The Vergecast - Pixel 4 hands-on and Mark Zuckerberg's speech on free speech

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

The biggest announcements from Google’s 2019 Pixel event The Pixel 4 has a radar chip that lets you control music and wave at pokémon Google Pixel 4 and 4 XL hands-on: this time, it’s not about the camera The Pixel 4 lacks one of the best perks that came with Google’s previous flagship phones Google improves the Pixel 4 camera with Live HDR and more With no buds or adapter, Pixel 4 opens the door to rival headphone makers Pixel Buds 2 hands-on: Google takes on the AirPods Pixelbook Go: Google finally made a reasonably priced Chromebook Google’s new Nest Mini has better controls, similar sound, and the same price Nest Wifi first look: Google finally combined a smart speaker and a router Google’s Stadia wireless controller won’t be very wireless at launch Facebook’s decision to allow lies in political ads is coming back to haunt it Democrats are striking back against Facebook’s ads policies Mark Zuckerberg on lies in political ads: ‘I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians’ Mark Zuckerberg took on China in a speech defending free expression Facebook privacy abuse targeted by ‘Mind your own business’ bill Take our Vergecast survey! theverge.com/survey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about all things Google, the pixel four, the new Nest stuff, pixel buds, new Nest hardware stadia. We also get into it about Mark Zuckerberg's big speech on Facebook and free speech. That's it on the Vergecast coming up 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. Proms something like build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data and Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. 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 a growing empire podcasts. Seriously, just look behind you. There's one again. I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Deere Bon is here.

Hi. There's Paul. Hello. There's another Fox Media podcast. I know, but now you turned into like a spooky Halloween. That's what I'm doing. Boo. A big week of news.

Casey and Addy Robertson are going to join us for the second segment. Literally on the day we're taping, Mark Zuckerberg delivered a speech about the future of free speech and internet platforms, the vergeist of verge cast topics. So Casey and Addy are going to join us, talk about that. But there's also a huge Google event this week. And to be fair, many things were leaked. I don't think anyone is that surprised. Google's fall hardware event was here.

We got the Pixel 4. We got sort of like a mysterious look at the forthcoming PixelBuds. PixelBook Go. A bunch of new nest stuff. Future of Assistant a little bit. A bunch of on-device stuff. Yep. Did I miss anything?

Probably. It was such a strange event. I mean, can we just start there about the way they ran this event? So everything leaked completely. And I think that fundamentally, like they may have also gotten like head faked by the weird backlash to um to apples keynote most i mean there was like the charlie was all thing and a bunch of people saying yes he's right the people we should stop being so celebratory i don't know and so instead of doing the traditional keynote that you expect

where like gets on stage all right first product announcing this product blah blah blah blah blah second product announcing this product blah blah blah they're like just like we're going to talk about ambient computing for a while and it's really important that everything worked together in your home and that, you know, the computer gets distributed so it's not all focused just on the thing in your pocket. And that's why I made the new Ness Mini. And it's also really important because, you know, you also want the assistant to work really well, blah, blah, blah, blah. And also the Pixel Book Go exists and blah, blah, and there's a picture of it up there, blah, blah, blah. They didn't announce anything. They, like, casually mentioned it while they were talking about something else. And then only later in the

hour that we're like, oh, yeah, I know, like, this is what it is. Sorry, that thing we brought up before that here it is. It was very odd. This is my like writing technique for essays. I make a bullet point and then I hide my points inside of paragraphs so that they're subtle. Right. That presentation style was very strange.

It did provide, I think, an element of surprise to an event that would have otherwise lacked it. You just didn't know what was going to happen next. Yep. Baratine Thurston had made a lot of videos with Google and it was like, he's walking in a room. What will he find in the room? Will be the leaked pixel book Go or the leaked pixel four? Who knows?

So that part was fine. And then the Annie Leibowitz showed up and had a little chat. The Annie Leibowitz part was very interesting and funny for two reasons. One was it seemed clear that not a lot of scripting had gone into that conversation. So, you know, the Google person on stage was like, so why do you like using the phone? And she's like, because photos, stories. Yeah, there's not, okay.

But right in front of us were some, like, very famous Instagram influencers. Yeah. Who were otherwise, I would say, somewhat disinterested in the goings-on of Google's Titan M security chip. Just the facts. They were not paying attention during that part.

And Annie Lee-Lewoods comes on, and they all, like, sat straight up. Yeah. because, like, I mean, she's Annie Leibowitz. So I thought that was very funny. So what's interesting is we got way more insight into what Annie Leibowitz actually meant later on in the day in the hands-on area because we got to talk to the person that was on ahead of Annie Leibowitz, which was actually the best part of the entire keynote, which was Mark LaVoy, who is, you know, Stanford professor,

created a bunch of the ideas behind computational photography. They just had him go on stage and just give a little mini lecture on how computational photography works and what his opinions on it are and how it got applied to the pixel four. And by the way, the sum total of that was dunking on Apple. Yeah, well, I was getting there. Yeah. But it was completely, if you haven't watched at least that section of this keynote, I encourage you to go watch it because it's very cogent. And the dunking on Apple was amazing.

I think the harshest burn, the most direct burn was he just, he's like, guys, this isn't mad science. This is just math. Yeah. It's really simple math. And that was a direct quote of Phil Schiller. Calling Deepfusion computational photography and mad science. Yeah. So let's go through them.

So the event was, it was like, like Dieter saying, it was very low key. It was a little oddly structured. At least it was different. I like that. I will say that the sort of post event, Google method, far superior to the Apple method. Uh, yes. So Google just like sets up a giant room with all the stuff in it and people like mill around and do their thing. There's like tons of devices. Apple is like you're basically in an Apple store

with more pressure. It's an Apple store with like four tables and twice as many people and a tenth as many devices and a third as much time. Yeah. Google's like, do you just live here? Do you want to live here now? There's a nest inspired sleeping area for you. Here's some jackets. It's whatever. Anyhow, Pixel 4. Let's start with a big guy. Yeah. I mean, let me say this. I have been watching a lot YouTube, I've been watching, I've been reading a bunch of Reddit and just sort of, you know, looking at Twitter and just a whole bunch of the reactions. And everyone's real mad at this phone or like disappointed in this phone. Why? Because I think everything got leaked.

And so they just were hoping for something. And when you look at it on paper, the only thing that the pixel 4 has that hasn't already been done on another phone is face unlock. and technically if you want to say having 90 hertz on a relatively small screen and technically if you're paying attention that chip that allows the Google assistant to work really quickly. And technically if you want to say the radar on the phone,

the radar thing, right? So there's things that nobody else has ever done, but because it all leaked, everyone felt familiar with it and so no one is bought in on them that mattering and everyone really wants like some kind of, you know, pound your fist spec war thing. So there's just, I need to, you know, you know, review the phone. But based on the hands-on time I had with it

ahead of the event and at the event, I think it's actually a very, very good Android phone. I think it's a very interesting Android phone. And I think there's a lot of stuff in it that is really compelling. I think that more than any other pixel before, the joke that people always make about pixels is that it's like, what if Google made an iPhone? What would it be?

Like, this is it. And not just because it looks like it because it has the big square camera bump on the back. But this is the most iPhone-like Android phone ever insofar as. It is very clean. It knows exactly what it wants to be, and it has face unlock. Yeah, well, there's that.

Yeah. And the gestures work exactly the same. Yeah. So the face unlock is interesting. It reports today, which Google confirmed. Works with your eyes closed. Yeah. They're going to add an attention detect feature to make sure your eyes are open.

They're definitely going to do that. That's what they told us. Okay. Like all things promises about future software features are not to be relied on, but they say they're going to. It worked with my sunglasses on, the sunglasses that block. the iPhone. So I think it's, it's, there's just a, I think there's an open question, particularly because of the eyes situation, about whether it is as secure as the iPhone. So that's like, right? It's really fast, right? Yes, it's really fast because solely, the radar chip,

when you reach for the phone, I mean, Deere and I were at the event, like, Deere's like, now you be the table and I'd, like, hold the phone and he would be the table and I'd grab it. So we're, like, testing it. So it sees you coming. It warms up. Grads you, yeah, lights up the sensors. And it does possibly a low end face recognition because maybe there's going to be false positives. Yeah, I mean, like Dieter's reviewing it. We got to talk to Google. I don't know. But, yes, the idea is that it's faster because it begins the process faster.

Whereas with the iPhone, you have to like tap it. It, like, lights up. It, like, does a whole thing. One of the other things about that speed thing I want to mention, I brought this up in the hands on, is I don't actually know if it is, like, if you had a stopwatch faster to unlock. It feels faster because it starts when you start reaching for it. And it also feels faster because Google has the default of it skipping the lock screen

and just going into whatever screen was last open on the phone. And so with the iPhone, you have like this extra cognitive load of like swipe up the screen or look at the lock screen or whatever. With the pixel, you don't touch anything and it's just there. And I think that might be part of the perception of the speed. Yeah. And the iPhone has that middle step where like maybe it shows you your notifications if you have that setting going on, right?

Yeah, I don't know. Dieter is going to review the phone. We'll find out. Let's talk about Sully for a minute because it doesn't do a lot. No. You know, if you're listening to this, you're presumably in the Verchcast feed. You know that we spoke to Rick Osterloe under the interview episode at the event. There's clearly more it can do or more it could do.

Yeah, Paul, did you get a chance to hear that it could detect your heartbeat if they wanted? Oh, yeah. No, I loved this conversation. I thought it was really interesting when he, you asked him, like, is this a thing that is part of Google's ecosystem, you know? Like, for instance, the Pixel 4 also has squeezable sides, which is an indication that squeezable sides are just like an important element of what makes a phone a pixel, you know?

And so at least he's talking like solely is an important element of what is going to be a pixel going forward possibly. But it doesn't do much. Well, there's a demo site. It seems like it does a lot. It can see if you're like, if you're like inclined towards the phone or inclined away. It can detect like two people are there or one person is there, which I think could be really interesting for like privacy.

Like you like, you could have your phone in a mode where like if somebody is around me, like just switch to, I don't know, something innocuous. But otherwise I'm going to be doing crimes. I knew we'd get there. This is like, I feel like the story of my life with technology because like it seems. like it is actually really cool technology. But at the same time, like, you know, a radar hemispherical sensor that's just detecting things around and you do the right math on it and you can discover intent and motion

and objects around the phone. But we also live in a world that we've tried a lot of gesture interfaces and they've always been bad and horrible and awful. And for a number of reasons, not just the, the. mechanics of the detection, but also the learnability of the gestures. Yep. And here, the phone, what, it's got, like, three gestures. There's, like, skip music.

There's three categories to think of in terms of what motion sense does. The first is presence, so are you by the phone or not? And if you're not by the phone, the screen turns off. It, like, it knows you're there, and they can potentially do more with that, but that's all they're doing right now. The second is, like, I guess it's called, like, reach. It knows if you're reaching for the phone and it turns the screen on, right? And it also knows if you're reaching for the phone to quiet down alarms and ringtones.

So the demo there is like you let the alarm go off. You reach for the phone. You don't actually, you haven't actually touched it yet. And the thing immediately gets super quiet. And then you can choose what to do with it. You can choose to answer it or not. So you're not listening to it the whole time. You have to hit a button.

You just like, you start to reach for it. And then it gets quiet. And then you can like wave your hand and dismiss the call or whatever. And then the third one is the gesture. So there's wave your hand and dismiss stuff. and then there's wave your hand left or right to skip songs, and then there's wave your hand to wave at a Pokemon. And then there's tickle of Pokemon.

Yeah. And that's literally it. But the original Sully demo is the tiny violin gesture. Yeah, and there's no tiny violin gesture. So this is not, I don't think this is indicative of much, because everyone's got to, like, learn the phone and get used to it. But I definitely enjoyed, you know, they had the wall of phones at the event. Did you just, like, run across them?

I skip so many tracks. Like you're doing high fives at the end of a soccer game. All those Pokemon's got tickled today. No, I really enjoyed watching people try to figure it out. And like the hit rate was low. Yeah. Right? Like what's the thing you can do?

If you see a pixel out in the wild, it's like open YouTube music and like wave your hand over it. It doesn't quite work the way you expect. I don't think that's really fair, right? Like eventually you're going to expect how it works and then you'll be fine and be good at it. That first thing, we're like stick your hand in front of it and just like wave, it doesn't quite work the way you expect. You have to like start out over the side and come over it in a broader gesture than you think. Yeah. That's like I just watched people kind of stumble into that over time.

So I think there are some questions about how precise it actually is, how small of a movement it can actually detect. What else they're going to unlock with it over time? And then obviously the big question that we were asking, Rick, like, are you going to build on this? Is this an interface paradigm for you that's going to get more and more complex. and sophisticated and understood by a wide base over time. A good comparison to this, I think, is you said they built an iPhone. The gestures are exactly the same as the iPhone on the screen, right? Like the same Android 10, slightly refined, a little bit different,

but like same sort of like library of gestures does the same stuff. Yeah. With solely in the pixel, they have the opportunity to like start from scratch and build the base of gestures that everyone understands. So if Apple ever does it, Apple has to copy them. But that's a big lift. You have to like sell enough phones. You have to get enough people to use the feature on all those phones that you sell.

You have to make them expect that from all the other. Like that's a couple steps out. One thing I'll say about solely being like, are they, can they really get the fine detail that they, you know, claim they can? My understanding, I talked to, you know, people that developed it at A tap and they developed it on a chip that they had like basically duct taped to pixel twos. And then they're like, okay, now we got the final hardware. Let's put it into, you know, the Jerry Wrig, Pixel 4s. and they realized like, oh, wait, our machine learning models don't work for this slightly new tiny hardware,

and they had to throw out all their machine learning models and start over again. So, like, there's actually not as much training in this as there maybe could be because they had to start from scratch. Yeah. So let's talk about the camera. Oh, yeah.

It's like, Deeter, your headline was, it's not about the camera, but... It's kind of about the camera. It's always... It's... I mean, it is the factor of competition right now that I think most people are interested in, which I think is great.

It makes me very happy that, you know, we just spent a lot of time talking about the new iPhone, talking about against the pixel. You see Apple had to respond. They did a good job. I think we had some questions about how Google would respond. I loved talking to Mark LaVoy at this event. That dude is the best.

I hope we can get him on the show soon. So interesting facts, we learned from that conversation. Here are my two. We learned a lot. Talking is great. My two favorite. One, effectively an off-the-shelf sensor, right? But Google thinks they can get it done in software,

and they're getting it done in software. Two, Annie Lee Woods gave them feedback, which was mostly like, stop doing this contrast thing you're doing, make it softer, and I'll turn it up if I need to. And he connected that to the fact that they know pixel phones have a look. We talk about this in all of our reviews. Pixel phones have a very distinct look. I can almost, I would say, eight out of ten, identify the pixel photo just straight out. They're more contrasty, they're punchier. They're HDRI sometimes.

Yeah, a little bit. I think less so than, like, the iPhone 10S was like the most HDRI phone I'd ever seen. I really disliked it. But pixel phones are just really punchy. So they know they have a look, but the pixel four, they have changed the look of the photos. They have backed down on that a little bit and made it a little less HDRI in one sense, maybe a little less contrasty in another sense, depending on how you want to look at it. And it's funny that we're like, did any leave it to give you any feedback?

And he was like, did she? So that's great. And that's just like cool. Like, I love that. But they're really doing the work in software. The live HDR, I thought this was really cool. They basically take the feed, the video feed, under expose it to like basically map where they are

with their under-exposed frames when you take a photo, and then they apply the same tone mapping to it. And he's like, because it's a low-res, it's a viewfinder and you're moving, you don't see the slightly lower resolution, but the tone mapping looks convincing. I think that's like really smart. Like, I could nerd out about that stuff all day.

Why can't they do it with portrait mode? He had an answer for this. I don't know if I believe it. What was the answer? I don't remember. His answer was, it looks pretty bad. There's no way to get real-time portrait mode that isn't actually true to the final result.

And any phone that shows you real-time portrait mode, if you actually, like, I don't know, take a screenshot of what's in the viewfinder and, like, look at what the picture that actually gets taken, they're very, very different. Yeah. So what's interesting is Apple does have effectively a lot, a real-time viewfinder. Apple is very much in these, they're giving you auto modes.

You can monkey with some settings on an iPhone, but, like, you know, Apple will turn on night mode by itself and set as shutter time by itself. The pixel has way more controls. I think the most interesting controls are the new brightness and shadow controls in the viewfinder where you can actually adjust how much HDR effect you're getting out of the photo. You can actually adjust whether it boosts those shadows all the way up to make everything flat. You can adjust whether the brights are over exposed or pulled down. Like that is really cool. I think that is an amazing advance on this camera. Is it going to do a lot in practice?

I'm going to use it or is it just going to be more sliders over the thing you're trying to shoot? Like, got to see. But it, you know, one of the things when we review cameras and we put out photo comparisons, I always hear is, well, I could just edit this photo to look like that phone. Right. And what I know, what every vendor tells us is nobody edits these photos, right? Like, you're just like, shoot the photos.

Yeah, well, how are you going to think about that with? I'm assuming most of your camera head-to-head comparisons are like, I'll take this picture on auto and I'll take this picture on auto. I mean, it's the only fair way to do it. So you're not going to touch the sliders on the pixel for comparison photos? No, I mean, I think that the move is like you compare the auto because you need some kind of baseline. And then you sort of like compare the, well, what can I do to like make this thing more interesting or better? You know, we'll basically have to take like 10 photos of every single thing.

Like I'm not going to do all of that for this review. I know it sounds really difficult. The question isn't so much about, like, what can produce a better photo if you adjust the sliders? It's like what provides the better experience of taking a photo and, like, gives you results that, like, you feel happy about. And this thing about editing after the fact, I think, Neil, you're right. No one edits after the fact. But in some cases, you cannot do the thing after the fact that you think you can because the phone isn't actually saving the data that you need to get the effect, right? So if you do HDR, it takes like the stack of 10 frames that it's grabbing to create that image, and it creates that image.

If you try and edit it later, it's just working off of the composited thing that it made, not off of like, let's grab these 10, you know, things that we're stacking together, right? So that's true. Another thing Mark told us was that pixel raw is substantially different than iPhone raw. So an iPhone raw image is a single frame off the sensor. That's what you get. That's what Halide gives you, for example. they do something called SmartRaw, so they do it a little bit differently,

but, like, Raw is raw on the iPhone. A pixel raw is actually like a merged image still. So they're generating a different kind of raw, and you can actually, I think, do some of that ton mapping. Yeah. This is all way out there. Like, there's no way for... We're now quickly at any point where we have to constrain

how we review the cameras because they're getting so many features and there's so many ways to use them that if we open up the full set, like, we won't do it. anything out. Like, that's how we'll spend our time. And we'll be showing people like 6,000 photos at different settings that have no bearing on reality, which is you just pull off the phone and take a photo. And some years, that is the move because that is the only differentiating

thing, right? Yeah. This year, at least with the pixel, it's not the only differentiating thing compared to, especially other Android phones, but also the iPhone has motion sense. It has the high frame rate screen. It has, you know, face unlock. Like, other Android phones don't have that in the same combination. It also has orange. Yeah. Does have orange. Teeter and I disagree about whether the orange, the white, is the number one pixel to get. I say it's orange. Yeah, well, the reason you're wrong is because I love orange phones more than you.

And I think that the white phone is very slightly superior. I think it makes a clearer, cleaner artistic statement about what this phone is than the orange one does. Wait, wait, wait, connect those dots for me. What now? So if you hold the phone, like the black one is stupid and should go away. Yeah, the black one's gray. It's a glossy black and it's not a matte black back. the everyday else it's got it's got matte sides the the aluminum rails are on the edge and on the iPhone

you look at the aluminum rail and it's like very shiny and it's like it's kind of minimized they don't really want you to stare like it's a pretty like thing right on the pixel that that rail is like black at a different color and it says look at me I made the joke that they're like big heavy chunky glasses yeah in the hands-on area right and I think that the contrast of that black to the white is more of a clean statement of pay attention to the way that this phone is built and how it's sort of like humble as an object and not trying to be too fancy but it's still very well made than the orange was just like look at me I'm orange with a little bit of peach inside but sorry back to your comparison with other Android phones it's interesting how much stuff is in this phone

that couldn't be easily done by another manufacturer especially because a lot of it is either solely enabled by very specific hardware or like stuff like the camera, the voice recording thing, which seems really cool. But that's accelerated by very specific hardware. Yeah. So the voice recording, they can now do transcription in a new app called recorder. It's all local on the phone. It seems very good. They can now understand more voice commands for Google Assistant locally on the phone that makes it much faster because they're not having setting it to the cloud first. That stuff is legitimately cool.

There is always an open question about whether the pixel team gets better access to Android than the other Android vendors. This is the most complicated thing for any company like Google to manage. Microsoft has to manage it too, obviously, with Surface devices and Windows. I did not see Hiroshi Lockheimer at this event yesterday. Did you? No. I guess two days ago.

I mean, I think a lot of this stuff is pixel stuff that makes use of Google, not custom Android stuff. And I think they have to walk that line very, very carefully. I think the way they like that line is they don't get special access to Android, but they do get special access to the Google Assistant. Yeah. I think it's actually really telling that they gave this Google Assistant thing a brand name. They call it the new Assistant. And to me, that means they might give it to other phones eventually. But like they didn't give Face Unlock a brand name. They gave a brand name to Motion Sense. They gave a brand name to their little chip, and they gave a brand name to the assistant, which is fascinating. Yeah. Well, I,

I mean, they could give out anybody else the assistant, but it's just Samsung that they need to worry about it. Like, they got a bixby problem. You guys ask Rick about backporting some of these features to Pixel 3. And I really like his answer, which is seemed very honest, is he's got a benchmark it, right? Like, they've got to port the software to make sure it runs on there. And then they have to benchmark it on those devices. And so hopefully some of these features will, like, maybe in a year, run off. on like Qualcomm chipsets with, you know, enough work on the software to adapt it and then, you know, the correct benchmarking and tweaking to make sure it is actual performant.

But the other, the other version is, what was solely you said like they changed hardware so they had to throw away a whole bunch of training. Like there is this aspect, especially with some of these machine learning things where the hardware becomes so integral to the feature that it is, it is the feature. It's not really, you know, software becomes pretty secondary to what the actual functionality is. So an interesting version of this is the astrophotography mode, the extremely long exposure mode. Mark told us they're going to try to bring it to Pixel 3, but the sensor is a little bit different. And so they won't be able to run the exposure times as long. So I think the pixel 4 can do like 15 second exposures, and then Pixel 3 can only do like four or five second exposures. Like it gets hot?

I think they're just different chips. I don't know if it's like how it's gated, I don't know, but it's definitely gated in some way. But I think that's great, right? Also, in stark contrast to Apple being like, yeah, no, that feature is special for the new phone. And it's like, is it? Is that? I don't know. So here's the problem that we're going to run into for this.

I just want to call it out directly. Yeah. Because it, when you see the review, if you notice it feels tortured in the camera section, it's because of this. We did the entire iPhone review. What is the shadow looming over the iPhone review? The pixel four is coming, right? So I'm telling you the iPhone has a better camera than the pixel three. Believe it.

Other people disagree with me. What is art? What is a photo? What's that? Fine. But we know that there's another version coming out, right? Like, okay, the pixel four is going to be out. Apple says, oh, by the way, the big feature of the iPhone cameras is this thing called

Deep Fusion, which is going to really improve medium light shots. Yep. And they put it out. We wrote a whole story about how it works. I grilled them with questions. DeepFusion is going to be active actually quite a bit on the iPhone. Yeah. Right?

The telephoto lens on the iPhone is almost always going to use it unless you're in really bright sunlight. If you're inside, you're going to get it. It's almost certainly going to be on because you're in a low enough light situation. Well, it's not out yet. It's in the beta of iOS 13.2. And we can't review it. We can't compare to a beta. That's not fair to Apple or Google or anyone.

Yeah. It's beta software. It could work. They could yank it. I mean, it's not like iOS 13 is like some very smooth operating rollout. Like, for all we know, 132 will come out and be like, actually DeepFusion made the phones explode. Like, we don't know what's going to happen. So it's very unfair to review against the beta.

So the shadow over the iPhone review is a Pixel 4. The shadow over the pixel 4 review is going to be DeepFusion. The difference is that it is in the beta. So in theory, we can generate some deep fusion shots and compare them. But DeepFusion might not be out forever. They could change significantly between now and launch. They could, yeah, they could change the sliders of how it works. They could actually give you some indication, the X-F data that it's been, that it's actually

been activated. Yeah, that's the other thing. They don't tell you that it's on. Oh, so you just have to, like, examine with a magnifying glass? No, there's one specific way to make Deep Fusion go on and off. It is a slender. It is tangential. So the iPhone 11 has the shoot outside the frame feature where you see the main camera and the main

viewfinder and the ultra-wight. or depending on what camera you're using, and you see it outside, that feature is off by default. Why is it off by default? Because when you have it on, Deep Fusion is enacted. Yeah, but even if you have it off, in bright light, you aren't necessarily getting it. So you have to stare at file sizes,

you have to like zoom in, you have to take the same shot with the outside the frame on and off and then compare, and then maybe you might have figured out that there's Deep Fusion there. Right, so I can explain why capture outside the frame turns Deep Fusion on and off.

So Deep Fusion is like a new H-G-R-R. It only turns it off. It doesn't necessarily turn it on. That's the infuriating part. Right, okay, it only turns it off. So when you have capture outside the frame on, it's using both the main camera and the wide angle, right? And then it will notice, like, oh, the horizon is off level or, like, you cut off this person's face. We'll grab the shot from the wider angle lens and merge it with this one.

But the ultra-wide camera cannot do deep fusion. So if you want that feature to be available, you have to not activate deep fusion. You can only use standard Apple HDR. You turn capture outside the frame off. Now you don't got that problem. You can do deep fusing on the wide angle or the tally. So it's like this, it's not a setting to turn, as you just point out, it's not a setting in turn deep fusion on and off.

It's a setting that went on prevents deep fusion from being activated. Right. But that means that we're kind of like using it to see what happens when deep fusion is on. I see this as a challenge, and I don't really know what you should do up front for this review, but I do, the opportunity here is a real double dip on traffic. You got the first comparison, and then you got the versus deep fusion comparison. Yeah, it's just, I think the thing that makes it really hard, and this is like extremely inside baseball, but I suspect our audience cares. If you don't, let me know. But it was a very clear line for me to be like,

the pixel four is not available. I do not have this hardware in my hands. You cannot pre-order it. It has been leaked and half announced, but I haven't gone to the Google party where they said it's, you know, like, I'm not comparing this to pixel four. It's coming.

That'll be fun when it's here, but it's not here. With software that's in beta, it's here. And people yell at me if I don't. People are using it. Yeah. Everyone called it sweater mode because we keep calling it sweater mode.

I'm very proud that the Virgin made a meme. You know, like, that's cool, but it's still not real until it ships. And I am so hesitant for us to actually review a beta product because how many times in our lives have we been burned by depending on a beta, right? So it's, I think it's just a little bit different. I think we'll end up, Dieter, correct me if I'm wrong, I think we'll end up showing like one or two deep fusion shots. We have to, but we can't review it.

And then Paul, we'll double dip and do like the big deep. fusion review when that thing hits. Beautiful. Whenever. We should talk about the telephoto. Yeah. The super res zoom. Super res zoom.

So Google's contention is that telephoto is more important than an ultra-wide because they have super-res zoom and so then they can use the extra data from the telephoto to make super-res zoom even better. In addition, they can also use, it's easier to use the data from that thing for portrait mode than an ultra-wide. Therefore, given the choice between either a telephoid. photo or an ultra-wide, they believe that their users would much rather have a telephoto that they will get much more utility out of it.

Why not both? Yeah, I don't get it. It makes no sense to me. I mean, in all fairness, the iPhone ultra-oid camera is not any good, right? Like, it is a very much worse camera than the main camera. Nelai, the iPhone ultroid camera is the MP3 of cameras. I love it. Yeah.

I mean, it looks real. It sounds terrible. but it looks cool the MP3 is like cool I'm definitely in the camp where I find more often with a phone that I wish I could zoom in than I wish I could zoom out like it's cool to zoom out but more cases where I wish I could zoom in

but yeah like this is a flagship phone they clearly went flagship on several features you know 90 hertz that's flagship a sensor that can detect the motion of your finger in a small violin sort of motion but not really do anything with that information. That's flagship. Wait, Paul, is this your new segment?

That's flagship. The defining feature of a flagship is it can do a thing, but it won't. Like sweater mode. Or what's the U1 chip, the location? Have you never gotten the U1 ship to work? I feel like I could do an entire hour on the U1 chip and the fact that it doesn't appear to do anything. Now, could you tell, could you see the screen

when you were scrolling at the hands-on area. Could you see the 90 hertz? Could you see it be smoother? Yeah, but I think that's only because I have an iPad pro and a regular iPad, and I'm very attuned to the difference of Pro Motion versus standard, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's nice. If you turn it off, am I going to cry?

Like, no. Yeah. But it's nice. I think the big question is, like, whether it destroys the battery life. Well, they say it won't because it's dynamic. And they can make it dynamic because, you know, they maybe have special access to Android. I'm worried about battery life. Because they didn't upgrade the battery in the small pixel, right?

2,800 million to the small pixel. And as a pixel 3 owner, I can tell you that it has a horrible battery. All right, we've been at this for 45 minutes. We need to take a quick break. We'll be back with all the rest of the Google stuff. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too.

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You can go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates

takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process

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you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, Paul, we're going to do your segment early because the third segment is Zuckerberg in free speech. And I'm being honest with everybody, I don't think we can go from Paul's recurring segment that will save democracy to Mark Zuckerberg and whatever he's going to do to democracy. Paul, every week you do a segment. Uh-huh.

What's it called? It's called the real crime. Teens is flavor. Now, you'll notice that there's a comma in there. It's like a, you know, you know how commas work. Teens, the crime is flavor. And the verdict is that Jewel has suspended sale of fruity flavor pods. And so I just saw it.

Front running the Trump administration's ban of said pods. Yeah, which is coming for them any second. I just don't know if this is, I mean, is this like a Tide Pod thing? Like, if you tell. If you tell teens that the most dangerous but delicious thing in the world is a flavor jewel pod, you know, are teens going to flock to it? I feel like once you're addicted to nicotine, you're not like, well, no more mango. Like, you're going to figure it out. As a current toothpick guy, former jewel user, I will just tell you that as someone who might want to pick up vaping for the first time, the tobacco pods taste like shit.

Yep. And the flavor pods taste really good. And so you smoke, you vape the tobacco pods despite it, and it takes way long. Like, you know how the first time you try coffee? You're like, yeah, and then like all of a sudden you love it. Like, you have to pour a bunch of sugar in it and milk, and then eventually you enjoy the original taste of coffee. Like, you never quite enjoy the taste of a tobacco jewel pot. It's always like a thing you do despite the taste.

So it's literally, you're creating a forbidden fruit. Okay. It is literally a truth. Let's talk about the Pixel Book Go. Okay. I'm just letting you know about the teens and their crimes. I mean, look, the teens are going to do crimes. It's just a fact.

But are they going to do crimes using the new $649 pixel book go? I can't. I don't know what to do with that. Just trying, Dieter. A transition doesn't work at all. I think this thing is, it's actually very pretty. That's what I got. Yep.

I don't like that it has a 16 by 9 screen. It's very pretty. I do not like that a 6. screen either. It's also to me personally very confusing because I just did the, you know, best Chromebook you can buy. This is my next Chromebook. And there are

approximately 10. I mean, like it's more like six Chromebooks that all have the exact same specs in motherboard, like down to like the placement of like the microSD card slot. And this is like one step up from all of those, but it also costs $100, you know, $150 more than those.

So do you spend the extra money to get something that spec-wise is like comparable slash only slightly better, but you also get like the Google name brand and the, you know, very quiet keyboard. You guys, the keyboard is so good. I love that we are now in a zone where everyone is dunking on Apple for the keyboard, regardless of the price point of the laptop they're putting at. Yeah. So I've felt the baddest Apple keyboard and then the new Apple keyboard, which is slightly less bad, but still mostly as bad. And then there's like, you know, well, there's the pixel book, which is a great keyboard I always enjoyed.

I never, you know, gushed about it. And then there's like a think pad keyboard. And, you know, there's different levels of key travel, but think pad keyboards have, you know, are mostly thought of as very good. So where would you put it in and all that? It's different. It's, they make it a quiet, it's an evolution of the pixel book, original pixel book keyboard. They just made it quieter. So it feels softer, but it's also springy.

so you don't get a clack out of it. So if you like that satisfying mechanical keyboard clack, like this is, you're not going to love this. But if you don't care about that, you just want good key travel, quiet keys that like hit when you tap them with your finger. You're going to love this keyboard.

You know, I've only spent like an hour with it. So like, I could be completely wrong about this. I want my key to move so I know I have pressed the key, but I don't want to work too hard. Oh, yeah. This is like typing on a springy cloud.

Aw. I mean, what I like about it is that I, I love the fact that in now the Google ecosystem, Google is making what appears to be all the default devices, right? They're making a play for the pixel to be the default Android phone. They got to actually sell them. But, like, it's a phone of that quality.

It's on all the carriers in the United States. Maybe that'll work out. The Pixelbook Go feels like, okay, this is a great $650. It's really well made. First party support. This is the default Chromebook. That's great. You can also spec up to like $1,400, which seems to me.

Chromebook and the 4K display. where we live now. And then they're doing the thing that every company is doing now, which is they've made ecosystem locked in headphones. Nothing makes me sadder. They made the headphones I've wanted somebody to make, assuming they're good. So the pixel buds, Generation 2, that's not their actual name, but you've got to call them something. The new pixel buds, they're very small. They kind of look like hearing aids. Just putting it out there. They're like little circles, but they go in your ear. They have a little flange to clip in your ear. Circles in your ear are the new thing.

That's like Microsoft made big circles for year, Google made little circles for a year. That's what we're, that's what we're right. Will I am was right. Sure. I got to wear the hardware. The hardware was not functional because they don't work yet. They're not coming out until spring 2020, which is a million years from now. Especially because there's a holiday season with AirPods to contend with in that time.

And I can't convince America that AirPods sound bad, so people are, are just going to keep buying AirPods. It's fine. And people love AirPods. No disrespect if you're an AirPods person. I just think they sound bad. These potentially sound very good. Right?

I mean, Google says they... Who knows? Who knows? But Google says they fit your ear. They seal. They have some base. They're like vented, especially. So you don't get that outside...

That feeling of being insulated. You get a little outside sound. They have this feature called environmental audio with the earbuds sense when you're in a loud environment and adjust the volume of your phone. They work with the assist. You can just say, hey, Google. All of this sounds great in theory, but they don't work yet.

Rick Osteros worked, he told us. But he didn't prove it. I will say that. He waved him at us tauntingly in that interview, but he didn't actually let us listen to him. So look, it's a USBC case with wireless charging that is relatively small. These are all things that the Samsung buds do. It's in ear, but it's in ear with that little vent so it doesn't feel too wacky. So that's good.

It has some on-bud controls. right, you can like do stuff on the buds, so that's good. Well, it says they do. I tap them, but they weren't working so they didn't do anything. So like they just have to sound good and they have to have good microphones. That's where the galaxy buds just fail. If the galaxy buds had good microphones, I would just say that everyone should buy them. Yep.

But they don't, so no one should. And then they have a special Bluetooth radio that lets them work at massive distances. And Google historically not good at Bluetooth. And Rick told us, I don't know if I made it in the interview, but he said they'd worked really hard in the pixel blue tooth stack. And that compared with the new pixel, the pixel buds actually go even farther than they claim. So again, we will have to see. What does pair with a single tap mean? Like there's some sort of easy pairing with Android?

So yeah, I think Android in and up has easy pair situation. And I think mostly the previous pixel buds use them and these pixel buds will use them. I don't know. Some random third party. Like Jabras might or like anchors might. There's like J-birds. There's like there's a couple others that use it. It's basically what you expect.

It pops up a big like bubble that has a picture of the headphones. Then you tap pair and you're done. Yeah. So that's cool. I mean, they're going to come out. We'll see. I mean like it's a long time from now. So we'll see.

Rick told us like, look, we're not having another event. So we just announced them. Like here they are. Like that's fine. Yeah. There's a bunch of nest stuff. I actually, I don't think it's that interesting. Like, the new Nest Mini, you can match it in a wall because there's a little keyhole slot.

Cool. It sounds a little bit better. They do some local machine learning. It doesn't go nearly as far as the phone does, but they will learn things that it could theoretically do locally over time and not need to ping the Internet for them. So the promise is after the fifth time you turn on your lights, it won't need to ask the servers how to do that anymore. Yeah. Yeah. They're re-architecting that works with Nest programs.

So that stuff is a little bit more local. That is so hard to explain what's going on there. But we were talking to Rishi Chandra, and he's like, look, the current way of the smart home works where you have a light bulb that talks to the Hue base station that goes up to the cloud that talks to our cloud. And then our cloud says turn on and it goes back to their cloud, back to that base. He's like, that is bad, very bad for a million reasons. We're going to get away from that. now they're doing this whole thing where they're going to audit vendors who need to see data from your home and everything else will be routines inside of the assistant. And it's very smart.

We are just going to have to see how that plays out. That is a big shift, a big ask for that entire industry to move that way. And then there's obviously the new Nest Google Wi-Fi. Nest Wi-Fi router and Nest Wi-Fi points. The points are basically double-tall Google mini speakers. So they actually should theoretically sound nest mini speakers. God damn it. So they've got a little more air.

They sound better. Who knows? And two is supposed to cover the same space as three of the Google Wi-Fi. It's $2.70 bucks for a two-pack. If you want to go buy the two-pack on Amazon, we don't know what it costs. And we also won't come at the point with the assistant in it because Amazon refuses to sell Google speakers. They're making a special two-router pack just for Amazon. Wow.

I like, I mean, I don't love that Eero got bought, you know, everyone knows if I feel about this. Consolidation is bad, break them up, et cetera. I do like the idea that Amazon and Google are in a router fight. No Wi-Fi 6 in the Google routers. Rishi told us it's just not ready yet. Eero famously also does not have Wi-Fi 6. So if you're trying to live on the bleeding edge. No set-aside channel for backhaul.

But Google says they don't need it. They're like, we figured out how to, how to, you know, route and massage traffic on the servers that run the Internet, that run Google. Also, we think we can handle it with your Wi-Fi network. It's like, okay. The Netgear just came out with some new, like, very cheap orbies as well. Yeah. And they look cute. Yeah, router fight is on.

It's hot. Dan Sefer does nothing but review routers lately. And lastly, they announced a launch day for Stadia, November. It's very exciting. It turns out, though, that Stadia controller needs to plugged in an awful lot. It's like it's only wireless if you use, like Chromecast? Yeah. That seems strange to me.

It's real bad. Like, I was, I'm actually super bummed. about this. It'll be the newsletter this morning when you are listening to this tomorrow. Time is hard. I had expected, because this thing had been shown often in beta, just out there for so long, that they would just have this launch wrapped up. And they clearly don't. Wireless audio isn't working super well. Now that you've got to plug this thing in to work with your phone. There's like a bunch of like, oh yeah, this doesn't quite work as well as we promise that have been leaking out over the past couple of weeks. And it's a huge bummer.

I mean, I think this is going to be the story of all cloud game. I mean, we're in the, well, yeah, XCloud, MicrosoftXClaude. Tom Trout did a hands-on with a beta for that. And it also was like, huh. Yeah, we're not quite ready for it. But it's, as they say, Dieter, early days. I hate you. That's the name of my podcast about features that are done ship.

Early days, a flagship story. All right, I think that's all the Google stuff. Yeah. I mean, it was a lot. We have a lot to review. I'm sorry that I talked about the inner workings of our deep future. conundrum for so long, but it's on my mind. Dieter's going to have to figure it out.

Sorry, buddy. All Eli did was just basically speak the thing that I was like ranting at him in Slack earlier today. I was like, this is, blah, blah, blah. The best part of the Verge cast is when I just read Dieter's slacks is my own thoughts. Welcome to The Verge, everybody.

All right, we're going to take a break. We'll be back with Casey and Addy to talk about this Facebook situation. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time

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Get started with Claude today at cloud. com.a.ai slash vergecast. That's clod.aI slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. All right, we're back. So big news today, Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech about

free speech at Georgetown in a hall that like heads of state have given speeches in in D.C. I didn't get to see the speech. I was in a meeting, but I read some transcripts, but Addy, you're here. Casey, you're here. You watched this thing. Casey, tell me what you thought of it. I thought the speech was more interesting for why Zuckerberg gave it than what it said. And I thought it was interesting in the way that it positions Facebook against some of the other tech companies.

companies in Silicon Valley, right? So over the past few weeks, a big debate has broken out over, in particular, should Facebook permit lies in political ads? And Elizabeth Warren has led the charge in saying they absolutely should not. They are profiting from misinformation. And there is a moral case against this company profiting from misinformation. And Facebook just hasn't had that much to say about that so far. And so this speech today from Zuckerberg was a way of saying, look, if a politician wants to lie. We think that there should be a record of that. And we think that the citizens of the democracy should discuss it. And it should not be incumbent on a private company to police that speech. So he wanted to make essentially a counter moral case for Facebook's decisions.

So give me just a sense of the speech itself. It's very long. I couldn't locate like a thesis. But tell me what you... It was like 40 minutes. I mean, when you think about the kind of, you know, televised speeches that leaders give. It wasn't that long. I guess I'm only reading the transcript, so I'm looking at it. I'm like, wow, this is a lot of scrolling. Okay. Oh, it's only 40 minutes, but I couldn't really grasp the thesis.

Tell me what it actually contained. So Zuckerberg is really staking this next iteration of Facebook's future on the idea that the company is about voice and inclusion and connection. And that the company is making the bet that the world will get better if people are, are connected and can share their voices. And so he wanted to make a case for that. And then in what was definitely the worst part of the speech, he sort of retconned the origin of Facebook from being about the rating of hot people

on campus, which is how it actually started, to being about a way to let people protest the Iraq war, which, you know, to be clear, that was not the reason why Facebook was started. And certainly the existence of Facebook didn't seem to have much effect on the you know, unfolding of the Iraq war. You know, it really did strike me. I was saying this to Deeter before we got started. There's almost something pointed about the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has no lived life experience, like in between college and starting Facebook. And so when he wants to talk about like formative experiences in his life, there's like the two years of college and like that

stuff that happened to him while he was the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world. So he's kind of like at a weird disadvantage there. It's just kind of coming across as a, you know, normal person. Yeah, it's true. He can't be like, when young, who wanted to buy my company, something that we've all experienced. Which he's done in the past. That's an example he's used. It's like, I don't, well, actually, can I just read? This is how the speech started.

Yeah, the low point is at the beginning of the speech. Like, I, Andy, I know you're like digging into it, so I want to ask you about it. But let me just read, this is literally how it began. And I could not get past this when I was reading the transcript. So here's Zuckerberg. When I was in college, our country had just gone to war in Iraq. The mood on campus was disbelief. It felt like we were acting without hearing a lot of.

of important perspectives. I feel like I could put a big asterisk there, but I'll just move on. The total and soldiers, families are nationalists like he was severe, and most of us all powerless to stop it. I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently. Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better. Back then, I was building an early version of Facebook for my community, another asterisk. And I got to see these beliefs play out at a smaller scale. I want to do the thing, you know, like genius, more like you hit stop and it's just me screaming.

Like, a lot of people protested the Iraq war. There was not some confusion in this country about whether that was a bad idea. But if they protested on Facebook. But if they used Facebook, maybe it wouldn't have happened. Let me play devil's advocate, though, which is the Me Too movement did not happen before social media. Black Lives Matter did not happen before social media. The Arab Spring did not happen before social media, right?

Fair. So there have been these number of sort of groundswells of public opinion that do seem like they have benefited from the viral machinery of social networks. And I do think we have to keep that in mind as we're weighing it against the, you know, many obvious negative consequences. I think this is the problem with the speech, which is that he is making a lot of points that are good, but in ways that are extremely disingenuous. Like the ridiculous thing is not that Facebook could have helped, like, that social media

could help the Arab Spring or cases like this. It's that Mark Zuckerberg certainly did not start it with the intention of doing that. And that's how this opens. So, Adi, you're literally writing a piece about Facebook's inception in itself. Give us the sort of the actual thing that happened. So the timeline is we invade Iraq in March of 2003 after millions of people protest. In October, the chief weapons inspector says there were no weapons of mass destruction. In early November, Mark Zuckerberg almost gets kicked out of Harvard for starting a hot or not clone using Facebook photos on FaceMash, which would later become Facebook through a series of not being Facebook.

It was the predecessor of Facebook. I imagine, I mean, I was in college at that time. Yep, people on campus were certainly talking about the war. But there's no correlation here. And I think that... Also, Facebook was explicitly, it was one of the less broadcast and, like, voice-focused things. Like, the point was that you could become friends with a person that you had met on campus. Like, it was explicitly touted as a thing where, oh, yeah, you're connecting just with people you already know.

You are... This isn't like MySpace. You're not going to try to put yourself out there as a star. it's to help people get to know each other. It's like a yearbook. Yeah. And there was no news feed. There was no engine of virality.

Oh God. We hated the news feed when it started. Yeah. Like these points are all so deeply true that we should just move on. Like the opening of the speech was like a calamity. I think the more interesting stuff is him positioning Facebook as a moral leader at a time when other companies are deeply compromised by their relations to China and are going to just. have to do all kinds of horrible things that we Americans like. And Facebook, by virtue of the fact that it was never allowed in in the first place,

has this wide open lane to be a champion of American values. And, like, that is actually what is interesting about this speech to me. I agree with that. It's funny, Josh Hawley, Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, who we talk about all the time. He's the conservative crusader against Big Tech. He just met with Zuckerberg. And so his response to this speech was a series of tweets being like, when I met with Zuckerberg and asked him in China, he said,

well, if he was there, he'd have to censor to comply with the local laws. But now that he's not there, this is so convenient. Like, Josh Hawley is not buying this read. I do see this speech as Zuckerberg trying to rally the conservatives who are always complaining about conservative bias, who are always complaining about censorship around him. And for them to say, he cares about free speech, here are the difficult tradeoffs he has to make. So to make it clear that he is not trying to censor, if you believe. that it is happening, but he's actually on their side. And that is, I think, very clever,

but it conflates two very important things. One, Facebook is not all of social media. And the case he makes most broadly is for social media to exist, not necessarily for Facebook to exist. And then it conflates Facebook's ability to moderate in a difficult environment with some difficult tradeoffs with its size. Right. Like, one of, I think one of them, subtle claims here is that only by achieving its size and scale can Facebook even begin to handle the moderation challenge of the modern internet. And I, that, I mean, I think everybody listening to this knows I don't believe that necessarily that Facebook needs that scale. But this is, you know, Casey in the audio you had, he pointed out the election safety team. They spend more

on it than Twitter's entire revenue and then everyone laughed. And in this one, he points out that their moderation effort costs more than their revenue at launch, or their revenue at IPO. So he's making this implicit case for Facebook to be huge. When the truth is, like, your problem scale with your size, Facebook had zero content moderators when it was at Harvard, right? But then they brought more people onto the platform and those people caused more problems. So then they had to hire people to, like, go clean up those messes. And then eventually, the problems became far worse than their moderators could get a grip on and they've been playing catch-up ever since. So, yes, I agree. The size is the real issue. It's the thing that nobody

ever wants to talk about because the unstated logic in all of this is, please, let us find an ideology that will let us maintain the status quo, right? And like, that is what this is. This is a way, like, how can Facebook exist as it is today, but under some sort of unifying moral banner and rallying cry that will still entice college seniors

who are smart to want to work there? Right? Like, to me, that's, that's like the backdrop for all of this. But, you know, as somebody who's been watching all of these companies just trip all over themselves with regard to China, I am on Facebook side here in that specific way. I do want to see a social network that allows a wide range of free speech on political subjects,

including stuff that I don't agree with. It makes me super uncomfortable, right? And at the same time, you look at what Apple is about to go through. You look at what Blizzard is already going through. There are so many American companies that have Chinese ownership interests. and there is like Zuckerberg is smart to see that he has an open lane when it comes to just championing a what has historically been a very foundational American value. And he can kind of go wave that flag. And guess who can't, Tim Cook.

But Tim Cook's going to wave that flag when he wants to. Notably the one true big competitor on the horizon is just actually a Chinese company, TikTok. Yes. Like there could be no better time for TikTok to have emerged. As I was walking into the studio, TechCrunch put up an article that says, TikTok makes education push in India. And in my mind, like the education pushes, have you heard about Chairman Xi and what a great guy he is? That's not what the story is about.

But yeah, you have a very fast-growing social network that is explicitly banning political speech, including speech of the variety that I think, you know, us sitting in this podcast, for all agree, is super innocuous. And so, you know, like, again, and like sort of on accident, Mark Zuckerberg gets to be a free speech champion. The other point that I wanted to make is, you know, when it comes to this fight over censorship, like, this whole thing is such a gift to Mark Zuckerberg, right? My entire Twitter timeline all morning has been media Twitter just sort of like dunking on the speech being like, L.O.L. Mark Zuckerberg, you need to be censoring more, you know. And, like, they're sort of creating a perfect bogey man for him to be able to sort of walk through the middle of and say, well, now I do agree we need to take down the stuff that is inciting violence. But broadly speaking, we want to invite a maximum range of free speech.

And then he gets to show that entire debate to every conservative who he sits down with and says, look, I'm the person you want in this file. I'm the person standing up for you, right? Like, you should go take your complaint to TikTok if you want to be mad about censorship on social networks, right? So this entire debate has been a gift to Mark Zuckerberg. Well, he also implied basically that Elizabeth Warren and everyone who criticizes Facebook for fake news ads is acting in bad faith because they don't like Trump. Yeah. And I think that's like it's just such a given for them now. It's such a winner of an argument, right?

If you had a Republican presidential candidate who was not prone to lying in the way that Trump lies, like maybe the shape of this debate is different. I think one real problem Facebook has is if it enforces a policy against lies in political ads, it might have to refuse all of the ads from the Trump campaign in 2020 because Trump is extremely prone to lying. That is a very hard position to be in after the 2016 election, after the Russian interference, without a hundred year history of being ABC News and vetting political ads against a set of standards. They don't have this long-range policy or this long-range institutional history of this is what we do and this is how we're sticking to our guns, right? Like, we're important. We're the elites. We're going to like manage the flow. Like Facebook doesn't have any of that.

They're just under siege. I would like to push back on that a little bit in your tone, making it sound like Trump has somehow invented lying in politics. No. I don't, I mean, half of our show is us pointing out the politicians are lying. Sure, I agree with you. I think that the amount and tone and tenor of those lies is qualitatively different. Actually, Casey, I'm curious what you think about is explanation for why they don't just ban political ads, which as I remember amounted to, A, we would have to ban a huge swath of things because a bunch of things are political.

Or issue ads. Yeah, you'd have to ban issue ads. And B, if we don't allow these ads, then it will favor incumbents because people already know about them and smaller candidates won't be able to get their voices out. I think that the bigger concern, the more practical concern, as that first one. And I know it because after they rolled out these new requirements for political advertisers, like you have to, you know, we're going to send a postcard to a physical mailing address to make sure that you're not a fake account. There were so many stories about these advertisers that are like, I just wanted to put up a sign that says, hey, recycle at work.

And they're making me register as a political advertiser. And it turns out that determining what is political is a content moderation job like any other, where at the edges it gets really, really tricky and you enrage everybody on all sides. And so, yeah, the question of what counts as a political ad does get, you know, really tricky. I usually agree with that, but I feel like maybe you could ban campaign ads. Like, I feel like that is actually a thing that you could maybe draw a line at. Or P.A. Or P.A.C. ads, right? Yeah. That seems like a thing that if you wanted to do, you could do. Can we take a step back, though? Like, it, I find it honestly incredible that we're having a discussion over essentially whether the elected officials of this country

and the politicians we elect to represent us can be trusted to take out ads on social networks. Like, we think, we do not trust them to the degree. We think we should take away their right to buy an ad, lest some of them lie to us. And I really think you should drill down on like, what is the thing that you're afraid? Like, yes, Trump tells horrible, horrible. lies, right? The lies of themselves are not actually what worries me about Trump, though. It's the policies. It's when he builds cages

and puts children in them, right? Like, that's what I would fricking like to ban. If he wants to take an ad that says that Elizabeth Warren is, you know, is like secretly a lizard person and she's drinking the blood of children, like it's stupid, it's horrible, it's offensive. You know, he's also used what is arguably a racial slur, right?

Like, related to her heritage. And he's been doing that on Facebook ads. I think that's really gross. But all of this goes to, like, do we not want to know who our politicians are? Is it not helpful to us to know when they are liars? Is it not helpful to the democracy to have a robust debate that is enabled by, by, you know, the free press about who these people are, what they're lying about, what is the truth? Like, to me, this just all feels like it's actually part of a healthy democracy. And to take that away from politicians altogether

seems possibly hysterical. That is naive. Disclosure, my wife, works for Oculus, the division of Facebook. Political ads on Facebook are of a different tenor than political ads on TV. They're much more convincing. They have a much higher opportunity to go viral. It's much less clear what their providence is. They come in a context where you might think it's like actually coming from your friend or your friend endorsed it in addition to being the thing that the thing that the politician made. And so to say that like we should allow it because then we'll know if they're lying or not, well, them doing the lying is already like tilting the conversation in a toxic way in a different way on Facebook that it happens in a newspaper or on TV or in radio.

Well, so one interesting proposal that gets bandied about as a potential solution to this problem is what if you permit political ads on Facebook but you ban micro-targeting? So essentially, if Trump has something that he wants to say on Facebook, he has it to say it to the whole country, right? He can't say one thing to the soccer moms and another thing to the NASCAR ads. And people sort of speculate that this would encourage candidates to, make a lot of the maybe retreat to more centrist messages and would not try to sneak a bunch of really inflammatory stuff under the radar that's only going to affect the most vulnerable populations.

So that, it's funny. I think it's really, we're at a point now where we're up against the First Amendment, right? Like, Facebook has its own set of First Amendment rights. They can, they can show people what they want. It's very difficult. So now you're at a point where you're getting to that, again, that the Josh Hollis. zone of what if I ban autoplay videos, right?

Like, what if I restrict the feature set of this software platform because it has some broader cultural impact that I don't like? Casey, I agree with you. Like, we should know when politicians are lying. Like, they do it. It's weird to think that you're going to vote for somebody who's known for being a liar.

At the same time, Facebook is, like, it's a private platform. And I think the challenge is that it's so big, right? if it was, like, we are not having this conversation about Reddit, right? Like, we are, we are just absolutely not having this conversation right. It's still pretty big. We are not having this conversation about the comment section of the New York Times, right?

Any other place where there is widespread political activity. We are not really having this conversation about Twitter. The president is, like, we're having a conversation where the president should be allowed on Twitter, but that is not about his ads, right? Like, it's bizarre. It's Facebook scale or its perceived ability, I think, because of 2016, to drive an election outcome that we are more, I think, concerned about its behavior

and what it does and doesn't allow. You're right, and I just want to say one quick thing on that point because this gets at the heart of my criticism of Zuckerberg's speech was that it accepts as a given that the platform is neutral and the platform is not neutral for all of the reasons that you just mentioned. Like Facebook is a medium, the medium shapes the debate,

and because of its size, it affects the debate too. And so we have to talk about the ways that the platform is not neutral. We have to talk about what it incentivizes. We have to talk about who benefits by its existence and who loses out. And all of that stuff is just as important as this sort of high-minded principle of free speech.

I don't like the conception of the issue that there are smart people either at Facebook or at government or some think-take that could somehow better determine what is true than the rubs who, you know, just mindlessly click, things on Facebook because there's this this I don't like that as a dichotomy because there's nothing essentially or or definitively certain about some person running a platform or someone advising

a platform or someone legislating a platform being definitively better at accessing the truth than a user of that platform. Sure. I mean I think one of the problems of Facebook is it's very easy to lie on that platform. And then Facebook has a context collapse problem, which is what Deter was getting at before, which is lies look like not, lies look like other content, ads look like real content, fake news, like literally that before that term turned into whatever it turned into now, was literally about websites that were fake, that were made to look like news websites. And Facebook context collapsed that, so it was very hard to tell the difference.

I think you can also not, like you can frame it as being. very patronizing and I think a lot of people do and it's very annoying. I think you can also frame it as a service. We shouldn't want, we shouldn't expect users to have to go through in fact fact to absolutely everything they see on Facebook. There's a way in which you can frame it. Like, Facebook may not have better access to the truth, but it can make, like, put people toward this that actually have the time and want to put in the effort to try to sort this thing out so that individual users are not supposed to be expected to like go through and definitively track down every lie on Facebook. I don't know if I agree with that, but I

I think it's a thing that is a better framing than whether people are too stupid to know whether something's true. Right. And if Facebook, for example, had a competitor that was better at it, it might compete on that axis. But it doesn't. So, Adi, you cover speech on the Internet very broadly. I tend to think of a lot of your stories as asking a very fundamental question, which is, like, what's allowed on the Internet, whether that's, like, cloud flare taking sites down or Microsoft removing GAB or, like, whether ads can be bought on Facebook. Like, it's all of a piece.

Like, what gets to go here? I read this speech. It seems like there's a straw man at the center of it, which is free expression is under attack, right? And I don't know, like, there was an entire debate about Section 230 in Congress yesterday. And not one person was like, we need to get rid of Section 230. Not one person really was like, we need to step, we need to define more content moderation policies for platforms. I didn't hear that. You listen to it more carefully than I did.

But is that central conceit that free expression is like under attack. Is that real the way that Zuckerberg seems to be framing it is real? I can't tell because I'm first of all biased to think that it always is. I think you can fairly make the case that like it is under attack in China and that whether or not he's being alarmist is kind of another question. But like definitely within China it is under attack. And that I think they're also like the New York Times is constantly publishing things that dance right up against should we outlaw.

hate speech. Like, they had to publish a correction that's like, actually, the First Amendment protects hate speech. Yes. Like, I think that that might be overblown, like, that that doesn't necessarily mean we are anywhere near restricting that. But I think it's a part of the conversation. Do you think the question is whether people have enough influence, like whether that actually is a thing or just people talking on the internet. Yeah. And I mean, also, like, there's, like, it can both be true that there is not an actual legal assault on the first amendment. And also, people are facing extraordinary consequences for free speech. My favorite example of that is the NBA guy, Wage, who had a show in China about the NBA in China.

And he liked the now infamous Daryl Morey tweet expressing support for the Hong Kong protesters, and his show was canceled. Like that kind of thing is happening a lot these days. And to me, that is an assault on free speech, right? Because if you're going to lose your job because you like a tweet, then we have entered new territory. I think also internet and infrastructure is, like, if you make it impossible to get online, even if you have the First Amendment, then to some extent, speech is being suppressed, like just in a practical manner.

Like if there's no way to really get the thing that you want online, which getting kicked off Facebook does not do that, getting kicked off every internet infrastructure provider kind of does. Yeah, I just, this is the conflation I see between the government and like what the society has decided to do around speech, right? the United States government did not fire dude for criticizing China. The Chinese government certainly might have helped, but that is the huge difference in kind. The amount of consequences people face for what they post in social media in their private lives has really nothing to do with the government's approach to free speech.

And it's nothing to do with Facebook's content moderation policy. I think it does. And here's why. Because all of us, we live in two states. We live in the country we live in and then we live on the internet that we live in. And the debate that we're having right now is are we going to live? on an American internet or a Chinese internet. So you think that's the actual underlying principle of this speech?

Yes. We talk about Facebook as a private company because it is, but it is also a quasi-state that two billion people live on. And so speech policy there does have these really dramatic consequences. And I think the question of, is it going to be a place that embodies these American values or is Chinese soft power just going to keep expanding until, you know, TikTok is the most popular social network in the world? and it's the one that I want to interact with all my friends on.

And, hey, I wanted to express some support for those Hong Kong protesters. And boom, my account gets nuked. Right? Like, that world is not too far off. Like, we are seeing it break out like this month in ways we never have before. So that is, I think, like, super relevant context. So, Casey, Addy, did, like, those stakes to me sound like really dire. Like, that makes this whole conversation feel much more, like, relevant and much less,

let's dunk on Mark Zuckerberg for spouting platitudes. about free speech than before. Did he in the speech that he gave actually, like, effectively communicate those stakes, or was it lost? Did he not have the guts to say it that directly? I mean, maybe Casey disagrees with me on that, but I feel this, but I think what Belize's saying is right, the problem is just that he presented the American Internet. It's not the American Internet.

It's Facebook. Like, it's weird that the framing that he has effectively given us, which we have accepted, is that the only option is TikTok versus Facebook. that there's no internet outside, that there's not a world where we don't have these companies. If you will forgive me, I wish to read a paragraph from Mark Zuckerberg's very long speech about free speech. Oh, now you say it's long. It's just 40 minutes, Casey. I've come around to your way of thinking. Here's what he says. This raises a larger question about the future of the global internet. China is building its own internet focused on very different values and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries.

Until recently, the internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by American platforms with strong free expression values. There's no guarantee these values will win out. A decade ago, almost all the major internet platforms were American. Today, six of the top 10 are Chinese. And so, yes. So he is bringing that context in. He is not just talking about Facebook. He is talking about which internet do you want to live on.

So Facebook is in many countries that are not the United States, that are not China. those countries have radically different speech regimes. They follow those laws. How do you square that? How do you square I'm the champion of American values? I will export them around the world. I will stand up to Chinese platform censorship with when we operate in Europe, we have to comply with European speech regulations.

When we operate in Germany, we don't let people post about Nazis. I think the historical justification has been get inside the country, adapt to their local laws, but then use your soft power over time to permit more speech and the hopes that more speech will lead to better outcomes. Like that has been kind of the policy framework under which they've operated. It has required some compromises, like some of which are hypocritical. Something that I think is very worth pointing out is that had Chairman Xi allowed Zuckerberg into China, like this speech would have read completely differently here, right?

Facebook was in China until 2009. Yeah, and it was like, until very recently was like setting up weird, like little subsidiaries to work on like tiny little social apps, right? So like, yeah, and that's like very, very fresh. Mark Zuckerberg learned Mandarin. I'm just putting that. Yes. He asked him and she what he should name his child. So all of that is super relevant context, you know, but I think it is sometimes the case that even if they wind up there for sort of craven personal, greedy, selfish reasons, they can wind up having a positive,

effect or they can stand up for an important value. And I sort of think that's what Facebook has fallen into here. So what happens next? Well, okay, so here, so I kind of went through a journey last week as I was thinking through, do I think Facebook should permit lies in political ads or not? And where I ultimately came down was, regardless of whether or not you believe in the principle, here is what is probably going to happen. In a 2020 election, there are going to be multiple and maybe very frequent lies in political ads. Many of them are going to go viral. And in every single case, you're going to get politicians and the press standing up saying,

look at this disinformation for profit machine that has been spun up and look at how it is corroding the fabric of our democracy. And I think that drumbeat is going to get so loud. And I think it's going to dramatically hurt the morale of Facebook employees. And I think they will be forced to change the policy. I just think whatever you think of the sort of principles involved here, I think practically the policy is untenable. So that is my prediction for what happens next. Adi, what do you think? I think that makes sense.

I think it's also back to what we were talking about whether it's weird to not let politicians speak on Facebook. the issue is also that we're fundamentally talking about ads. We're fundamentally talking about like politicians can put what they want there, but like Facebook is collecting money to like let them give them extra reach. Like I think it is also plausible that they will cordon that off. I mean, they kind of did before. My much more spiraled out conspiracy theory, and I was thinking about this a lot because of the 230 hearing yesterday,

Facebook is as far as I can tell nowhere on 230. They have no real loud public position about it. They're not advocating for it to stay. they're not advocating for it to go. I think Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are very happy to accept an outcome where we just treat Facebook as an inevitable giant, where we turn them into the national champion of the United States values. We regulate them very tightly. And then they are cemented as an information distribution monopoly in this country. And they continue to collect those monopoly profits.

You take 2.30 away. Facebook says, now we spend 3x Twitter's revenue on monitoring every post before it goes up because there's that scale. liability. No one else can afford that. So everyone just come on and use Facebook. We've got it. We are going to export American values around the globe. You have this fight about political advertising. They accept some massive political advertising regulation scheme. And you glue that onto Facebook. And now you've got 45 more lawyers looking at everything that campaign does. And Facebook accepts that cost. And no one else can pay that money. That is a very realistic outcome for Zuckerberg to like turn himself towards. To say, hey, Josh Hawley, you're my guy.

I know you think we should break up, but what if I accept your regulatory scheme that you think is fair, instead of letting Elizabeth Warren just break us up entirely? I can see them making that move. I think it's a clever move. It's not the move like I'm in love with, but it's a very clever move, and I just see them sort of inching towards it consistently. Yes. You're completely right. There is nothing about this that is not self-serving. Again, the whole idea is find the ideology that enables the status quo, and that's what they've come up against here.

It's just that they're doing it at a time when many of their rivals, like companies that maybe we even like a little bit more, are hugely compromised. Yeah. I mean, the Apple situation is completely upset. I mean, can we talk about that for five seconds? Because for years now, Tim Cook has been building a great big pedestal for him to stand on top of and talk about the fundamental dignity of all human beings, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and kicking Mark Zuckerberg in the junk every single change. he gets. He has never turned down an opportunity to dunk on Facebook. And what's about to happen? Apple's about to be the company that won't stand up for free speech, the bill of rights, like, you name it. And they're going to be so compromised by their relationship with China and Zuckerberg.

I have to imagine, it's just relishing all the speeches he can give about, well, you know, like, we actually believe in American values unlike the company that made the phone in your pocket. It's going to be amazing. But like over the quartz app, like if you were, At market quartz, right now, you're like, Zuckerberg's got our back. Like, that's a weird outcome. Yes, it is. And it's all weird. This is why journalism is fun.

You never see any of this coming. Does that probably into, like, Facebook actually taking over any of the markets that it cannot currently enter China with because all of Facebook stuff is speech? Like, Facebook doesn't start, like, making a phone because of this. Yeah, or, I mean, you could, I mean, Google is trying to build a censored search engine for China. What if Facebook makes a freedom phone and manufactures it in America? Oh, my God. That'd be so great.

It would cost $4,000. Maybe it will. Or maybe it'll be ad-supported and they'll give it away for free. Like a Kindle with special offers. The Android fork the world needs. No, just make the air headsets. They'll give us all the air headsets. It'd be great.

If everyone was walking around in a quest, desperately being like, there's no apps here that I want. That's great. But I support America. Okay. That's enough Facebook talking. Casey, Addy, thank you very much. I appreciate it. I'm sure we're going to have you both back.

gone very soon because this doesn't seem like it's going away. Oh, this never ends. Never ends. Vote Patel 2020. That's my only answer. I've been thinking very hard about the solution and it's for me to be the god emperor of America. So if anyone can help me make that happen, I'm here for it. Is that a political ad? Also, subscribe to the interface. Thank you. Subscribe to the interface. Yes. The position of the interface is that someone from the verge, really anyone, should be the god emperor of America. That's correct. All right. Thank you, everybody. My thanks to Casey and Adi. for joining us. Please subscribe to the interface.

It's Casey's newsletter, about all things, platforms, and democracy. Clearly, we're in a time when knowing about that stuff is more important than ever. It's a verge.com slash interface. You can follow us on Twitter. I'm at Reckless. Paul's at Future Paul Dieter's Backlon.

Addy is the dexterarchy. Casey is at Casey Newton. I want to plug a new show from the ever-growing Vox podcast Empire. It's from former Verge science reporter, Ariel DeHem Ross. She's got a new show out three days a week, actually called Reset with Recode and Vox.

It's a tech news show, but it's about a very broad definition. It's very Virgie, actually. It's a tech news show. It's about science, medicine, politics. It comes out Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. Go check that out. Ariel's like literally one of the best reporters, I know. She was great on our team.

She was great advice. And now she's doing this show. Check that out. It's in all your podcast apps. Also, Deeter, plug your newsletter. verge.com slash newsletter command line. It's four to five days a week, depending on if I'm on a plane or not. Roundup of the day's news and sometimes an essay from yours truly.

That's it. We'll be back next week at all kinds of interview shows, got all kinds of chat shows. We've got reviews galore coming. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. promo code.