The Vergecast - Season 3

Episode Date: May 27, 2016

Vergecast is back! But something is different…Dieter moved to San Francisco and Nilay is still in New York City. How can they make it work? This is the future and we can chat in cyberspace, that's how. Using ~technology~ we also patch in Paul Miller and Lauren Goode for a special State of Tech discussion. Wait! There's more! Nilay interviews Kara Swisher, executive editor of Recode, to talk about what's to come with this year's mammoth guest lineup at the Code Conference. We want your feedback! Tell us what you want to see on the show, who you want on the show, or even where you want the show! New episodes every week. 25:55 - Paul’s gadget of the week 31.12 - Nilay and Dieter’s car trouble 41:31 - interview with Kara Swisher 52:23 - lightning round Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, this is Dieter. Hey man, it's the Geli. Oh, hey, how you doing? You know, you're not here. I guess I'm a little sad. How's San Francisco? It's cold. I don't know.

It's fine. My apartment, all I can see in my neighborhood is a giant glowing redask.com logo. Oh, good. The glowing logo of failure just above you at all times. You're literally in the bubble. Well, it's beautiful in New York, so just think about coming back sometime. But while you're out there, we got to figure out the Vergecast, man. How are we going to do this?

Yeah, I don't think it's going to go well at all. Yeah. I mean, you know, I look to you for optimism at all this time. But we got to try something. So here, why don't we do this? Why don't we patch in Paul and Lauren and then just try to have a show? Yeah, I think that'll be grand. It won't fail.

It'll be, everything will be good. It won't fail. all right and uh let's play i don't know some sort of sound effect that indicates that we've patched in the guests all right listeners hello that was the gimmick that opens this the revised and refreshed verge cast uh the flagship podcast of the verge dot com i'm nel i'm joined by deeter deeter moved to san francisco um breaking my heart but opening the hearts of millions in the process i think that's a phrase and that is the sort of math that we'd like to do here um but we're gonna you might notice isn't live anymore. We're going to do it pre-recorded. We're going to add some segments,

some polish, some this and that. Their surprise is coming. But I'm joined now here. Paul Miller's here. Hello. Lauren Good is here. Hey guys. And we actually, we do this from time to time on the show. And I think it's, if we're rebooting a little bit, it's a great time to do it again, especially given sort of where we are in the news cycle. From time to time, we do just state of the union. What's going on in the tech industry? Let's talk about all the big companies. We're in a tiny little bit of a lull. We had the big Google conference. We had the big Facebook conference. We had Microsoft Build, actually a little bit ago. We're in the lull in a couple weeks is WWC, which is Apple's big conference. Let's just talk about how things are going. So Lauren, I want to start with you. Tell me

how Facebook's doing. All of the tech companies have suddenly discovered the power of speakers, apparently. So they're very hip to speaker hardware now. Like 1997 is back again. However, the big difference this time around is that a lot of these companies are working on artificial intelligence, whether that's in the form of bots or some type of personified AI, or it's some kind of underlying, you know, smart layer that is powering all these things. So it's really interesting because, you know, for the past several years, we've kind of all looked at our smartphones as this thing that's unlocking this incredible world around us. And now I think people are figuring out, well, it can't necessarily be something that you're actively interacting.

with. Maybe the future is actually this passive sort of like shouting into the world and making things happen for you. And so this has been really interesting to see like Google announced Google home at I.O. last week. Obviously there's Amazon Alexa. And then there were rumors earlier this week that Apple is working on some type of Siri like device for the home. So I think that's what, I don't know, that's most interesting to me right now and what I've sort of been focusing on. But they all have like little tiny riffs on it that are different, right? I mean, you look at it. You look at it. You look at Google and their riff on it is we're the smartest, basically.

Microsoft's RIF is we're going to build the servers and development environments that enable everybody to make these things. Facebook's RIF is like, we're watching you at all times. You know, and it's sort of unclear what Apple's version that will be. Amazon's is

basically like, we're shipping it already. We're here. We're done. You can shop right now if you want to. Paul, we launched Circuit Breaker and you came back to do Circuit Breaker because we saw the shift happening. like really obviously and now like put a chip in it and make it smart is dominant right both you and i kind of talked about for different reasons why the phone can't be everything forever and i just have this visual of of this like collapse i think this is how stars work collapse of all technology

your your PMP, your camera, your photo viewer, and all things collapsed into the phone. And now it's like, well, let's explode it. Yeah. And I, one thing I really- So you're saying the phone is a black hole. It's like a supernova. Right.

And- Like a black hole sun. Yeah. Because then, yeah, doesn't it compress? Do you think that you are a student- We are back in 1997. I don't know. I hope not.

Maybe 1994. One thing along these lines, like, I hate this new Google Project aura thing. You hate it. Yeah, as far as a phone. And then I read Deeter's piece, great piece of technology journalism done by our own Deeter. Yeah. And it mentioned, like, oh, you could use these modules for other things in the home, too. And I think that's also part of this exploding.

Like, we don't have to always talk to Siri. in our phone, but maybe if Siri was part of your coffee table, maybe you'd talk to your coffee table. I'm like that. And because, I don't know, and this is all falling apart. But you know, explode from the phone is my thing. So what happens when you, when a supernova happens as it Siri goes everywhere? I'll pull up the Wikipedia article about how stars.

And we'll get this metaphor really. Then you just have to ask your coffee table five times to do something. If only Lauren Grush is here. So, Dieter, I'm going to get somebody to talk about one of these companies specifically. It might as well be you. Yeah. Because you just came from I.O. Yeah.

You covered the hell out of I.O. You did the big RAPs, which was really interesting. And then Google sort of, they did kind of like on the sly. They were like, we're making your own consumer phone. It's coming out next year. Yeah. It was like a, it was on the last day of their developer conference. And the last day of any developer conference is usually a big snooze, right?

but instead they chose to announce that Google for the first time ever is making its own phone, which is ARA. And I actually see the stuff that Google announced like in this spectrum that Lauren was talking about, about AI. CEO, Google Siddharpa Chai was talking about machine learning and basically Google say, yo, we are smarter than everybody. Here's how we do it. And they're also preparing for this future that is coming after the first. phone. So this is why they're talking about their natural language comprehension chops. This is why they are eventually going to launch this Google Home speaker that you're going to be able to talk to their assistant. This is why their crazy future division, ATAP, is making a jacket with Levi's.

I'm going to buy that jacket. I'm going to buy that jacket. I'm going to buy it bikes so that I can wear that jacket and not feel like to be able to. Truly live in San Francisco now. You traitor. Welcome to the dark side. Deeter. But the jacket is like you put a little Bluetooth dongle in the cuff and then you can use it to control your phone but when you talk to them about it they don't care about the phone.

The phone is just the closest internet connected computer that they have. What they wanted to do is just talk to everything everywhere all the time. And like ARA is actually on that spectrum. They want your phone to stop being the monolithic central

black hole that sucks up all of your technology life. And they wanted to just be a piece of it. So they want to do to phones what phones did to PCs. You know, Steve Jobs had, you know, the digital hub theory for the Mac, and then the phone became the new digital hub. And now Google, you know, they lost. I mean, they lost in the U.S. Like the iPhone is much more popular here. Android is more popular worldwide. But their ecosystem and the amount of, like, people that get genuinely excited about Android apps isn't quite where, you know, the iPhone gets up to. and so they're laying all the groundwork that they feel is necessary

for the next wave of computing that's coming after the phone. Right. But didn't, I mean, Jobs put out that slide that was like, iCloud is the new hub and the Mac is just a client. I mean, I, Dieter's on Skype, but I can still see his disdain for this concept. Right. It's iCloud. I mean, what do you want me to say about iCloud other than like shrug and kind of sigh and laugh?

If bots are our future, if you now you don't have, it's not one cloud service, it's not one device, but this general intelligence that kind of permeates your life that you access from a bunch of different points, like your coffee table and your phone and your jacket, Apple is not going to do well. Because like, look at, like, Siri, the company that they bought for Siri, had a way more functionality than Siri has even now. The founders of that company just recently announced a new AI that has a lot of those functionalities. So like Apple has kind of seemingly an inability to do software right. And a lot of that I think is part of the culture where they don't quite attract the researcher type, the

open sourcer type. Right. Like Apple famously has a lot of like developers like they they they consumed a ton of developers to make OS10, like open source, like the free BSD Unix type people that are underneath what they've created. Those people eventually leave because they don't like how controlled Apple is. Meanwhile, Google has open sourced

its primary machine learning libraries, underlying libraries, and they're always talking about in the open. Facebook is really attractive to developers for its open source stuff. And I think that's one reason why Apple might be really falling behind in software. And I don't see how they're going to catch up this way. So they have Darwin and they open source Swift, right?

We're in a complete reversal of that common narrative. So one of the things that happened at Google I.O. Is Google kept on saying over and over again, Google can do this, we can do this. We've got some cool partners. But they did not say, hey, developers, come play with our assistant. Come make chatbots for Google. They didn't say that at all. They said, we'll figure that out later.

Meanwhile, the rumor with Apple and Siri and its speaker is they might open it up. So we might, a year from now or six months from now, be in this bizarre world where Apple's intelligent assistant, Siri, is more open to developers and to chatbots than Google's. I completely agree with Paul. And I think that's a real problem that's happening on the back end in terms of attracting developers and attracting these new skills that these AIs can do. And that's a pretty critical part of sort of the vitality. of these artificial, you know, assistance or personal virtual assistance, whatever you want to call them.

But on the front end, like on the consumer side, I actually think there's even more of a problem because it's kind of an identity crisis. If you look at Amazon Alexa, everyone knows what Amazon Alexa can do. Everyone sort of knows where she lives right now and that you can buy things through it, right? Which, you know, that's clearly Amazon's end goal, at least for now. Google is just saying, hey, we're so smart and we're so good at search. We have so much information on you that we're just going to make this happen. We don't really know what it's called yet. We don't really know what format is, but don't worry, we're smarter than everybody else.

And then Microsoft's sort of like, yeah, Cortana's great, like, as a utility. Like, it helps you get things done. You have a notebook. You can't find Clippy on your Windows machine. So you ask Cortana, like, or whatever, you know, you're not clippe because the sniffing tool, right? Whatever it is that you can't find on Windows 10, basically Cortana will help you find because you're supposed to be super productive. But now you look at Siri right now and you're thinking, what am I really using Siri for? I mean, I use Siri to make phone calls when I'm in the car and I'm like, oh, call Mom or call

Eli or call Dieter, whoever. Paul, I'll call you sometime too. But other than that, I'm thinking right now, what am I using Siri for? So I have to think that Apple must have this grand plan where like 10 years from now Siri, I have to hope, like 10 years from now, Siri is just going to work completely seamlessly in our cars and our homes, but it doesn't feel that way right now. The thing about Google, the Google version of this is the bet is Google's so smart. It'll just start doing it is the next version of Google. I mean, I think Google wants its assistant to be called Google, not Alexa or Steve. One of these days, somebody's going to call it called Steve.

If Google's names assistant just Steve, it would be perfect. I think they just wanted to be called Google. I think the, and we should actually talk about Microsoft because there's so much Microsoft news this week. I mean, Microsoft gave up on phones this week. No, they're streamlined. They've been slowly streamlining that phone division. It's so fast.

It cuts through the water with the greatest ease. That's really sad, a bunch of people. Yes, I'm sorry for those people. But the streamlined joke was good. Anyway, but they've been cutting down, they basically just admitted it's over for them in mobile. They might put out a surface phone because they need to have a phone. Right, Windows as an operating system,

is now supposed to run everywhere. And they've actually accomplished that goal in a pretty meaningful way. It's on the Xbox now. That means anything to you, Paul. You know right Windows apps? your Xbox? No. I didn't even know you could do that.

You can. They've been saying they'd do that for seven years. No, like we should commend them. They did it. Good job. Good job. A generation late, you know.

Here's what I'll say about Microsoft. Yeah. They should have cut and run on phones a while ago. I mean, it's too late to relitigate buying Nokia. But, you know, when Satch is like, yo, we care a lot about making apps

for iOS and Android. they shouldn't have put out the last round of Lumia phones. The big question for them is, you know, can they get their apps to be successful on those other platforms and then monetize it? They're actually doing a pretty good job of that with Office and Office 365, but now they've got to do it with the other core apps. And then the even bigger question is when we talk about them in the context of these intelligent assistants and bots, they can make a great bot ecosystem that works super well on Windows 10.

but we're talking about the thing that comes after the phone, but when you look and use a bot on a phone or an intelligent assistant on a phone, that is a pretty big platform lock-in. And I don't know how likely it is that Microsoft is going to be able to convince people to switch away from the default option on Android or iOS to Cortama.

No, but that's the system level, right? I mean, isn't Microsoft's whole play that they'll be in Skype and in WhatsApp and in Facebook Messenger? So, I mean, they showed off Dominoes, the thirstiest pizza company of all time, right? Like, you can just... Was it Facebook?

No, Facebook was Burger King. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're right. It's probably Domino's. I mean, if Domino's can get in early on a fast way to order of pizza, they're in early. And Microsoft was the first. So like, but they...

Is there any uptake on these chat, like the chat bots that are in? Because I have like apps that have a chat style UI that are like a fake bot kind of. But these chat style bots in your messenger app, is this what, like, this was what Facebook and Microsoft specifically are really into. Right. Is this what people want? Well, it's just a layer. I mean, the way I've been thinking about it lately is the first war was like,

who's going to ship you the piece of glass, right? And Apple and Google kind of Samsung sort of like won this war. Like they're the ones who ship you the piece of glass. The next layer down was who's going to get icons on your home screen, right? And like Facebook won that sort of like running away. They've got all these huge icons on your home screen. And now Microsoft is like putting icons on all the platforms and getting on the home screen.

And then now the war is once you click on one of those icons, who can power services up through those experiences? So you click on WhatsApp, but Microsoft has partnered with Domino's, or Domino's using Microsoft's backend, so it can talk to you in WhatsApp, and Microsoft obviously gets a piece of that. Or you click on the Facebook thing, and Facebook has partners,

and Facebook Am is going to send you a monkey or whatever the hell it does. I don't know what Facebook is. But they're entirely transactional. One of the things that came up after Microsoft Build when they were talking about the bots was, I had a question around, well, what's the difference between an AI and a bot then? Right. Because last year it was all, everyone was talking about their AI, and this year it's bots is the hot word.

And a person from Skype gave me this analogy, which I found really helpful, which is that bots are transactional. They're more like you go into a store and you swipe your credit card once, but it's just that one-time transaction. and you don't anticipate or you hope that, you know, it's not going to be a repeat transaction or that that person behind the register knows really anything about you based on that one interaction that you had. But that the AI is sort of the equivalent of like, well, once you walk into the store,

that AI knows what you want. I mean, it's a personal relationship. It's there all the time. It's kind of this underlying layer. Yeah. It gets to know you. But to Paul's point, I kind of have a hard time believing that the bots are, are really that useful.

I mean, on the one hand, in order for an AI to work properly, you have to give up so much of your personal data. And that's really freaky to some people. And there are a lot of privacy implications around that. But on the other hand, Casey Newton tried to interact with the bot. I figured which one it was. It was a Facebook Messenger. He did a video on it.

And it was just like this horrible, inefficient interaction. Yeah, it's like having a really dumb friend. And I think this is my mantra is that I think what is exciting about bots is that they're like a text-based interface, and I think that is great. Dude, I remember when Siri came out,

you were so mad that you couldn't type to Siri. Right. I think you wrote an article about it and Engadgett forever ago. I want to be able to issue discreet, clear, but expansive commands to my computer through text. And I think all these companies feel like, well, the future is phones, and it's hard to type of phones,

so we've probably got to do all, you know, And it's like, and so now we have to like trick people into basically using a command line. I mean, that's what I think a lot of these chatbots are are a bad version of a command line. That's where I'm at. I mean, why can't I order dominoes from the terminal? What I want to know. All commands would you use? Dominoes.

But it's like basically what you're doing, right? You like, instead of typing dominoes, you open. Yeah, so why did I have to have a whole like chat? Why did I have to friend some weird bot thing and have this? weird back and forth and stuff like that. Because technology is better when it's like a needy friend. I want to make imperative commands not have a fake conversation. I think whatever the audience is learning when it's like to be friends with Paul.

Just not stop impairing. He just walks up to you. But there's also good times too. There's love. It's not me just walking up to you. There's mutual respect. I just love the pizza. Deeter, you were saying something.

I'm just annoyed. that all of the chatbot demos and intelligent assistant demos are about pizza. If this is the beautiful future, we are all going to die of heart disease. Well, it's all about finding a restaurant or booking a hotel. They can't do anything else for you.

There was one example during Microsoft build where this was in Skype, I think, and the bot knew when you were your geolocation and so when you arrived somewhere where you had like a friend that live nearby, they would message that friend and try to make plans. for you, which was one slight variation on the domino's ultra-crispy, you know, double cheese

and pizza. But nobody has this sort of like anxiety of I need to go to a place and not talk to anyone and just leave this place as quickly as possible. Is I the only person who's like, I hope I don't run into anybody I know here? Because I just need this transaction to be here. I just want to eat alone. I never, I never not feel that. Dieter feels that right now.

He's like, I can't wait for this view. I mean, did you guys ever feel like, I just really want to eat my lunch in peace and not during the birdcast? Lauren, I'm sending you a chatbot request right now. We have to hang out during lunchtime. No, it's like all of these, I mean, this is going to sound really cruel. It's like the people in Silicon Valley are so bad at the formalities of regular social interaction. They're hoping to outsource it to machines so that you can, like, no matter where you are,

it's like, here's some social interactions you may have if you issue the following the commands. That's the aspect I like. Yeah. I just want to, I want to ultimately program my own robot that's based on my own data that is controlled by me somehow, that then will deal with my friends for me. But I don't, I, I don't want Microsoft to deal with my friends for me. Right. Did you write the thing about how you don't want robots to talk for you? Yeah, yes, I think so.

Maybe. But a lot of people wrote a few. Huh? But maybe you secretly do want robots to speak for you? Yeah, but I want, I want my robot to speak for me. I want some sense of agency. Oh, yeah, I did write that. I know that you did.

Well, so Google, we've already talked about this on, like, Facebook Live or something like that. But like the Allo thing where Google is going to prompt you of things to say when you receive a picture of a dog from somebody. Maybe some people find beneficial and really useful. But to me, that's like demode, allowing me to kind of demoting my involvement in a conversation. Right. And it's just like, if you really don't have the time to tell somebody what you think about their dog, maybe you shouldn't be friends with them. Or just ignore it. Yeah, it's a cute picture of your kid, but I don't have time to reply.

Yeah, if I don't have a multiple choice option right now. You know, this is a pro tip. if you ever have to work with really busy people who don't have time for you, you're supposed to email them a yes or no question or like discrete options. Once again, I'd like to point out this is a window into what it's like being friends with Paul. It's just binary choices all the long. That's not how I naturally think. But if you want to get an answer out of somebody that's real important and doesn't have time for you, that's how you formulate the email. And so Google giving you those options is like, hey,

we know you don't really have time for your friends. So here it's, that was just the one part of my life. I didn't want them to optimize. Yeah, I mean, I think those quick replies should be marked, right? So if someone tapped a button to reply to your dog photo or to say yes to the rest or whatever, just like I message gives you a blue bubble if they're on an iPhone, an auto reply should like be marked with a little tick that shows you that this person didn't type this thing. They just hit the button.

Oh, yeah. Why? For ethical reasons? No, it's like insincerity green. So you know who to be mad at. who your true friends are. Your true friends type out the emoji. Your fake friends hit the emoji button.

It's like the equivalent of asking for an autograph when you're a kid and someone sends, like, you get one sent back to you and you're like pretty sure this was just, you know, printed out. Yeah, like autopen. Yeah.

Yes. No, but you're right. Deeter, the bubble should be another color that's like just close enough. It's like the regular I message is blue, but then there's insincerity blue. It's just like a little bit lighter or a little bit deeper. And you'll know.

The people who know will know. And everyone else will just slide on by. I'm going to buy my next card. People you know will know. Did you see the, the people who know that you hate them, they'll see the different blue. Everyone else will get by.

So I want to, let's go back to hardware for one second because we've been deep in the weeds of this AI bot stuff. Paul, you cover a shit ton of hardware on Circuit Breaker. I mean,

it's like basically all Kickstarter where the idea was, what if this mundane object had an app? right in a Wi-Fi chip yes um is that just where hardware innovation is right now or is it in other places where what's the state of the state is it just iPhones with apps and Wi-Fi juicers yeah it's a lot of it's a lot of it's a lot of um it's a lot of pairing things over Bluetooth or think this is what like we have like a five gigahertz Wi-Fi network at work and we

have a secret Wi-Fi network that's 2.4 gigahertz yeah they don't want to tell anybody about right all these like fancy new connected devices that we get are all 2.4 giga. It's always like I don't know I feel like there's there almost all of these things that we're covering a lot of these kickstarters that are like supposed to automate your life. They're almost all completely useless and make your life harder. Right. But it's just it's just fun. I think I think what we're mostly limited by is battery life chip speeds, wireless things available. as a word just at this right now we're at this point where basically you can for free put like the brains of an iPhone one into anything right so what do you want to put it in and they'll just try everything and we'll see if any of these work out i don't know what's the best one wait this is a new segment new segment

andrew play the sound all right paul what's the craziest circuit breaker gadget of the week gululu turns drinking water into a tamaguchi like game for kids. Sorry. I gotta say that again. Gululu turns drinking water into a Tamagachi like game for kids. It does not transform the actual water. Yeah.

But the verb, the activity of drinking water, can now be a game for children. Is this the second water-related thing that we covered this week? Wasn't there another one? We did like a water purifier that like texts you like reminders to drink water. Yeah, the Britta, right? No, the purifier was the other one. The Brita's new.

Yeah, there's also purified. Yeah, so there's a lot of water going on. Yeah. There's a lot. I mean, truly we live in the end times. The theme of all of these is that you're not very good at living life. So let's help you live your life better. You don't know how to teach your child how to drink water.

So what if we put a game literally like a screen on the, side of a water bottle and your child has to care for this virtual pet by drinking water. Right. Which I think is hilarious. Yeah. And maybe sad, maybe great. I don't know. Well, I think the idea that you're terrible living life.

I mean, Lauren, you cover the hell out of fitness trackers and wearables. And they're all predicated on the idea that you're lazy, right? And that if you attach some sort of very basic plevalovian response system to steps that you will stop being quite as lazy, do you think that works? I mean, I don't know, you, you've tried more fitness trackers than anybody I know, I think. What, like, is that, do they, are they, are they sticky? Do people hold on to them? Do you hold on to them? Yeah, they're pretty much all Tamagachi, like, positive reinforcement bands and end up in drawers within three months.

No, so that's a very sort of dystopian view of them. So I think, like, recently I've been thinking a lot about this because I was injured for a while. I was recovering from a surgery, so I actually couldn't work out or exercise that much. and I was still wearing them, and I was thinking, well, I'm really not getting anything out of them now. But I think that there are two categories where they actually can be helpful. One is just when people are really sedentary, I mean, they're either stuck at a desk all day or they're in their car all the time, and they just kind of do nothing. And somebody puts a wristband on them.

It didn't cost that much money. And they basically say, go, try to do 8,000 steps today. Just try it for like three months and see how it works out. I think for some people, that can be incredibly motivating. And, you know, Dieter made a joke before about, like, all of us dying of heart disease, but it's true that it's like a problem. And so, like, for some people, this is a really good thing. But then I think on the sort of total other end of the spectrum,

there are people that are really into these things for performance purposes or maybe more serious clinical reasons. You know, like they want a Wi-Fi-connected blood pressure sensor or they want a $600 garment that's going to help them do the crazy things on mountains that they like to do. Those are like your friends with, like, ruddy cheeks that are always like, want to go for a 23-mile run this weekend? And you're like, no, thank you.

Although, you know, it's not kind of fun, right? But, but, but, so I think, like, in those instances, they can be really great, but those are not, neither of those things are new ideas. Right. Right. Neither of those is, like, like pedometers have been around for a long time. And so have performance fitness devices. I mean, Garmin's were around before, long before something like the Apple Watch ever came out. So I just keep waiting for, like, that next something that's going to hit the middle market where people are going to be like, yes, this is actually valuable.

But isn't that just the Fitbit? I see so many Fitbit. Like the president wears a Fitbit surge, right? And like every picture of him, you can see it like poking out of a really expensive suit being really ugly because there it is. I see charge HRs everywhere. Like they're like they seem like the biggest player in the game because it's cheap and accessible. But it's funny because last year, you know, it's crazy to think that we're now past. the year of the Apple Watch existing, and it seems to have just not made a sound, right?

Like, people have them, and I see them, and I always ask, what do you like? And they're like, I like notifications. And then half of the people are like, I like fitness tracking. And no one says I like running the third party New York Times app, the cooking app on it on my wrist. I bought a car. Oh, Deeter, we got to talk about car stuff. Oh, God. Yes.

After five years living in New York, I bought a car. I was signing up for a car insurance, and I went to download the Geico app after I bought the car insurance. And just under it, it's an Apple Watch app available. And I was like, why the fuck do I want Geico on my wrist? In what universe does my car insurance company need to be here touching my body at all times? It's just like one in three times you look at your wrist, you get a Geico app. It's like a little lizard. It's like dancing.

It's a tomogachi. That's what it is. Honestly, if the little lizard popped up from time to hand my wrist and said something in an Australian accent, I would like it. It was just like, why did you put your effort there? Anyway, I bought a car updated the software and the car is broken and is at the dealer now. Do you know? It's broken? Absolutely happened.

I bought a Jeep Grand Cherokee and it has Chrysler's UConnect system, which is just some of the hottest garbage in the world. It has Nokia here maps. The maps have not been updated. Seriously, it's like a new-ish car, but even the new ones at 2016's, the map data is like a year and a half old on these cars and just it gets updated once every 18 months. And you update the software by a shit you not. You have to go to your computer, you have to go to their website, you put in your VIN number. It downloads Akamai NetSession, which is a distributed download client that has to, that needs like system level off to go. on your computer.

99% of the support messages on every forum is figuring out net session, and there's like a black market for these update files. Anyway, so you get this update file, which is an ISO. It's an ISO of a CD-ROM image,

but Chrysler insists that you use at least a four-gigabyte flash drive for the 600-megabyte CD-ROM image. None of that makes sense. Then you stick the USB stick into your dash, board everything reboots into like the worst thing and then what happens is it updates 10 of 11

modules gets to the Sierra wireless 3G card which is in the Jeep for some reason in case you want your Jeep to be a Wi-Fi hotspot the Sierra module crashes because whatever it's garbage you break your car and you break your car and then so is your car like what does you're writing about this um absolutely writing about it um so uh the car like runs, which is a victory. The screen, the 8.4 inch resistive touchscreen, they're not going to capacitive until 2018, I believe.

Which is incredible. It's like a beautiful car. Like, I love the car. This whole piece is garbage. The touchscreen just flashes white and says in Courier, insert USB to continue. You just try again and it crashes again. So the car is at the dealer, and the dealer had to order. This thing failed.

so badly trying to update its firmware that they have to order a new head unit. Wow. Wow. Yeah, it's great. It's perfect. It's exactly what you want from a piece of technology that is literally supposed to keep you safe if somebody hits you at 60 miles an hour. Right. So, Deeter, you bricked your car. Deeter bought a new car and bricked it too. Yeah, so mine wasn't totally

bricked. So I bought a Honda Civic, mostly because the unit supports both CarPlay and Android Auto. I have deep feelings about both of these pieces of software. Yes. And they involve the word garbage. Do you know, every time I tell Chris, I just want to put an iPad in my car, he calls me an Uber driver. But it's seriously the best choice, right, is to put a fucking iPad in your car. Except that the interface there is not great.

It doesn't matter. Anyway, so the Honda runs on Android. The Android system runs the infotainment system and the climate system. But all the other stuff, like, the brinket. brakes, the cruise control. I'm assuming like the radar like stop stuff is not part of that. I hope to God. Anyway, I would say once every, I don't know, once in every like four hours of driving,

depending if you're using Android Auto or CarPlay, the thing will just crash. And with Android Auto, it crashed so hard. I couldn't adjust the volume. I couldn't change the temperature. And I couldn't like turn it to like change anything with the audio. It was just frozen playing incredibly bad San Francisco radio, The Bone. Wait, when you moved to San Francisco, did you start exclusively listening to The Bone as your number one radio station? I mean, I had to find the radio station.

I forget what number it is on the dial. It's like 100 and something. I think Vergecast listeners are about to experience me losing a friend over time. Turn it back on. Yeah. And then you end up in this world of like, you. you know, fan forums. You know, the world that I grew up in,

that's how I got my start in technology, is going to like, Visor Central and Palm Infocenter and powered forums and going to the forums to learn all the weird hacky things you need to do to fix your shit. And there's a bunch of Honda people in there with all the weird hacky things to fix their shit.

And they're also like trading stories about how to talk, how to sweet talk the dealer into installing the iterative update that's in beta that might fix it. Yeah. And so, like, we're all sitting around knowing there's a software update out there. It probably makes things better. And we're waiting for, like, Honda to give the word. But they won't let me install it. I've got to, like, drive my car to the dealer and have them do it because they don't trust me not to brick my car like Nil I did.

Yeah. Also, the whole thing runs on Android 4.2.2, which is great. No, I, uh, there's Jeep forums. I mean, there's forums for every car model. And what's amazing is every Chrysler car uses the same UConnect system. So, like, the Jeep forums has, like, random visitors who own Chrysler 200s and they're like I'm so sorry for being here but it appears that you might know how to use this garbage computer that I too and it's I don't know all that's such a crazy parallel that Dieter's bringing you up like when you were early adopter of technology you had to be enthusiastic to get through the door right and you had to go to forums to figure out anything useful or interesting about your technology

And now you have to do that for your car. Yeah. Well, no, it's because they're computers, but they don't treat them like computers. Like my iPad Air 2 is obviously 10,000 times faster, smarter, more capable. This car has a 3G radio in it. My iPad has an LTE radio in it. And it was probably cheaper than replacing this garbage head unit. But they don't want it to be modular.

And I think, Dieter, your feelings about Android Auto and CarPlay. I'm, like, really curious about it. because when our audience thinks about buying a car, you know, when I was like tweeting, I'm going to buy a car. They're like, well, you got to have CarPlay. And then I went and used it. And I was like, this is not much better than me sticking an iPad in the glove box or whatever and just using Google Maps.

In fact, it's worse because not every app has a car play app. And so you need to like, you still need to fill with your phone if you want to listen to like podcasts, if you don't like Apple's podcast app because of course you don't. Except for you, Vergecast listeners. Please use a podcast app and go to the Vergecast and give us five stars right now. Just do it. Do it in your car if your radio works. Please, God, we need it.

All right, go ahead. I've basically hacked my car to make, I have a 2007 car. And so it didn't come with Bluetooth. And then for Christmas, when my boyfriend bought like a third party Kenwood thing that doesn't work very well. But like that's the way to a girl's heart, right? like I got you Bluetooth for Christmas in your car. And then I have this like eyeball thing, you know, this eyeball that I stick my phone on.

And between those two things, I mean, there are definitely things about it. I would change. But I don't feel an overwhelming need to have my dashboard running one of the native operating systems right now, right now. My favorite tech product, I should put this on the website, but it's so old. My favorite category of tech product right now because I've been trying to figure out how to solve this car problem is, they make, there's a whole range of ways to mount phones and tablets in your car. But my favorite of them are the ones that mount inside an old CD player. So the actual mount is like a fake CD that you insert into a CD player and then there's like a little piece that braces it on the bottom.

And then you just like, you just cover up your dashboard of the tablet. And it's like, it's the market economy at work. It's like, what's the best way to solve this problem? Let a thousand flowers bloom. And we're just going to stick it in the old CD player directly. It should come with, like, fake CD covers. Yeah, exactly. It should be like the Judy Brothers.

I just feel bad for all of you. Soundgarden, CD. Yeah. But actually. Paul, would you, again, would you say that you're a spoon man? I don't know what I mean. I really seriously don't. This episode of the Veritas is brought to you by Squarespace.

Whether you need a landing page, beautiful gallery, a professional blog, and online store. It's all included with your Squarespace website. Squarespace is easy. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content and features of the click of a mouse. Just go crazy. Just put everything everywhere.

You get a free custom domain. Squarespace makes adding domain to your site simple. If you sign it for a year, you just get the domain for free. You can't beat that deal. There's beautiful templates. Designed best-in-class online store of Squarespace's beautiful, award-winning templates, customizable settings, and more, all without a single and plugin. You get seamless commerce tools from nationally recognized brands, your favorite local shops.

Squarespace trusted by hundreds of thousands of savvy shop owners around the world, including all the tools you need to track inventory, process orders, and send custom emails in one intuitive interface. Squarespace commerce allows you to understand every aspect of your business. I feel like delivering these ads in a threatening matter is really helping me out, Paul. You get customer support. Squarespace offers 24-7 customer support. Every member of the customer care team is an experienced Squarespace user working in Squarespace office. No matter how technically a problem or trivial seeming your question, one of their team is always online to assist you. So, so start your free trial today at Squarespace.com and enter offer code Verge, that's V-E-R-G-E, to get 10% off your first purchase.

Squarespace, set your website apart. Next week is the Code Conference, and I talk to Kara Swisher, who's the executive editor of Recode, and host to the Code Conference, along with our executive editor, Walt Mossberg. We talked about what's happening in Code, who's going to be there, what they're going to talk about, what the big themes are. And she talked a little shit about Peter Thiel, which I thought was great. Here we go. So I'm very lucky right now to be joined by Kara Swisher, who's the executive editor of Recode, one of our sister sites and our favorite of the sister sites. Don't tell anybody else. And it's big week because code conferences next week and the lineup is unbelievable.

So, hey, Kara. Thanks for joining us. Hey, how you doing? How's going? It's going well. It's good to have you on a show. I don't think you've ever been on the Burgecast before. No, I have not.

I've been waiting for my invitation. And finally it's arrived. Finally. Finally, it's arrived. Well, it's only, it's been a year since. I know. I've been waiting by the phone. I'm sure you have. So co-conference next week, you have this all-star glittery lineup. Walk us through it. Glittery. They're not glittery. I'm not sure if any tech people are actually glittery, but it's a pretty good line. We're opening with Jeff Bezos. You might have heard of him. He runs a little retail company called Amazon. We also have the Elon Musk, who is two, who is.

who runs two companies, SpaceX and Tesla. He's a favorite of our conference store, because they love. They have man crushes on him. Count me in. I'm one of those. I know everybody does. It's funny, not me, but he's going to be a great interview. Obviously, there's a lot to talk about autonomous vehicles, space.

There's so much artificial intelligence. And we also have Jack Dorsey, who's running Twitter and also Square. We have Bill and Melinda Gates, which I think will be fantastic. I know philanthropy and a lot of other stuff. We have Cheryl Sandberg and Mike Shrepfer from Facebook talking about that platform, which has been enormously powerful over the last year and really has moved ahead of all competitors. We have Google CEO Sundar Pichai who just got that job recently in the redo of Google to alphabet, whatever that means.

And many, many more. We've got a panel on food tech with the CEO of Impossible Foods who's making the bloody vegan bird. which I tasted yesterday and it was delicious along with a very well-known chef who's going to name Dominique Cran. He's a Michelin two-star chef. She's going to talk about the changing nature of food delivery and food preparation and just food in general. And more and more. We've got tons of people more than that. Yeah. I mean, it's just an insane lineup. I got to say I was, Elon was there two years ago and it was three. It was three. And I just remember it was like a blow away moment because you asked him, what do you focus on? He's like trying to get off

the earth, basically. And it was just one of those moments. So every year, you guys kind of have a theme at code. I think last year it was a really big important one. He asked everybody about diversity. Is there something that you're focusing on this year? Well, you know, I think there's a lot of topics. I mean, it's kind of a crazy year with the election and there's kind of a mood in the country. There's a little bit of a tech downturn. It feels like not exactly the popping of a bubble, but there's a lot of rethinking going on across the country around income inequality, around sort of the tone and tenor of this campaign that sort of has a lot to do with online. So we'll probably be talking about those issues. I mean, Donald Trump has taken over Twitter in a really troll-like manner.

And now Elizabeth Warren is going after him. There's all kinds of things to talk about of where tech is evolving to. You know, everybody, there's a lot of topics around publishing, you know, Amazon, Google, Twitter, all the other's Facebook all have become important publishing platforms. platforms and content creation platforms. So that's going to be interesting. We also invited Harvey Levin, who's the head of PMZ, who's going to be somewhat of a controversial figure. He's, you know, done very well with sort of the original online gossip site that's done really well. And we want to talk about the controversies around that. We're also not ignoring Enterprise. We have Ginny Remedy, who's the CEO of IBM, and Chuck Robbins, who's the new CEO of Cisco, talking about sort of the big, massive changes over all of the enterprise, which I think anyone who's in that space knows that it's just been disrupted extremely this year. So we're talking about that, and I don't want to leave anyone out, but we just have a lot with a lot of different topics, I think. But I think just the sort of the maturing of tech is probably one of the ones that we'll be talking about and where it goes next and what happens to, you know, what happens to the sort of startup ecosystem and the funding. Yeah, I mean, the moment when you could just be super idealistic and believe that you could disrupt everything seems to have passed.

Yeah. I mean, just in the news in the past day, you know, Facebook has been in the news for conservative news in the news feed and in trending topics. And then Peter Thiel was trying to shut down Gawker. At Jackass. I'm sorry. What a Jen. What a tear. I mean, we have to obviously ask, well, he's always been a pleasant fellow.

But, you know, that's a really disturbing thing that a person's on the board of Facebook is paying secretly, you know, instead of being like a person of substance and actually taking a foe head on, he's secretly funding like the craziest lawsuit in America in order to take down a website that outed him many, many, many years ago. What a story that is. I mean, it's, it's, there's so many ways to, to cut at it, especially because of the facts of the Hogan case themselves are so terrible. You know, whatever, I get it, but you still have to defend, like, publishing is publishing, and someone's secretly funding things. It's just, like, it's creepy and scary and lots of life, I think. That's my opinion. I think he's a creepy, scary man who's using his billions of dollars that he gained through Facebook and other things to close down media companies.

And it's his prerogative to do so, but you should man up and do it in the light of day, I think. No, I completely agree with you. It's just that whole story, and then you combine it with the Facebook moment. So you were saying all these companies are sort of moving into media and publishing. That has been something that you in particular have

covered very deeply with your coverage of particularly Yahoo and, yeah, but your coverage of AOL and Yahoo through the years, being tech company and media companies, and then obviously Peter, probably the best media reporter in the game. Do you think that has changed in the years you've been doing first the D conference and the code conference?

Is it waxed and waned? Yeah, you know. I mean, you know you're an expert at it, like figuring out distribution on Facebook and whether you should be doing deals with Twitter and whether you should be doing in video and what does it mean that, you know, that watermelon got so many watches or the cop lady did or like,

how do you decide where is your content on your website? No, not anymore. You've got to put it on Snapchat. You've got to figure this and, oh, wait, Snapchat doesn't work. And, you know, I mean, so I think it's a really disturbing time for media and interesting at the same time because it's changed the way people consume media, which they're doing it rates unprecedented

because of smartphones and everything else. It's not like they're not consuming media. It's just the nature of media is changing. And then also how to make money from that media is changing, you know, rather drastically. So do you think this generation of sort of tech media players is any better suited than the AOL Yahoo? I mean, obviously Yahoo just continues to be Yahoo. But are they better suited? Do they get it better?

Do they understand it better? Well, Yahoo feels like the 90s. I feel like, you know, Boy, Georgia is going to pop out. moment. Suddenly there's Madonna. What is they doing here? I just, I think that,

yeah, I do. I think that's a really, I mean, everyone's going, holy Google, we'll go over that deal, but it really,

it's a lot of old media players moving pieces around. And, you know, Yahoo hasn't been at the forefront of media publishing for, it's sort of brute force publishing, right?

Like, we have 700 million people who are going to shove it down their throat. I think media has changed really drastically. And, you know, there's, you know,

including box media, there's all kinds of, you know, bites and whatever you think of them, and, mashable and obviously most famous of all Budspeed, you know, figuring out how to do it. And again, even those players

are sort of something works one year and they're scrambling to the next, you know, the next thing before it floods. So it's a really interesting time. I don't think it's a bad time. I just think it's really a challenging time for all media companies. Well, I think that the combination of media and technology is something that

it's dominating the discourse right now. Like you're saying, because of this particular election year, this cycle, because of the way Trump is using social media, because of the way Bernie Sanders is using social media. It's very interesting to think about how responsible this cast of characters that you've assembled at the conference is for how those narratives are shaped. Yeah, I think Jack Dorsey, that'll be an interesting question. Did you ever think you would help elect Donald Trump president?

Hello. You know, I'm guessing no. I'm guessing the answer is a flat no. But, you know, we're putting him on with the Black Lives Matter, Durey McKesson, to talk about that because that movement has had some fascinating twist and turns online. and, of course, hashtag Black Live Matters has been one of the many examples of using social media to move things. You know, on one side, you have Black Lives Matter. On the other, you have Trump, and then you have hashtag NeverTrump. And so it's really interesting.

And at the same time, Twitter is struggling, you know, at the business to figure things out. And it's never been more powerful in the social media space. Yeah. So I've got to ask you, we're kind of at the end of time here. Any anything that people should be on the lookout for, any surprises, any hints? Well, I'm hoping. I'm trying to add one or two more. I would like to get a big politician. So we're working on that. But I think, you know, one of the things we're doing different this year is we're doing spotlights. And I can't talk really about them, but you're going to see some people giving little speeches that I think will be fun.

They're sort of like quick tend to, you know, we pioneered it with Mary Meeker, who's coming back again this year who did, who does 500 slides in 15 minutes of all the top Internet trends, which is manic and fantastic. And we're taking that and trying to do it with a bunch of other topics. And there's some that are, hopefully they'll work. But we're going to try to show a little bit of moments of insight for our audience that isn't just an interview to give them a little different thing. And then we're going to, with the possible foods guy, obviously, they're making this burger. It's not come out yet, but everyone's going to get to eat this bloody vegan burger, which should be interesting. It's delicious. I had one yesterday.

Talk about a Facebook live opportunity. There you go. Yeah, exactly. Of course. See, you already are on it before me. You're always on it before me. I didn't even think of that. Like from here like, oh, I'll interview the guy.

But as usual, you're on you. I know you'll grab it. And it'll be like 4 million views. And I'll be like, oh, once again, I provided content for Nile to take advantage. But go right ahead. I'm there for it. Look, it's all one family. Yeah, thanks.

Well, anyway, I'm really looking forward to coming out there. We've got the Verge crew will be out there. Deeter, KC., Lauren Good and I will all be there. We'll be trying to steal as much of Walt's time. And so let us steal to do Facebook live stunts. Waltz's doing some big interviews. He's interviewing Joe. Bezos and he'll be interviewing Sundar and also the Gates is.

So he has some big interviews to do. So that'll be fantastic. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and we'll see you next week. All right. Thanks, Eli. Bye. All right.

So we're back. Let's do a little bit of a lightning round. I'm going to say a word, a company name. You give me the one sentence summary of where you think they are. Ready? And we're going to go around. So Microsoft. Paul.

Please love us again. Oh, wait. You never loved us. well, maybe download an app. That was an incredible sentence for a professional writer. Is that what you're looking for? I don't know. It's something.

Dieter, you can't have both mobile and cloud be first. I don't know how we're going to figure this out. Lauren. We're the general electric of the tech world, and we're going to be cool again, damn it. Wow. I feel like GE is really trying, though. Like, they have got those ads with the...

So is Microsoft. The engineers. Yeah. But the GE ads with the engineers. are like, don't you want to be this unloved nerd that nobody understands? General electric. They're kind of insulting to you. Yeah.

To some demographic, I'm not sure which, but some... It's really hard to know. It's like, insulting to dads because the dad is like, I don't know what you do, son. In every one of those commercials, he's like, dad, I'm an engineer. He's like, do you drive a train? And it's like, your dad paid for your school probably. He probably helped you out of that. Maybe.

Dads are actually getting a bad rap now because for a while, people were just saying moms didn't understand tech. and then there was this backlash to that. Like, no, you can't say. So now dads are just getting all the heat. Everyone's like, well, what if we did a mom, a dad commercial where dad doesn't understand the tech? That's the worst. Poor dad.

That just thinks all engineers drive trains. Okay, Google. Paul. I just had this mental image of a search bar. That's pretty much. It says a lot. They're trying to break out. It's Sundar just banging against the walls of that search bar.

Two trillion searches. Dieter. Apple envy. Ooh. The most powerful of all sentences. Lauren. The smartest kid in the class who still seems to have a shirt untucked all the time. Ooh. Hmm.

I feel like I need to tuck in my shirt. You do a sentence. For Google. I mean, in Silicon Valley, you don't really have to tuck in your shoe. I have to wear a shirt at all. Yeah. Wait. That's true.

I can confirm. I feel like weird things happen to Palo. Dieter. See, we're pre-taped. Well, you don't know. Dieter's been shortless this whole time. It's true. What's my sentence on Google?

I wish they were better. Oh. That's what it is. I think the listeners of the show know, I'm perpetually about to switch to Android. Right. And then I get out my 6P, which is a beautiful phone.

I actually love it so much. I just updated it to N. And I think the visual refreshes of N are gorgeous in many ways. And I'm like, it's almost. It's always just almost. I can't tell you what's keeping me on the iPhone. but there's just one little tick of polish. It's not just I message though.

It's eye message. It's one little tick of poly. It's like everything on Android's like too big. It treats you like you're a little bit dumber than you are. You don't get that? It's just not refined. Also it's I message. And it's not prior I message.

Okay. That's it. I'm actually ready to, once Android apps on the ChromeOS come out, I'm actually going to try to get rid of my MacBook and do a pixel full time and be any. Android and like live that life and it will last a week in the first two days of that week will be incredible and the final three days of that week will be hell and then everyone will hear about it and I'll switch to my neck okay that was my that was a very long sense I wish they were better

why you're pointing at me I'm trying to think of the next time on the Amazon and then Dieter as soon as Paul's finished with his sentence you got to start your sentence we're just going for it now better be nice to us because we got all your data because we have the best cloud Dieter, this is your moment, man. I can't. Don't you? Don't you think the joke is kind of like a pity play? A pity play?

I don't know. What's a, define pity play? It's just. Yeah. You just, they just sounded really good. I got it. They power like half of the apps. Yeah.

Please don't forget about the echo next year. Ooh. Rough. Okay. Lauren. I don't know. Sometimes I just picture Amazon sort of encapsulated in the form of like a Jeff Bezos maniacal laugh.

Like, but I guess maybe, you know, I would say they're still utilitarian and still strangely proud of it. Yeah. I mean, again, you know, the new Kindle, the Oasis, it's a beautiful product. It's pretty fancy. It's pretty fancy. And then you close the lid in that Amazon logo is like, Disneyland. Like, you know, it's too goofy.

Like, again, it's like, I just wish they were one tick better. it designed. Okay, what's the last one? I wish mine worked. Apple. Do we do Facebook? No, okay, Apple and then Facebook. Okay, I don't know, I kind of already said it, but we are, I don't know why I'm personified in these companies. Yes, you are. We are bad at software. Whoa. Software in general? Yeah. Why do you think of bad at software in general? That's a new one. I don't know. They were the software company that was so cared about software so much, they made their hardware. It's a problem. Give me beyond just we're bad at cloud services. What are they bad at?

It's iTunes. It's just the MacOS, which is what I spend most of the time on. They don't feel like they're moving very fast. They're trying all this stuff with Swift being open source, but it's like they still haven't gotten all their apps over to Swift. And it's like a moving target right now. It shouldn't be a 1.0 really. But they're coming out with 3.0 of Swift.

they're just doing a lot of weird things that are making software kind of unstable, and it's not settling down, and it's getting worse. And I keep hoping for it to settle down and get better, but it's not. All right. Dieter. Apple is not ready for the next stage of computing. Yeah. Walt, I mean, the Walt podcast, he Walt talked about that for 45 minutes with me.

He's very down on them as well. I mean, I think, but that next stage, what he was pointing out was, it's about privacy, and you have to give up some of your data to enable these big cloud services, particularly AI, and Apple just culturally isn't ready to do that. Lauren. I think Apple needs to figure out what the next step is beyond simplicity, because for years now, people have gravitated towards their products because they're just, they were super simple to use, and partly to Paul's point, they're getting more complicated.

I mean, everything is getting more complicated, everything is getting sort of more crowded, and everyone has to be everywhere. And so, I mean, I think maybe Apple Music is kind of the epitome of that. But they need to, I don't know. I don't know if they, I don't know if streamlining is the answer, but they just need to figure out a way to, I guess, continue to use intuitive interfaces as one of their best marketing ploys, aside from privacy. Right.

Like, you already know how to use this. Which would be voice. I mean, that should line right up with their skill, right? Like, you can just talk to this thing. Do you think that they were unprepared for Google and Facebook and Amazon to be as good of competitors as they are? I think that companies in general, for a while, they were segmented tech companies. You know, companies did data networking and then they did store, you know, some did storage and some did software and some did hardware and some did social networking and some did shopping. And now they're all starting to do everything.

And so I don't think anyone sort of could have foreseen that in some cases some of these competitors would have popped up in a particular area the way that they have. Yeah, there's that. I mean, the rumors there, Apple wants to buy Time Warner and own HBO, which is insanity, right? But then you're like, what's a big... No, I mean, I think if you had actually told me a few years ago, these companies want to own media, you know, that Jeff Bezos would buy the Washington Post or that Apple would want to, I don't know, somehow create its own TV content and become the next TV platform.

I would not be shocked by that at all. But I think there are other things, like the automobile industry. I don't think anyone saw, I mean, maybe some people did. Maybe if they did, I wouldn't believe, if they said they didn't wouldn't believe them. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. Here's what I'll say about Apple. They deep, deep down, all the way down on their bones, have always defined themselves as we are a company that makes products. Really good, discreet, atomized, go buy this thing, install this piece.

of software, we make really good singular products. But that vision is the thing that we've been talking about moving away from. Like the iPhone is no longer the singular product. And, you know, Apple talks a little bit about like building an ecosystem and all these things, these things talk together. But like pretty soon the difference between talking to your watch and your phone and your coffee table and your car and whatever else, it's all going to be on a continuum. them and that's not a discrete singular product that's like something else and apple needs to stop

defining itself as we just make products so if like i've actually not a hundred percent freaked out by the idea of them buying time warner owning HBO because it will force a cultural shift in the company that we do more than just make singular products yeah but you still want good products like yeah you know like at the end of the day you got to you got to hold a phone You got to look at a coffee table. You got to, these things are expressed in hardware. And I don't, I couldn't tell you another company, I'm struggling. I mean, there's a few.

Another company that makes hardware, software integrated products at the scale and complexity of Apple that the stuff is as good. Like, the PS4 is the thing that is coming to my mind right now. Right. For your BSD. Yeah. But no, like, you know, it's like a, they sell a ton of, them. It's a beautiful piece of hardware. It's well engineered. Yeah. The software's pretty good.

It's actually a really good example. Right. I would, but it's like, you know, the echo is like another example, but like the echo is not a complicated thing. Right. Right. It's not nearly at the complexity of the. I think, I think that's where it falls apart. It's relatively much easier, or maybe it's just a different skill set to design one beautiful, great thing. than trying to design someone's entire lifestyle, which is what these companies want to be involved in. Right. And we've been talking about this forever, right?

You get ecosystem lock-in, but now it's like shady. Even ecosystem design, let's take ecosystem lock-in for granted that that's their technique, designing an ecosystem so that it's pleasant and consistent and useful and magnifies the impact and power of the individual instead of just giving them more, hoops to jump through. That's a skill that I don't know which company I'd point to you as being great at that. Which company is best at just making your life consistently better in all facets? I mean, the only company, GE.

This podcast has been brought to you by GE. If you're in the market for a turbine engine or a nuclear missile, what do they even make? Isn't that what these companies should be trying to do? If they want to touch my body constantly, if they want, like, to have my eyeballs constantly. If they want all my clicks and all my swipes, shouldn't they be trying to make my life better? Yeah.

I feel like there's a big opening here for furniture companies. No. Like in the same way that cars are going to be become smart. And like, yes, we're all going to be using connected IKEA at some points. Yeah. But like those are not even worse. Like the refresh cycle on TVs,

TVs are basically furniture is like too long for the TV to be good. The are, I'm like furious at the car thing. I need to write. about my car and like emotionally relieve this pain. But like the car companies, I mean Jeep is like we're putting Android Auto in the next one.

So trade in your Jeep, which is insanity. Like it's insanity. It's just a piece of the car. Just like let me swap it out. Who cares? I'm definitely not trading in my old Jeep for Android Auto. Well, yeah,

I'm not going to trade in my Jeep for Android Auto. But I'm saying like that's their answer. It's not we can take out this thing that is a screen with an arm. behind it and put it in another screen with a different arm chip behind it it's this is an integrated piece of the car which is baloney like it's just like nonsense um i'm getting really fired up about this car i feel like you have to write about this i'm absolutely going to write about it i like i mean i definitely have already started talking to like jeep like the you connect people who seem

terrible i mean like they're not a tech company like they're a car just to be clear because i don't really understand cars very well this is not a thing that you can take out and put a different thing Yeah. No. This will always be part of the car. No, I mean, it's obviously a piece of hardware. Like, you can peel, open the dashboard and pull the thing out. But it's not like you can go to Best Buy and buy a new one and stick in there.

It's not like a head unit. To turn on the heated seats in my car, you have to use the touchscreen, which is so stupid. Right. But there it is. Let's have a two-hour podcast where we bitch about the fact that head units aren't removable. And then on top of that, the idea that the only thing that the only thing that the only thing, between a Nexus tablet and the thing in your car

is that the thing in your car has an amplifier in it so that it can power the speakers and otherwise that's it and that little difference and the monopoly they have on how they design their dash or whether or not you can put one in

amounts to a price premium of somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000 over the cost of an Android tablet that does the same thing. It's infuriating. But they're like if you have an older car like this is a good argument to buy a car like Lawrence

which doesn't have all this like integration because there are people out there who will build you beautiful custom dashboards that are like an iPad pro. I've been deep in car forms this week. Anyway. Oh, we didn't do one sentence about Facebook, did we? Oh, one sentence about Facebook. Facebook.

Polk. I was going to do poke. My God. Dieter. No, I'm just kidding. Facebook. I don't know. Facebook is starting to show me egg freezing ads below pictures of my friends' babies.

So as I wrote today, I kind of deplore you Facebook, but I have. also must admire your tenacity when it comes to procreation. Facebook really just grabs the one piece of your life you don't want to think about it and just like shows it to you a million times. And on that note, I have to go. Goodbye, Lauren. Goodbye, Lauren. Dieter, what's your one sentence about Facebook?

I disclose that my wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. But having said that, I really wish that one of their board members wasn't trying to sue my competitor Gawker into oblivion. I hope he wins. That's my one sentence about Facebook. It means nothing to me. I just really dislike Cocker. Anyway, Paul.

I'm all into their, like, React stuff. Yeah. They've got a lot of good open source stuff for web development and app development. It's kind of interesting. All right. But I don't like using their platform. My one sentence to my Facebook is I don't think anyone will ever trust Facebook. And that is a huge problem for them.

Yeah. If they need trust, they're not getting it. Yeah. Okay. That, Deeter, I think, was our first. So Lauren has gone. Paul wandered off. That was okay for a Vergecast. Just us now. Yeah, we'll figure it out. Yeah. You know, a little segment there with Kara.

It was good. Yeah. And, you know, my ad read was choice as always. We're getting better. We're getting better at this on contiguous podcast. Look, listeners, we're going to figure this out. I promise you. We're back. We're vertrcasting every week. Next week, actually, Dieter and Lauren and I will be together at the code conference. So we're going to put something together there, so that'll be fun. But we're back. Deeter's going to remain in San Francisco, unfortunately, for my personal sanity. But it'll be great for, you know, everybody else. But this is the new format of the show. We are eager to hear your thoughts on guests you want us to bring in interviews. You want us to do segments you want us to have. The sky is the goddamn limit here. And potentially not even the limit. We could go beyond the sky,

beyond the sea. We're going to go into space. We're going to do the next first cast from space. You know, they interviewed Scott Kelly today. We could get some tips. Yeah, I heard. Scott Kelly, we got the website. So anyway, that was the Vergecast. Go to iTunes, give us the stars. Tweeteders, at Backlon, Paul's.

Paul, future Paul. Lauren is at Lauren Good. Just talk to us. With an E, the end. Just talk to us all the time. We're at Verge on virtually every social platform to go there. I think Kirsten was in here snapping, doing some snapshots of this podcast.

You can check that out on Snapchat. And then, man, somebody on a podcast. Well, it's podcast control. Delete is great. Recode decode is great. Recode media is great. What's Tech is great. For GSP is great.

Lauren has a great podcast called Too Embarrass to Ask. I mean, just listen to everything all the time. And we'll be back next week. Hey, Eli. Yeah. I miss you. I miss you, too, buddy. Rock and roll.