The Vergecast - Recapping Code Conference, Youtube’s CEO apologizes, and the Pixel 4 leaks

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

Fresh off of Code Conference, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s apology and difficult week, and consider whether there’s any viable alternative to Youtube. They also discuss the leaked photo of the upcoming Pixel 4. And later, a recap of what happened at E3 includes video game and hardware updates. Subscribe to the Vergecast here for free in your favorite podcast app Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this episode, the Vergecast, Deerepaw and I talk about everything that happened at Code Conference, including YouTube CEO Susan Wichickie's performance on stage. We go through the Pixel 4 leaks that Google just tweeted out, and Megan Ferokmash runs down E3, and we get into what's going on with the new Xbox. That's 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 Bill. Building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software.

What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA. All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Hello, and welcome to the Rochcast, the flagship podcast with the Vox Media Empire. I have to say this week was the code conference, and the third day the code conference was like a bunch of Vox Media podcast. Podcasts on stage doing their thing live. They didn't ask us because they wanted good shows. Yeah. But I sat there thinking, these people don't know the flagship is here. Anyhow, I'm Eli. I'm your friend.

Dieter Bone is here. Howdy? Paul Miller's here. Hello. I would say we had a rip-roaring week in news. And it's really funny because last week we did two episodes on Friday because I couldn't figure out how to slam together the YouTube job. drama with Apple drama.

Right. But this week we're just slamming them again. This week was the code conference. A bunch of platform executives from YouTube, from Facebook, from Twitter, we're on stage, talking about their content moderation policies, how they're running their platforms.

We got to talk about that. It was huge. Deeter and I were there. Casey Newton was there. Casey Newton actually interviewed the executives from Instagram and Facebook on stage. So you'll hear that next week as part of the interview episode. We got to talk about that stuff. It was a big deal code's always a big deal. Lots of talking about there.

And then it was also E3. And we're going to actually have Megan Frokmanesh do a little E3 news rundown for us later on in the show. There was a new Xbox stuff announced. More stadium news. So there's a lot of that going on. And then Google just yesterday decided it would just tweet a picture of Pixel. I think it felt left out.

So the Pixel 4 was announced yesterday in a tweet. Rick Osterlo, the head of hardware at Google. Just randomly tweeted without a period at the end, yes, there's a pixel form. Like, the most casual of all phone launches. That's just amazing. So we definitely have to talk about that. But the reason where, you know, last week we pulled them apart, there was definitely an hour's worth of stuff, if not more, you know, with all of WWC and all of the YouTube stuff

to fill that space and, you know, tensions are high. I think this is just a much more normal week of technique. So we're trying them together again this week. if you think it is too jarring and you want me to start splitting these things apart, let me know last week was obviously an experiment and I love your feedback on

and how sort of diffuse you want the show to be versus mesh together. You're saying we should break them up. We should break them up. If you think we should break up the Vergecast, let me know. You know, I'm always ready for our episodes to compete amongst

themselves in the market of Vergecast. Anyhow, let's Let's start with Code. The Code Conference, obviously one of the premier tech conferences in the industry. It is indeed run by our company, Vox Media. But it was Walt and Kara's conference. Now it is obviously Walt We're tired. Kara, Swisher and Peter Kafka now run it.

This was a big year. We moved it to Phoenix. It was extraordinarily hot in Phoenix. So it was fun because everyone had to stay in the hotel to not be in the impressive heat. So we just, like, ran into a lot of people. It was a lot of fun. But previous years, the Code Conference and before that, the D-Conference, lots of products got launched there. Yeah.

Right? Like, Siri, before Apple bought it, launched it code. Yep. Someone pointed out to it, Bing launched it code. Really? Really? Sure. My favorite code launch of all time was a feature for, wait for it, the Palm Pre.

it was the event where they revealed that they were going to hijack iTunes and make it the sync product to get music onto a Palm Prix because they made it pretend like it was an iPod immediately got shut down they found a work around that got shut down again

it was incredible how what's the context what's the question what did Kara ask and then well let me tell you well so this is before so when I say Bing launched a code I mean Bing launched the de-conference when I say code I mean code and the previous de-conference So during the D conference, during that time, there was not live video streaming, which is a remarkable thing to think about.

There was not, like, Samsung couldn't just hold a press event and be like, yep, it's a speaker that looks like a grill. It was like the time before that. So you would get all these fancy reporters in a room, and this was your moment outside of like the press conference event world to launch a product. So they would come there knowing they were going to launch a product, have this interview, and then, you know, Walt O'Carrow would be like, but you want to announce something here today, and they're like going to it. Yeah. So in fact, I mean, I just Googled Bing launches at DeConference.

And there's like, you know how we write preview articles about like an Apple event? Like what to expect from the Apple event? Yeah, yeah. There's all these articles that's like Microsoft CEO Bill Bomber is expected to take the stage and debut Redmond's new search brand. It's like amazing. Just think about being in that moment. They're really going to take on Google.

Anyhow, that was like, and that has happened in the past. There was some last year. This year, though, very little emphasis on that side of the tech industry. A massive emphasis on particularly the big platform companies, and basically their responsibility for what is on their platforms and what people do with all the technology they've built. Steven Sinovsky, who a friend of the show and a frequent rival of ours on Twitter, I guess I think it's fair to say.

He wrote a good piece about code, and he has like, the thing that is really remarkable is most of these companies have grown up on this stage. Yeah, right? Like, Google was a startup, and Walton Kera brought them onto the stage. Facebook was a startup. One of Mark Zuckerberg's first high-pressure interviews on the Code stage in his hoodie, and he put him under such pressure that he had to take his hoodie off because he was, like, sweating so much. So it is really remarkable to have been to as many of these conferences

and see these companies go from Pipsqueak Upstarts. startups to now these like dominant players where that every single one of them got asked about content moderation policies, about breakups, about regulation. The CEO of Delta got, of Delta Airlines was on that stage. He got very bad at me because I was like, you're, you're living this life in reverse. Like we're talking about doing breakups and regulation on the tech industry. The airline industry is all about deregulation and consolidation. He was like, the premise of your question is totally wrong. So that was like entertaining. But so that was that's the context, right?

I just want to set that up. Like this was a very serious addition of the code conference because it was about the responsibilities dominant firms have in our life. And so that's all the wind up to the first person to take the stage was the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wurisicki, a lot of pressure on her. Obviously, huge controversy last week around YouTube. They rolled out and this is all separate. I think this is all getting conflated.

So it bears repeating. A bunch of individual things happened. last week that people are conflating. YouTube itself rolled out a new hate speech policy, all by itself. It had been working on it for a long time. They briefed Casey on it weeks before because they were rolling it out. That led to some channels being turned off. There was the Stephen Crowder, Carlos Mata, harassment, just situation, which was really bad.

I don't know what word you would disaster catastrophe. They handled that as poorly as any company can handle. anything. And then there was a, you know, just a small petaphaelah crisis. It's happened. And then Kevin Ruse wrote an article in The Times about how the algorithm just leads to some radicalization, which is something that people have been talking about with YouTube in particular for a very long time. So she was on stage. She, she, I'm going to just say this, Deider. I'm curious for your take on it. But she did a bad job. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Look, she, and all credit to Susan.

First of all, she's the CEO of YouTube. She's been in Google for 20 years. She's successful, right? Like, she runs a thing that is the dominant company in its space, right? So, like, all credit to her, she accomplished that. She showed up, which she did not have to do in the midst of all these crises. And she answered the questions. So, like, that's a lot of credit.

And I think she was extremely genuine. I think she was extremely sincere. I don't doubt any of that, but I think she did a bad job. And walking around the conference talking to folks afterwards, universal assessment of that performance was she kind of blew it.

But so the thing to realize, and you can go watch this interview on YouTube right now, RICO has put up all this stuff pretty much right away. Just because it was like a bad performance, doesn't mean it was a bad interview or that it's not worth your time to watch. Yeah.

Because her, for whatever reason, her inability to directly answer questions. You know, typically, you know, executives from companies are very, very rehearsed and very prepped and have, like, answers in their pockets for all the stuff that they expect. And she either didn't have the answer in her pocket or didn't like the answer that was in her pocket. And instead, she was, like, very clearly having a hard time articulating what was actually going on in response to a bunch of questions. One of the last questions was just a straight-up yes or no, does YouTube radicalize people?

And instead of saying, you know, there's radicalization in content everywhere or, you know, something, she just said, our view is we're offering a diverse set of content to our users, which is a straight-up refusal to even address the premise of the question. And there was just sort of a lot of that. But I will say that the thing that struck me was she's getting asked incredibly hard questions. about incredibly difficult issues. And if I were in that position, I would probably be flailing just as much because it may have been like not a great performance,

but it was sincerely, like she was being sincere and honest in her inability to articulate answers to the questions is what it seemed like to me. So I disagree. Okay. And I don't disagree sort of with what, like, your assessment. right. I'm trying to be careful here because I do think she was being sincere and I do think it is very hard.

What I disagree with is I don't think she saw the problem. Ooh. And so I just, I live tweeted all this. Hold on a second. Let me find the right quote. What is the quote you're looking for? So there's a couple of quotes that just made me think she doesn't see the problem. So Peter said, can you get to the point Peter Kafka interviewed her? So Peter said, can you get to the point where there isn't a bad story about YouTube almost weekly? and Susan said at the scale we're at,

there's always people who want to write negative stories. And this isn't that, right? By the way, Peter's response to this was great. He said, if I ran a business where people were dumping that much sludge on my platform, I'd seriously rethink what I'm doing. But that's, you know, that's like the point of code is to, like, have this back and forth. Yeah.

But if you're looking at this and you're saying, people are selectively choosing only negative stories because they're so big and you can always find one, then you're missing, I think, the core of the problem, which is you're being constantly hijacked. Yep. Right? There are bad faith actors on your platform who have gamed your algorithm, who know how to

play the game better than you, who are extraordinarily good at walking up right to the bleeding edge of your rules and forcing you to be in a position where you have to apologize for being consistent and getting to the wrong outcome over and over and over again because they're in bad faith hijacking your rules. you are constantly wandering into a debate about free speech that you shouldn't be having because you're a private company. And you're basically putting your gigantic dominant company in a position where it is reacting. Right? If you don't see the problem, you are always reactive to the problems other people are creating.

And then you're saying, well, people are always going to write negative stories. That's not the issue. So the possibility exists that she sees the problem exactly the way that you described it, but has not. no solution. And it's better to not acknowledge the problem if you don't have a solution than to just flat out admit, I have no idea how to fix this because fundamentally we want, you know, people to be able to upload videos without us, you know, looking at every single one, because of course they do, right? Yeah. And then so she had another answer. She said, anytime you have a bunch of creators and people who are upset, it's difficult. This week we managed to upset everybody. It's on

an easy job. It's a tough job. But I'm encouraged about the stories I hear about people using YouTube for good things. Right. I think what people are looking for from the leader of YouTube is not this admission of how hard it is, not this half apology for offending LBGTQ people or seeming like they're sorry that they're upset, but we've got to be consistent. They're looking for this company to have values, right, and to be able to declare what those values are and say if you're going to participate in our platform, here are the rules that we're making.

And we're not, this isn't necessarily about political speech. it's about being good to each other, and we're going to enforce those rules. And instead, we're lost in this, like, legal morass of how do we write the rule so it can cover beauty influencers and how-to people and comedians and real political actor. Like, you cannot write that rule. Yeah. And if you want, like, that rule, the way that rule really looks is, like, the First Amendment in the United States, right?

Like, that's the, you're a country. You're trying to write a country that can cover. everything, but then inside of the country, you have lots of other places that make their own rules. Right. In our workplace, there are rules about what you can or cannot say. In your, people listening to this, in your workplace, there are probably some code of conduct guidelines or some employee guidelines about what you can say in your workplace.

If you want to go on broadcast television, I assure you ABC and CBS and NBC have guidelines about what you can or cannot say on their platform. Anywhere you go. So that's how we usually do. We cut it into discrete pieces and say, this is what you're allowed to do in these spaces. YouTube is trying to create one rule for everybody without any acknowledgement of the spaces people are in. For YouTube to be the dominant, like the video platform, just the only place where you put video basically on the internet, other than like a walled garden of like Netflix or something. How big of a percentage of people who want to make videos can they ostracize before they are no longer YouTube anymore?

There's something different. I think that's an amazing question. I wish I'd, the question I wish I'd asked was, I'm mad at you and I want to go somewhere else. Where do I go that scares you? Right? It's not Vimeo. We got a very nice note from someone that said, Vox Media should go to Vimeo. That's a huge number of people.

And I think the network effect of YouTube, the reach it can provide you if you're on their platform, is so big. And I honestly, I just honestly think, again, to her credit, I do not want to disparage the obvious accomplice. YouTube is the thing that it is. She has managed it to this place. Yep. That is an enormous accomplishment. Great. She's been there for 20 years, right? Like, do you see the problem from the, do you have the distance from the problem to identify it at this point in time? Isn't, to me, what this interview reflected. And I think everybody should go watch it and you can decide for themselves. But it felt like she didn't, she didn't have a handle on it. The way I see it is that there's a set of videos that's on YouTube that I didn't have a problem with the large percentage of them being on YouTube.

And there is a large group of people who are loudly advocating for a lot fewer videos to be on YouTube. And so it seems natural that YouTube's position is like, well, the current set of videos is what we think is appropriate because we allowed them in the first place. So of course they abide by our guidelines. So it seems like a change in policy is being advocated for from people like Vox. Sure. I'm going to quote this. I'm going to quote the CEO of Delta and say that I reject the premise of your question. Okay.

Is YouTube being asked to change dramatically, is what I'm saying. So, again, I learned this from the CEO of Delta. I can just angrily say I reject the premise of your question to avoid answers. No, but I will actually answer your question. The thing that I disagree with fundamentally is that there is any such thing is the current set of YouTube videos. Right?

YouTube, it's like a billion hours, an hour or whatever, gets uploaded to YouTube. Yeah. Like, the ever-changing nature of that content library is impossible to manage. It is even impossible to understand what's on YouTube. Right? Like, the first thing it is, she even said this,

is like, this is a search. engine. Like, we're an information service. So, like, they're pulling in all the stuff and they have to index it. And so, like, there isn't some fixed set of the things that were okay yesterday and today. Between now and tomorrow and the next day, YouTube will, like, double in size. Right? That curve is accelerating. So, right, like, I get what you're saying. I just, I think the first problem is just managing the inflow of content. You can't hold them to that standard. You can't say they've already looked at everything and said it was okay, and now we're changing the rule. They have definitely not looked at everything.

And with every day that passes their ability to look at everything falls even farther. Right. So as a user of YouTube, I use YouTube to find videos that I've never seen before or I have seen before. And some of the videos that I've never seen before are new videos. But there's a large set of old videos. Some of them I've seen. Some of them I haven't seen. As a user of YouTube, I expect that library to continue to.

exist because I want to go back to those videos. If I was worried that those videos would stop existing, like my favorite ones, then I would like download like backups or something like that. And then as for new videos, those new videos will exist if people think that they can build a career on YouTube. But if people are uncertain of whether either YouTube is willing to monetize individual creators or whether YouTube is a moving target and therefore what might be okay today is not okay tomorrow, then that's disincentivizing creators. Therefore, I, as a viewer, might have fewer reasons to tune into YouTube because fewer creators are drawn to YouTube. And what I would say to you is, yes, in a functional market with many competitors,

some of these people would go other places. But we don't have that thing. We have YouTube. Yeah. We have this monopoly on user-generated video. This is where they are. All those people go to IGTV tomorrow. They're not doing it. I don't know why. All those people go to Vimeo tomorrow. They're not doing it. I don't know why.

They could all start posting your videos to Twitter. They're not doing it. I don't know why. YouTube is the place where they are. And they could all go to Facebook watch. Enjoy that problem. But YouTube still, if YouTube stopped running, right? Imagine a weird world where all of Google services go down for like a day or something like that.

Right? China. Imagine China. At some point. actually do something else, right? If YouTube completely failed to be YouTube, yeah, there would eventually, an alternative would emerge. Presumably. And right, and I think what you're saying is there's enough people who are upset that such an alternative, it seems natural that such an alternative would exist. Or is YouTube such a loss leader that they're

just basically hosting everybody's videos at an incredible loss? Actually, when Google tweeted out the pixel last night. Mark Bergen, who's the great Google reporter of Bloomberg, responded with, now do YouTube revenue. Because I don't know. I don't know the answer that question. So, Paul, like, again, we're saying, like, to very directly answer your question about what Vox is advocating for, and our publisher, full transparency, Carlos Bonsor works here, he's our colleague. You're not, like, hanging out every day, but he certainly works here. Our publisher has written a letter to YouTube. The Vox.com team wrote an open letter to other

YouTube creators. What they are asking for very directly is for YouTube to just enforce the policies it has. Right? There are policies against attacking other people. There are policies against inciting harassment. There are policies against using hurtful language. And they didn't do it this time. And then Susan's answer was, we feel very sorry about that, but we have to be consistent because, you know, if we start taking this down, the next thing we'll do is we'll take down rap music videos, right? Or the next thing we'll take, we'll find some other thing to take down. That answer is troublesome, right? It speaks to, I think, a very foolish kind of consistency. Like, yes, that's true. Like, many songs contain difficult language, like, sure, but they're not, I don't think they're the same thing.

Right. And this is what I just keep coming back to is the rules for what you get to play on MTV and what you get to put on CNN are different. Like, we instinctively understand that they're different. We instinctively understand that, different spaces in our society have different rules inside of the umbrella of the First Amendment. And by the way, the First Amendment does not even apply to private corporations. And YouTube is obviously a private corporation. Can I just say, I know I say this like a hundred times every thing. There's a free speech as a concept and ideal and there's free speech as a law in the First Amendment, right? Well, sure. But like, okay. I just want to make sure that that's clear. People, people hear the term free speech. And they're like, oh, well, you're talking about the First Amendment. That just applies to limit the what the federal government can do.

Yeah, because that's what it. But that's not what free speech as a concept is. Okay, what is free speech as a concept? It's an ethic. It's an idea that you have freedom to speak. Right. And I just like, that is true. Sure.

And so someone was like, free speech, that sounds like a good idea. Well, let's make a law that enshrines that in the constitution of, this specific government. But it doesn't mean it stops also still being an ethic. No, it absolutely means it stops there. Right? Like, it doesn't stop being an ethic, but like the law is very clear on who it relates to. The first word is Congress. Yes. Yes. It's clear what the limits of the law are. I'm saying that the ethic does not cease to exist just because it has one concrete implementation. Let's say I started another country and I'm like, what, what ethic should I base my speech policies on? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could base it on what I'm saying here is like,

murder is bad. We made it, so we made a law against it. If the law went away, murder would still be bad. Yes. Okay. Thank you. I'm sorry that I was poor I'm explaining. I'm really glad you were here at each time.

It's true. I think we can all agree for once on a policy principle of divert chats, which is that murder is bad. Unless it's your thirst and you need a can of water. Yeah, it's true. This is horrible. I'm not plugging that. I mean, I had a good time drinking liquid death, but I'm not plugging it.

Anyway, Paul, I think the disagreement I have with you is that the prohibition against murder is, like, you're prevented from doing it, and the ethic of free speech is something that you are required to provide. And, like, I am not, as an employer, like, I'm a bunch of people's boss. I don't have to provide them free speech in my office. We actually actively constrain, like, people into being kind to each other in our workplace. That's a thing that we ask employees of oxygen we need to do. Google can do that as much as it wants. In fact, their ability to moderate their platform is another expression of free speech. They get to choose what they distribute.

So it's very thorny, right? But the law applies to the government because it is more dangerous for the government to constrain your speech than a private company because presumably you can go to a competitor. If you don't like it, you can leave, right? And so we can't tell the difference between Google and the government. I just keep coming back to it. We're confused. We feel like we can't leave them.

So we should apply the law to the government because we can't leave the government. Right? Like, it's not something you're going to do. Like, you can threaten to move to Canada, but then you live in Canada. Canada's nice. But you know what I mean? Like, you feel like you can't leave. So you're trapped.

So you should be held to this higher standard. Yeah. And I feel like, okay, if you're going to be in that position, if you're going to be the CEO of the thing that feels like the government, your job is to be forceful. Your job is to be the leader. And I just, I do not think that Susan Warchicki demonstrated those calls. I think fundamentally the substance of what she said. And you should go watch this interview and tell me if you disagree because I'm curious. The substance of what she was saying was exactly the same as a substance as Adam Aseri and Baz from Facebook.

Right? We have policies. We enforce them. We change them. We try to be consistent. It's so hard. They were just more confident. So people were like, they did a good job.

Vigigata, who's Twitter's general counsel, was a lot. on stage being interviewed. Same questions. Same incredibly hard questions. Same answers. How do you enforce... Vigya came off incredible. Like, she did a great job being like, this is hard.

We make rules. We get it wrong. Here's how we're going to deal with the president. Like, those are hard questions. People walked away being like, Twitter's got it sorted. They know what they're doing. One of the reasons she came off so well, is because her CEO, Jack Dorsey, has been doing a terrible job of explaining.

So finally somebody. Yeah. But everyone, like, winning, this conference ends. Everyone goes out. They're like, eating lunch or whatever. We're talking about it. And everyone's like, she did great. I'm like, but Twitter is bad. It's incredible to say like this executive did a better job of articulating how content moderation should work. Twitter has exactly the same problems. Facebook has exactly the same problems. I watched that Joe Rogan episode she was on. I disagreed with probably 95% of the words that came out of her mouth, but I still thought she did an amazing job.

But that's just, it's literally like a leadership thing. I don't want to, and again, like, can you look at YouTube? Like, this is a massively successful business that dominates the category it's in. She obviously has done a good job of managing it. But in this moment, the job that the ground has shifted to no longer manage a tech product or a revenue product or whatever the thing is, a publishing platform, a video hosting service. The responsibility is like, I'm now the arbiter of speech. video form for the world. That's the job.

And I just think some people see that problem and some people don't. What did you guys think of, this is a little bit of a tangent, but the new Twitter rules. Yeah. So if you look, Twitter tweeted out the rules, they like rewrote them to make them simpler. There's like links to more, basically same rules. The thing that I got me always, always, always makes me laugh is that Kay Vaughn was on stage. she's had a product to Twitter.

He's like, we're doing a good job. We've made our rules human readable. Right. And this just implies to me like lawyers are not humans. It's true. I have a longstanding theory that if you ran, I don't think you'd get elected, but were you to be elected on the platform of word count? Like my only job in the Congress will be to shorten laws.

Like they could all have the exact same content, but I want them shorter, more concise. I'm a big proponent. Maybe. I mean, our country has been around for a long time. There's a great Twitter account called A Crime a Day, just list all the things that you can become a federal felon for. You actually just turn into a book called How to Be a Felon, and it's like the most insane stuff. I think we all forget that like a bunch of stuff happened between like the Constitution and now. and we actually

like, right? It doesn't mean we actually created a lot of stuff along the way? It doesn't mean every bill has to be like 100,000 words. But I guess, and I guess part of it is that

I read those Twitter rules and I felt like these are very straightforward. These are very easy to understand. And I also feel like, you know, let's say this, this, they included a rule that said,

and no Paul Miller's. Like I follow another Paul Miller on Twitter. I know there's multiple of us, right? told Paul Miller's. It would feel capricious, but at the same time, it's like, I understand. I get it. It's right there. And the rules, they said up front, I can't, I can't be on Twitter. That's like if you, what was it? There's some service from back in the day, like slash dot or FARC or whatever. And the rule, the first rule is like, don't be a jerk. Yeah. Right? And like, that's like it. It just gets to cover everything else and we're going to make decisions

on that. Right. And like, I just think what the thing that is dangerous here and it is a real danger is that every user of the internet is becoming a lawyer, right? It is like, has these, like, grand thoughts about how the law intersects with their ethics, with the dominance of the platforms. I don't think that's what you want, like, a functional society to look like, that we're, constantly having legal debates about the services we use, that we're constantly flooded with terms of service agreements that no one can read, with privacy. policies that are insanely complicated. There's a great New York Times data visualization this week where they just like ran a bunch

of privacy policies through like a readability scanner that plotted them at like grade level and sentence length. Yeah. And like literally, I think it's only Kant was like more complicated in an average privacy policy. And like Ulysses is like less complicated than many private. Like that's crazy. That's like it's a, that situation I think is untenable. And yes, I think it is extremely bad that this apology from Susan Wichickie to the gay community on her platform didn't feel sincere, even though she wanted it to.

Yeah. It is a problem that employees at Google in that community are super upset and feel like their company doesn't take them seriously. That's all real. And we should not discount it or set it aside. But I think the biggest problem is that everyone feels powerless. with these companies. And we are beginning to treat them like the government. We are beginning to treat their rules with the same sort of standards and scrutiny

as we would apply to like, how should the government write laws? Like, should all the laws in America be tweet length is like a ridiculous place to have arrived. Right? Yes, they should. Sure. And like,

that's great. But that's not our podcast where we usually talk about like SSD cards. And like that's just where we are. And I think that's, that was a lot of code, right? Yeah. And we can go to, we will run the full Casey interview with Messeri and Bosz because it was really interesting.

And boss said that people love the Facebook portal and they're putting out new form factors and all that happened. And we'll run that whole thing on Tuesday. But, you know, you go through it. And we listen to them and we listen to Twitter. Ev Williams from Medium was on stage. I asked him, what are your content moderation policies? It is true.

They all have different policies. They all have different ideas about how they should function as platforms open to the public. That should be real, right? Like, you should be able to start a company that does user generated content and decide what you're going to, what you're going to distribute. It's weird for us to start to demand that everybody lives up to the exact same rule. Like, that is actually not a great market principle. That's not even a great ethical principle. So it's just a weird moment where it feels like there's so little competition that we're starting to make unhealthy demands of the market. But Susan actually, people really criticized her for this answer.

I thought it was super genuine. Peter was like, well, what happens if they break up YouTube from Google? And she goes, well, it's been a really long week. I've been really focused on other things. We'll deal with it if it happens. Yeah. Right? And like, yes, like the criticism I heard of code was like, you're the CEO of YouTube,

you're a billionaire. You got to be prepared for that question. Yeah. But I thought it was just like very genuine. Like there's so, like the world is on fire right now. Like I will deal with that crash when it. it occurs to me. Like, I get it.

But I think that amount of pressure, you can, you could just see it. That amount of pressure to be the arbiter of speech in the world that is distributed in video form is maybe not appropriate. And so all the other companies had to answer the breakup question, right? So Facebook's answer, which is their answer, I think, I think it was Boz who gave it. No, it was Missouri. So Facebook's answer to should we break up Facebook. You know, Adam Massaro is like, look, there are more people working on privacy and security

and election interference at Facebook. then work at Instagram. So if you break us up, I don't get that benefit of scale anymore. He said the first promise he made when he took over Instagram was he wouldn't, like, screw with it, and he immediately broke the promise

when it came to, like, election interference and, like, security. And he said, they were upset with me, but that's the huge resource that I need to use. So that's, like, one argument for scale. Like, you shouldn't break us up because we have this scale. Nobody asked Twitter about breaking them up

because what would you break them up into, like more tweets. Moments. Oh, wait, no. Break them up and, like, they break off Vine, which doesn't exist. they're forced to, you know, fund it, bring it back.

Think about it. Yeah. Andy Jassy, he runs AWS. was asked about breakups. He also said sort of a non-answer. Yeah. I mean, it's just like, that's the moment we were in. And I think that moment is not so much a reflection of just anger. It's a reflection of, like, helplessness.

Like, we don't, we can't go somewhere else. So, like, we have to, like, take some action. I feel it on both. I really do feel it on both sides of the. the political spectrum. Yeah, my personal goal is increasingly becoming, like, trying to not feel as helpless with these platforms. Like, I want to host my own podcast and not use SoundCloud or I want to host my own blog and not

even use WordPress. Like, I'll make it myself. Like, it's almost like using technology to make, like, hand tools to make my own, like, mini platform. Yeah. And I can, I can succeed at that because I don't have all the complexity of scale. So maybe I can create my own stuff and publish my own stuff. I can't quite host my own stuff yet, but I could get pretty close to recreating most of what I need these other services

for. But nobody's actually going to, nobody's going to follow me because RSS is dead. Well, there's that. I mean, there's two, there's two things. One, yes, you can, you can do that and you should. That's pretty complicated for most people, right? So you're like, you lose this democracy of access and like little D democracy. Like you lose this democracy of access. Yeah. Like if you're a musician, do you have to learn how to host an audio file

in order to publish your work? Like, there's some value to the platform existing. Right. Right. Not if it, like, if you're a musician, like 10 years ago,

do you have to learn how to burn CDs and like apply like stickers or? I think a lot of musicians 10 years ago didn't know how to burn CDs. You think Bono knows how to burn a CD? No, no. By the way, I would pay money to watch Bono Burn. If you've got a big, swanky, big city publisher, you know, that, like, puts your music out on the, on the big, in the big times.

I just love that. It's friends with Billboard, you know, then go ahead, do that. But if you don't have access to a platform, right, you're burning CDs yourself, you know? Or I, like, I had a band and, like, I called somebody on the phone, like, we're going to make 100 CDs. and here's like the JPEG, you know. And how many times did your band reach the success of Old Time Road? Right? I mean, that's just like a kid.

He like bought a sample. He really did. Just like, buy a sample, buy a beat and then like made that song. And now he's a worldwide phenomenon because of two different platforms. So there's like, there's just a democracy of access that comes with the existence of these platforms. They simplify. I mean, this is technology, right? like in order to take a photo when I was a kid, you had to like know how to operate a camera

and develop a, I mean, I didn't grow up in the 1800s, but you understand what I'm saying. Yeah. Right. And if you wanted to be a good photography, you had to increasingly raise your skill set. Now you just like, it's like part of your phone. Like you just like get it for free, right? And Instagram exists and like the world can see your photos and you can build a business selling crystals and honestly we should stop it.

But the point I'm trying to make is there's an enormous amount of value to these platforms that a democracy of access, or a democracy of creation, our democracy of distribution. What obligations do they have, when their network effects turn them into monopolies, is, I don't think anyone is doing a great job of answering that question well, because there's not competition.

If there was one great competitor to YouTube that was like, our rules are a little bit more relaxed and we're in compete on that front, maybe this would look different. But right now there isn't. There isn't a great competitor to Facebook. There was, but they bought them. Yeah, twice.

And they bought the other one. Friendster? Anyhow, we've been going for way long on this. Yeah, we are. We're going to play some ads. We're going to come back, and we're going to talk about the pixel phone. We're just going to do that in this episode. It's going to happen.

Here we go. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need, for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com,

Framer has programs for startups, scaleups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com. from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash Verge for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's Framer.com slash verge for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply.

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 from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates

and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus 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, dot com slash track.

Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Dieter. Yeah. Hard shift. Hard left turn. In the phone leaks land. Let's say you had a collection of sensors.

And you're trying to figure out an optimal way to arrange them to fit inside of a shape. Yeah. What shape do you choose? I would choose a square. Oh, maybe a rectangle. So, walk us through the chronology. Here's the chronology. What about a squircle?

A squircle. We knew that they're, like, Google's going to release Pixel 4 in October. And so every year, like, you, like, start to see that, you know, the cadence of rumors begin. This year started a little bit differently than usual because we got this, like, Unbox Therapy got this metal slug that was, like, the shape of the phone for that case manufacturers used to design their cases. You usually see cases first. You usually start to see some features. So all this stuff started just ramping up a little bit this week. You know, I wrote the story that like all the stuff is ramping up this week.

And here's this rumor about Project Soli, which is amazing that they might include a radar in a phone so that you can do gesture controls in space, which I don't know if anybody wants because we've tried it before and it sucks. Anyway, like I was just ready for that to be what, you know, the next three to six months look like. just rumors piling up and you're building a picture. And then made by Google just tweeted a picture of it. It's just like, here it is. Yep, there's a square camera module. There's no fingerprint sensor on the back.

It's no longer, you know, matte glossy two-tone. Just we can't wait to see, we can't wait until you see what it can do, I think, was their line. And then we're just all sort of went, huh. They confirmed it was a pixel four to me an email. And then Rick Osterlo tweeted, yes, we're making a pixel four. there was a leak of The serious confirmation of all time Like are you going to stop?

Yeah, right The thing today, the day we're recording and Blast tweeted Verizon's planned roadmap for the rest of the year and it looks like they're planning on the pixel four happening in October again after the iPhone 11

which means that just because we saw the leak doesn't mean they're going to surprise us by releasing the thing next week and there's just a lot to like think through Google just tweeted a photo of their phone that they're going to release in five months or three months or however long October is from now. Time has no meaning.

So I think we can assume that fingerprint sensor will be under the display. I do not think we can assume that because there have been many, many rumors that Android Q has code for a improved face unlock, not the junk that Google's had since like the Galaxy Nexus. In addition to getting the metal slug, Lou over at Unbox Therapy says that he has heard that the top of the... the pixel four will not have a notch. Instead, they need that entire forehead area because they're going to have like five different sensors up there. They're going to have a couple of cameras and then they're going to have maybe a depth sensor and then maybe that's where the project solely is going to go. And, you know, they'll have some other random crap up there. And you don't need that many sensors unless you're going to do face unlock. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I like face city on my iPhone. There's nothing about,

The only time I, like, this is better than a fingerprint sensor is when it does the password auto fill for me. Oh. Which feels like that it's just like so extremely seamless and magic. For me, it's the ability to set my notifications to be private by default and they only unlock when I look at it. They only appear when I look at it. On an Android, like, if you set your notifications to not be, you know, visible on your lock screen or, you know, be private on your lock screen, you have to unlock the phone by the time you've unlocked. your phone, you're in like a different space. Yeah.

And that's annoying. So I would prefer some sort of face unlock solution myself. Well, maybe it's there. So, okay, can assume fingerprint sensor removal means fingerprint sensor under the glass. Yep. The four little things in the camera square. Is that, is that what we're going to call it? The camera.

Yeah. The camera square. What's a name for a raised square? The camera. Mesa. Oh, the Mesa is usually round. Not a cylinder cube? The camera cube.

Yeah. That's it. So there's two lenses, a two-tone flash, another hole, which could be microphone, and another hole which is either, you know, a spectral sensor, which is what's on the Pixel 3, or they could do time of flight, or it could be something we haven't thought of. So they can do portrait mode, probably better if they do time of flight. They can probably get a new night site a lot better. Does it on the Huawei phone use its time of flight to, like, help with its low light in some way? Yeah, possibly. I'm not super sure. But the other question is, like, is the second lens going to be ultra-wide or telephoto?

Which, like, which way do they go there? Because companies have been experimenting with both. I think you go ultra-wide on the front and telephoto on the back. So there's not enough room in here to do, like, a periscope. There could be. Who knows? The Huawei style. It's totally possible.

They could be doing it. I mean, it is, maybe they'll do like a spiral periscope because that's why the mesa, the cube, the cube is so big. The mesa. The camera cue with a cube, I think, is a. important. Oh, yeah, there you go. So, Deider, you wrote a piece being like, this is a reboot of leak culture. They really raise the stakes for themselves. Explain that theory. So I, you know, I just gave the timeline of how leaks go. Google decided to disrupt that. And I think it raises the stakes them because, like, they're directly participating in the hype cycle. It does some clever things.

Like, next time I want to write about a pixel four leak, I get to use a good image that Google made instead of, you know, whatever crap render was the last leak. So that's clever. But, If they're going to participate in the hype cycle this early in this way, then they need to live up to that. And I think this is a year for them to actually do that and actually try and sell pixels in volume because they're selling the pixel 3A, so that creates space to let them make the pixel 4 more expensive. They are selling across every major carrier in the U.S. right now, minus AT&T. I think AT&T will probably come on board for the pixel 4. So they're going to be on every carrier. They're going to be on every carrier the month after the iPhone 11 comes out.

So if they want actual support from every carrier, they need it to be comparable to the iPhone 11 in terms of its hardware quality. So I think that they have set themselves up to hit higher expectations than we've typically had for pixel phones. It sounds like that you think they're going more flagshipy than the three. I think they have to. I think if they don't after this tease, there's just everyone will be very mad at them. Can you name a scenario other than I'm cooking and I have like chicken on my hands? Where are you solely? Why do I use a phone radar?

I don't know. Just sure do I need. Your screen isn't on and you want to go next track and you wave your hand over it real quick? I don't know. Again, I'm very skeptical that there's a lot of particularly interesting use cases for this, but I don't know what Google is thinking. I do know that when I tried solely four years ago, it worked super well.

I was just like rub your thumb and your forefinger together. Like you're like rolling up like a wrapper or something into a little tube. Like just little tiny movements and it's able to detect those movements. So it can do really fine grain control. What they're going to use that for, I have no idea. The rumor again from XDA found some stuff in the code is there were media controls. They found I think skip and pause. Here's what I mean, I buy your explanation.

Like it's great to get out ahead of the hype cycle. It's great to make people Right. Like every article about the iPhone now Also is like, Google has confirmed the Pixel 4 is coming. Yep. We see it square camera bump too.

Right. Great. They've accomplished that. I think this is also just like a quiet admission that they don't sell enough pixel 3s for drastically diminished pixel 3 sales to fall. Like they're going to go from like five a week to four. Yeah.

You know, like whatever. Well, the Osborne effect is traditionally why people don't announce, don't pre-announce stuff too far ahead. They don't want to kill sales of the current product. No one is buying Pixel 3 is the answer.

Like that's why you do it. You're like, okay, well, how about the next one? You know that one? I do think this is the first one, right? They basically aquired the entire HTC phone team. This is very much the first one that that team is making where the pixel 3 was sort of a holdover. Yeah.

I have some excitement there. You kind of see why there'd be some pride there. Google tells me that the Pixel 3A was the first one that was basically soup to nuts made by the Taiwan team, as they call them, and that this pixel 4 will be the first flagship made by that team. But they have contributed to previous phones. Where the line is between, like, who made the phone and who, like, didn't make the phone is so much fuzzier with pixel phones and Nexus phones before them than it is with iPhones,

right? Or even, you know, other Android phones. It's like, yeah, who made it? Google made it. Well, Google made it, but Foxcon kind of made it, right? Or Google made it, but HTC kind of made it, right? So, I don't know, man. They do need to justify that purchase, though.

They should make something good. They should make something good. I do think you're right that they're going to price it high and make it premium. Yeah, they have. That's where they need to play in the U.S. market. By the way, can I offer a quick Foxcon update? Oh, boy. You said Foxcon?

Yeah, yeah. Just in case you're wondering, Foxcon has still not issued a statement or correction about its empty buildings in Wisconsin to us. It's been, I believe, over 60 days at this point. But they did announce that they will now be making computer servers, automotive equipment and something else in their factory, which does exist. It's just so in case

they're tracking. They went from really big LCDs, AIA 8K-5G, to different LCDs to computer servers. Yeah. That's where we're at is what are some other words we can say about things we can build. So we'll see

what happens. Anyway, sorry, you just said it. I forgot to put it in our run down. It's on my mind. I think about the Wisconsin Foxland factory every day. They really got your number. I mean, it's like, my mom's complaining about traffic every time I talk to her. It's like hard to forget. Neely, what do you think they're actually going to build in that factory?

We just ran a big report last week, Josh Chesa, a reporter on the beat. Wisconsin, like, needs that deal to work. Yeah. Democrat or Republican whoever, they've already spent so much money on like roads and pipes and like water diversions. And they've kicked people out of their houses. Like, they got to do something. They've already put forth a lot of money. But they're now at the point where Foxcon is so far behind its own hiring curve

that the contract doesn't make sense for Wisconsin either. So, like, Foxxon, in order to get, I don't get any of these numbers wrong, but in order to get their first set of tax credits last year, they needed to employ, like, 500 people. And they proudly announced that they employed, like, 200 some people. And then they filed their actual documents with the Economic Development Corporation there, and it was only 150. So they lied, but they didn't even lie enough.

Like, they didn't even, like, tell the right lie. So they're, like, way behind this hiring curve that gets in the tax benefits. You should just read that piece. It's very complicated. But basically, it seems like they're going to cruise towards renegotiating the deal so that it actually pays off for Wisconsin. And I think both sides of the table are interested in such a thing, because Foxconn is, they can't employ 13,000 people making AIK-5G things.

like they just like can't. Like first of all, that isn't a thing, right? Yeah. They have to define what the thing is. So they're going to make like, you know, automotive connector components. They have to redefine the deal to actually support such a thing in that state.

Did you see the clip of Joe Biden trying to talk, to stoke some fears about China? And he's like, they're going to have the G5s before we do. Oh, no. This is like another thing the CEO of Delta said. at CodeCon, he was like, 5G is going to be a game changer at the terminal. And Kara was like, why?

And he's like, once he get that Wi-Fi bandwidth, and I was like, no one, literally no one knows what this means. Like, everyone is so deeply confused. So, Neal, the thing that's going to happen is 5G is going to enable a complete and perfect understanding of Section 230. Section 230 is my personal nightmare. Look, I set this goal on Twitter. this is going on Friday, you still have time. Your goal for the week is to find one friend and explain to them that platforms versus publishers

was the old law from Stratton-Okmont versus Prodigy. This is true. Straton-Ok-Bond, the firm in Wolf of Wall Street, sued Prodigy because users on Prodigy were making fun of them. And the court found that since Prodigy did any moderation, that they were the publisher of the content and could be held liable for it, which is insane. So then Section 230 was passed to overrule that decision and give Platforms freedom to moderate.

Just go tell someone that story. Be like, do you remember Wolf of Wall Street? That firm is involved in a massively consequential internet law decision that was superseded by Section 230, which explicitly gives platforms a freedom to moderate without being called the publisher. Just say that phrase. And then maybe you can watch Wolf of Wall Street again. That's a great movie.

Leonardo Caprio, Mario Robbie. right? You just go watch that movie together and you've learned something about internet law and you've watched a great movie. Just do that for me. That's your goal for the week. All right. We're going to have, we're going to take a break. Megan Froggmanesh is going to give us a little scene report of all the biggest game news from E3 and we're going to come back and dig into some of it. Let's take a break. Hello, I'm Megan Brokmanash and let's talk about E3. So first off, we were missing one of the big three this year. Sony decided to not come. That meant no presence at the press conferences, no presence on the show floor. I'm pretty sure they put a bar where their booth usually would be, which actually was kind of nice. Overall, I'd say the year was kind of weird, too, because as somebody who's been going for the last five years, there was actually a lot of space on the floor.

It felt like a very empty, three, a lot fewer people, I would say. But in terms of the big announcements, so there are a couple things that I think were pretty interesting. At the Xbox conference, we finally had the announcement of George R.R. Martin's collaboration with Dark Souls creator from software. So the game is called Eldon Ring, which is not the catchiest title. But I think it seems pretty promising. So far, it's like a fantasy epic kind of thing. We got a trailer and that's about it. More exciting, though.

So Keanu Reeves is going to be in Cyrepunk 2077, which if you don't know what that is, it's the latest project from CD Project Red. They made The Witcher 3 and a bunch of other games. So they actually had Keanu Reeves come on stage during the Xbox conference to talk about this, which was pretty fucking good and wild. If you haven't caught the video yet or the clips of it, you should totally watch it. Alongside that, though, alongside our beautiful Canter Reeves, we also got a release date, so the game is coming out in April 2020.

Up next, we had Bethesda. I would say probably the biggest thing that you should take away from Bethesonference is that Arcane has a new game coming out called Death Loop. Remember that Arcane made the Dishonard series. Death Loop is sort of about two assassins struggling to kill each other. Honestly, it just looks like a really rag game about time travel. Not usually in my jam, but I'm into the idea of, of just, you know, murder, I guess.

So Ubisoft also announced that they have a new watchdogs game coming out. It's called Watch Dogs Legion, and the whole thing is that you can be NPCs, basically anybody you want in the game. The big hit from that presentation was that you could play as an old lady. I guess she's a retired assassin and beats people with her purse, and I'm sure, you know, more serious things. Moving on to Square Enix, some really cool stuff here. So the Final Fantasy 7 remake has been absent from E3 for probably four or five years now, I

want to say. But they've come back in a pretty big way. They've announced a ton of news in the last like month and a half or so. Not at the show, but at a concert before their actual press conference. Greenix announced that the first game in Final Fantasy 7 remake is coming next year. Yes, you heard that right. There's going to be more than one. The wild thing about this series, because it's now a series, is that we don't actually know how many games you're going to be in it. Also, the first game is only going to focus on Midgar, which for anybody who's played the Final Fantasy games, or at least Final Fantasy 7, you know that that's like maybe the first like couple hours of the game. But they're really blowing this up into this whole experience.

I actually got the chance to play it at E3. Andrew Rupster was kind enough to give it to me after I threatened his life. And it's pretty fucking good, I'd say. You know, there's something really especially, I think, about seeing a game you grew up with as a kid, especially one that was like so low-poly when it first came out, like just blown up into this very dynamic, cool experience. So far the gameplay feels really good. That being said, how are they going to turn two hours of gameplay into a 40-hour or so game. I have no idea, but they promise it's going to be a standalone release. Other than that, so let's talk about Nintendo. So saved the best for almost last. They're making a sequel to The Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild. We don't know anything

about it other than the fact that it looks good, you know, looks like the first one, and obviously Breath of the Wild is an excellent game. But also just like a lot of exciting stuff, Luigi's Mansion 3 is coming. Weirdly enough, it inspired a kind of star of own. So there's a whole thing where Luigi has like a goover. I don't know. To be honest, I don't know what the deal is. It's called Guigi. Andrew Webster actually wrote about this and got Nintendo to comment on what he tastes like, which is a weird thing that I just said. They say coffee. To be honest, my guess would have been Lysol for the way he looks. But whatever, it's Nintendo. They have to be very family friendly friendly for everything. Other than that, uh, Link's Awakening is

coming out this year. Uh, The Witcher 3 is coming to the Switch, which is on. honestly wild because I can't imagine how that huge game is going to fit on that tiny console. It took up so much room on my PlayStation. So other than that, Nintendo has announced a bunch of smaller titles. We actually have a pretty good round of post that pushes everything into one post because I don't have the patience to sit here and read it all off. Overall, though, a good E3, I would say, a little quieter than most, but I feel like the lineup we saw was pretty solid.

So that's it for me. Be good. I love you guys. Bye. 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 from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, 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. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies.

That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper. than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis

with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.aI slash vergecast. That's Claude.aI slash Vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned

in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. Okay. every week, my man. Yeah. You do a thing. Same name.

Renowned in the podcast world for its consistency. I saw Nick Kwa, it's the Hot Pod newsletter at Code. He was like, man, no podcast has ever been as consistent as y'all. The weird thing is we introduce it a different way every time. So we've really got to work on that.

The segment is called Skate 4. Is not a joke. Do I look like I'm laughing? By the way, Nick Kwa did not say anything about us being insistent because I have no idea what the hell you just said. Scape 4 is a video game that could exist if EA didn't hate people and want the world to burn. If you might be familiar with skate and also its sequels Skate 2 and the much beloved Skate 3.

Yeah. Which came out in the Xbox 360 era. Yeah. There's still no skate four of EA had the Tamerica. to make a joke at the end of their presser about their not being Skate 4 just to rub it in. So they know. They know we want

skate 4. Yeah. And then they make fun of us for wanting skate 4. It's not a joke, is what I'm saying. It's not funny. You know what this reminds me of you have, Paul? For like the past, I swear to God, decade. Every time Phil Spencer

would get on the stage for an Xbox announcement, he'd be wearing like a Battletoads t-shirt. And like they were They're just really just like milked every piece of like hype they can get out of that franchise where they finally release the game. I just realized that I'd use the phrase milk and so he's milking the toad, which is wrong. But they finally released it. So do you just have to wait five years? That's how long.

It seems like a trip for battle toads. I have waited at least five years. It has been very many years. But yeah, it's true. I guess now that they're joking about it, maybe maybe. Now we're on the five-year timeline. They're just going to tweet it out. They're just going to tweet it out.

Valve should definitely announce Half-Life in a tweet. All right. Let's do a little. Dieter, I know you're super excited about Zelda. All of the Zelda's. There are three... There are three Zeldas to be excited about.

They've remade Game Boy Game, and it is the cutest thing you've ever seen in your entire life. It's like moving around little diorama characters. There is the... insane Zelda game where they gave it to somebody else and you have to like kill things in tune to the beat of the music and that looks like fun and everyone seems to love it and that's available right now for the switch and then they posted a teaser trailer for a sequel to Breath of the Wild. They're probably just going to use the same engine because of course they are because they spent a lot of money making that engine and Ganendorf is there and he looks real mad and it's just whew I don't want to be. I don't want to be that guy. But sometimes Nintendo puts out a trailer for a Zelda game, and it doesn't come out until the next console generation.

Yep. I know they already made the engine. It looks like they already got the same character models, so that's good. They've already made a cutscene. That's what the trailer was. I just don't want you to be hurt. Like, I have been hurt by skateboard. Look, I'm also, I'm still recovering from the fact that they had to completely

the reboot Metroid Metroid 4, which, Metroid Prime, so I'm so bummed about that. But fundamentally, I have decided I will no longer get mad about video game delays

because if there's a video game delay, it probably means that there is a better chance that the people making that video game aren't being forced to do crunch. Yeah. And crunch is a huge problem in the video game industry. We've been writing about it. Megan has been writing about it forever.

It's getting increasingly worse instead of better. from what I can tell. And yeah, so you know what? Delay your game. It's fine. We'll be okay. Yeah. Deer will just keep grinding

on the original breath of the wild. I have put so many hours in the original breath of the wild. And then we'll just wait for the next one. Yeah. All right. There was hardware news at E3 though. Yeah.

Microsoft said some Xbox stuff. You don't want me through that? Yeah. So Xbox Project Scarlet is a PlayStation 5. Wow. I mean, it's always like that. Yeah, it's always, but they're, I mean, from what we know, because we don't know the actual specific specs, right?

They're basically the exact same thing. It's like next gen. It's the AMD chips that like AMD just announced basically, right? CPU-wise. Yeah. And then a mysterious SSD that's faster than anything you could even imagine, which is exactly what the PS5 has, which is really exciting. So they said some dumb words. They said 8K, which I, I mean, you could probably play like overcooked in 8K, which would be a great time.

But also frame rates up to 120 frames per second and variable refresh rate. They said ray tracing as well. I believe that's announced for the PlayStation 5. I mean, it's the same hardware, and they're doing the exact same. They also said, what if this is what AI, 8K plus 5G means? I'm going to freak out. If I get the end result of all this is I start building the Xbox

in my parents' house, fine. So one possible Microsoft advantage is this X-Cloud stuff and the hybrid gaming cloud, which I feel like might be one of those things that doesn't really get delivered on time

or work very well. So the X-Cloud thing, I don't think they did a very good job explaining what their idea is here. You can stream games, cool, but if you happen to buy one of our super expensive Xboxes, it will stream the game from there

instead of from the Xbox that we maintain for you in the cloud. And apparently if you do it from your very expensive fancy Xbox that you buy and put in your house, it's still going to have a spinning disc because we'll never get to kill the spinning discs ever, which is fine by me because we killed the headphone jack and look how that turned out.

Then it'll cost less to stream, apparently, like cost less to get your game from your own Xbox, than it would if you just subscribe to the whole thing. They haven't announced pricing. I'm very curious to see what their model looks like here. I just, I feel,

I'm skeptical enough that Google wholly focused on Stadia can pull it off. Yeah. If Microsoft is going to put all these things like, you're playing, you're playing, you're playing, oh, Halo. There's a new Halo coming out, right?

You're playing Halo, and then you press pause on Halo. You turn off your TV, and then like, and then you like, play Halo from your laptop streaming over your local network. And then you go on vacation. And now you're using like a real X cloud server and your save was in the cloud.

Like that sounds like a cool world, right? You're getting the best of both worlds because you've got like a real console at home. But when you're on the go, you have the same game. I mean, that would be cool if they could pull it off. I have no indication that they could actually pull that off. Well, see, I think what you're missing is that it's an intelligent cloud. and an intelligent. And with their intelligence is combined,

they can do anything. Yeah. Okay. Well, there's also some details about Stadia. Yeah. Right? Yep. So it's $10 a month.

You can buy a Founder's Edition, which will get you the $70 controller and a year of service for $130 bucks, so you save, you know, $60 or whatever. And they're also going to have a free tier at some point. And you're going to be buying the games. But if people, want to offer their own subscription services on top of Stadia, they will be able to do that.

And I believe Ubisoft is like, ooh, subscription services. Why yes, let's do that. Which means that in addition to having to deal with the 50,000 streaming video services that are coming, from Disney to Quibi to whatever. You're going to have to deal with every single video game manufacturer deciding it wants to get in on this action and offer its own subscription service. So welcome to hell, my friends. Or what if you don't? So I've been trying to put together a list of like, I think Stadium might be really good for Borderlands 3,

cyberpunk and like GTA 6, right? Like huge worlds that Twitch reflexes are fun, but they aren't make or break for the game, right? Nintendo is Nintendo. There's only one place to play Animal Crossing. Fortnite, best Fortnite console, best Dark Souls console, like, you know, any, any game that, you know, obviously fighting games, anything that is like Twitch reflexes is totally going to be Xbox PlayStation 5.

Also, like, I'm curious what you guys think about the price of the Xbox Scarlet and PlayStation 5 because famously Microsoft screwed up by making a $500 Xbox 1 because they bundled to connect when Sony did a $400. or PlayStation 4. Right. But this is kind of a whole different world because this is like competing against like the Xbox 1X and the PlayStation 4 Pro. So like are both Sony and Microsoft going to land at $500?

Yeah, they're going to illegally collude with each other and set the price at $500. They're going to price. Yeah. It's definitely going to happen. No, I mean, I think it makes sense, right? They're both cutting edge hardware. The previous generation consoles, no one's crying out, as far as I can tell, crying out that they're not getting what they need from them, right?

Like, previous console generations, they went with display resolutions a little bit, right? Like, Xbox 360 got you to HD, Xbox 1, I'm sorry, the Xbox 1X and the PS4 Pro got you to 4K. Like, they're both saying 8K, but that's like, no one even has that, right? And dumb. So I think they're going to price them high and call them the flagship,

so you're going to get a bunch of stuff. You're going to get frame rates out of them. You're going to get maybe very very, Variable refresh rates, maybe 144 or 120. That's cool. Variable refresh rates add load times. Yeah. And, I mean, to be honest, like, so one of Google's things with Stadia is that games are going to start really fast, right?

But obviously, so are the games on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlet. What I'm wondering is if you made a game optimized for these ultra-fast SSDs, like, you know, the famous Sony example is Spider-Man. Like you can see, you can move through the world faster because we can load it into memory faster because our drive is faster. If Stadia is on older hardware doesn't have ultra-fast SSDs, can they even run that game? Because like what we're looking at is Stadia is a bit better than Xbox 1X, but it's going to be a lot less powerful than a PlayStation 5 or Scarlet. So Stadia either will have to upgrade or Stadia will be the low-powered service. I think maybe I don't know enough of these architectures. I think they might be architected differently enough that that isn't a thing.

Like, Stadia might persist the entire world in one memory space, but have you in it differently versus an Xbox that is like trying to load it on the fly as you move through it. But they can only give you each user so much RAM, right? Yeah, but they're Google. How much RAM do you want? Oh, maybe they can run it at a loss like YouTube? No, Google has a history of providing more than enough RAM for all of your needs. Just look at the pixel three.

All right. We'll see. I think that's a really interesting. Like, there's a part of me that thinks Stadia is, like, really super compelling. Yeah. Like, I don't want to have a console in my life. I'll just pay the subscription fee for the service. Or maybe I'll even play a 1080P in the free tier.

And there's, like, four games, and I'll be able to play them wherever I want. Like, I really only ever play, like, two games at once. I would be telling you I'm subscribing to, Stadia right now this minute if it was coming to the iPad. Ooh, that's interesting. Yeah. Well, you know, Xbox controllers

and PS4 controllers are coming to iPad. Yeah. So there's another way to go, which is play your great iPad games. You can control over once you're like. No, but like if they said like what game do I play the most, I play Madden the most. They said Madden's going to be in Stadia.

Like my next generation console, I would just do Stadium, play it there and like play it wherever I want when I traveled. Right? Like, that's a thing I want to do. do I think that any hotel has the Wi-Fi I need to actually play Madden Overstadia? I do not.

And that's where it kind of falls apart for me. Like the true value I'd get out of it just goes away because it's not local. And then I think like, do I want to buy yet another round of consoles right now? I don't. But I also just bought a PS4 Pro at the very end of its life cycle.

So maybe that's just me. But I think that what to buy how much to pay conversation here is just going to start to look radically different versus I don't want the stupid connect so my MPS 4. Yeah. Okay.

That's a lot of our chest. All of it. It's the most of it. But do tell me if you want me to break these episodes up more because we can. It's just more of me talking, which honestly is not a very hard lift. Let me know. Or if you want us to just have one chat show, I'm actually very curious. Thank you to Megan for coming on and doing the E3 roundup.

Very helpful. Better than we did, I think. Thank you to E2 gentlemen. Always a pleasure. Why did you push that button is going on right now? They just started a miniseries, Death Online. The first episode is about what happens on Facebook when you die. It's a lot.

But it's kind of funny, but it's a lot. They're in it. This is their first mini series. They're trying it out. I think it's super interesting. Ashley's going to do an entire episode about a robot that died. People are very sad. Paul, that seems right up your alley.

I got to be honest with you. It seems laser targeted at Paul Miller. Check that out. That season is so good. Why just push that button? You can obviously listen to all the stuff that happened on the Code Conference on Keras podcast, Recode, Decode. You can listen to Pivot with Scott Galloway.

Scott gave a presentation of code that was incredible. Definitely start listening to that show. And obviously, recode media with Peter Cofco. All available on the Vox Media Podcast Network. That's it. Rock and roll. Paul. Snip, snip.