The Vergecast - SpaceX launches humans to space / Facebook's ongoing moderation controversy / Sonos Arc's convincing surround sound

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

Stories from this episode: Blaming protesters for COVID-19 spread ignores the bigger threats to health 5G coronavirus conspiracy theorists are endangering the workers who keep networks running Telehealth wasn’t designed for non-English speakers The pandemic has made it harder to buy a new laptop Byte flight The United States will cut ties with the World Health Organization, says President Trump  FCC extends deadline for ISPs to quit charging customers who use their own equipment K-pop stans overwhelm app after Dallas police ask for videos of protesters SpaceX successfully launches first crew to orbit, ushering in new era of spaceflight A rocket launch can’t unite us until the space world acknowledges our divisions Watch NASA astronauts fly SpaceX’s Crew Dragon using touchscreens SpaceX’s Crew Dragon successfully docks with the space station What the future of the space station looks like after SpaceX’s historic launch Meet the cute stuffed dinosaur that hitched a ride on SpaceX’s historic launch SpaceX is launching its latest batch of internet satellites, including one with a visor Trump’s Twitter order violates the First Amendment, new lawsuit claims Facebook won’t take any action on Trump’s post about shootings in Minnesota Facebook employees walk out in protest of Donald Trump’s posts Twitter takes action against Rep. Matt Gaetz for glorifying violence In leaked audio, Mark Zuckerberg expressed ‘disgust’ with Trump’s posts Mark Zuckerberg defends hands-off Trump policy to employees after walkout Nine things we learned from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg facing his employees Ban them all What other social networks can learn from Snapchat’s rebuke of Trump Huawei P40 Pro review: there’s a catch HBO Max won’t hit AT&T data caps, but Netflix and Disney Plus will The Sonos Arc puts convincing surround sound in a single soundbar Here’s our best look yet at Google’s new Android TV streaming device Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Lauren Grush, joins us to talk about the big SpaceX launch. We talked to Casey Newton about Facebook's always controversial moderation decisions. And then we actually talk about some gadgets. Sonos, Arc, HBO Max, data caps, Huawei P40. It's all coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom.

And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Burchast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media podcast situation. That's how I feel about everything. It's not a moment for timely jokes. But I'm Neal. I'm your friend.

Deeder Bone is here. Also your friend. We got a big show. this week, Lauren Grush is going to join us to talk about the historic SpaceX crew dragon launch. What's going on in space generally? A lot. Space, very busy. Casey Newton is going to join us to talk about Facebook moderation.

So, like, what he usually talks to us about. But obviously with the protests, with Trump's various posts, there's a lot of activity there. There was some leaked audio from Mark Zuckerberg. We're going to unpack that. And at the end of the show, Dieter and I are actually going to talk about some gadgets. Yeah. There's some gadget news this week. So we're going to do that at the end of the show.

I want to start, as always, with some updates on. the pandemic. I think it's kind of a combo platter. There is bigger news in the world this week. I think listeners know that by now that we want to focus on that stuff as much as we can, but also provide the escape that people ask us to provide. So I just want to give the updates on both the pandemic and some coverage of the protests that are all over the country right now. So it is week 12, 12 weeks since Donald Trump promised the world a website where you could go get tested for the coronavirus. Just going to keep counting. I'm assuming it's not going to happen. I will say a lot of states have built their own testing apparatuses, but the nationwide testing apparatus that I think we will

need to manage the pandemic and the coronavirus going forward. Still not there 12 weeks since then. Trump is also insisting that we cut ties with the World Health Organization. That's a big deal. You can read about that on the site. Some of the second order effects of the coronavirus in the pandemic that we keep talking about Zoe Schiffer wrote a piece for us called Bight Flight, which is about tech workers moving out of San Francisco. There's a lot of, I think, underreported on antipathy towards San Francisco from the big tech worker community. And now that companies like Google and Facebook are all working from home or moving to work from home policies, people are going to leave San Francisco. So that's a really interesting piece. A lot of quotes in there. Check that out from Zoe.

Monica Chin wrote a piece for us that we have actually been tracking since the very big beginning of sort of the pandemic, which is supply chains for laptops. So what you have is skyrocket demands as people are working from home, as kids are learning from home, and then supply constraints because the supply chains in China have went dark for a while. And those curves, I think, have started to hit. So it's really hard to buy a laptop now. Monica dug into that. Nicole Weitzman, our excellent health reporter wrote a piece about telehealth. There was a lot of sort of before the pandemic hit, there was a lot of excitement about telehealth. Obviously, with everybody working from home, doctors are doing more telemedicine. It turns out there are some consequences

of telemedicine, one of which, importantly, is that if you don't speak English in this country, it is harder to get medical care remotely. So check that out from Nicole. And then this one, to me, is just like one of the more, I think we think of conspiracy theories as something that happened to the internet without consequence. But James Vincent talked to network engineers in the UK who are being harassed and attacked because of the 5G conspiracy theory around the coronavirus. And there's hundreds of incidents of abuse towards these engineers have been reported. He actually talked to some of those engineers. That's a great piece. Go check that out. The protests, there's some stuff that I want to call out in our coverage. My favorite one is that

K-pop fans have been overwhelming the apps the police are using, particularly in Dallas to ask for videos of protests with fan cams of K-pop, which is amazing. And then on a more serious note, the combination of the protests and the pandemic, I think a lot of people are expecting the pandemic to get worse because of the protests or the virus spread to get worse because of the protests. Nicole has a great piece about how there are larger threats to health than the protests, particularly the use of tear gas, particularly the underlying racial dynamics that have made both the pandemic and the protests bigger than you would otherwise hope. So we have a lot of coverage beyond that. That's just some stuff I wanted to call out. Let you all know that we have the coverage of that stuff on

the site. We know that our audience wants us to talk about all the other things too. So as always, Start there. Check out the site. There's so much that coverage there. We are really focused on it. We are really focused on coverage of the protests. There are an immense number of verge stories inside of the protests around who gets to make the videos, who gets to share the videos, how the videos are operating. T.C. wrote a piece today about swatting, which is a very common online harassment tactic. That is built around the notion that the police will conduct violence in America. So there are just multiple, multiple angles and the things that we cover all the time that's all on the site. Okay. There was a rocket launch. So, Lauren, you're here. Hi, Lauren. How's it gone? You know, it's going as best as can be expected. Lauren, you actually wrote a piece about rocket launches in the broader context and how they play together. I want to get to that. But let's start at the start. Crew Dragon launched, historic event. Tell us about it. Yeah, so it really is a launch. I mean, depending on how you want to set the starting line, you could say it's been six years in the making, a decade in the making, or really since SpaceX first formed 18 years ago. It was the first time that SpaceX actually launched

people to orbit. It's been their express purpose since they were formed. And it was also a big deal for NASA. It's the first time in nearly a decade that people have launched from the U.S. since the end of the shuttle program to orbit. And it was also the first time that a private company, like a purely private vehicle, sent people to orbit. So there were a lot of a first associated with this launch, which is why it was a really big deal for a lot of people in the space community. Let's start with just that first of a private company. Just how does the interaction between SpaceX and NASA work here, right? They're obviously NASA astronauts. Are they just, like, is it like calling for an Uber? Like, how does that relationship work? I mean, you joke,

but that is kind of what NASA was going for with this program. So it's really important to note that NASA has always used contractors to build its stuff. The shuttle was built by contractors, the Saturn 5 rocket built by contractors. The main difference is that NASA always had key oversight and input in the design and development process. So NASA knew everything that was going on. They were constantly checking in with the contractors and making sure, you know, that they had a voice in this process. And then once the vehicles were done, NASA owned and operated them. So it was not really a commercial transaction. It was the government in charge of these processes. With this program, the commercial crew program that the crew dragon launched for, the idea was, all right, let's take NASA a little

bit out of that process, you know, they'll be the customer in this scenario and they're going to pay, they're going to put in some money for development. So they gave, they gave SpaceX partial money for to develop the crew dragon. But in reality, they're the ones that are going to be like, I want to pay a ticket to ride my, or to put my astronauts on your vehicle. You're going to be in charge of design. You're going to be in charge of production. You're going to be in charge of testing. And then you're going to own and operate that vehicle when it's done. There's some, if you, if you read my coverage on theverge.com, there's some, you know, nuance with that because NASA was really involved with the process, you know, because when you launch humans, you know, it takes

on a whole new standard for the agency. Like, they are pride and joy for the country. So whether or not this was a purely commercial transaction is up for debate, but it was definitely very different than the way NASA used to do things. And I think for all intents and purposes, we can say this was a commercial vehicle as opposed to the other vehicles that NASA has launched in the past with humans. So my big question here, like, is, is this what NASA, if it, like, had its struthers and could get whatever budget it wanted out of Congress would want to do? Or are they, like, shifting their entire, like, organization to be, you know, contracting

and licensing from, you know, outside private companies and just buying tickets on ships instead of building the ships themselves via contractors or whatever. Is that how NASA, like, wants to operate going forward? Or is it a thing that they have to do because they can't get the funding to build their own damn rockets? I think it's both, actually. And it's a little more nuanced. You know, like you said, you know, NASA's budget is limited. We're not in the Cold War anymore.

So we're not getting these huge increases for the NASA budget like they did during the Apollo program that sent humans to the moon. So, yeah, they do have – they face this reality of, okay, if we want to do these big bowl, things in space. Let's let the private sector take over these things that we've been doing for years and years, like sending people to low Earth orbit. That's something we've been doing for 50 years. We know how to do that. So it's like, okay, NASA is going to give that to the private sector. Then at the same time, stimulate the private sector because that they own these vehicles now. It's not NASA's vehicle. It's SpaceX's vehicle, so they could potentially use it to make their own market later on by selling it to tourists or selling it to private citizens. And then

NASA can take the rest of the money that it does get from Congress and put it into these very big ambitious programs. Notably right now, that's going back to the moon with this Artemis program. So it's like, okay, you know, we're going to get a cheap investment, a cheap ticket to space, basically for our astronauts while we spend the big bucks on these other programs and do more ambitious things. So that commercial crew program, it's been years in the making, right? Yeah. So the contracts to SpaceX, and we shouldn't forget Boeing is also part of this program. SpaceX is just the first one to launch crew. But there's two companies, SpaceX and Boeing. They got their contracts in 2014 to start building and developing these vehicles and start testing them.

So it's been six years since those contracts. But really, it's been a decade of NASA testing out this process because it didn't start with commercial crew. It started with commercial cargo. So they tried this new method with they're like, okay, let's have the private sector send supplies to the international space station. Like we know how to launch crap in the space basically. That's something we've been doing for years. We can trust the space industry to pick that up and do that for us. We don't need to be in charge of that anymore. And so it started. with cargo. It was called the COTS program. And then that model, that contracting model that I was talking about, was transformed during the Obama administration into the commercial crew program.

So we're like, okay, we're going to take a step up from cargo. We're going to actually launch people this way. So this rocket that launched with the crew dragon capsule on board, that is SpaceX Falcon 9. That's the, it's the familiar rocket, right? Yeah. Was there a process to adapt that rocket to change it anywhere? or do they just put the capsule on top? I mean, let's just say that the Falcon 9 got way more scrutiny than it probably ever did, you know, just because we were putting people on this.

And there was actually some controversy that it's not even around anymore, but it was for a while during this development because SpaceX is a very different policy than they did during the shuttle about how it loads the vehicle with propellant. So a lot of aerospace experts prefer that the vehicle is fueled before astronauts get on board because fueling is considered a dangerous event. And, you know, that's not a bad argument.

I mean, actually, a SpaceX, a Falcon 9 rocket exploded while it was being fueled on the ground once during a ground test. So there is some precedent for being a little nervous during the fueling. But instead, SpaceX likes to fuel its rockets after. the astronauts have gotten on board already. And there was a lot of controversy over that decision. NASA demanded that SpaceX, you know, prove that this process was safe by doing it a number of times prior to this launch

and demonstrating that, you know, it wasn't going to destroy the rocket while people were on board. And also, there are tons of other safety measures put in place to you. The crew dragon, for instance, has an abort capability that the space shuttle didn't even have. So if the Falcon 9 were to have some kind of failure during flight, there's actually thrusters inside the Croodragon that can lift the capsule up and away from that rocket and carry the astronauts to safety. So there's all these redundancies in place because Nassau is very, you know, protective

of its astronauts and they will continue to be protective of their astronauts. So, yeah, the Falcon 9 got a lot of eyes on it during this entire development. And then obviously the Falcon 9 is famous for being reusable. we've watched it land. This particular Falcon 9 landed on a drone ship. This was a new one, right? It was like just a simple, like, you want to use a new one for the astronauts. Yeah, but it's funny that you say it.

Like, it didn't even take that long. I saw something that NASA's already giving the okay of SpaceX using a used rocket for future crew missions. I feel like we're going to have to move away from the phrasing used rocket. Like, it sounds like they're going to get like an 89 Selica and like blast that off into space. Like, it's, they're going to refurbish it. Let's just say I get in trouble when I say the word use because they don't, they're not pleased with me.

They want, they like previously flown. Float proven. Flight proven is the industry term. Flight proof. That's a good one. That's way bad. Previously flown also sounds like you're buying like a certified used car. Yeah.

Like gently used rocket. And then as I was watching the stream, a thing that struck me is there were a lot of shots of SpaceX in Hawthorne operating the rocket, not the sort of standard NASA mission control that you think of. But it still took off from Kennedy Space Center. How does that dynamic work? Yeah. So this lunch was really kind of a team effort from multiple different sites. It included, like mission control was in Hawthorne because this was a SpaceX launch. So the shots, when they were in charge of the launch and they were the ones in charge of communicating with the crew while they were flying to the International Space Station.

At the same time, you had crew, or you had people in mission control at Kennedy Space Center who were operating the ground systems and just making sure that, you know, the launch happened okay. And then you also have people at Johnson Space Center. They're the ones in charge of the International Space Station. So once they got to the International Space Station, there was a lot of coordinating between Hawthorne and JSC to make sure that process went smoothly. So now that Crew Dragon is docked with the ISS, who's in charge of it? Johns and Space Center is in charge of operating.

But I'm assuming they are still very much in contact with SpaceX throughout this process, especially because we need to find out when the astronauts are coming home. We don't know when they're coming home yet, but NASA is going to make that determination in a couple weeks. Is that it'll get handed over back to SpaceX when they come home? Like, what's the plan there? Yeah, essentially. I mean, it's still going to be a very collaborative process,

but really that's the point of this whole thing. is SpaceX is in charge. And so they are in charge of the crew dragon and it's traffic, you know, and how it flies through space. When you say they don't know when they're coming home, what are the, is that they don't know inside of a window specifically or you're just up there until we decide you come home? So this was supposed to be a quick trip. Really, I think it was supposed to last like a week or two originally because it was just supposed to be a test. It was just be like, can they get to the station? Can it survive on the station for a little bit and can it come home. The problem was the commercial crew program, like any space development program, suffered

its fair share of delays. And originally these launches were supposed to have in 2017. Obviously, it's three years later. And so the problem was our only other option to get to the space station was the Russian Soyuz rocket. We've been paying the Russians to put astronauts on those vehicles for the last decade. And our seats were running out with them as the delays continued with commercial crew. And so right now, they've only, well, before these two astronauts launch, we only had one person, one American on the International Space Station. And that's a really low number. We usually like to have more than that. So it was like, okay, we don't have a lot of people on the space station. Why don't we keep Bob and Doug the two astronauts up there for an extended

period of time so they can get some work done because they need to do maintenance. There's possibly some spacewalks they might have to do on the outside of the space station. And then once they get that work done, we'll make a determination of when they can come home. But the max amount of time that they can stay up there is really dependent on the solar panels on the crew dragon. Apparently, there's a thin atmosphere in space where they're at right now. And that's degrading the solar panels over time. So they're trying to get a better understanding of how long that process lasts. But I think the max for now is they can stay up there for four months and then come home, but we'll find out, I guess, in the coming weeks.

The idea that there's, like, a limited number of seats that we can lease from Russia on the Soyuz is also, it's like, so much of this is just weird, like, not the way I think about space. Like, are we going to get a coupon for more seats on the next SpaceX rockets at some point? Like, we ran out of tickets. Like, there's a coupon book for Soyuz. Like, it's very strange. Well, to be fair, that was a conscious decision.

NASA didn't want to continue paying Russia, and they wanted to eventually transfer full-time to these commercial vehicles. So the expectation was we were going to stop purchasing these soya seats so that the commercial crew program could continue. But they actually purchased one more, like, safety seat on the Soyas for this fall. So there's actually going to be another American. It's Kate Rubens, who's going to launch this fall on the Soyuz. But now that we're going forward, the idea is we're going to stop paying the Russians tickets, and then we're going to trade seats. on our vehicles. So we'll still have Americans flying on the Soyuz, but we could potentially have Russian cosmonauts on the crew dragon or on Boeing's vehicles as well.

So when the crew dragon leaves the station whenever it leaves, how does it come back? What's the mechanism? It's just falls through atmosphere, heat shields, doesn't burn up, parachute, like standard 60s Apollo? Yeah, I'm sure the engineers will tell you there's quite more than that, but that's essentially it. You know, they have protections in place so that the crew dragon you know, stays intact while it comes back through the atmosphere. And then, yeah, they have a suite of four parachutes that deploy, and then they splash down in the Atlantic Ocean near Florida, where they'll be recovered by a SpaceX recovery vehicle

that will take the crew and the capsule both to shore. And is the capsule reusable? It is not at the moment, but I believe that is something that is in the works. The problem is the ocean. You know, once they hit the water, that saltwater is really corrosive, and it does a lot of damage to the vehicle. But I think they are working on ways to make it reusable. And then the capsule itself, you know, you watch the stream, you see them.

They're just like using touchscreens. Yeah, we've got to talk about this. I mean, I just, I understand like there's a, it's mostly computerized and like to some extent they're just like along for the ride. But like, are there just like Tesla touchscreens in there? Did Elon? Was he just like pull them out of a Model 3 and let's go? Is it hardened?

Like, how does that work? I do not know the origin of the touchscreens, but I did get to interact with them a bit when I went to Hawthorne once and they were showing off the interface. And I feel like the touchscreens, honestly, are the biggest, they're the ones that sent the biggest shockwaves through the space community because if you look at the space shuttle console, it's like hundreds of switches of gadgets, joysticks, you know, it looks like a cockpit. And this really looks like, you know, like you said, a Tesla interface. And even Doug Hurley, one of the astronauts, mentioned that it was kind of jarring for him at first because they're both pilots. And so they're very used to being able to have this active control with something that can grab onto. But he said after a while, you know, it became pretty easy to control. And I mean, it looks pretty great.

Actually, my husband was saying, you know, when we were watching it, he's like, this makes me feel like we're in the 21st century. Because really all they did to fly the dragon was press, you know, like the translational movements on the screen or they needed to rotate. They have that button for it too. And they can do that with their gloves on with their spacesuits or they can do it with their gloves off. Neil, I just, I want you to know that the interface for these touchscreens is written in JavaScript on top of Linux and Chromium. I saw, I saw a tweet from like a Google engineer saying that. I sent it to Sean and Lauren and John's like, we've known this for years. I was like, ah, I thought I had some news.

I mean, that's incredible. Presumably there's a more redundant. Yeah, no, the rest of it's like standard C++. It's just like the gooey is, yeah. And then the spacesuits were also designed by SpaceX. That was like a big reveal. There's an element to this where Elon made it look cool. Like you can tell that he made it look cool.

Is that just Elon or is that like a commercial crew? Like, will the Starliner look as cool when Boeing does it? I mean, I think the Starliner looks cool, but they're definitely very different aesthetics. And the Starliner looks more like your typical, like, old space vehicle. It's got its standard, you know, switches and buttons. And that's not to say. Spacex did have to put buttons in there. There were some things that they had to actually bring out of the interface.

There's also a, if I recall correctly, there's a huge button that just says eject. And like that is if the astronauts are feeling something that we're not seeing, they can just grab that and take the crew dragon off the falconine. But yeah, I think if you've listened to Elon, you know, over the years when he talks about space, he's always very, he just places a lot of emphasis on the aesthetic. And I think that's very clear with his rockets too. It's like he wants people to think that space is cool. And so a lot of that goes into the design part of the process. So right before this launch happened, there was a controversy at NASA where the head of human spaceflight left.

Walk people through that because I think it's still just like an unresolved question with what is going on with this entire program is it doesn't have, there's nobody in charge of it right now. That was pretty wild. I did not see that coming at all. Yeah, so the associate administrator for human exploration, human space exploration, he suddenly resigned a week before the launch. Everyone was freaking out.

They were thinking, oh, my God, he knows something about the crew dragon mission. Like, what is he not telling us? But I actually spoke with Doug Levera's name. And it's just something that he can't reveal. He said he took a risk at NASA. There's some rumors that it has to do with some contracts they gave out regarding the human lunar landers that they're building. Basically, he couldn't tell me what it was, but he said it was 100% nothing to do with the Crew Dragon mission. It had to do with some decision he made that must have violated some rules and then he had to resign over it.

So the reason I asked that question is it seems like as NASA moves towards this more commercial, model, more private companies involved in space, there are going to be many more opportunities for bad contracting processes or backdoor deals. Is NASA ready for that as an organization to be a customer like that? I don't know. I think we're going to find out. You know, I think one other thing that I'm concerned about too, and a lot of people have been concerned about during this process is transparency.

And I commend SpaceX. They've been very transparent for a lot of this process. But when you are a private company, you don't have to tell us everything, you know? And a lot of the times, like, we were getting information because we had to pry it out of them. And not just SpaceX, but Boeing, too. Like, it was, sometimes we were like, wait, why didn't we, why are we just hearing about this now? You know, like, we would hear about testing failures. Another thing, Boeing had a software glitch that we didn't know about.

We knew there was one software glitch on their first uncrewed test flight. There was a second software glitch, and we didn't find out about it until some of us were listening in on a public meeting, like a safety panel meeting, and they disclosed it there. But they had known about it since the flight, and it took them months to tell us. You would think that Boeing would know better than to hide a software glitch. Well, I think they didn't want, they really did not want to talk about it. That cuts both ways. Also, you would think that Boeing definitely hides software glitches. Yeah, that was my understanding of it.

But yeah, so I'm not pointing to anything particularly egregious. I just think that moving forward with NASA is doing these kinds of deals, and there are astronauts, right? Like, we paid for them to go to space. With our astronauts on those vehicles, I do have concerns about private companies taking that over. just in terms of information. But I guess we'll see how the companies, you know, continue to talk to us moving forward. Can I tell you, I watched this on a,

I watched the launch on a Zoom with my niece and nephew. And we like, my nephew called my mom and said, you should watch this. And then my mom called me afterwards. And all she asked was, we pay the astronauts, right? And I was like, yeah, they're like, NAS employees.

Like, it was just like not cleared her. She's like, they're not volunteers. Are they? It's so dangerous. It's like, no, they're not simply. Yeah, they do well. I just think, like, spaceflight has been out of, like, launching Americans to space from American soil has just been out of the public consciousness for nine years. And it's, like, amazing how much we have to relearn some of the basics.

I mean, I know you know because you're my boss, but, like, how many people do you think in your sphere know that we've been launching from Kazakhstan this whole time? Yeah, I think zero, zero people. Yeah, exactly. We keep talking about Boeing, but they have the Starliner. What is the status of Starliner next to Crew Dragon? Is this kicking them in the butt? Are they trying to go faster? So I mentioned it earlier.

They're uncrewed. They have, so both of these companies did uncrewed test flights of their vehicles last year. SpaceX's went flawlessly. And then Boeing's did not. So they, like I mentioned, they had a software glitch once the Starliner was deployed from its rocket. and it prevented its engines from burning at the right time. And so it didn't get into the right orbit it was supposed to in order to meet up with the space station, which is kind of a big deal because the entire point of these vehicles is to

take astronauts to the space station. So they had to bring it home early. We found out about this other software glitch that they actually corrected in time. But if they hadn't, it could have been a problem when they came through the atmosphere. So there were a lot of problems associated with that launch. So Boeing was like, you know what, we're going to do it again. And they're aiming for this fall to do another uncrewd test flight of Starliner. And then once that is deemed successful, then they will do a crude mission like the one that SpaceX just did.

How much, like the space community, how much best practices sharing of information do companies like Boeing and SpaceX do? Like when you talk about code and like Boeing has bad code and SpaceX is going flawlessly, if you map that to the tech companies we usually cover, Apple and Google don't talk a lot, right? Like, Samsung phones explode and Apple's like, told you so, and they don't help them. This seems like a different set of stakes, a different market that we're creating. Is there communication back and forth between all these companies and their agencies trying to make it all work better? Well, I know that SpaceX is pretty, they make things open source for a lot of their data.

I don't know about communication between the companies themselves, but I do know that NASA definitely shares a lot of its information and testing, because, NASA has years and years of, you know, testing data that they can, you know, provide as, like, a gift to these companies. So I know that they definitely worked with NASA on a lot of those things. And it almost gave them, no, not even almost. It gave them a leg up in the development process because if they had to start from scratch, they would have had to do a lot of that testing on their own to begin with. So I know that NASA has been a very vital resource in that department for sure.

And are there other companies beyond SpaceX and Boeing that, might participate at this level, or is it going to be a market of two kind of big companies? It's going to be a market of two companies for now, but there is another company, Sierra Nevada Corporation, that also bid for the original contracts in commercial crew. They have this like really adorable little space plane. It looks like a mini space shuttle that's designed to fly on top of rockets. And they're developing actually to send it to the space station with cargo, but they say it can also be used to carry humans if just design the right way. So that is also potentially coming.

But for now, SpaceX and Boeing are the ones for this long. Is Sierra Nevada Space Company related to Sierra Nevada Beer Company? That's really what I'm thinking here. It is not, but I get that a lot. It's just, you know, like Jeff Bezos was like, well, my internet bookstore is going great. I'm going to start a rocket company. Yeah. It's a path that people take.

If you want to feel better about it, my first inclination was the computer games company, Sierra, from like the 80s. So that's where I live. All right. I'd be remiss if we let you go without asking you about Elon. Okay. What is the current status of Elon Musk? Last I checked, he said he was going to take some time off Twitter. And then that, I guess, lasted a total, like less than 24 hours.

So he's back. And he is suggesting that Jeff Bezos break up Amazon because it is a monopoly, because it would not. publish a contrarian COVID-19 book. That makes sense. You want to break up the bookstore from AWS to punish the bookstore? That makes sense. Look, I'm sympathetic to it. I think the bookstore would still just do whatever it does.

Was he on his best behavior for the launch? Like, he was there in a suit, right? The president was there. They played macho man. That was very strange. Like, macho man by the village people while the president was like watching the rocket. Was he just like on his best behavior? Yeah, I think he composed himself very well. And I think the parts I enjoyed the most were when they, everyone realized the level of importance of this launch. And it really kind of hits home because these two men that they launched our dads. And we got to see them interact with their children when they both left. Like that was probably the most emotional part for me was them saying goodbye to their sons and their wives, who are both astronauts, I might add. And so Elon was very

clear he's like, it's important for us to bring these people home to their families. And I think him being a dad, you know, that resonated with him especially. It just, it strikes me as there's the Elon character that we see on Twitter that runs Tesla. And then there's the SpaceX Elon character who seems like a very different person. I think I have the better end of the deal in the terms of Yeah, there's like you and Sean and you're like devil and an angel. Well, here's why. It's because SpaceX is a private company. And also SpaceX inspires a lot of awe, right?

You know, and they get their fair share of criticism, of course. But it has a lot of fans. And I think he geeks out a lot talking about space, you know. And so that that shines through when he's on his, when he has his SpaceX hat on. Is there an element to this? I think about this a lot. I actually asked Liz about. this when she was on the last time. SpaceX COO. Gwen Shotwell, like, runs SpaceX, basically. There is not

that kind of character at Tesla, but she's very much sort of in the background. Do you see her taking a more public role, being a more public face as commercial crew ramps up? I don't think so. I think that's very much their dynamic, as Elon's the one out in the world, and he's kind of almost become the like PR leg a bit of the company. You know, like his tweets often are like they'll make news about the things that SpaceX is working on. You know, that's a lot of the times when I'm reporting, I'm just going through his Twitter page and pulling out the stuff that he says because that is where we learn a lot of the new developments or like one of the stuff that they're working on. I think Gwen, Gwen was definitely a part of a lot of the press coverage. For sure, she was doing

press conferences before this. But I think her job is definitely being, you know, the rock of the company and being the leader that is doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes that we don't see. Yeah. It's just a really interesting dynamic because that there's not a parallel to her at Tesla. And so Tesla just, like, SpaceX cannot be a chaotic company. Like, I don't, it just cannot be. Whereas Tesla is like free to be whatever it is. Well, it's like when you, when you have these government contracts, you know, it takes things to a whole new level, you know. And we also saw the consequences of when chaos is introduced into SpaceX, you know, with Elon smoking pot and NASA did a review of the company's safety culture, you know, that has major consequences because of the level

of work that they do. Yeah, I just don't think there's time for chaos when it comes to basics because of just what they're doing and who they're launching. Yeah. All right. I want to end with your op-ed. You wrote an op-ed about how this was supposed to be a shining moment of American unity, but it's obviously happening against the backdrop of the protests of the incredible focus on police brutality in this country.

Tell us, like, is that resonating? You said something to me that just really affected me, which is the space community is in a bubble. Is that bubble starting to break down? I hope so. The sense that I get, and I think if you talk to a lot of reporters who report on space, is that the space world does not want to admit that there are problems, they want to just continue with their work, and they wanted to celebrate this launch as if nothing was going on. And look, I understand. I am empathetic to that because I cannot imagine the countless amount of hours that people spent on this launch. But at the same time,

If they really want people to be united to watch a space launch, they have to acknowledge that there are major injustices happening on the earth below. And I think that that silence and that, what's the word? They just tried to ram through it, you know, as if nothing was going on. They're not going to change their plans. They're not going to make any kind of adjustments. They're just going to say that this is, you know, this is going to be a hopeful launch and a thing of unity. but that's just not going to work when space is a very, it's still very exclusive, it's still

expensive, and also I don't think a lot of people feel like it's for them, you know, unless you're rich or white or an man. And so I just think that the space world really needs to take a deep look and say, okay, if we really want people to be involved and excited about what we're doing, we need to work here on the ground to fix these injustices, and make sure that we are actively helping the world and making things more equal, and then people will feel like they're invited to these kinds of launches. Elon has said himself, like you were saying about design, he wants people to be inspired by the launches.

He wants them to feel a sense of awe. I think to me, if you feel that sense of awe, and then you have no opportunities to act on it, to build a career, to participate, it is actually, we've done something wrong. Like we've made some mistake if there are kids across the country who feel that sense of wonder and then they are blocked from the opportunity to participate because of whatever structural problems we have, that is, that's just an obvious mistake, I think, for the space community to say, this is the pipeline we need.

100%. And if the space community should want as many bright and amazing people to come and work for them as possible, and that means committing to fixing these structures. problems here on Earth. And I've been seeing some commitments to that eke out from the space community over time. It still just feels like they just want to keep on doing their work and not really address that. So I hope that changes. But I think we should point to something that was really powerful when I saw it. Lauren Lyons is a SpaceX engineer who does these launch live streams. And she is black and she was prominently featured on the live stream during the NASA

mission. And it caught the attention of a young black girl whose mom tweeted out, you know, how can we find this girl? Because now my daughter feels like she can become a rocket scientist. And I think that's just so compelling. That's what we need. And that kind of, that kind of stuff. And more is what the space world should be focused on. One thing you noted in your piece was right now corporate America is going through a a frenzy of brand statements about the protests, saying they support Black Lives Matter. We have not really seen that same sort of vocalization from major space companies. Is that started to change?

Like I said, it's slowly eking out. Virgin Orbit put a really great statement pretty early on. Also, Blue Origin put out a statement I saw yesterday. So I'm sure there's more. And these companies are probably going to be mad that I did not point them out. But I am seeing it, and I hope that it just is a snowball effect and that it keeps going and that this and then it doesn't stop. I want it to be more than just statements. Like, we need to see action behind it.

And there's some programs and organizations that are really working hard to change things. And I hope it just spurs even more organizations and programs that are looking to fix racial injustice and to bring more people of color into the space industry. Yeah. episode too. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for joining us. It's your day off. I told you 20 minutes. It's been 40. I never have a day off. I'm going to make you take one. It's going to happen. But thank you so much. We'll have you back soon. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your

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Casey Newton, welcome back to the Vergecast. Thanks for having me. We're going to have you on for good news one of these days. It's going to happen. It's going to be great. Have you heard something? I just know it in my heart. But sadly, it is not today. So you were on last week. We were talking about Trump's executive order, something to do with Section 230, a bit of a legal mess. We unpack 230. We unpack the order as we were having that conversation. And the executive order was spurred by. Trump tweeting, Twitter, putting a label on that tweet. It was about mail-in ballots. Since that time, the protests in this country about racial injustice have exploded to all 50 states. There's a lot of controversy about them. Trump is not doing, I would say, any kind of reasonable job responding to

them. More tweets have been moderated by Twitter, particularly in glorifying violence. Twitter has taken action against another member of Congress for tweets, glorifying violence. there has been unrest at Facebook from employees about not moderating Facebook posts from Trump. Zuckerberg had in all hands. The context of our conversation around that executive order moderating content has just dramatically changed. And the tenor inside of Facebook seems to have dramatically changed. Just walk us through that a little bit.

Yeah. So you can sort of think of it as a two-step process. The first step was that there were posts about mail-in voting that Twitter believed. sort of crossed a line related weirdly to some policies they put in place to deal with COVID-19 misinformation, although the intersection of COVID-19 and voting is actually super important and something to keep an eye on. But Facebook made the decision, you know what, it doesn't violate any of our policies. You might not like it, but we don't think it violates a policy. And then the second step was Trump did a bunch of posts that some people took to be either glorifying or inciting violence against.

against protesters over the weekend. There was one about, you know, protesters will be met with the most vicious dogs and ominous weapons I've ever seen, right? She really does talk like Palpatine. I just want to. When Twitter saw those tweets, they decided to put them behind a warning label and say that they glorified violence. And that is what really put Facebook under pressure because Trump cross-posted the exact same words to Facebook. And so now Facebook was in a position. of applying less enforcement to the president's posts than Twitter had. And for employees inside Facebook, who thought that those words did violate Facebook's community standards, it became the sort of breaking point, which then led to a virtual walkout. So tell us how that

walkout played out. Well, as employees began to debate this among themselves, a group was formed, about 400 people joined it, and they discussed ways that they could protest. And one of the things that was suggested was a virtual walkout. And so on Monday, employees changed their status to say that they were out of the office. They stopped doing work. Maybe they attended an in real life protest or they, you know, did some sort of other organizing. And some of them tweeted about it publicly. And this was a really big deal because normally Facebook has a lot of internal debate, but it very rarely spills over so that folks like us can take a look at it.

But in this case, you had about a dozen employees who, you have a lot of internal debate. said that they disagreed with Zuckerberg's decision and sort of called on the company to handle it differently. So, you know, for people like me who've been writing about Facebook for a long time, it was really striking to see so many people come out and be openly critical. Real briefly, well, one, real briefly, my wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook that is now as closed. Can we just very quickly talk about what Zuckerberg's justification was and like why he didn't think these things, these posts, like broke Facebook's policies? Yes. So it's a couple of things. One is Facebook has a rule that if a state threatens violence,

it generally will leave that post up. And the assumption has been that a state will be threatening violence against another state, right? Maybe you live in Israel and, you know, it's threatening to, I'm sorry, maybe you live in Palestine and Israel is threatening to bomb it. and the assumption has been that, well, if you live in Palestine, you have a right to know that. They did not take into account that a leader would threaten the use of force against their own citizens. And so they felt like there was nothing in the policy that actually let them remove those posts. So they felt like they had to leave it up. Yeah. And I mean, that specific issue is I think why this feels, I mean, especially agree, just on top of everything else.

It's like the very thing that people are protesting against is violence from the state. And that is the reason that Mark Zuckerberg is citing for leaving the posts up. Yeah, there are just a lot of contradictions here. You know, over the weekend, our executive editor, T.C. Sotic wrote a piece about just the enormous amount of incidents of police brutality at the protests that were captured on camera and uploaded by citizens to social media. that content is section 230 is the mechanism by which Twitter and Facebook don't have to sit around like moderating all that content. And so if you think that the smartphone camera has caused

social change, which I think it just very clearly has, there are many other consequences of it. But if you think that this window into police brutality is a function of social networks, technology, cameras, all the stuff, well, all of that is enabled by the fact that the social networks are not required to moderate in this way. And at the same time, Zuckerberg saying, we're not going to moderate this other thing. And then to be faced with calls to moderate harder, there is just an inherent messy contradiction in there. Yeah, I mean, I'm not somebody who thinks that this was a really easy call. I did think that the president's tweets were incitements to violence. But I also want these companies to make decisions that are like rooted in principle and can be

repeated and are not just the whims of their founders, right? Because when we have these unelected, unaccountable CEOs making moderation decisions that are not rooted in some sort of principle, then I think a lot of bad things do happen. What I think is really notable is that once Snap weighed in later in the week, you had two of the biggest alternative social networks taking one position and Facebook taking another. So that is really interesting to me. In the backdrop of all of this is this Trump executive order calling on the FCC to be, to somehow reinterpret section 230. If you, you know, if you ask the Democratic commissioners in the FCC, they say this will turn us into the speech police.

And then Commissioner Rosen-Worsel has been public saying that. You have the Republican commissioners in the FCC, like seemingly eager to take on that role. So there's this like churning backdrop of somehow regulating moderation on the internet. And you have Facebook and to a large extent Google with YouTube, not doing a lot. And then you have the smaller ones becoming more aggressive, feeling emboldened. Does that dynamic is not what I expected. Does it make sense to you? I mean, a little bit, right?

Like, let's say like you, me and Dieter had a web forum and like we invited a few people in. And one of them started saying like, man, I hope those protesters all get shot this weekend. We just like kick them out. And it wouldn't be related to principle. We would just think people have a right to peacefully protest. We don't want you in our forum, right? And because we're small, we don't really owe anything to anybody, right? We just kind of got to set the rules.

Whereas if you're running a platform that almost 2 billion people a day are using, the calculus changes. All of a sudden, you're taking into account all sorts of different equities that are going to pressure you to actually make the fewest moderation decisions possible and just try to let people kind of, you know, come to their own agreements or disagreements on your service. So, you know, once again, the reason this feels so high stakes and so consequential is because we have this one network that is just so much bigger than all the other ones. The listeners can go read this too. There are transcripts of Zuckerberg's all hands, internal all hands at Facebook. I think RICOD has one. There's some other ones out there. I was struck by how much he is talking about himself is the decision maker.

Yeah. He went and talked to other people. He went and did the research. He says, I know this will have practical consequences on us. he really made it about himself in a very direct way. At the same time, he's trying to set up like a Supreme Court of moderation decisions that it doesn't exist yet. There are some practical and technical reasons. It's not up to speed yet. But even right now, he hasn't divested that moderation authority. He made the decision. Yeah. And I mean, I think, you know, one reason why

so much of that meeting was about him was because the employees are trying to hold him accountable for the decision that he made, right? Like the pressure that he's getting is, hey, you decided this, why? And so the meeting is like, all right, well, here's what happened. And he sort of walks through it. But, you know, for a long time now, critics have been saying it probably doesn't make sense to have one person ultimately responsible for all of the world's speech in determining what goes up and what comes down. And that's why they have started to set up this oversight board, which is, you know, getting on its feet, but is not fully baked yet. Doesn't it make sense? I know Facebook is much bigger than Twitter. But shouldn't it be that Twitter has one set of moderation decisions and Facebook has another

and YouTube has another? Or should they coalesce into one sort of broad standard for the internet? Well, I mean, you know around here we love competition, right? I do. I mean, I'm baiting you into the question. And I do think that it has been a boon to all of the social networks that other ones exist. We've seen over and over again in the past few years how like Pinterest will make a progressive decision and then it will get copied in its own way on YouTube or Facebook, right? The existence of these other sites, they wind up becoming these little laboratories of good ideas and the best ones I think do kind of get adopted as these industry-wide standards. So, yeah, the more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned. And Zuckerberg in his meeting, he laid out some things he

was going to do and some takeaways. What are they and what do you think of them? You know, they're going to go back and look at some policies, right? Like, it sounds like he's open to the idea that if a world leader threatens violence against their own citizens, they may, they may come up with a new label, a new warning for that, right? Probably wouldn't take it down, but might put a warning. So they're going to look at that. They're going to ask employees to come up with ways that Facebook could fight for racial justice. So they're kind of like soliciting input. I mean, I'm sorry. That is a the most PTA shit I've ever heard my entire life. Okay.

You asked me to say what they're doing. So this is what they're doing. There were seven things total. You know, but I mean, I think something that we should say is the real problem that I think a lot of employees and a lot of Facebook users want Mark Zuckerberg to solve is that Donald Trump is president, right? Yeah. That's not a problem that Zuckerberg can solve. And he's trying to put himself in a position where he can make decisions. that he can stand behind and believe in,

even when there is a non-insane person running the country, right? And he doesn't want to ratchet speech so far down because of this one actor. He even says during that call, which we got a hold of the audio of, that over time, all they do is implement policies, which generally just reduce speech. And he's getting very nervous about it because it feels like a one-way ratchet down.

And so he's trying to figure out where can he stand firm to permit speech so that Facebook is still a vibrant source of discussion, if you see it as one, when Trump is gone. Well, this I think leads to, you wrote about this in your newsletter, this framing from Azaraskan. I actually went to college with Azaraskan. Really? It did.

Wow. Free speech legend. Yeah. And so he's got this framing freedom of speech versus freedom of reach. And the thing that gets me every time is, yep. okay, you're going to moderate. But Facebook, the most shared content on Facebook is from Fox News and conservative sites. The YouTube recommendation algorithm famous for radicalizing people in this way.

Like there's an element of we will permit you to post, but we will not amplify you. Snapchat obviously took that. We should talk about what Snap did here. But it doesn't seem like maybe Zuckerberg understands the distinction there or he does. He doesn't want to make it as clearly. is some other folks too. I think Facebook has been a little slower to consider those freedom of reach questions

than some others have. Their recommendation algorithms, who gets suggested to whom, they've been pretty behind on that stuff. So when Snap comes along and says, hey, Trump can keep his account, he can post all the snaps he wants, but if you go to the part of the app

where we promote interesting accounts, which is Discover, he says it's just not going to be there. And so he can still be found. You can still find him in search results. But if he's going to get any views, it's going to be because he earned them and not because we handed them to him. Now, it's easier for Snap because Snap is mostly a messaging app, right?

It doesn't have a central feed. If it did, all these questions would be a hundred times harder. But it at least raises the question for Facebook, where are the surfaces in the app where you are just helping Donald Trump build an audience and spread these messages, which do include stuff that walks right up to the line and probably tips over of wishing violence on peaceful protesters. Where are the places within the app that you could pull back on that and restrict that if you wanted so that he could still say whatever he wanted, but you would not be the handmaidens in helping him to build a larger megaphone? And that goes to the idea that the only moderation

decision that exists is leave it up or take it down. There's a massive spectrum in between. And it feels like Facebook hasn't really thought about the fact that, okay, maybe we just don't show this content in the feed as much as the other stuff we want to show. Maybe we put labels on it. Like all this other stuff you can do, they haven't, there's no transparency around that. And he was weirdly critical of Jack Dorsey's decision to put a warning label up instead of just taking it down too, right? He did criticize it. His point was, if you think a post is going to get someone killed, take it down. Like, why would you leave it up at all if you thought it was going to get people killed?

That's not weird. That's like completely reasonable. Yeah. You know, as to like labels, Facebook was early to labels, right? I mean, I think they were probably the first of the social networks to put up, like, fact checking labels once they finally started a fact check post, which wasn't after, it wasn't until after the 2016 election. So they put up the labels. They also use this really confusing terminology. They would say, well, we reduce the reach of this post, right? Like it's permitted on the site, but we're going to reduce its reach. And then, of course, you're thinking, well, okay, but from what to what? Right. And it's like, yeah, you know, we decided it was so bad. It was only going to get 463 views. You know, it's like, okay, well, but who did you show it to and why? Right. Like at a certain level, all of these questions can just sort of break down into insanity. But I wanted to make that point because they have certainly addressed the freedom of reach questions in a bunch of ways before.

But as you noted, Eli, all along the way, it does seem like it is those big far right megaphone. that have grown the largest. And one of the questions that you can debate with Facebook executives all day if you want to is, is that is because Facebook and other social networks and the Internet that we have now just radicalized a generation into becoming fascist, or were there just a lot of latent fascists in the country? And as soon as they got a hold of their own printing presses, they just kind of came out to play and started talking to each other.

What did you make of that Wall Street Journal report that Facebook was told by its internal researchers that it was radicalizing people and decided to ignore it? Well, I can tell you that Facebook hated that story. That was communicated to me in very strong terms. Very strong terms was that communicated to me. I read about this in my newsletter and I think a couple of things need to be said. What is polarization is a tricky word. It's kind of an umbrella term that can mean a lot of different things in this context.

And it's worth asking yourself, if you ran Facebook and you decided that your number one aim was to reduce polarization, what does that mean? Does that mean we should have one party? rule in this country? Does it mean that we should all agree with each other on every political issue? Right. It's a really weird kind of metric to organize around. Now, at the same time, if an effective using social networks is that all of the liberals are now way more liberal and all of the conservatives are way more conservative, well, that does seem like a problem and something that we may want to look into. And so they built these teams that tried to devise ways to stop that exact kind of thing from happening. And what Facebook would say is, we implemented the ideas that

we thought were best and we threw out the ones that we thought, you know, would be counterproductive or would have other negative effects. I think actually both the journal and Facebook are right. I think the journal was right in the sense that, well, let me start. I'll reverse it. Facebook was right in the sense that they have implemented measures to try to reduce polarization in certain ways. Like, that's true. You can look them up on the internet. They exist. They're in the product today. But the journal's larger point was that polarization really isn't that important to Facebook. They did not make it a priority. And that I think is true. And executives have, more or less told me that because there's a study that came out,

Ezra Klein wrote a really good piece about it in Box earlier this year, and it said if you look at what they call affective polarization, which is basically, hey, your daughter is going to marry a Republican. How do you feel about that, right? And they looked at kind of how these sentiments tracked in different countries before and after Facebook came out. And what you see is that as internet usage goes up in these countries, in some countries, polarization goes up, in some it goes down,

in some it stays the same. it doesn't seem like social networks are having this uniform effect all around the world. And it seemed like if Facebook, which is the same product in all these countries, had these unique properties that were driving us all mad and causing us to, you know, hate one another, then you would see a uniform effect and you don't. And it is really on the basis of that study that I think Facebook's leadership team decided, this just can't be that big a priority for us because it's not empirically clear to us that we are uniquely polarizing the world.

Obviously, there are other factors in every other, like, there are not there's not fox news in every country that facebook is in there's not a president who for his many many moral faults our president is very good at being an internet troll and like making policy through internet trolling it is maybe his only skill uh that seems like the problem here and you already brought it up like the problem for these social networks is they are built to amplify some kinds of leaders, amplify some kinds of companies, let, I don't know, Instagram crafters all find each other. They are not built to mitigate a president who seems outside of all norms and boundaries of the American political system. Is that just Zuckerberg has to realize

like he's not normal and I got to do something special? Or is it he's just trying to walk the line until there's an election and then he might have to deal with it then? So this is a really good question, right? One of the reasons why Facebook employees were so upset over the weekend was the sense that there is nothing that Trump could do that would be enough of a red line that Facebook would actually remove one of his posts or take some other action that you know would would make him mad, right? And, you know, what I heard back after that was, well, if you go back to last month, the president's campaign team had tweeted this ad that looked like the official U.S. census when in reality it was just like a garbage campaign survey and it misrepresented itself

and Facebook removed it. They said this is not, you can't make it look like people are taking the census when you're just trying to like collect their email address so you could get them to donate to you, right? And it didn't make a lot of waves at the time, even though, you know, it was, you know, Facebook saying you're not allowed to run this kind of political out. And it's particularly interesting given all the crap they took for for saying last year that they were not going to fact check political ads right here's a case where they actually sort of did if you squint right so facebook's point to me was look we he he already crossed the red line and we got rid of the post so why do people think that there's no line that he can't cross that we won't make a decision on you know so here like it's i i feel

like i'm all my predictions are always wrong but like here's here's something that i'm predicting I predict in the next month or so Trump will say something on one or more social networks that is so horrible that it makes all of this discussion look quaint right? Like this conversation will just be a time capsule of oh, remember when the worst thing

that Trump would say was when the looting when the shooting starts the looting starts the looting start or when the looting starts the shooting starts, right? Casey, Casey, I'm sorry, you say you're going to go out on a limb and make a prediction and your prediction is Trump's going to do something awful on social media? that is specifically like far worse than what he said before in a way that clearly violates everyone's guidelines. And I think there's a really good chance that like by July or August, Trump will have said something that Facebook removed.

Like if I were a betting man, I would make that bet. And yeah, so that's the bet that I would make. It's interesting. I said this to you earlier, but it's interesting that the census is the line. Like you can do a lot of things, but you cannot remove Mark Zuckerberg. ability to get data about the United States population. Like, you that's he will not let that happen. When you look at the things they draw really hard lines around, it just tends to be stuff that's easy to figure out where there's not a lot of black and white, right? And like, you know,

that's why they will say, on one hand, we're not arbiters of truth. But on the other hand, if you say America votes in December, they'll just take that down instantly. And they won't even send it out to be a fact checking. But the reason is it says like, well, despite how polarized we are in this country, we still agree on the calendar dates. Right. That's like something that polarization hasn't taken from us yet. And so it's just like easy to build a policy around. And like are you faking a census is like easy to design a policy around. But you know, getting back to what kicked off this whole discussion is, what can a sitting

president say about protests in his country and what he might do to stop them or manage them? That's like there's not an up or down left or right answer there. Right. Like that is just shades of nuance. And that is hell world for their policy teams. T.C. wrote a piece this week, it was on my mind, too, that these networks should just ban these actors. Like, they're obviously bad actors in the system. They're outside of our political norms. They're calling for unacceptable levels of violence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

My argument is the conservative movement in this country, for decades now, has thrived on saying the media is against them. It has thrived. Like, Fox News is the most popular cable channel in a country, you just watch it. I have family who watches it. I hear about it. The foundational value of Fox News is the mainstream media is lying to you. But they're the most popular source of news in the country. If Facebook is just going to be

accused of being biased against conservatives, Twitter is just going to be accused of censoring conservatives, why not take this step and say, actually, there are some lines. Because Facebook does not just want to be a social network for Democrats. Like, Facebook wants to

be a service that all people use to keep in touch with their friends and family and talk about the issues that are important to them. And if its policy framework is we're just going to sort of make a moral calculus about how much we like all of the elected officials in the world and then keep up the ones we like and get rid of the ones that we hate, then they'll just break the service. Like it stops working. The other thing that's that's weird here, not weird, the other thing it's like maybe hard to suss out is it seems to me like Facebook really wants to have a a universal set of rules for every country. So you can make the argument that, like, they don't want to, they don't want to do what you're suggesting, Nelai, because the, the news dynamic in the U.S.

is very different than the news dynamic in another country where Facebook operates, and they want to operate, you know, 2.5 billion people, you know, America accounts for, you know, some small percentage of that. And so the question then becomes, like, is that actually feasible to have a universal set of rules for a network that big. Well, I mean, again, like a lot of my criticisms of Facebook really come down to size, right? It has so many problems of size. And it loves to talk about the benefits of size. But here, everything we're talking about, here's a huge drawback.

We're trying to create one context for all of human speech. It seems pretty obvious when you say it like that, why it's not working, right? Like, the entire history of humanity is organizing into tribes with shared norms and values. And now we're trying to march all of humanity. into one online space and telling them to abide by one set of norms and values. And that's an extremely weird thing to ask of humanity. And yet that is what Facebook is asking of us. You know, all of this framework is gone deregulated out of existence.

But there was a time when the FCC had local broadcast ownership rules. And it would limit the amount of radio stations any one person or company could own. It would make sure that a TV station, broadcast TV stations, were, owned by some local nexus of people. All that is deregulated. But the foundation of that was, hey, we should not have media consolidation in this country. Hey, you should be somehow connected to the community that you're serving as a broadcaster. The reason they were able to do that is because the radio waves are a public resource. So they had some sort of like policy mandate to manage them. You cannot do that with a Facebook. But that set of principles does not seem to have carried over

even as a norm or a philosophical framework for how Facebook should manage itself. And I've now baited you right back into the competition question, which is, if you broke up Facebook and said it needs to be smaller so that it can be managed, does actually breaking WhatsApp and Instagram off of Facebook accomplish any of that? Or is that just we feel better because we took a hammered or a thing that we think is bad? I think it's a fair question. I think, that if you spun off Instagram, we would still be asking whether Trump's post could be on Facebook, right?

At the same time, I would say that even if you don't take it to this place of break them up, you can look at how other social networks have managed this problem. So again, benefits of competition. Look at what Reddit does. Reddit doesn't say, really, we're going to have one context for all of speech. Now, they do have a floor of rules, right? Like, you can't post. illegal content on Reddit. There, you know, there's a handful of things that you just can't do

on any subreddit. But any subreddit can raise the ceiling of those rules. So maybe you run a, a subreddit for children and you decide you don't want there to be any cursing or profanity. You can set those rules. You can build those norms, right? You can have your tribe and you can have moderators that sort of make sure that those rules are followed. And that way, like-minded people can congregate and and have exchanges and not have to abide by the code created essentially, I shouldn't say created by, but enforced by one person who none of us elected and is accountable to almost no one. Right.

So I think that that kind of local control could be reborn in these networks if they revisited those policies. Do you think that is something that Zuckerberg is considering as he builds this sort of global speech council? I don't know if he's considering that specific thing. I think that the oversight board is about something different. One, it's about creating some legitimacy and some sense of justice and their decision-making because now there is a formal mechanism for appeal.

And it's no longer Zuckerberg making the call, right? Think about how excited Mark is going to be a year from now where there's some really tough call that he doesn't have to make because it can just be referred to the oversight board. and they will abide by that decision. And some people will hate it and some people will love it. And Mark will get to throw up his hands and say, well, we built this institution because we believe that experts with backgrounds in speech law and, you know, human rights should be making these decisions and not me.

And I actually think it's really hard to argue that you're better off having Mark make those decisions than the oversight board. Yeah, that unelected group of global elites. I'm sure that's going to go great with the Fox News crowd. What happens next here? I know you said you hate predictions and we don't really know. But we are operating in sort of a minute to minute moment. The employee unrest is very high.

The last time there was employee unrest or it felt like Facebook couldn't recruit, we saw them sort of take action on privacy. Yeah. What happens next in the turn of the wheel for Facebook? So I will say that this particular employee revolt just within the past 24 hours, does not seem to me to be the sort of thing that is snowballing. Now, I still have some reporting to do on this sort of over the weekend. But it doesn't seem like the sort of thing where thousands and thousands of people are now

lining up against this decision. And while I don't want to take anything away from the 400 or so people who participated, it's worth noting that the Google walkout that we all paid attention to a couple years ago, I think it was about 18,000 people, right? So it was really, really much bigger. I think there are some questions about what are those 400 people do, how many of them will quit. Some have quit already. I know that others are asking around, seeing what jobs are out there.

That kind of stuff has a delayed fuse, right? It can take a month or two to line up a new job, particularly during a global depression. Some employees might be likely to stay because we're in a global depression. So all of those are kind of unknowns. But I think the sort of secondary question is, how much longer do we have before Trump does something really, really inflammatory and posts about it on a social network? that's the thing no one can predict, but I assume that once it does, we will be having all of these same conversations all over again. All right. Well, it's a good thing you read a newsletter about Facebook and democracy. And would you believe that it's absolutely free, Neelai? We just give it away to people.

Yeah, we've got to figure something out. Yeah. Do you accept Bitcoin? Oh, yes, absolutely. Wow. That was so enthusiastic. Where can they find the interface, Casey? You can find it at theverge.com slash interface. All right, my friend. Well, I'm sure. I'm sure. Sure, we're just going to have you on the show over and over again, until the end, the heat death of the universe at this point. Well, this is the only human contact I have anymore, so I love it. Thanks, Casey. What's nice to soon?

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verge cast. All right, we're back. We have to stop going along, Deeder. Have you noticed that we, every week now, we just like, we hit an hour and a half? You know what? I think the answer is, Nelai. I think the answer is to stop saying we've gone long and just accept it in our hearts. Yeah. Verchast quarantine edition is always. 90 minutes long now. That is our policy. I ran it by Zuckerberg. Look, there is all the other stuff happening in the world. It is important. It is arguably more important than gadget news. It is more important than gadget news. However, our listeners consistently tell me and Dieter they enjoy the escape. So I want to make sure we talk about some technology news, some gadget

news. It's still happening. The industry is still moving. Please know, like, we take this stuff to you. You can look at the site. Dieter and I are in charge of this website. Look at the site. That's where our priorities are in terms of coverage. But this stuff is still happening. And I take it very seriously. And Deeter, I know you get a lot of notes about this too. People need a break. And this stuff is the break. So that's the balance we're trying to strike. Let us know if we're getting it wrong. But it's on our minds every single day. So to give you a break from having to think about politics and what the Trump administration has done, we'd like to talk about a phone that is fundamentally broken. because of Trump administration policies. Oh, God. Sam Biford reviewed the Huawei P40 Pro. And there's, like, three things that I think are interesting about it. Number one, the most relevant thing is unless you live in China,

your app experience on this phone is going to be just fundamentally flawed because it doesn't have Google Play services because Google's not allowed to provide software to Huawei because Huawei's in China, and there's this whole thing going on with that. And so if you're in China, great. Like, you've got the entire ecosystem of content and services and apps and whatnot. But you can't get it in the U.S. full stop. And in Europe, you can, but you don't want to because, like, the app, even if you didn't

care about Google's apps, the apps that are available for it, are really not good outside of the Google Play ecosystem. However, in an alternate universe where that wasn't true, I think the P40 Pro would be, like, an incredibly fascinating head-to-head comparison with the GAL. the S20 Ultra, because I think that it did the camera stuff in a better way than the S20 Ultra in just insofar as like they didn't screw up the focusing. They threw a really, really huge sensor. I think it's like one over one two eight or something. It's a gigantic sensor.

And it does focusing pretty well. It has an incredible performance in terms of low light photography. So, like, when you look at the phone world, you've got Samsung throwing hardware at the camera problem and not so good at software. You've got Google throwing software at the camera problem pretty bad at hardware. And I guess you put Apple kind of in the middle there. And Huawei is definitely Samsunging the camera better than Samsung. They are doing a better job of just solving the problem with hardware than Samsung is right now. And I find that fascinating.

And then the third thing is Huawei hasn't got the memo that everybody hates curved display. and like that moment is done. Not only did they curve the left and the right, they curve the top and the bottom, and it's just like, stop it. Stop it right now. Why? It wouldn't be bad if anybody had ever figured out

really what to do with those curved edges. Right, Samsung had the weird swipey thing, but like you don't want your content spilling over there. Well, the thing that you do with those curved edges is you just like, it's just a shortcut to getting rid of bezzles, right? And like minimizing or eliminating the view of bezels. But like the screen should just be inoperable. just light up there.

Just like make it look pretty. Have it light up, but don't have the pixels, the touchscreen part of that actually do anything. And you're done. I don't think that's the right solution. Like you're watching a video and there's just like shining pixels at you? Or they just go black? No, like it can display content, but just don't have it curve so much that you lose it.

Like have it be basically flat. Just use it as a bezel reduction technology. That's all it should be. I feel, I just, when did bezels get so bad? It's fine. Have a little bezel and make the, rational. Like, no one's going to be mad at you.

No one, no one is buying a phone because of the bezel size. As we have seen from the iPhone year after year, where they're like, check out this giant forehead bezel and it's fine. Anyhow, iPhone SE2 still has a huge bezel. Yeah, it really does. We're not like cons bezel. I was. I'm a con bezel on that thing.

Anyway. Well, that's why Huawei keeps doing this. It's your fault. Yeah, well, I'm sorry. All right. Well, Marquez Brownlee has actually been, like, leading the charge against curved screens. He's been really, really strong at about it. And so I don't want to take credit for complaining about this stuff.

Nealai, can you tell me what's going on with HBO Max and data caps? That's my victory. I'm very excited about this. All right. Well, I mean, but I'm also sad. It's a sad excitement, I would say. It's bittersweet, but like more energy. Like a high-energy bittersweet.

Like the take a monster energy and put it in a Wothers. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. caffeinated bittersweet. So I'll just give some backstory here. There was a concept called net neutrality. No, I don't go back that far. Oh, my God.

So Julia and I interviewed Tony Gonzalez on Tuesday. He is the CEO of a division of AT&T called Otter Media, which is responsible for the operation of HBO Max. Got it. HBO Max is a new streaming service. It's very confusing. Literally my first question in him was, you should change your title to CEO of HBO Max.

I don't think most CEOs get that question. Yeah. He was like, no, I'm not. Anyway, so the guy in charge of H.U. Max, Tony Gonzalez, comes on the Vergecast. It's a great interview. Julia did a great job with it. And I, of course, ask him the data cap question, which I have been talking about on this show for years and years and years. Net neutrality is gone.

AT&T buys a content service. Obvious thing for it to do is give priority access to its own content on its network. And I'm not making it like a moral judgment here. It is just a rational business decision. If you own the pipe, you want your content to go through it better than your competitor content. Right? Like, it's why you would do it. It's why you would buy, it's why AT&T would buy a time winner.

So I ask him and he says, we've had the conversation and don't know the answer. Later on, I push AT&T really, really, really hard. And they finally tell me, okay, we are letting HBO Max sit outside of our data caps. They did not want to tell me this information. Like, I promise you, they were not happy to say it to me. but I pushed them really hard on it. Which is super weird because wouldn't they want to tell their customers? Wouldn't this be like a benefit of HBO Max for AT&T customers?

I don't know, but if you look around, it's not in any of the marketing material. All of the marketing material from HBO Max is it's bundled into your certain AT&T home internet plans. It's bundled into our ultimate plans. It's free. But what they're talking about is the cost, the monthly cost of the service. Right. So if you have AT&T unlimited, elite preferred 25, whatever their insane names are. HBO Max comes for free.

If you have 18T home internet, 1,000, HBO Max is for free. If you have one of their other plans, it's free for a month. All of it is about that monthly service cost. Nowhere, in zero of their marketing, is there a reflection of whether or not it hits her data cap.

Right. So I pushed them really hard because it seemed insane to me that the CEO of HBO Max does not know this answer. That just doesn't, it didn't click right. So I pushed them really hard on it.

And they finally told me it does not hit their mobile data caps. So if you buy a 10 gig a month plan from AT&T and they still sell them, they're, they used to be called mobile share plans and not called something else because they're always changed the name. But if you buy 10 gigs a month of data from AT&T and you stream HBO Max all day, you still have 10 gigs of data. You stream Netflix all day. You've used up your data. If you have one of their unlimited plans, which have what they call soft caps, right now the soft caps are set at 22 gigs and 50 gigs. depending on what you buy.

So you have 22 gigs of what they call priority data, which just makes me sad. So you have 22 gigs of priority data, which means you get data. And if the tower is congested or the network is busy or something, your speeds will throttle down. Okay. So if you stream HBO Max all day on an AT&T unlimited plan,

it does not affect your 22 gigs of priority data. If you stream Netflix all day on your unlimited plan, it hits that cap. Underneath this is a system they call sponsored data, which is a hedge to make it seem fair. I just want to be really clear about that. Sponsored data is the net neutrality equivalent of the E on the end of 5GE. Well, they all did it for a minute.

So AT&T's had this program on sponsored data since 2014, which it's effectively zero rating. So if you're in Netflix and you say, man, I don't want AT&T customers to use out their 10 gig data cap. I'm going to pay for that data myself, right? So you can write AT&T a check based on the predicted data usage of your customers

and then whatever. You've sponsored their data. So now you can go advertise to your customers. Hey, you can stream Verge video stream service. We've got to start around streaming. We're like late to the party at this point. Yeah, it's been a... So let's just say it's the verge.

So you can stream Verge videos all day in AT&T and it won't hit your cap. But I have to pay for it. That's a check I have to write. Well, AT&T, owns HBO Max. So HBO Max is writing a check to AT&T mobility for

sponsored data. So it's a cost for HBO Max, and it's a revenue for AT&T mobility, and at the top of AT&T, it's just fake money. It's just moved from one pocket to the other. Moving from one division to another.

And they're totally fine with it because they don't have to break out the P&L of HBO Max. It's just AT&T. If you're Netflix, that's real money you have to pay. So either you're now, saying to AT&T customers as Netflix, we will hit your cap and HBO won't, which is, you know,

if you're out on your phone, it is likely you'll pick HBO because it won't hit your cap. That's a choice you would rationally make. Or your Netflix, you pay the real money and you pass the cost onto your customer raising your prices or lowering your margin. Or your Vervege video and you don't launch your service in the first place because you know no one will pick it because they don't want to hit their cap and you don't want to have to pay for the sponsored data cost. And so all of a sudden, the lack of net neutrality has suppressed competition, and therefore HBO Max wins. Yeah, like, or your startup costs get, yeah, your startup

costs to start a new video streaming service and compete with HBO Max could just ever higher. So like, is that going to play out? We don't know. This is one of those when net neutrality is going away. People said this was like a fairy tale. Like it was a bomb that wouldn't go off, you know? Well, here it is. And the thing that strikes me is AT&T has not wanted to say it. And when we interviewed Tony, he didn't want to say it. And we pushed it out of them. And immediately the thing that happened is a coalition of senators, Ed Markey, Ron Wyden. They sent a letter today being like, tell us about the serial rating scheme. And I'm pretty sure the reason AT&T didn't want to say it is they did not want to attract this kind of scrutiny, even though there's no net neutrality. because it just doesn't seem fair for AT&T to exempt itself and not exempt everybody else.

So the comparison is to T-Mobile, which has binge on. So if you watch Netflix on your T-Mobile phone, it doesn't hit that data cap. But Ben-John is an open program. Almost any service router can sign up for it. It's free. You don't have to pay for – the service writer just don't have to pay for it. And it's like – it's not beloved in sort of net neutrality circles, but it's – at least something close to open.

Right. So there's no gradations of competitiveness for video service providers. You just sign up for binge on and you're like, yep, our video is going to stream at 480P. Whereas with AT&T, you have to pay them and they're effectively giving it to themselves for free with this accounting trick. That seems way more problematic in terms of maybe not legal net neutrality, but in terms of network operation. Do you think that AT&T was like nervous to say it because this is a lot.

a company that is perfectly happy to lie to you about whether or not you have 5G in your status bar by putting 5GE. And yet they were nervous to say this thing that their customers theoretically would want to hear. And I just can't help but wonder why are they being nervous about it now? And like a year or three ago, they might not have been. And I just have to think that the streaming wars have heated up. And now there are other companies with a huge bank account that have a history of suing people that might actually like cause some problems for them. So they're unhappy about the government scrutiny. But they're probably. not eager at all to have Disney be like, hey, this is bullshit. We're going to use our club to do

something about it. Yeah. And it, you know, the net neutrality fight, as tiresome as it is, has, it's not actually over, right? There are still state level net neutrality laws that haven't really been challenged. The public safety throttling has been remanded. Like, it's not over. Like there's not, you can't quite say net neutrality is gone. It's gone, but there's like this ancillary fight next to it that isn't it's not a stable ground for companies to operate on. So they took it still smell it in the room. It's like a. Yeah. That's one way of thinking about it. So it's still it's still there. And I think making these moves just gives more energy to California or New York or what have you to pass their net neutrality laws. And now they have

now they have something to say in terms of defending them. Here is a real concrete harm of not having an neutrality law. And so we, California, are going to vigorously defend it. And when we go to court, we're going to say, look at this harm. And I just think, and I really mean this. Like, I don't think Tony was dancing too much. It is the rational business decision for AT&T. It is legal for them to do it. The question is, should it be legal? The question is, should the internet have these kinds of gatekeepers? It's funny. We just had like all of this conversation with Casey about Facebook moderating speech. The question is, do you want 18 and T? moderating with another mechanism what you're able to watch for free or not.

And I've made this comparison 10,000 times I will make it again. What we are cruising towards is AT&T customers streaming CNN for free and having Fox News hit their data cap. Just after that whole Facebook conversation, think about that next level of cost. Whatever you think of CNN, it's free to watch CNN. Whatever you think of Fox, it's going to cost money to watch Fox. just by dint of the data plan that you have. That is, to me, it has always been problematic. It has always been the heart of the conversation.

So we'll see. But it was just, it was a real roller coaster to get AT&T to tell me this information. And now we're seeing some scrutiny of it. Let's talk about Google and TV, man. Yeah, so the XTA, well, first it was 9 to 5 Google and that XDA developers got leaks of the upcoming Android TV thing. We don't know what it's going to be called. to me it makes sense that they would call it like Nest TV because they're using Nest for their home products.

But it looks like it's basically a successor to the Chromecast that is a Chromecast but happens to run Android TV. So it has a remote control and it runs Android TV. And, you know, it's codename Sabrina. We don't know what's coming out. Presumably in the fall. There's rumors that it'll cost, I think Protocol had that it was going to cost less than 80 bucks. So there's a new version coming.

So great. It'll be cheaper than the Apple TV, but that's no big accomplishment. because everything's cheaper than the Apple TV. But the thing that's interesting to me is this is the 50th time that Google has tried to get TV right. And the only success that they've had was like the Chromecast. So they're trying to build off that, I guess. But I also think that if they're smart, they're going to build off YouTube. And they'll make YouTube feel like a first-class citizen on the main UI.

And if you just think about the main UIs on different devices, like Apple has just got a grid of icons because they can't get anybody. to use the Apple TV app on the Apple TV, and no one wants to, like, participate in that. We've had all these debates, and we've had Julian talking about reverse carriage disputes. You think people don't like Apple and don't want to be in there? Like, the number of fights that Google has had with cable companies over the years would blow your mind. So, like, the thing that Google has to do is, like, put YouTube front and center and maybe YouTube TV front and center, which sort of is interesting because, like, it could be, like, if you use Google stuff and live in Google land, you should get the Google TV. If you use Apple stuff and live at Apple Land, you should get the Apple TV. And if you use Amazon stuff and live as Amazon land, you should get a fire TV.

And so the stick attached to your television is becoming part of the ecosystem buy-in that you need to live with in a really real way. It's interesting because, Julia, today, minutes before we started recording, published a piece about Roku's numbers, Roku now controls nearly 45% of connected TV viewing time. So the total number of minutes watched on smart TVs, 45% of those minutes are on Roku devices. The next highest Amazon Fire TV, 19%. Yeah, so Roku's winning, but they're very good at getting on cheap TVs. Their hardware devices are cheap, and they're also, like, easy to understand,

and they're relatively neutral because they're relatively non-threatening to these other companies. That's changing, right? They're threatening to HBO Max. HBO Max is not on the Roku platform. Exactly. And that, like, they're starting to flex a little bit. The underlying HBO Max, we've seen some reporting. Julie has done some reporting.

HBO Max is not on the platform because eventually they're going to launch an ad-supported version of HBO max. And Tony basically said that to us. It's not now. It'll come down the line. If you run ads on a Roku, they want a cut of that money. That's part of their business model. And the HBO is fighting against them. And, like, they don't have the app now because they're having the fight about the version

of HBO Max that's coming in the future. It makes sense. You should do that. But Roku's at a place where they can say, we will not have HBO Max on our platform at all because we control so many minutes of viewing time. So once again, we're talking about a platform banning content based on money in the background.

It's like a TV neutrality issue. Oh, my God. Can you remember web browsers? Web browsers are great. They, uh... Can we just briefly talk about what I'm, I was writing this, like, you know, article in the newsletter, I wanted to just call back to all the things that went wrong with Google TV's efforts over the years. And I completely forgot

that in 2016, the Tom Wheeler, FCC, and the bottom administration tried to force all cable companies to allow neutrality for cable boxes so anybody can make a cable box that would work with your cable system. Yeah. Like, this is a thing that happened. It was called hashtag unlock the box. Yeah. This was a period of time when, like, the FCC would call. me with like exciting activism news and I'd write it up as though it was going to be a thing. By the way, this went nowhere. They eventually were like, maybe just make apps. If please, please just make apps. That was that was where that ended up. Well, so it's interesting to pull that apart. Like the cable TV system was another kind of network.

It was adjacent to the internet, but it was a video, one way video broadcast network. That was an upstart designed to like break the establishment of broadcast TV. That's true. And eventually they added like some amount of interactivity to that video network right you could make purchases and buy video on demand you could do pay-per-view all this stuff but it was still like basically a one-way broadcast network and when they went to digital they encrypted it and the idea was we should allow anybody to build a box that will encrypt this bundle of video channels that's being sent into your house and the first cut at that was cable card which is just continues to limp along as some kind of disaster and then the second part was we'll do it in software we'll build a set of

and then anybody can do it. And Google was super hot on this. And they actually built some prototypes. They showed me some prototypes of like, we can decrypt spectrum and we can build our own guide and UI. And what you eventually had as a model was, just like you buy the internet and bits come into your house and you have all kinds of front end to internet service,

you should be able to buy any front end you want to video service. And if you want the Google interface for cable or the Apple interface, and this would have been great. and the cable companies are stupid and they shut it down and said eventually we're going to stream everything anyway and now we're at a place where everything is streaming, everything is apps

and it is incredibly expensive, hard to find anything and what people really want is something that looks an awful like a cable box built by Apple or Google or Roku and it's just like this cycle just keeps repeating and the cable companies don't realize

like oh we should just charge people an extra 50 bucks a month. for a video services package and let anybody build an airface for it, because we're cruising right back to it with Netflix and HBO Max and whatever. People are, they just want a bundle pricing. That's my prediction. I don't know if it's going to go anywhere. I'm assuming Julia will have a better read on it than I do because she's in it.

But it's just funny how fast we're cruising back to a cable model. We'll just see how it goes. Yeah. One last thing, real quick, because we're running long, you know. Very long. Chris Welch reviewed the app mode, the new arc. from Sonos that supports Atmos. I know you've got one in your house.

I do. Other than looking like really dumb because it's just full of holes. It looks great. I will say this. It looks great, really. It looks terrible. Like our very, very good photos still, I'm like, no, thank you. No, it looks great.

It's very black. It is on a, the white one, I don't know why anybody would buy a white one. Yeah. Like, why would you want a glowing white bar under your TV when you're watching movies? But the black one basically disappears. Okay. And it is actually, it's so hard to do these products launch. Because we don't see them in person so we get the review units.

So I was very skeptical of it being made of plastic. It looks great. It's totally fine. It sounds great. Really? Yeah. So it's here. It's in the next room in my basement sort of media room.

I have like the full Atmo system here. I have a Denin receiver. I've got, I think it's 5.1.2. So I've got speakers in the ceilings for the height channel. I watch. Everyone knows. Like all the lights. It is totally competitive with that system.

Wow. So absolutely competitive. So competitive with that system in turn? It's like what? You end up spending like two grand to get like the sound bar, the sub and a couple of surrounds? No, no. Just the arc itself. No, nothing.

Really? I mean, you should buy, you should get the sub because it's like, sub looks cool and it makes all the explosions boomier. But like in terms of immersion. So my favorite at most test scene is the opening scene of baby driver. Okay. Yeah, yeah. There's just like a lot of stuff whizzing around. The music's fun.

There's a helicopter that goes by. Yeah. That's just like a really good test of the thing. Like, it's all really loud, but can you place this one helicopter or this siren? Like right at the beginning of that scene, you hear a helicopter go back. Right. So it's like I, that's the thing I test everything with. Atmos, like the arc running that scene in Atmos, totally as immersive is my seven-channel real

Atmos system with speakers in the ceiling. Right. And in some cases, better because all of my speakers are in the ceiling. My rears are in the ceiling too. And the Atmos bounces sound off the rear wall. So it can locate them in like height a little bit more accurately. Right. That said, I have a fairly low ceiling and I have a wall right behind my couch.

So what the arc is doing is it's bouncing sound off of all those surfaces. I took it upstairs, which is a much more open main living room. All that's around it. Just like one away. If you don't have the walls, it doesn't work. So if you have a fairly normal living room, which is a box. Well, and if you have a fairly new TV, because this whole thing runs off HTML arc, there's only one input. It is the input of HTML input that has to come out of your TV, and only recent TVs fully support Atmos.

So, like, your options for, like, this whole, I don't know. Like, I don't get it. Every other high-end sound bar, like, they give you the stuff. Like, did you see the Dyson finally put out? Like, we wanted to make this electric car, but we can't do it. and so here's what we would have made. I've got a point here. Did you see it? Yes.

Go look at the post for Dyson's proposed electric car, and go look at the steering wheel in particular. It is covered in buttons and switches and dials, and they're amazing. It's right out of like a 1984, like, cyberpunk movie, B movie. It's terrible. It's amazing.

When you buy high-end audio shit, you expect to have like some gie gauze. right? And Sonos is like, we hate gigas. There's one input. And if your TV supports it, bully for you. If it doesn't, you get a degraded experience at the end. And that's just like weird, right? I ask Sonas. Let me unpack the tech geek side of it. Okay. And then I have a theory that is unconferred. So the way Atmos works is object-based surround. It doesn't have discrete channels. It just locates sound in a, like sound objects in the field. And then the system processes it hour it's going to try to locate those objects.

You can send Atmos out in a compressed way over Dolby Digital Plus. Some TVs can do it. And that's compressed Atmos. My TV cannot. Chris Welch's TV cannot. So my 2016 LG OLED cannot send out Dolby Digital Plus over its arc port, over HTML. If you use optical, you can't do it. You're just like stuck.

Some TVs in the middle of. of that figured out how to send Dolby Digital Plus out over Arc, standard HTML Arc. Right, right. So you can get compressed Atmos to the Sonos arc over arc. The name is confusing in this context, but just hear me out. Yeah, there's also EARC, which is like... Right.

Then the new standard is EARC, which is enhanced audio return channel. EARC is higher bandwidth. It can support uncompressed Dolby Atmos, some other uncompressed formats. It has a data sync channel, so it can automatically sync the image on the screen and the audio so you don't get weird lip sync problems. It's enhanced. It's enhanced. It's enhanced. It's enhanced.

So the E in front of it means it means it's real. The E after it means it's fake. Is that the distinction there? Anyhow, so new TVs, super new TVs have EARC. Like, it's the new standard. If you have an older TV, 2016 or below, you probably won't. get Atmos out of this thing. If you have a 2017 TV, I would say, it's a Google it. Look at AVS forum. People make lists. If you have a, if you bought a TV this year, it's going to be fun.

My guess, and so this is annoying, in order for me to test Atmos here, Sonos sent me a new Sony TV because my TV can't do it. And even though I have an Apple TV and a Chromecasts and a Roku and all these other Atmos devices, because it has to pass through my TV and then go into the Sonos, it won't work. How much does this soundbar cost? $800. Some portion of people who want to buy this thing are people who, A, want to have Atmos and B, have already bought a big-ass nice TV that isn't, like, they bought it early enough

because they're early adopters that it doesn't happen to support it. I am getting emails from people who own the LGB-6 OLED, which was like the first mass market reasonably price point OLED. Yeah. So like. And they're mad. I'm mad. Well, but Sonos chose to only have.

the one arc HTML port on this thing. They could have chosen to put the GIGOs on it because like what some portion of their customer base would want it. And you'd think a relatively large portion.

Well, so I think there's two arguments here. The first argument I sort of understand, which is Atmos isn't like everywhere yet. Mm-hmm. And doing HTML pass-through adds a level of complexity to the system that Senos doesn't want to engage. And most people are not us

and they don't care about Atmos. They're going to plug it in and they're going to get 5.1 out of their older TV, and it's still going to sound great and it's great. Right. Yeah, that's basically the argument Patrick Spence made to us. Yeah. You can go listen to that interview.

The second argument, which I'm, I actually had this guess that people buy TVs and sound bars together. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, there are some people who have older TVs like me. They're going to be upset, but most people go to Best Buy, they buy the package, TV soundbar together. The person comes, puts on the wall, and that's it until you buy a new TV in a soundbar.

So I asked Patrick Spencexby, he said that is correct he told me there are three other tradeoffs into not having the thing he said one you have east of use you have you have to start letting people select inputs you have to add an additional remote to control inputs that's just not their philosophy they don't want to do that he said it would affect sound performance because they'd have to change the internal design of the product yeah okay but that's what he told me uh it would take more space inside the product it would affect sound and he said we're placing a bet on e arc as we believe it is the long-term industry trend So they built the product for the future.

So they've got this moment where I think some people who are early adopters are going to be mad. Yeah. But the product itself will last for a much longer time and they didn't have to build all this input menuing. Well, given how long they kept the playbar in the market, yeah, they don't want to redesign this thing for like two decades. 45 years now. Like, EARC is the thing. So that's the answer. I really think that people buy TVs and sound bars together is from their perspective, very competitive, very competitive.

very compelling, from my perspective, is a guy whose TV can't do it, is less compelling. But there it is. Well, and I guess for them, like, if you are not in that group and whatever, like the beam is actually a super good deal. So just go get a beam and stop complaining, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think this does a really credible job with 5.1 surround. Like, you can still get that. It still works. It still sounds like surround sound. I, you know, I wrote this line that our commenters are taking some issue with, which is like, it's $800, it's a lot of money.

If you add a sub, it's like $1,400. It's a lot of money. But in terms of cost and complexity versus a standard Atmos system, it actually makes a very convincing case for itself because, I don't know, I had to cut circles into my ceiling and run wire and hide the wire and make it look nice. And I had to do that eight times. Yeah, well, I live in an apartment,

so I can't do that. So I got to, like, put little poles up or mount visible speakers. up there or I can just get this. I'm not going to get this because I don't think my Vizio supports it. But I see what I'm saying? And you get this like extremely credible surround sound experience. And I think I just, I say it over and over and over again. If you have $1,500 to spend, which I understand right now, but you might not.

But like, that's how much you, we talk about spending on the flagship phones all the time. Yeah. Right? The top end note when it comes out is right at $12, $1, $1,300. an iPhone 11 Pro Max 1235, whatever the numbers are with the top end storage is right at $12, $1300. If you like your phone, like the better money to spend is Adobe Vision TV and an ammo sandbar. And I think this to me, given that it's connected to the rest of the Sonos ecosystem, given that it has support for all of the services, given that you can just like airplay to it,

like this is the $800 you should spend out of sandbar and then buy the 65 inch TCL road. TV. You won't get HBO Max quite yet, but you get Adobe Vision TV and now you're home and all of your entertainment's at home and you've got effectively a competitive theater setup, a competitive theater setup. That's a way better value for dollar than a phone, right? To me right now. Yeah. Anyway, I wish people ask me why I didn't make a video. It's like, how do you make a video about helicopters sounding like they're behind you? Right. You can't. So like, it's hard to, it's hard to explain, but it's definitely worth checking out. And I just continue to believe, like, if you're at home and you're consuming all of your entertainment at home, spend the money on the TV and the audio, and you will be just so much happier than a moderate increase in cell phone picture quality. That's it. We have gone now, I think, an hour, two hours is what my recorder says. Yeah. So here's what we're going to do. Andrew's going to speed everything up by 10%. This virtual has is going to be 45 minutes long, but we're to sound like chipmunks. Teeter, tell him about your newsletter. newsletter. It's called processor. You can find it at theverge.com slash newsletter. And it's about

computers. Yeah. Casey is on. You can subscribe the interface. It's obviously the interaction between the reader's newsletter and the interface is like all of the things we're interested in. So it's good to have them both. They play off each other. We have just our run of interview episodes continues. Next week, Ashley Carman I interviewed the CEO of Tinder. Oh, L.A. Seidman. He was super interesting. I'll give you a little preview. Tinder video dates have to be chaperoned for obvious reasons. so they're building AI chaperones for video dates. Amazing. But just to make sure you don't do the bad.

Quite a job. It was a wild conversation. That's coming on Tuesday, back on Friday with the chat show. Tweeted us, I'm at Reckless, Dieter's at Backlon, Casey's at Casey Newton. Lauren Grush is at Lauren Grush. That's it. Rock and roll.

Paul.