stadium that the Falcons play in.

Yeah. And he was just live streaming himself and looked like a lot. a jail cell, like finishing this album. Just like hanging out in it. It was like sleeping on the floor. It was super weird. So the whole thing is really stunty. But what this thing that we've seen, you can buy, and I've obviously ordered one already, it's $200.

It's an MP3 player. It's beige, like flesh tone beige. Yeah. It looks really weird. And it's got a circle, like a circle in the middle, touch controls, a circle in the middle and then a cross. So the whole thing's a circle. And basically, Donda, the.

album will be loaded onto it in the form of stems. So just the individual tracks that make up every song. And then you can like turn them on and off like a mixer. And then it's got effects. It's basically a little DJ controller. It looks really cool. I also think that making people mix your music for them, like it's like blue apron. Like I can't stop thinking of this as like the blue apron of music. Like he's not going to ship you an album. He's going to ship you like a little canister of garlic. Like that's what he's doing with it. It's really neat. And it's being made by this kind of called Kano, which Kano makes like build your own PCs.

We've covered them a lot, actually. So they make these modular kits where kids can learn how to build PCs and do hardware engineering. Some of them run Windows. And the story, as far as we know, is that Kanye was walking on CS a couple years ago. And he came upon the Kano booth

and the CEO was there. And the Kano Windows tablet is clear, right? Because they want kids to put it together and put the case. And Kanya was like, I like that dope clear tablet. And then they got to talk and they realized like they both love Jesus. And so the K&O CEO and Connie had been partnered ever since. And so that's incredible.

Don DeStem players coming out because he has a hardware partnership with like a real company that makes real hardware. Yeah. So I'm very excited about this whole thing. We'll see. Okay. It looks ridiculous. It's wonderful. It has a headphone jack.

That's the real reason. That's a headphone jack. There are some, if you look at our posts, there's some videos and leaks and like tests. Like people have had them. It just seems really fun. Alex, can you talk about this new AR lens and Snapchat that Alex Heath got a little exclusive on? I guess we should also talk about Facebook's glasses too. Yeah.

You know, Alex Heath just got a really cool look at the new Snapchat, is it called Snaps? I think it's a program they've had around forever that lets you use the Snapchat camera to actually scan other stuff. Right. And now it's just, they're kind of making it more forefront. I think this is like kind of their push as they go towards AR and glasses and everything like that. Like everybody wants to have this, you know, the perfect scan app. It didn't really work with dogs.

He kind of struggled with that. It didn't really work with clothes. But it worked really well with plants. And it's really dependent on the different databases that it ties into. And it ties into some ones like the one that Google has used for years with a very similar product is a Google Lens, I think, was like the product that's been around for ages. And so, yeah, I think it's interesting. I think it feels more like Snapchat continuing to plant that flag in the AR world than like something people are actually going to run out and be using.

What's interesting to me about it is, you know, Google Lens has been around for a while. Big Sbee has done this for a while on Samsung phones, just saying. but the idea that you point to your camera at something and you like get information or you do something with the fact that this camera recognizes a thing has been a dream forever. But Snapchat is the app that has like the best claim to the app that you do something with with the camera that's, you know, more than just take a picture and put it somewhere. You do stuff with the, you know, all the filters and everything else. And so they, to me it seems like this is, they've got the best shot at having. AR where you actually like do engage with the thing that gets scanned in some way or do something with it or whatever compared to anybody else. Like I am not opening up my iPhone camera or my, you know, Android camera to do something.

I'm opening up to take a picture, right? Yeah. And you open up Snapchat to like talk to your friends and do stuff. And so it's more interesting there than it is anywhere else. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, it's and it looks like it's actually from, from what he's done with it seems smart. Like, it seems close, as close as we've gotten yet to this ability to just, like,

look at stuff and then know what it is. But, yeah, I think it's still just more like waiting for something else and not your actual phone. Like, I know they're trying to make it, like, what you said, the phone doing the stuff, using the camera to do this thing. But it feels more to me like, dope, this is, so you can tie it into your phone later or your smart glasses later. Right. Right. And they are working on those.

Yeah. That's something they're very focused on. And they're not the only ones. Facebook is also working on air glasses. Apple probably is. Everybody is. And yeah, we're finally, we're finally getting a look at them. And I think Protocol was the first one that found the FCC filing for these guys, these new glasses. So you can go and we've got it also on the verge. You can read it with us if you don't want to go to Protocol. Do both. What's great about these companies entering hardware is they're starting to make the mistakes that, like, old hardware companies learn. Like, Musics did this. No, it's just like funny.

Like, scouring FCC docs for hardware leaks is like, I was doing that song in 2009. But like Motorola learned not to do it and now Facebook is doing it because they just don't know not to do it. Because they've never built a phone. Yeah, exactly. It's just fun. They're just like, yeah, we'll put it out there. And, you know, these are really big, really, really chunky glasses. I'm really curious to see what they look like in real life.

I'm just not sold on them yet. I don't know about you guys. Like, what's your take on AR glasses in general? Because for me, it's like, I think AR glasses, nobody's going to adopt them until you don't look like a dill weed when you put them on. Well, so there's two parts. I think that the Snapchat piece, like, you can read it as they added some cool new features to their app and they've got these partnerships and their building an ecosystem.

the other thing that they need to do is they just need to quickly recognize things in the world. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's a data collection and processing component to building AR glasses that you can start to do with an app on a phone. And why does Apple build all their hardware? Because they're leading up to it.

So it's smart for a snapshot to do it and build an ecosystem. Facebook has to do it, Google. Whoever wants to build air glasses, like, the first thing you have to do is identify what is in reality so that you might further augment it. Yeah. And it's just that's a very hard computing. problem. Then you've got to like put stuff on top of reality in real time and track it and make it

look good. And I have not heard a whisper about the actual display technologies here. Yeah. Right. So this thing might be big and clunky. It might have a big battery or, you know, whatever Qualcomm processor it appears to have. Like, fine. But what is it going to look like? And even with HoloLens, with Magic Leap, we were promised like pretty gigantic display technology. Like Magic Leap, magically made a big, they made a big claim because they're like, we're going to beam it right into your eyeball. It's like it's there and it's a postage stamp. Addie thinks I'm too mean to magically. But like they first started, it was hacking the GPU of the brain was the quote that they used, which was incredible. Like just an incredible thing

to say and all of us should say it more often because in many like optical illusions hack the GPU of your brain. You know, it's like, I don't know why we don't use this. phrase more often all the time. That's how, I mean, that's how they secured Beyonce for, I'm going to hack it. But like, the point of that, all that hype and it all came to nothing was that they had invented a new display technology that looked super real, right? And it wasn't based on putting an LCD in front of your face. Right.

And we, I think we're still kind of, and the HoloLens is an LCD in front of your face. Like, we are still kind of an LCD in front of your face all the time. And I don't think any of this stuff is going to work unless there's that display technology innovation. And so like I look at these glasses. I look at all the other stuff we've seen. Yeah, it's still kind of like LCDs in front of your face. That's why I tend to not believe any of the Apple glasses are right around the corner things, because we haven't actually seen like in the science the technology leaps we need to make like this stuff appear in your face, right? And Apple's not going to do it until it works because like... Well, we've heard about their headset that's going to have

inside out tracking and pass through. We've heard about. about it, but like we haven't seen like, for me, that's the two fundamental things of you can't look like a dillweed and it has to actually be like good. It can't just feel like, you know, the really cool admittedly Disney AR headset where you can play like Star Wars that costs four dollars. I think they'll look in like a dillweed. Let's call this the Vergecast dilweed ratio. So like on one side of the ledger is like how much you look like a dillweed. It's very strange. Okay, that's one side of it. Yeah.

Yeah. And you balance it out with how much functionality you get. Right. And there are expectations. And the reason this comes to mind is I wrote a story once where I went to the Indy 500 wearing Google Glass. It was just a strange opportunity I had. And I was like, I'm aware of Google Glass. And so I'm wandering around the infield of Indy 500.

And the number of people who just like jumped out of corners, right? like race cars like coming to a halt and the drivers are coming to talk to me. And the only thing they said was, can you see through clothes with that thing? Yeah. It was like this universal reaction. Like NFL players I met were like, can you see naked people? Like, yeah. Because if you look that stupid, the expectation is that you're getting that much value.

Right. Right. The dill weed ratio was negative for Google Glass at all times. Absolutely. But the dillweed ratio is very positive for AirPods. Yeah. Where just abstractly, you don't look good. Like, they look very stupid.

Now, is this a straight ratio or do we need to have like sizes of the numbers? Because like a relatively like a one-to-one dillweed ratio were the Intel vaunt glasses that I tried before they canceled, right? They looked fine. They looked so normal that like there are just like random glasses. the shops all around the world that are using this picture that was taken of me wearing the glasses because there's like a little laser that shines in your eye. Like, oh, I get, I get emails like once a month. Like, I'm in India and I'm looking at you.

What the hell is going on here? Yep. That's right. Because it showed up for some, you know, Google search anyway. But the functionality of, you know, the little laser beam that shines into your retina, it was just like a monochrome, like, you know, it was like 200, 300 by 400 display, something very, very small. and it, you know, it didn't actually overlay anything.

So, like, the dillweed to functionality ratio, both were very, like, you know, low. I looked relatively normal, but I got relatively little functionality of it. But there seems to be no interest in that. No one is trying to do that, really. Like, everyone's trying to do the thing that has high functionality, and then can you actually get a low dealweed value with high functionality? And I don't know that you can. So it's like with smartphones. We had, like, we had crappy smartphones before the iPhone, and then, like, they had the iPhone.

Everyone's trying to just make the iPhone. It's in a quality. The verge cast dillweed equality There we can Right One to one You need the functionality To far outweigh the dealweed number

I think the hollow lens almost does that Like in a professional setting I will never read that it I will never walk outside in it But like if you're going to like Professional versus Private Life Dilreid equality Yeah

It's got nothing But there's like a There's a like a professional factor Yeah Right so your dealweed number is lowered. Yeah, it lowers when you're like in a professional setting because everybody's doing it. We can apply this to other wearables. Like, what about the like the cargo vests so you can like store laptops and crap in like the Scott E vests, you know? Tactical cargo vest. The tactical vest.

So if you're if you're a professional photographer. Yes. You look cool, right? You're getting all the functionality, but you're at work. You're professional. It's a professional factor like evens out the ratio. As soon as you leave the football stadium. If you're walking around, you're walking around, Yep, and you're like, I'm carrying all my lenses with me. You try to go to Waterburger after the game. Like, it shoots right after. No, you just never put the camera down. And if someone tries to make fun of your jacket, you just yell,

I'm working here. And I think you're cool. Immediately equalizes. Yeah, there you go. I'm just saying, there's something here. And the thing for me is the products can look really objectively dumb. I think AirPods are actually a good example of this. Yeah, because we all made fun of Bluetooth headsets for years.

and now we all are wearing Bluetooth headsets all day long. They did it because they delivered the value. They also, I mean, they look better than your average Bluetooth headset. But I think AirPods are like the one example where the utility was so high that it overcame the dillweed factor. Yeah. Okay. Right. No AR glasses are even close to delivering enough utility for whatever they look like.

They're all just like, this is an experiment. And if they don't start to look like regular glasses soon, the, The fact that like Google Glass poisoned this well will just like be very difficult to overcome. I feel like it's, this is a real downer because I desperately want AR glasses. I want to be able to wear them and go to an event and not have to remember anybody's names and just have the glasses tell me. But that's also like privacy nightmare. Yeah. I mean, what you are describing is the greatest worldwide facial recognition system ever to exist.

Yeah. Like horrifying. Don't want it, but also really want it because I hate having to remember everybody. If I could remember anyone's name, I'd be the greatest politician in the history of the world. It'd be incredible. That's just what I know about myself. But instead, I'll just be like, I'm going to introduce you to someone else and hope you say your name. That's what I'm going to do.

That's my strategy. It works. You know, you just, you're like, oh, yeah, you. Like, there are people who I don't, I haven't said their name in years. Oh, my God. It's so good to see you. Have you met this other person I know that I'm hoping you don't know? Everyone knows what you're doing.

You're just quietly sipping your drink in the little plastic cup while staring and hoping a name is said. Well, no, the good news is in the modern environment. Everyone has their name on Zoom. That's true. I don't need any of this. Okay, Teeter, what else is in this crap bag? There's a new Fitbit. It looks nice.

Google owns them. They're still doing Fitbit things. The end. I don't know. It looks nice. It's a more expensive, though. Can we talk with the fact that there is finally. someone who's in charge of Windows on Microsoft's

like senior leadership team. Panos Panos Panes just got named to that, you know, that August group. And that hasn't, there hasn't been a person in charge of Windows in that room for a minute. That's very weird. Yeah, but he's also in charge of their devices, right? He

runs all surface. It's interesting. It's like, what is that signal? Like, obviously, Nadella was just on Decoder. They made a big deal out of Windows this last time. I think they went through a moment, much like Apple went through with Mac where they're like, this isn't important anymore. And then they realize like, oh, it's, you can't make stuff for any of our other stuff unless

this is good. Yeah. Right. Right. Like, Windows has to be good so people can write Azure apps or whatever. Like, so I think there's a recommitment there. And I think that very opportunistically with the Apple, Google, App Store stuff, like Microsoft is like, oh, our operating system is relevant again.

So I think all that's good. I just, you can, you can like overread or chart moves sometimes, I think. And Panos has been there a long time. He is one of the faces of a company. He is a very good executive. It just kind of makes sense. Do we need to talk about the Tesla bot? Yes.

What were you going to go to? I was going to say that the new Halo-themed Xbox looked sick, but that's all I have to say about that. It looks sicker than the Tesla bot. Well, they are going to do XCloud on Xbox, which is amazing. And it's made me realize that I'm on board with the idea that cloud gaming is going to happen, but only like for some people. Like in the future, there's going to be two classes of people,

people that live in a beautiful dream where they don't need to buy a console and they can do cloud gaming or whatever screen is nearest to them. And it just works and it's great. And then the real world in America where you don't have good broadband and you have to buy a refrigerator

and put it under your TV. Yeah. Those are the two worlds. Anyway, that's it. That's all I have to say about that. So yeah, let's talk about the amazing Tesla bot, which is also totally real. Alex, would you like to begin?

Yeah, you know? I just try to get someone else to do it. Tesla did a big AI day where they specifically said the whole point of this day, this event, and it wasn't a day, technically. It was at night, at 8 o'clock at night in the United States. We had poor Sean O'K. and Andy Hawkins on late at night, ready to cover this event. And they talked a lot about, like, their full self-driving car. like all of their AI technology and what they're trying to do there. And at the very end, they're like, and also we're going to make a robot.

And then a person came out on stage. Like an actual person. An actual person came out on stage in like spandex and started dancing. My dog is upset. So they announced it. They showed off this guy just dancing. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, there's another way to describe it. I think James had an excellent headline, which is like, don't overthink it. This is a joke. Yeah. But people take Elon seriously all the time. time. So, like, other publications, like, made very serious videos about, like, here's what the Tesla bot will be able to do. And it's like, what are you talking about? Like, they're not going to be solving one of the greatest, like, challenges of engineering in the world, in the

history of the world, in like a week, a month. I will say that I thought, actually, because again, car CEOs just need home. So we've been talking a lot of car CEOs lately. The car CEOs need home out of context that makes no sense they canceled the new york auto show so there are car CEOs available to be talked to but we just had the CEO of rio a ion he's like this problem is really hard self-driving cars is really hard it's a long way away like and you can listen to it it's like in-depth and then elon is like well we already built all the self-driving stuff so we figure we just like put it in a robot and the robot can walk around it's like those aren't the same problem and you haven't even solve the first problem.

Yeah. Like the self-driving cars still think the moon is a yellow light. Yeah. What I do recommend if you're interested in robots, like,

and James put it in our piece on it, we're really used to seeing those Boston Dynamics videos where the robots are all dancing. They look terrifying. They're doing parkour. Boston Dynamics doesn't show you

the fact that the robots often fail. So they made another video where they're like, here's how we do this stuff. and that video is far more instructive than the parkour dancing videos because you see the robots are totally beat up

they're constantly being repaired and they fall over all the time and that's the company that's the best at it so if you're if the Tesla bot piqued your interest like I recommend the other video where it's like a bunch of like they're very happy like if your job is to make robots do parkour

like you seem like a happy person but they're also stressed out because they're like uh the robot's going to out again. Late breaking news, I just found this on a light reading, which is an industry publication. Neil, I need you to know that DISH had for years been supporting the multimedia over coax alliance protocol, but it has now thrown its support behind the HomeGrid Forum, G.HN. And so I want, we're going to need to start paying attention to these home networking

standards alongside O-Rang. So we have, we have a few more things, few more pieces of the puzzle to put together. You know, I run a Moka network in this house. I'm just letting you. Really? I do. It's old news. Dish is no longer supporting. I mean, Dish is still doing it, but they're throwing their way behind G.D.HN, man. Just get on board with the future. G. Dot H.N. Dish is like, what obscure standards can we better company on? No, I turned all the cable wiring in my house into Ethernet and you do it with Moka. I was thinking about doing that. So tell me all about it at some point. Do I have Amazon links for you? I'm so excited.

All right. Deeter, do you want to end on this phone that burst into flames? That's where we should end this particular episode of the Virginie Castle. Yeah, okay. So a Samsung Galaxy 821, according to somebody from the port police in Seattle, so a phone on a plane burst into flames. The plane had landed on Alaska Airlines flight in Seattle. the things just started smoking like crazy town. And so the flight attendants did the right stuff. They ran over there with a battery containment bag, through the phone, like on-fire phone into the bag

to stop the toxic smoke from filling the cabin. And then they pulled out the slides and everyone in a relatively orderly fashion got out and I think only two people had to go to the hospital. Like no major injuries. Everything is fine. The question is what, phone was it? And according to the passenger who talked to the police, it was a Samsung Galaxy

A-21. And that's all we know. Will there be more, will there be further Samsung phones that explode? There's a historical precedent for it. There's a little bit of precedent there. Does A-21 have like an oversized battery? You know, I don't actually know. I mean, it's the A-series, which is lower-end and it's a 21, so it's the lower end to the lower end. And it is like sold on T-Mobile, right? So you can go buy one right now if you really want to. But I don't know, man. Part of me is like phones are going to catch on fire.

It's just going to happen. And it's going to happen on a plane every now and then. And so the real question here is, is this a Samsung problem? Or is this Samsung just got incredibly unlucky? And I don't know whether in my heart I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. here. I kind of don't, but I also know it's unfair for me not to like just keep the possibility that they were just unlucky and their phone happened to be the one. I mean, when the Note 7 happened, we were all like initially like, oh, it's just unlucky.

Yeah. Oh, that's a lot of unluckiness on one phone. Like phones, you know, every device that has a lithium ion battery and it is a potential little firebomb, right? So there's always the possibility it's going to happen. Maybe somebody dropped it right before they went on the plane and it got dented or something and was just waiting to explode. It's possible. But because it's Samsung, I'm like, uh-oh.

Yeah. I believe it's only a 4,000-mill amp battery. Okay. Well, I mean, the other thing, the unluckiness is like statistically related to how many A-series phones there are. Ah, true. Right. Like, we talk about this a lot. We don't talk about these phones enough.

They are the most popular phones. Yep. Like, these low-end Samsung phones are just, like, the most popular phones in Samsung's lineup, the most popular Android phones. It's, like, mathematically certain they will be unlucky more often than any other phone. But, oh, poor Samsung. Yeah. Although, they deserve it because if you, this week in lock in, if you unlock the bootloader on a Galaxy Z-Fold 3, it disables the cameras.

You got to be kidding me. Yeah. Why does it disable the cameras? Because they need to be able to control the cameras via, I mean, benefit of the doubt, devil's advocate, blah, blah, blah. The cameras need to be controlled by Samsung Knox because they need to be able to, if an enterprise wants to shut the cameras down, it needs to be securely managed by Knox. And so if you, you know, unlock the bootload on our phone, you've made it fundamentally insecure. And so it cuts off access to the camera because the camera needs to be fundamentally controlled by Knox.

Is the devil's advocate argument? It's just a huge throwback for me because we used to just get so angry at companies over locked bootloaders. We don't do it get angry quite as often now. I think it's because basic Android is good and not crap. We don't feel the need to load cyanogen on as much as we used to. But I feel like it's creeping back. I also feel like locked phones, carrier locks is kind of creeping back. If not officially, then like all but official.

A lot of this lockdown stuff is getting real again. And I'm not sure what the like consumer pressure will be to like stop it. But I hope it comes. I think App Store stuff might be part of it, but I'm not sure what else. They're justifying it because of security, right? Like, they kind of figured out like, oh, we can actually lock things in again. We just have to say it's because of security reasons. I mean, cynically, it is because of security reasons.

Phones have a lot of cameras and microphones. They need to be secure. Like, you want that not unlocked. But it seems like, yeah, like, how do you counter at that? What's your complaint for that? Like, we don't want people to be able to get into your phone and use it to record you secretly. Yeah.

Okay. I would say that it's a pendulum that swings back and forth, but like in reality, it's only ever swung a quarter of the way. And then it swings right back to like. Real hard the other way. Yeah. It's like it never really swings all the way to open stuff. But with the power of this week and lock in, we will expose these egregious abuses.

Yeah. We will change the industry. But I'm mentioning one story at the end of the first class. All right. That's it. have gone way over. We've actually got some great stories that you should read on the site this week. I want to call them out. Ashley Carman did a big investigation into what it meant for Joe Rogan's influence when he went behind the paywall at Spotify. Ashley covers a hell out of a podcast industry.

One of the things she's been tracking very closely is as the big players starts to do exclusives, what does it mean for the open ecosystem and like how it works? So that is a big story. Got a lot of attention this week. We've got a big package called Making It Work. I love when we do these. It's just about how businesses use creator platforms. So it's just a huge package, all this stuff. My favorite is always when we do small business TikTok. So now they're like TikTok tour guides. We have a guide to platform fees. Just a lot of cool stories in that package. Go check that out. Okay. Thanks to Addie. And by the way, Adi's explainer on the only offense thing. We'll be up by the time this goes out. So go read that too. But thanks to Adi, you can tweet at her. She's at the

Dexterity. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Dieter is at Backlon. I'm at Rutton. I'm at Rutton. We love hearing from you. Please tweeted us. Decoder next week is a Harvard Business School professor named Willie Shee. We're into the chip shortage. Fascinating. Like the chip shortage is not what you think. I'll just leave at that.

But that's a good episode. What is? Is it lizards? It's like a weird combo platter of things. I'll give you one. The Trump administration told Chinese companies they couldn't buy American products. And so they thought a debon was coming and they bought a lot of chips and they used up all the capacity. I don't know.

because they were stockplied. That's just not how we think about it. A car company, listen to Decoder. It's going to be a good one. We will all learn a lot about ourselves and capitalism. And we got a big party coming up on the verge. You come to it.

Get vaccinated and then come to our party in October. We're announcing more. But tickets are available. The post on the site. All the info is there if you need it. That's it. That's a Vergecast. Rock and roll.

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