The Vergecast - The Boring Company flamethrower, Samsung foldable displays, and iOS12 reports

Episode Date: February 2, 2018

The Vergecast is here once again! Nilay, Paul, and Dieter run through the news that hit the site this week to fill you in case you missed it. We talk about the Boring Company’s flamethrower, some Samsung leaks and previews, a bit of 5G wireless network talk, and wow — now that I’m looking at it — a lot more topics. Keep listening for a deep dive into what each member of The Vergecast thinks The Vergecast is, as well as Paul’s weekly segment that everyone knows the name of. Happy Groundhog Day! 01:12 - Elon Musk has sold all his flamethrowers 11:22 - Samsung Galaxy S9 images leak ahead of next month’s unveiling 13:38 - Samsung says foldable displays and Bixby will help drive growth in 2018 17:41 - The thesis of The Vergecast 27:48 - The Trump administration said it has no plans to build a 5G wireless network 40:26 - Paul’s weekly segment “Not my editor’s choice” 44:07 - Headphones talk 50:31 - Nintendo is bringing Mario Kart to smartphones 54:17 - Apple reportedly focusing on reliability and performance in iOS 12 over new features 1:06:55 - ICE has struck a deal to track license plates across the US Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the podcast that you are listening to. It's the flagship podcast of a lot of things. An ever-expanding Venn diagram of media companies and ideas. But we're the flagship of those things. And of all the podcasts you're listening to right now, this is clearly the flagship. This is the best podcast you're listening to right now. Anyway, I'm N Eli. How's it going, everybody?

Dieter's here. I'm here. My parents always told me that I was their favorite middle child. I was the only middle child. Oh, man. That is the most Minnesota trauma thing you have ever said on the show. Paul, hey Paul. Hello.

How's it going to, man? I'm also a middle child. Although not sure of my parents' favorite middle child. I was a baby. That was obviously the favorite. It was great. My sister's been mad at me for 30 years. Real quiet week this week.

I got to say. Yeah. Like a really, really quiet week. That post-CES lull. Just living. Our flamethrower is quiet. Do you want to start with the flamethrower? Let's just jump right into the flame thrower.

Or as I like to call it, modified airsoft gun. So our man Elon Musk, who our managing editor T.C. Sotic says is the biggest celebrity in the world of the verge, which I think is true. Elon, he's not content with landing the rockets or launching bigger rockets. He's not content with making electric cars or a new smaller electric car. He's not even content with landing rockets literally in the ocean water. He's not content with literally launching his car on his rocket, which is what he's doing. I love it.

I love the ambition. Has a third, well, he has like 15 other companies, but he's got a third company. Which started as a Twitter joke. Started as a Twitter joke called the Boring. company is near as we can tell. So it started as a joke. As in boring holes through the ground. To build a tunnel from LA

to San Francisco or something. So you could put a little fast little car conveyor belts underground. Basically. It's just like very obvious. What if you don't have a Tesla? Are you allowed to ride in the tunnel? Can you just like get on one of the conveyor belts and just

hang on? Well, it's just really clear that a central thing, like a central problem in Elon's life is getting from L.A. to San Francisco. Like the hyperloop, The whole hyperloop started because he's like, how do I get from L.A. to San Francisco faster.

Okay. Okay. In that context... SpaceX is like, I got to get from L.A. to San Francisco. So in that context, Elon Musk was like, what if there's an apocalypse?

And there's all these zombies in between me and L.A. and San Francisco. How do I solve the zombie problem? So the boring company is his company to dig a tunnel from L.A. to San Francisco. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he bought a boring machine.

He's digging holes in the Tesla parking lot. but he wants to like raise money and hype. So first he sold hats. Right. Hats. Hats. Like, like ball caps. I'm trucker hats, actually.

I highly recommend this is one of the silliest videos on YouTube. Sam Shephyr got a boring company hat and like unboxed it. It's like a very serious video. And at the end he's like, I'm wearing a hat. It is one of the silliest things I've ever seen. I sold a bunch of hats, made some money. Then he's like, afterward. done with hats, we're doing flamethrowers, which everyone thought was a joke.

Turns out, a flamethrower, not a joke. He sold $10 million with a flamethrowers, $500 a pop. And then he gave everybody a free fire extinguisher. So it's true. It's fact. I missed that part. So this is like one of the greatest. And he's like, he's posted Instagram videos of him running around with a flamethrower.

I mean, we were trying to figure out like what to write. Like, Liz Lapado, our science editor was like, I've written all of 43 words. And I was like, I don't think you need to write more. It's a video of Elon Musk running around with a flamethrower. It is the thing that it is. I think why people that, why Elon Musk is the verge's biggest celebrity is because people who read the verge, people, most of the people I would say that write the verge would think in their heads, if I was as rich as Elon Musk, I would do the same weird shit. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, to be fair, like he's accomplishing amazing things. Absolutely. SpaceX is like an amazing thing. Accomplishing everything but shipping model 3s. Yeah, that's, he's getting there. Sorry. But he's like, he started a car company. But it's true.

He should ship more model 3s. I think everyone knows it. It took me a while. I forgot about the cars. Right. The main thing. I forgot about the car thing. Literally the main thing.

The number one thing. Yeah, he's working on that. The number one thing is going to Mars. Yeah. We need to be a two planet species now. Anyhow. A flamethrower. How does Mars way into the L.A. to San Francisco thing, though?

No, I think that's just like literally there's like big problems and little problems. And if you're Elon, little problems are on the scale of redefining the trip from L.A. to San Francisco. If a few million people from the West Coast would just move to Mars, the traffic between L.A. San Francisco would have been so bad. No, it's like, you know, like you're like a regular person. You're probably in your carlessness right now. Like every now and again, you're like, man, I wish my commute was better. And you might think about moving or, you know, getting a different job or telecomputer.

He's like, I'm going to dig a hole, a tunnel from these two cities for my car. And that's a choice he can make. That's great. Here's what he needs to do. Send robots to Mars that build a sign. And the sign says, if you lived on Mars, you'd be home by that. Anyhow, the flamethrower threw our staff into what I would describe as a completely productivity-free tizzy.

Liz Lepado, our science editor, literally just said the word Flamethrower in all caps for the better part of a day, both privately in our Slack and publicly on her Twitter, super into it. The best joke is Liz asked the staff, what should I burn first? And Casey Newton piped up in our all-hands meeting

and said, the patriarchy. Yeah, that was very good. The haters was also listed. Yep, yep. Then we fell down the hole of trying to build our own flamethrower. Which, by the way, Ars Technica did the work of finding the Airsoft gun that this thing is basically modeled after.

They look almost identical. It's the CSI XR5 Advanced Main Battle Rifle. No, so that's Elon's. No, wait, but Elon. So, Elon's is a modified airsoft gun. So when you, as a regular person, you're like, I would like a flamethrower, and you Google how to build a flamethrower, you land on what I think is the crowning achievement of human civilization,

which is flamethrowerplans.com. Flamethrough. Which is a whole website, and the top of the website says everything you need to make your own flamethrower for only $450. That's the number one duck, duck go result, too. Yeah. So you know, they're on it.

It's not Google's like liberal machinations. Also, they, um, So that... Everything you buy in FlamethrowerPlanus.com, you end up donating to St. Jude's Children Research Hospital. Oh, yeah, that's great. Literally, this is what we... Our whole civilization has been building towards this. So this flamethrower that you build is basically a modified pressure sprayer.

Right? So if you're going to like pressure wash your car, but instead of filling it with water and soap, you went with gasoline. That's what you... Well, it's like a propane torch. It has a propane tank on the top. It's kerosene. I've fallen deep down the hole of building your own front door. Elon's flame.

And this is like a classic when you think of a flamethrower. Oh, that's your flame thrower, not Elon's flames. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm saying. The build your own flamethrower. The traditional one is like what you think about. It shoots a stream of gasoline that's on fire. It shoots really far.

Elon's is more of like a blow torch. Like it's what, as Dieter is saying, modified airsoft gun that appears to be more of like a blowtorch situation. And then now you have to have a really intense conversation of what a flamethrower really is. Right. And I say they are all flamethrowers. I'm expansive. If you just pick up a burning log and chuck it, that's technically a flamethrower. You are the flamethrower.

But when you say Elon's... Would you say that you're the fire starter? I think of my son more of a flame pusher than a flame thrower. Wait, are you saying Elon's flamethrower as in his actual one is different than the one of the boring. company sold to consumers. He made one himself and now they're taking it and finishing the job to sell the consumers.

He is, you might say, a flame hawker. Anyway, all this is genius. It got a lot of journalists and people and Elon fans talking about flamethrowers for a week, which I consider a victory. That's true. He made a bunch of money. You said it set many people ablaze with excitement.

Oh, my God. The question is, he's got to finish the car. He's got to launch the rocket. I just want to meet the class of people under Elon who do the work. Yeah. I don't think they get enough credit. Do you think a good CEO is the sort of person that sets a path and then gets out of the way?

Doesn't micromanage? I mean, when I think about myself. It seems like it doesn't have time to micromanage. Yeah. I don't think it's time to micromanage. Because that means there are people who are doing the work. What? I think we should give them more credit. I think a great CEO is a guy who shows up at work one day and he's like, you know what?

Yeah. This company that I just started to dig a hole from LA of San Francisco. We're doing flamethrowers today. And everyone has a good time. He probably bought pizza. Who is the man inside of Elon Musk's suit that Elon Musk,

the small child, is sitting on the shoulder and poking his head out? Now, I'm just like, SpaceX is really, really successful. There are some people at SpaceX that have more public-facing profiles. Gwen Shotwell, like, President's CEO type. She's obviously running SpaceX.

She's doing a great job. Tesla is like a little bit more, mysterious, right? You don't see a lot of Tesla executives out in the world. Elon's great. He's very ambitious. He's obviously driving a lot of these decisions. But to run that many companies requires a kind of big stable of operators, right? And like, I'm curious who those operators are. But I'm also in love of flamethrowers. And I will tell you this right now. We bought one and we're going to have one and we're going to fire that flamethrower. What are you going to burn? Other than the patriarchy.

I got it. Oh, gosh. Whoa, I did not agree. I'm kidding. This is the first thing here. Wired. Wired's paywall. We're to burn to the ground.

That's fine. I'm trying to do some media. Yeah, some more beifs. Just whatever beeps I can get up. You're getting really close to, like, making actual threats here. You should probably slow down. Hmm. There's nothing happened this week.

We got to start some conflict on the first camps. So, honestly, that was a big. biggest scenes a week. Like, I'm going to be 100% honest with you. The biggest, what you got? What you got? A Galaxy S9 leak. It looks like a Galaxy S8, but the fingerprint sensor isn't in a stupid place. I thought the fingerprint sensor is going to be on a new screen. I hoped it would be. I kind of thought it would be. I'm disappointed that it's not. I suspect that Samsung ran into the same problem that Apple runs into now because Samsung sells at that scale. They could probably make 100,000 of them, with the fingerprint sensor under the screen,

but could they make, you know, 10 million of them? And I bet the answer to that is no, and so they have to wait another year until production can ramp up on that part. And I saw a really crazy stat about Samsung. We often talk about how Apple has a billion iOS devices in the world. Samsung's closing it on 2 billion Android devices. No one's ever hit that number.

That's bonkers. But like... 200 total sold. 2 billion. Sorry. 200. Yeah, Samsung has sold 200 Android devices. The Galaxy node forums are sales success.

How many of those are living phones? Yeah, I think that's the big difference, right? I think with iOS devices, you have this expectation that iPad 2s are still out there doing stuff. The Galaxy A9 tab 5. Right. Probably not doing so great. So I think there's a difference in kind. But in terms of just numbers, if that's what you're comparing numbers, they shipped a hell of a lot of devices.

They haven't done yet. I think they're closing in on it. You know, I was wondering Samson also the world's biggest chip maker once you, if you include memory chips. Yeah. They passed Intel. Oh, that's right. They're a big

company. Yeah, I always wondered what Remember when you'd like, you'd have an old computer and then like, okay, I bought a new computer, what do I do with the old computer? Oh, well, it could be your like MP3 server for your home. Like when will we be able to take our old phone and like slot it into like some sort of server type thing and then it becomes like I mean like

any phone that you bought in the past like five years is probably more powerful than your like Wi-Fi router as far as processing power like I don't know I just think yeah the thing to do is like you buy a you buy an IR blaster attachment and make it your TV remote control oh that's so smartphone. Samsung also posted huge revenue numbers. They're doing great. It's a great quarter. And they're saying their next wave of growth, foldable displays. We've already seen some like prototype renders, I guess you would call them Dieter. Yeah. And they made like this insane promo video a couple years ago of like women at the coffee shop. There's a jerk with a Bluetooth headset on one side and there's the cool guy with the foldable phone on the other side. Just like old

misogynistic Samsung stuff. So that exists in the world. So you have a sense of what maybe they're thinking. The other thing they are going to chalk up their growth to. So if Samsung makes a foldable phone, yeah, I think that I'll probably drive some sales. It's pretty cool. It's going to be pretty bulky. The other thing that they said

that would drive sales in the future. Bixby. Bixby. Bixby going to drive sales for them. What are you doing? There's a little dog in shoes. Everyone loves tiny little dogs. We're wearing shoes. Bixby.

They really think Bixby is going to power some growth. Someone, I think Bixby is going to be adjacent to growth. I think they're going to put Bixby on as many things as possible. And they will say Bixby drove the growth. It won't be true. That's like saying you put a dog in the car and the car goes somewhere and you're like, the dog drove the car. Think about that. Whoa.

That sounds like a beautiful world to me. But like. Actually, that's so good. But the dog is in the passenger seat. There's along for the ride. Was it, though? Foldable displays driving the car. Dog just sitting in the car.

Yeah. The car here, I think, is mobile phone sales. But maybe the dog is driving the car. You just can't see it. How long do you think that Samsung is going to keep pushing Bixby? There's a world in which they're like, nope, we're in it. We really mean it. And of course, that's a world they tell you that they live in.

But truthfully, we know the answer. The answer is they're going to eventually. have to like give up on it and let it slowly become a weird random setting deep in the heart of the Samsung experience which by the way is what you call touchwiz now the Samsung experience I'll go ahead how long like like how many years are we going to be in a world where Samsung's like and it's got expee I think people companies and like open source projects because there's open source projects around making like a voice assistant as well there's one like on Kickstarter, like called Mikecroft.

I think people... Is it Mikecroft the bad guy in Sherlock Holmes? Mikecroft is a brother in Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, yeah. Okay. He's just lazy. So I don't think any of these voice assistants are very useful. And until one is truly useful, none of them can be like truly, truly dominant.

Does that make sense? Some of them are very useful. They're just useful in very limited contexts. Well, I have this theory that at the point that voice assistants are truly useful, there will also be an interesting open alternative. It might not be the winner, but it will be, it's like once we've solved enough of the voice problems. Because if you think what was so exciting about a personal computer, like what was this exciting? exciting about like a Cabador 64 or like an Apple 2 you could write your own software for it you could create like your own functionality and what has pushed the the industry forward is people who

decided that computers were their own and that they were going to tinker with them and then they were going to make their own software and so but like the thesis of the the verge cast is those those beautiful glory days of the web and hackball computers is over and we're all controlled by corporations now and it's impossible to build the product without being fully controlled by a question corporation. And so Paul, I think your theory is right. And it will happen the same year that the Linux desktop takes over. Wait, wait. Let's go all the way back to the thesis of the verge cast. Okay. What? Wait, the thesis of the verge cast is that if we just talk enough in people's cars, we can save the web. That was my understanding of what we do here. So, no, the thesis of the

Vergecast is much more closely aligned to the feeling of being a Vikings fan. You want that to be true, but deep in your heart, you know that it's going to fail and that you're going to lose in the playoffs and that some other jerk team with jerk fans is going to get to play in the Super Bowl in your hometown because your team inevitably botches it at the like 11th hour and you don't get to ever have anything good in your life. I think what we just learned is, I'm pretty sure that's how technology works. Deeter has said Firefox to be his default browser. I said Duck, Duck, Duck, Go, it would be my default search engine.

There you go. Okay, I thought, well, two things. Yeah. I thought the thesis of the Vergecast was boat related. So I was way off. But if I really thought about it, my personal thesis is that there's certain inevitabilities in how software evolves. And I think we've talked about this before. I think you get walled gardens because gardens are fragile and you need to tend to them.

And at some point, those walls don't necessarily come down, but the problems inside those walls are solved. And I think, you know, if you think, how hopeful were you in the 90s when you had Apple versus Microsoft for the desktop? And that was everything. And then Linux came along. And it didn't take over the desktop, but it did take over everything that wasn't the desktop because it was open and it could evolve to fill niches like the server. It always wins. I want to say it always wins, but it has a lot of upsides that the closed things can't capture, like the server, like Android. And so I think if there's something truly very fundamental and important about voice assistance,

if they're not just some sort of massive branding exercise on the part of these large companies, if there's something that they will actually give people that will be truly integral to their lives, then an open alternative will show up and push that section of the industry in new directions. But here's my question. How open, right? I agree with you a lot, actually. But I think the thing that we've learned over and over and over again is that the platform vendors cannot predict what their platforms are going to get used for. And when they try to build their platforms around specific use cases, they back themselves into corners.

They inevitably make bad decisions. And people go elsewhere. So the question of how much freedom do you give developers while still maintaining things like security. With voice assistance, like, securing those microphones is really important, right? Like, that's a big deal. So how do you maintain security and still provide some amount of openness? I look at just this range that we have right now. Right.

And it is so hard to get Siri to do anything other than what Apple wants Siri to do. Like, you have to ship an app for the phone and that phone, like, that's a big deal. Imagine a world where you're not allowed to change your wallpaper on your phone. That's the current status of voice assistant. I believe that was the first version of Windows phone. Also the iPhone. You couldn't change your wallpaper on the iPhone forever. No, but let me just let me just thought.

Okay. The competitor in the market that does make it easy to do weird, crazy, unexpected shit is Alexa. That's correct. You can just do it. It's chaos. Is that open enough? So let me give you one specific example. We can knock something specific around.

Boat related. Okay, good. Take the ferry to work. The ferry schedule is online. It's hard to use. The ferry app on the phone is a piece of junk. One of our developers, Heather Savetta, her husband made an Alexa skill that just pings the server and tells you when the ferry's going to come. It's a private skill.

He just emailed it to me and pushed a button. And now it's on my Alexa. If that had to be an iPhone app, he would have never done it. It's an open skill he's going to submit it. It's like a whole thing. By the way, it's great. I love it. making that for me. They use it too. They live in my same number, but it was nice that they gave to me.

That is the level of innovation where like the small thing leads you to maybe try to build the big thing, but the barrier to entry for the small thing is so low. Whereas there's just no way you could build that for Siri without building a whole app. I don't even know how to begin doing that for assistant. There's a whole other thing. We brought up security, but there's this other question of is it possible for a decentralized open thing to have the infrastructure and the like AI chops to have the basics that enable that sort of small person to make that innovation? Or can you build this new interface that's being created, this intelligence system assistant interface to the internet and to all of computing?

Can you build it without being Google, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft? Can you is like their their core thesis, especially Google's core thesis is we are so much better at AI than everybody else that we can like we can enable stuff that you like you wouldn't be able to do on your own. The other thing that I'd point out in terms of like some of the stuff like that data is out there. But like there are these big institutional things that might differently. You bring up the boat schedule literally today, sidewalk labs, which is. related to Google, like announced a thing that they are creating a grand, massive public database of like curb information, what curbs are open, and it'll someday work for mass transit schedules and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which sounds great because all of these like local transit apps

are actually kind of bad. But if like, if Google just solve the problem for everybody with a big standard that Google supported and then it plugs into their AI, like that sounds great. And so, but it also is scary because like, then Google controls everything. So the fundamental question for me isn't, you know, what's the cool open source assistant that, you know, when's that going to come? How's that going to work? It's, can it overcome the giant institutional advantages that these big companies have? So Paul, I think your, your thing about the 90s is exactly right.

We couldn't imagine a world in 1994 where somebody could, like, create something that would go around the power that Microsoft and, you know, not Apple, but Microsoft had. And so it was scary and weird. We didn't foresee the web. We didn't foresee Linux taking over, you know, servers in the cloud and phones eventually. So, look, the thing that I don't know is, what are we not foreseeing that will end around these intelligent assistance? Well, I think there's two things there.

I think Waze is an interesting and also maybe a little bit sad example of it's sort of a ground-up. people want to use their data together to solve a problem. But Google bought it. And the problem is driving your car through like tiny little sleepy neighborhoods and ruining everybody's like experience in their neighborhood. Anyway, continue. To possibly stretch the Linux analogy too far, it was one guy against however many million man hours Microsoft put into Windows NT.

But that one guy was copying. a very successful operating system from the 70s. And I don't think there's an example right now of like, oh, I'll just copy that AI assistant from 30 years ago and use that. But I do think there is a, there might be a one guy trick that can, I don't know. I'm not super hopeful. I want to be hopeful.

You know what? I can sum this up really easily. Is it another? Evil always wins and therefore root for the Patriots in the Super Bowl. I knew it. I do like that we started with... Evil doesn't always win Lennox. I do like that we started with is this dog driving a car?

And we ended up with, does evil always win? It's another Vergecast, everybody. We did it again. I'm going to read an ad. This episode of the... The Vergecast is brought to you by Simplsafe. Here is some exciting news. Simplsafe is a company that's been around for many years.

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It's not dogs driving cars. It's something even stranger. It's so strange. This started, what, Sunday night, Deeder? Yes, Sunday night. Yep. Sunday night, Axios, which is an upstart political publication based on a little town called Washington, D.C. They're actually great. I love Axios. If Reid works there, she's wonderful, great tech reporter.

Axios publishes Scoop. Scoop. The headline literally, the headline is literally scoop, Colin. It says scoop. Trump administration planning to nationalize 5G network. Considers. Well, they changed. Oh, really? Oh, really?

Oh, no. So they went out strong. Went out strong. Planning? Strong. And they had a document. They had a whole document. They had a whole deck.

I read this doc. The deck is insane. Also, you have to tilt your head sideways to read it? PDFs, always very complicated. Look, we can build a national 5G network, rotate 90 degrees, way over our heads. So there's a whole doc. We got it. We read it.

It's nuts. The idea is someone, it's some government agency. Is terrified of China. National Security Council. Yeah. It's terrified of China. It says China's got a lead on 5G. Right.

And because all of the networking equipment manufacturers are Chinese like Huawei, right. That we, America, the government should take the spectrum back from the carriers and build our own using equipment that was made in America which makes no sense. I just don't understand it.

It makes sense in the very, very abstract, right? If you look at, I don't know, look at the way wireless service works in the UK. There's like a general sense that there's like a big centralized network and then all the carriers like leasing bandwidth on that network to sell the customers. And since everybody's on the same standard,

everyone has the same baseline, and it drives prices down and drives innovation. Again, this is a very, very, very, very, very distant comparison. One of the reasons why this scoop rang true is because at CS, you know, Huawei was, was got to have a phone for America. But America said, no, no, Huawei. AT&T and Verizon, by the way, turned out.

There were rumors that that was the U.S. government's pressure or not. Glad wrote a great piece about Huawei's CEO stood on stage and basically was like we're going to, you got to figure this out. Guys, like we're in every other country in the world. Right. Which is a fact. So that's, it rang true, right?

The Trump administration, particularly aggressive towards China. China. Well, this Wallway stuff was going on a couple years ago. It did not ring true insofar as the idea that the Trump administration would nationalize anything ever. Right. So that part seems very confusing.

But you're right. So network infrastructure in the United States informally, the government suggests that our carrier should not buy Huawei equipment. Right. That's been going on for a couple of years. So the question, this is where it truly falls apart. There are already 5G networks up and running in this country. Built on equipment from Erickson and Siemens and Nokia.

like Verizon's got one, AT&T's got one. Verizon whole page of partners. Like, if you would like that to happen, maybe, you know, corporate tax breaks, you know what the Trump administration likes better than nationalizing industry?

Corporate tax breaks. Like, give them a tax break for building equipment in, you know, America. Oh. You could just do it. But, you know, what you don't have to do in that case, that requires accountants

of which the government employs many. It does not require, for example, network hardware design engineers. That's the tough part. The problem and the solution seem very different. So then I tweeted like, this seems like nonsense, and people are cheating back. Like, they want to build a network end to end so they can spy on everybody. And I was like, oh, they can already do that.

They just have to ask. And they're like, no, they control it. They could like wear a headset and listen. I'm like, no, they already do that. Definitely something to pop it in my head. Yeah. They could do it. Like, like, I like imagining, here's how I imagine it.

The NSA is like, it's not fair. Every time we want to spy people, we have to intercept their wireless riders in the mail and then hack into them to install our spy stuff. It's too hard. We want an easy spy. No, but they did that too. Do you remember the HP, Carly Fiorina? Like, they slid them, like let them into the facility.

Yeah. AT&T built them a facility. Yeah. It's already happening. Why do you want to run a customer support? number. The NSA is like, what we need is to build a consumer service. We're going to have to spin up a Twitter account called NSA cares. And when your water list goes down, people can be tweeted us. New question. Which voice assistant is totally of the NSA's pocket? Anyway, so this

happens on Sunday night. It's fucking Bigsby. Are you kidding? They'll do anything. No. So this happens on Sunday night. Everyone starts swarming it. Tony Rahm at Ricode, who is an absolutely excellent policy reporter next day publishes. Trump administration has wants nothing to do with this. He talks to sources. Ajit Pye, our man, the FCC is like, no, don't do that. The other commissioners the FCC are like, no, we're not doing that. Democrats and Republicans alike.

It's something we all can agree on. Like, literally. This could be the unifying issue of our time. Ajit and I on the same page on this one, probably not a good idea to nationalize 5G. Can I ask it more like abstract question? Yeah. What would be, oh, and there's also a little technical hurdle where you can't really build a 5G network right now without having a 4G network. Yeah, that's a huge hurdle.

There's also just a random graph at the end of the document that's like, we're also losing the AI race and this will help. It's like, what are you talking? What shardinet fueled adventure have you gone on here, man? Wait, why is it shardinette? I just imagine NSA. It's shardinet, you know. That's what we have in the house. So a lot of people are pretty interested in, like, municipal internet service, right?

Sure. What would you say is the philosophical difference between a 5G infrastructure, theoretically and implausibly built by the federal government and, like, a municipality saying, will build and own a fiber network? I have an answer for this. Because I, so do I, but I want to hear yours. Okay. So my, so every time we argue about neutrality, which we do a lot. Sure. Welcome to the Vergecast.

My issue is that consumers are not well served because of monopoly-like conditions. And they don't have, because they don't have market recourse in the form of competitors that they can't get better products and services. So a municipal system, there is recourse for the customer of that because you could vote the bastards out. Right. So if your mayor decides he's going to build municipal Wi-Fi or she's going to build municipal Wi-Fi and they blow it. Well, you could vote your federal bastards out too. Yeah, but like I would much rather have competition. Right.

And most of the municipal services are proposed not as like replacements for a free market. They're proposed as a public baseline system. And this proposal is flying in the face. It's a vibrant. So, like, my position is markets need competitors. Right. And competition serves consumers well. Okay.

And regulation should be in service of providing good market conditions for competition. Mm-hmm. Which, and if you absent competition, which is where we are, net neutrality, for example, we should provide consumer protection. But, like, I would rather have competition than consumer protection. If you build municipal broadband, you're digging wires down, you know, main street. and, you know, Jefferson Avenue and whatever. This would be a national, it's a national resource. It's literally the spectrum.

It's like where you're allowed, what radio waves you're allowed to push out into the air across the whole country. And having that be different from like municipality, local areas, causes huge problems because everybody has to have different equipment. It would never work. And your phone in Tulsa wouldn't work in New York, blah, blah, blah. So it makes sense to have a, national standard for what spectrum and what types of radio waves get to be used for what.

And so if you, but if you nationalize that, I mean, again, like, go, go full socialist. In theory, I'm okay with it. In practice, they just, I don't, I don't think they'd be good at it. Yeah, I think if our country was much, yeah, like, our carriers who are profit-making enterprises not great at running wireless networks all the time. Right. Our country is like way smaller. Yeah, sure, right?

Like the problem set becomes smaller. It's more like local. But it's like a really big country. I hate both things. Which one do you want? Pure free market. But then that inevitably is monocally and then you don't have a market at all. No.

Yes. Markets and small. Also, if you like pure free market, why not let the municipality build a broadband network? They're just another player in the game. Because they have course of power. Sure, but I'm saying markets tend to monopoly. It's illegal to do this or that. But straight up, they just, they will because then you capture 100% of a customer base and you're fine.

You don't have to spend money making new products. Just horse and buggies for days. It's weird. We don't have horse of buggies. How'd that happen? I guess there was a law. I made horses illegal, Paul. Don't you remember the Patel Act of 1875?

No, you're right. There's other disruptive competitors. But markets tend to consult. If the government would allow AT&T and Verizon to merge, they would do it tomorrow. And they should. That would be insanity. It would be so much work. It would be crazy.

But they would be crazy. Yeah. Right? Because then they would just own almost all the customers in America. They wouldn't own them. Where are they going to go? You're going to go? You're going to try Google FiLife like Dieter?

Where are you going to go? I'm a Verizon customer and a Phi customer. Thank you very much. Yeah. All I'm saying is my central contention is there a short. be competition. Absent competition, you should have some other remedy. I think the central thing

is freedom of action. Freedom to use your property, how you want to use your property. But it's not a property. It's the public's property. Often it is the public's property. The public is granting you the right of flag. Yeah. The airwaves of America are the public's property.

They're least. Because they just won't sell them. But they're right, because they're a public resource. The Homestead Act of 28, Look, when I made horses illegal, like Paul J. Miller. Elon Musk owes this to me because otherwise he'd be riding an electric horse to space. I don't know what that means. I'm reading another ass.

This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by Mattress Firm. You guys must be riding a lot of mattress because they're back. Mattress Firm has one question for all of the I'm going to listen to a podcast to help me fall asleep people. Are you struggling to get some shut-eye? Because you answered, yes, you're in luck. There's a great tip for I can zonk out more easily. Mattress Firm, America's neighborhood mattress store, lets your budget stretch farther when you're looking for ways to improve your sleep.

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Again, go to mattress firm.com slash podcast to learn how you're sleeping could be monumentally improved. If you're still awake, the show's going to happen again with a little segment Paul does every week called Not my editor's choice.

Oh my God. Oh. Fire! All right. This week, as is his right, Vlad wrote a review about a mouse thing. Freedom of it.

action, Paul. He loves, called the rock at Cone Pure. Cone spelled with a K. It's a mouse for right-handed people. He loves his mouse. Good for them. He loves his mouse. You know what this mouse is?

Way cheaper than the mouse that I recommend people buy. Yeah. But it's also for right-handed people. It's also not wireless. It also doesn't do the cool, uh, unlockable scroll wheel thing that the G-900, which I recommend does. The only reason I,

I ever unlock that scroll wheel is to fidget with it. I love it. Just spinning away. I love it so much. Anyways, get this mouse, I guess. I'm sure it's great. But it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, editor's choice.

And I, and I just like to point out that there are editors at the verge, not just me, who disagree. You're saying G900 X or GX 900. The Logitech G900, I think there's a newer, like the G910 or something. That's slightly, that's my feeling. favorite. Yeah. It's a pretty heavy mouse.

GX9. There's a lot of G mice that a lot of people are really into. X90G. Sorry. I'm just trolling it. Eli, this is really serious. Come on. Yeah.

So I'm just letting people know that there's a diversity of opinion. Yeah. So, but all the other ones are really expensive. Vlad's whole point was like, this is a cheap, good mouse. It's a great deal. With good clicks. It's a steal of a deal. Yeah.

Are you a wireless gaming mouse person? I lost my wireless dongle. I own a wireless mouse. It is always plugged in. Someday, I heard that you can buy a replacement wireless dongles from Logitech. I might take them up on that offer. I do love the mouth.

Dongles, man. I sat, I was in San Francisco. I came back. I sat next to a guy in the plane. He has Bluetooth headphones to his iPhone. and, you know, the seat back lit up. He was like, oh, Wonder Woman's on.

He went to, like, listen to it. And then he just sat there, just looking at that screen, looking at his AirPods, didn't know what to do. Really? He was just stuck? Well, I mean, he was like, oh, I can't use my headphones. And then he had to, like, ask for headphones. You can watch the movie.

Yeah, I used to always be confused when, like, the, you know, the flight attendant would come by when, like, offer people headphones. I'm like, who doesn't have headphones? but now it's like it's a real thing that people need because they all have wireless headphones and they don't have the headphones that actually work with the airplane anymore. Well, you know what's great.

I mean, like the big bows over the ear ones have an oxen jacks. You carry your ox cord with you. But also my wireless mouse has it charges. It has micro-o-dispy. Yeah, by USB. So you plug, you unplug that USB,

plug the wireless dongle, now you have a wireless mouse. But if you want to charge your mouse, you plug the USB cable straight into the mouse, but it's still a usable mouse, Apple. Yeah, it's incredible, right? It's weird, yeah. You can charge, use your mouse simultaneously.

So, to be fair, the Bluetooth touchpad that Apple makes does that. The magic touchpad. Yeah. It has the jack on the back, and you plug in it and it turns into a USB touchpad, and then you unplug it in Bluetooth. So this is why I now travel. So I used to have those both iPhones. Dieter, you have QC-25s, right?

35s, yeah. Yeah, I have 35s. But that cable is 3.5 to 2.5. Sherry, lose it. You are screwed. I bought three. No, I bought three extras because I lost mine. So now I have a bunch of extra 3D2s.

But I switch to the Sony, MDX, 1000, whatever the new ones are. Yeah. 3.5 in. So now it's like much smarter. They are, they sound much better than those. Because you've got so many 3.5 to 3.5 cable sitting around? I do. I at least live that ox life.

All right. I don't know. I just have a lot of them for some reason. Um, Eli's pointing at me. I don't know what's going to happen next. No, I was going to say,

Paul, your time has come. I just do you. No, the Sony ones are real nice. They sound way better than the Bose ones. They are super heavy and super hot.

Oh, they're hot. Yeah. Everyone's making fun of me for not buying them and sticking with my QC35. Can I ask it? Yeah.

So I'm just going to ask the Virchast listeners are really gross questions. When you wear big, heavy over the hear. It's a long plane ride. Dieter, you take that plane ride way more

than I from San Francisco to New York. It took a long trip. It's like six hours. So when you wear the headphones for that long, it was like a lot of heat that builds up. And it's just like, my ears start to feel a little swampy.

Like the earwax and my ears like melts. It's like fucking gross. It's like I don't know. It's like I don't know if that's what's actually happening. You know sometimes like you feel a feeling and you're like, I think I know what's happening. I'm not a doctor, but I think I know the science behind this.

You're afraid it's like dribbling out. It's like melting out of your ear. No, it's not like a candle. It just, it feels gross. Okay. Well, what's the question part of this? Is Dieter, does that have it happened anyone else? You're not alone here?

Who is? Who is? Who is? Big headphones. I'm just saying. Like, it's just like an experience. Every time I take this flight, I'm like, man, these headphones, it's kind of icky in there now. So that's.

It just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's, it's, warm. Like you don't often seal your ears for six hours like that. I didn't mean to take us down this road. You just, I really wish you hadn't. No, I think your ears are giving off a little more heat that is common. My problem with over the ear, my problem with over the ear headphones is that they push

on my ears and some of my ears are sensitive and fragile. My problem is they are way more uncomfortable when I wear glasses than if I wear contacts. And I always wear glasses on the plane because they're super dry. And so wearing contacts on a plane, it's just n-e. Yeah.

You know, I wear contacts on my back. And I played Zelda on the Switch for four hours. And then I realized, like, oh, I've been paying attention to this. My contacts are glued to my eyes for the rest of eternity. Oh, no. But, Zeldon on the Switch is the best thing they do on a plane. Yeah. I'm like drawing a crowd.

Huh? We should talk about Nintendo a little bit because they had their weird earnings call and they've announced a bunch of stuff, some of which was kind of surprising. But I'm really curious to hear about Neli buying a Switch because I have been telling you to buy a Switch since it came out

and you have refused to recognize the genius of my recommendation. Please tell the world how smart I am. Deeter's very smart. There it is. I don't trust a man whose ears don't get swampy on planes. But how smart?

Very smart. The Switch is an incredible product. It's weird, though, because I'm only playing one. game and I'm very curious how my relationship will change when like I'm out of Zelda which seems impossible

to achieve but right now it's just like Zelda machine and then it's going to change right and I play it I have all the docs I got big TVs all the stuff it's fun 99% of the time I use it as a handheld Yep

what about Mario Kart with friends I haven't done that yet's a great party game mostly on play that's great and pretty soon you're going to be able to play Friends need a thing where you know how they have the flight attendant call button? They need a button. It's like, I have a switch.

And what does that find? What does that get you? Switch buttons? Then you can like have friends. You can like play games with them. Have you played Mario where one person's Mario and one person's the hat? Yes, I've done that. That's pretty good.

That's bonding. No, but the switch is a piece of hardware is like just truly remarkable. I mean, it's just like, it's just really good at being the thing that it is. I think. But the thing it is for me, though, is a screen that plays Zelda. Like, I haven't... You know, like, game consoles, like, change. Your relationship to them changes

because you're in the world of a game, and then you play a different game. I don't know. Do you make any sense? No. Say that one on. No, that makes perfect sense. So, like, right now, this whole thing,

the whole switch experience for me is Zelda, which I love. This is deep in the whole... This is the best Zelda hardware I own. Yeah. And then I'm going to play a different game. game. And it might change what it means to you. Yeah, the whole, my relationship with the device. And like, right now when I sit down and play it, like, I want to give it an hour. I want to spend

at least an hour run around that forest. What if, what if Nintendo call of dutyed Zelda? Would it just be horrible? Or like Assassin's Creed. You know what I mean? Just like every year, every year a new Zelda. I would love that and then I would hate it. It would get really bad, right? The answer. I mean, the answer to your question is Majora's Mask. Majora's Mask is a lovely underrated game that they just kind of cranked out. Yeah. I mean, this game is, Breath of the Wild, I mean, people have talked about it endlessly. I don't need to recapitulate this.

But, I mean, it's just such a deep game. It's like 5,000 games in one. So, like, as a thing to do on a plane, right? Like you can just like waste time. Yeah. Yeah. In a different space. I will say super annoying the switch doesn't support Bluetooth headphones.

What are they doing? Like they got to know, right? Like I'm like fumbling with the ox cable. What, like, if I'm going to live in that world, just let me, just force me into that world. Yeah. Well, the Nintendo's not part of that world. It's true. What are you saying, Dieter?

Oh, we should actually bring up that they, um, are releasing. Mario card on smartphones in the next year. Isn't this a a plan? Right? It's like slice off bits and piece of their IP and make a couple bucks on the phone. But Mario cart for a phone would be way

different than like what they've done so far. I think. Yeah, they basically made like, they made an infinite runner game and they did a pretty good job differentiating it as an infinite runner game. But they have admitted they're not making that much money

on Mario Run or whatever it's called. I don't know. There's just, there's such a deep well of love for Mario Kart as a like gamers game that it's almost risky. Like they best not screw it up. The other thing that they're doing is they're making a movie with the company that made a despicable me, aka the minions. Is that imagine?

Yeah. And I don't know, man. I'm old enough to remember the original Super Mario Brothers with John Aguizamo and what's his name, Bob something. I just, I have no faith that that movie is not going to just ruin things for me. In the same way, like, I'm super nervous about this Tomb Raider movie that's coming up, because I love, love, love the Tomb Raider game reboot. I think it's one of the best reboots of an old video game franchise I've ever played in my entire life.

And, man, I hope that movie is not terrible. I'm not actually that optimistic based on the previews. Wait, hold on. I just want to... Go ahead. So it's not imagination. It's illumination. When you start to type in Minions Illumination,

Google just autocorrects it to Minions Illuminati, which seems very confusing. What makes a lot of sense? Yeah, I think we have to point... I don't know. Do we have to do... I'm just going to say this disclosure. The minions are universal,

which is owned by NBC, which is the master in Boxman. No way. No way. We got some video. Are you kidding me? It's a whole fact. There it is.

There's your disclosure. I don't know if we needed it for that one. Anytime anyone brings up the minions, I want to be like, there's some million dollars floating around the bank. Man, that's so good to know. Yeah. How could it, let's say the Mario movie is as bad as anything possible. By the way, my roommate believes that the original Mario movie is one of the best cyberpunk visions. Yeah.

ever made on screen. It's not the worst. But let's say this is just a terrible movie. Yeah. Yeah. What is that, how does it hurt Mario for you? Because you'll be playing Mario and having a good time,

and he'll make his little woo-hoo thing when he jumps. And then in the back of your mind, you'll think about some moment in the Mario movie when he does the same thing, but it sucks. And it's just going to color it. Hmm. Yeah. I don't know.

I feel like Nintendo, they've got a big hit with the switch. Outsold the Wii U. already amazing Megan wrote a piece based on GDC the GDC surveys are out developers are super into the switch

just a lot of interest in like heat around that because as you're saying it's like a great piece of hardware it's really into it if you ask Casey Newton he's like what's their next thing like they need to have these franchises over and over again so the question is

is Nintendo just this set of X games that they're going to like bite off a piece of Mario cart and, like, throw it on a phone? Or are they going to, do they have more? I think that's an interesting question. Hmm. I have no idea what the answer is. They don't need to do anything right now.

Yeah, they're selling switches. All right, should we talk about Apple for two minutes and wrap up the show? Yes. There's only one story about Apple, which is, earlier this week, it was leaked that Craig Federigi went to a meeting and said, we're taking features out of iOS 12, and we're buttoning up.

or software quality. What? Yeah. Does Craig listen to the fridge? I think he does. Oh, my gosh. I mean, this is very exciting. It's also like, it's a thing that Apple does,

especially on the Mac OS every other year or so. They're like, this is the year where we sort of clean things up. And there's a huge number of under the hood things and blah, blah, blah. But like, in terms of apps and stuff, what we're really doing is mostly bug fixes. The most time it's one I think was Lion to Mountain Lion. They're like, yeah, it's just another lion, but it's like a slightly, and the leopard is snow leopard. It was leopard to snow leopard.

It was leopard to snow leopard. Snow leopard, the greatest software release in Apple's history. Without question. The year of Snow leopard on my black MacBook, black plastic MacBook, the best year of computing of my life. One thing that I want Apple to focus on, you know, Swift is very exciting and developers are really into it. Every time I go, it's like, we're on Swift 4 now. You know, so it's been like about four years that Swift has been out, I think. Every time I'm like, well, now it's a good time to learn how to make an iOS app.

You'll always end up running into Objective C. Like Apple has a huge code base that is half a deprecated language that nobody's learning anymore and half a new exciting language. And like, I was just watching a talk of this program. I was like, well, I made this thing. It's really fast. Then it has to call out to Apple stuff. And then there's some weird objective C

that has to translate everything into something that Swift understands. And it's just like, that's still at the core of a lot of Apple software. That's what I'm putting a lot of the blame on. So I hope that they can, like, clean that up and make a more... But I think it's bigger than, it's bigger than, like, user experience. It's bigger than, like, for example, earlier this week, CNN sent out a push alert in Apple News that's like, the person who sent the fake Hawaii missile test drill had, like, it was like the story was like, that person had a history of making mistakes before.

CNN sends out the push alert. Apple News was broken. and so it sent the alert like 10,000 times. Oh, my gosh. And so people are like CNN stop alerting us. And CNN put out a statement that's like, our servers indicate that we sent this alert once. Right. The problem is on Apple's now.

Well, yeah, that's the thing. It's like how can you, even if developers are using Apple tools to make software that isn't at the highest of quality, if Apple can't make highest quality software with the tools that it provides people. Yeah. That who can't? I don't know. Evil always wins, Paul. Big speed.

Yeah, I mean, the Big speed drives the car. Big speed drives the car. Notifications on iOS 12 are going to continue to be hot garbage. Yeah. I just think it's interesting. Like, I'm all for Apple taking, I think the phone is already so complicated.

I think what they really need to do is not just like fix bugs. They need to just like take a minute and just clean up the weird user experience flows that are all over the iPhone. Yeah. Like HomeKit. Like take a year. Everyone just work on HomeKit. like just make it easier to understand what is happening in home.

No normal human being can operate HomeKit. Like it is conceptually complicated. Now, it's not complicated to set up and use. It's complicated in that to understand what it's doing requires an enormous amount of sophistication. So they've achieved this simplicity of like, I bought a light plug and a panel showed up my phone. That simple. The second you want to try to understand the relationship between your phone and the light bulb, everything goes to hell. Right? Like, now you have an iPad in your house that's like Bluetooth connected and it's the hub, like, or you have an Apple TV, presumably the HomeCod

forthcoming. But those devices aren't like, HomeKit lives in like a meadow layer. That's like, It's just a very complicated idea. Here's the thing. Not everything in life is simple. And if our devices teach us that everything that can be done is simple, then you never learn how to use like Excel spreadsheets. Excel spreadsheets are approachable and they're possible to use, but they're difficult. Yeah. And a lot of people think it's a really great abstraction for how you want to deal with data, but it still requires some learning.

And if users learn that I never have to do any learning. Like, so I think I have a whole, you can make things simpler, but you also have to teach people that they have to learn something. All I'm saying is that the user flows on the iPhone are, they're trapped in that tension. And they often shade towards just masking complexity instead of making things simple. And like, if you just mask the complexity, when you need it, it's not available.

You don't have the power. What's, Tito, you said you have a whole thing? I've got a whole thing. this was an old rant. It was born out of this piece Dan wrote that everybody should just start using these gestures and there's this whole idea. No, gestures are hard for people to learn.

And every user interface is unintuitive at first. And so the problem with the iPhone isn't that it's not simple enough. Simplicity is actually not a problem. We are humans and we can learn how to learn, we can learn abstractions and then build knowledge based on those abstractions. Like writing is the most unintuitive thing.

Walking is not intuitive for a child. They have to figure it out. And so I'm not necessarily looking for the iPhone to get quote unquote simpler. I'm looking for it to get more coherent and consistent. We are like we learned how to use Apple twos. We learned how to use command lines. Grammas learned how to use Windows 95, right? we are actually way more capable of figuring out new interface paradigms and companies give us credit for.

And it is a mistake to assume that everything has to just be simple and direct in one layer deep. The actual thing you need to do is be consistent and coherent so that when I, you know, do an action in one place, I learn something and then I can repeat that action in another place. And that is the fundamental problem with the iPhone right now and with a lot of operating systems right now is, skills and abstractions that you learn in one context don't translate to another context. And that was one of the reasons the original iPhone was so good is you learned three or four basic things and then you just applied them everywhere. And that is going away right now on the iPhone and it's a huge problem. Yeah. Yeah, you should be able to learn like a vocabulary.

Right. And then exercise that vocabulary. Right now, I'm just 3D touching everything and I never know what's going to happen. Right. Where? It's exciting. You want something that you know there is a setting for. Where is that setting?

Yeah. Is it in the app? Is it in settings or is it in settings slash apps? Yeah. Who knows? My greatest, I'm thinking about HomeKit a lot lately. My greatest fear is that I will accidentally unlock my door. It's your greatest fear.

It's not snakes. It's like, it's not dogs driving car. Huh? Your greatest fear isn't dogs driving cars or snakes or whatever? It's you're going to unlock your door. Where did snakes come from? Oh, I see just in general. I feel like dogs driving on the list of fears.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. List of fears. You already said what your greatest fears. The very top is, I will actually unlock my door. Okay, so that's number one. It's the greatest fear in the world of home kit.

Oh. It's not like my lights will turn purple. No, it's still clowns. It's just like, I'm going to unlock the door and forget about it. My door's unlocked. That's the one thing that you don't want to do. inside of HomeKit. You can come up with a way darker scenarios in HomeKit.

You could definitely come up with way darker scenarios. Well, I mean, there's the one that just like fires the rifle mounted above the door. Like, we don't want to push that button either. That's like a very famous law school towards case. Oh, really? Yeah, it's like, you learn it as a 1L. Like, this dude set up a gun in his barn and the intruder came and the gun shot the guy. Who's liable?

And he's like, yeah, you can't, you can't have to take reasonable measures. It's the whole thing. Who's liable? The dude, the homeowner is liable. Not the gun. Not the gun. They could not sue the gun. There's a whole thing.

Okay, so in the world of home kit, that's the greatest fear. Okay. Snakes, not a huge fan. Yeah. I feel like all I'm trying to get to is dogs driving cars very low on my list of fears. That's more on my list of hopes. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, you want to get there. Dogs are happy. And they love humans. They don't want to hurt humans, for the most part. And so having them drive cars is actually a really good idea. because dogs inherently want to protect humans. Here's what I want to do right now. I solved the trolley problem.

It's dogs. Yeah, you put dogs who love humans, as Dieter just pointed out, in a little control room. Every time a self-driving car has a trolley problem, it beams it up to command center. You know, dogs with little doggy headsets on like NASA. Here's what I'm going to say. And they got two buttons. It's a great idea. They push the by with their paws.

They push the by with their paws. Is this episode? of the verge cast is over. Dogs salt. Charlie problems. We're a little over an hour. Paul's fully in a world of dogs in a control center.

Think about those good boys. We're done. That was the Vergecaste this week. There was not a lot of news and I apologize for everything that happened here. If you just put the three of us in a room with no news, we end up at dogs

in space. No. So that was that week. We're going to try this again next week. Hey, we're going to do a better job. Please make some news. Have you seen a poll 13? If you work at Microsoft or Google or Apple or Amazon or Facebook, think about making some news next week.

That would be great. We would really like that. Dell, you probably have some laptops to put out. Just give us a call. Let us know. We really need you here, buddy. Okay. It was a truly a ride.

Thank you for listening. We've got all kinds of stuff happening. Next week, actually, Circuitbreaker Live is coming back. Whoa. Tuesday, 4 p.m. We're moving the show to YouTube. I'm going to do something very dumb, and I'm going to keep the YouTube chat open on our IMAX Surface Hybrid,

so you can talk to us during the show, which you could have tweeted us, but now it's like live. That's exciting. I don't know if this is going to be a good idea. I'm excited to try it. Please behave yourselves. Yeah. I retain all band privileges across.

all platforms. I don't ban your ass. But what I'd like to do is be cool, and then I'll talk to you. Two choices. I'll talk to you or I'll ban you. Yeah. Live in the good bubble.

That's a phrase. So, Circuit Breaker Live, 4 p.m. Tuesday. 4 p.m. Eastern. It's going to be on YouTube, so if you miss it, you just watch it. I encourage you watching your TV, because I think that's a good place for it. Why did you push that button season two is happening?

I know Andrew, our producer, is working on that with Ashley and Caitlin, but you can listen to all of season one right now on your podcast app of choice so go listen to that. Casey Newton's show converged. I swear to God it's coming. It's happening.

But if you don't want to think about hopes and dreams, you can listen to Too Embarrassed to Ask and Lauren Good. That's a great show. You can listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. All wonderful. All on the iTunes and everything else. Rate, review, like, and subscribe.

Ring that bell, fam. Hmm. some YouTube. Oh, come on YouTube. I got to try out some YouTube stuff. YouTube, Eli. Very exciting. It's going to be great.

Yeah, so tons of stuff to listen to you. The site is doing great, by the way. Speaking of The Verge, there's, I want to call it a story. Russell Brandem, huge scoop. ICE, Immigration's Agency, struck a deal to track of license plates all around the country. You should read that story. Russell got the scoop. He got way into it.

Just great work. The whole site's been great lately. Just grown like a weed. We love it. But listen to the podcast, Circlebreaker Live, Tuesday at 4. I'm super excited about it. It's going to be fun. Check it out.

And that is the Vergecast. Paul. There's a good radio right here. Hmm? Nothing. Sorry, Andrew. You're going to have to add this.