The Vergecast - The lives of YouTube moderators, a new smart home standard, and the Xbox Series X announced

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

Stories discussed this week: Google and YouTube moderators speak out on the work that’s … Big tech is finally working together to fix the smart home Z-Wave is making a huge change so it doesn��t get left behind in the smart home wars Ikea 2.0: inside the furniture giant’s big bet on the smart home ... This Apple Watch charger plugs directly into a USB-C port so you can carry fewer cords Xbox Series X: all the news about Microsoft’s next-gen game console Microsoft’s next Xbox is Xbox Series X, coming holiday 2020 The Xbox Series X is basically a PC The Xbox One Series X: bad name, good design  Google Stadia should have stayed in beta Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Casey Newton joins us to talk about the lives of YouTube moderators. We go deep on the new plan to combine smart home standards and when the Z wave alliance was left out. And we talk about the Xbox Series X that's coming up now on the Vergecast. 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 Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Empire. Can I tell you a story? Let's start with the story. I saw Kara Swisher at a party, the company assigned a little party. I saw Kara, and someone was like, hey, Kara, do you know that Neil has said a VergeCat? is a flagship podcast of box media.

And she was like, what? And I was like, oh, God. And she's like, that's okay. I have the podcast of the year. Whoa. It was great. It was like a perfect caramonic. She's like, you can have that.

I don't need it. Because I RICO's E-Code was AdWix podcast here. Anyway, I'm your friend, Nealai. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Deeter Bone is here. Howdy? And we have a special guest.

Casey Newton is here. Hello, my friends. How's it gone? It's great. And I want to thank everyone who reached out to me after my controversial opinions about cyber truck on the episode where Eli was not with us, asking me

to return to share more spicy thoughts. So thank you for having me. Colin, Letcher and I interviewed, Ann Milgram. That episode would come out. But we interviewed her. She's the former Attorney General of New York. We interviewed her about data and policing. And she came in and sat down and said, I love the Vergecast.

I just want to talk about the cyber truck. I don't think we should. But I think I don't want to do an hour of cyber truck conversation, the former Attorney General in New Jersey. I have a lot of cyber truck podcast related ideas for 2020 that we should talk about offline. Is it a podcast called CyberTruck?

I said we'll talk about it offline. All right, fine, let's not give it away. Anyway, this is a special episode in the sense that it is our last episode of 2019. We're taking a break for the holidays. I hope you get some rest. You spend some time with your loved ones. Stop thinking about USBC connectors or whatever it is you do when we're on the air. You're going to think about USBC connectors because you're going to get a present for the holidays

from someone you love. You're going to open the thing. and it's going to be micro USB, and you're going to on to swear. And when that happens, don't take it out in your loved ones. Just tweet it. Go out to your car. Scream in your car. And then tweet it Dieter.

Just send Dieter a photo of every micro USB gadget you get. He's at Backin. Oh, my God. It's going to be good. Actually, please do this. This would be great. So, Casey, I would say that you have had quite a run this year in 2019. So it's fitting that you're with us to cap off the show for the year.

Thank you. You have been reporting on the lives of content moderating. at various companies. A lot of them talk to you. This week, you published a huge feature on the lives of Google and YouTube moderators. Do you want to talk about it a little bit? Yeah, so I wrote two stories earlier this year that were about the lives of Facebook moderators. One was about a group of folks in Phoenix, Arizona, and then the second one was about folks in Tampa, Florida. And after I wrote those stories, people contacted me who were moderators for YouTube and Google. And they said, you know, we've experienced some similar issues, and we'd like

to talk about them. And so I spent five months, I talked to 18 people, I traveled to D.C., travel to Austin, Texas a couple times, and we published a story on Monday that examines one key aspect of this issue, which is that at Google, there is a different standard of care based on whether you are a full-time employee or a contractor. And the full-time employee that we talk to is this incredible woman named Daisy Soderberg Rivkin, who was a content moderator for Google from 2015 to 2017, working on what they call their legal removals team. Her job was to remove stuff from Google search that didn't belong there. She wound up seeing a lot of terrorism and child exploitation. And at the end of that process, she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder,

which is something that she continues to struggle with to this day, two years after she left the company. We also talked to this group of moderators in Austin, Texas, who are mostly low-paid immigrants, who are also suffering from severe mental health issues in some cases. but they don't have access to the same level of care. Daisy was able to take six months of paid leave, and the folks I spoke with in Austin don't get anything like that. And so it's kind of a story about how on one hand, no matter how much you're paid,

you're going to have significant mental health consequences or at least some portion of Google's content moderators will suffer. But it's also about how there's a caste system inside these companies. And based on these rather arbitrary distinctions of whether you're full-time or a contractor, your life is going to be very, very different. And so my hope with this story was that we would illuminate that a little bit and kind of start a conversation about it. So the first story did the trauma floor, we had you on, we talked about it. And I remember very clearly so much of our conversation was these are basically the cops and firefighters, the internet.

And we valorize cops and firefighters and real society. And we have parades and there's like days of service. Like we pay a lot of attention to these folks and we honor them all the time. And the people who are doing on the internet are horribly mistreated. Facebook was employee and company called Cognizant at that time. They were their contractors. And I remember one very clear takeaway from that first conversation was you were like, just pay them more.

Pay them more money, treat them like employees. And so now we come to this story and we have an employee who did make quite a bit of money, was an employee of Google, had all the benefits. And it still didn't like help. And I'm wondering if your kind of thought process there has changed at all. It really did. You know, after I wrote the first two stories, the whole time I was reporting them, one of the questions in my mind was, how do we make this work better, easier, more just? And the obvious thing to do was just to pay folks better, right? Like in Arizona, they were making $28,000 a year. And it just seemed so obvious that that wasn't enough, given the risks that they were taking with their mental health. But then I talked to somebody who was making good money. People on the legal removals team were making $75,000 when Daisy started. She was able to. able to afford a private psychiatrist, right? So she had all these benefits. And at the same time,

like, it didn't save her. And so I think we need to start talking about some other potential solutions. One of the things that has been brought to my attention actually since we published a story Monday is that there's this quasi-governmental agency called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And they run a hotline. And so if you see, like, child abuse imagery anywhere on the web, you can report it to Nick Mick, as it's called, and they will investigate it and sort of work with law enforcement to bring the perpetrators to justice. Someone told me this week that the folks who staff that tip line are limited to a year on the job because they do not want to expose those people to abuse for more than a year. And then someone else brought to my attention that Google, in its

early days of hiring content moderators, also limited moderators who are working on these issues to a year on the job. So there actually was a time at Google itself where there were essentially lifetime caps on the amount of disturbing content you could be exposed to, and those disappeared over time. And I think we need to move back to that place, you know, as sort of one of many strategies that I think would be more effective than my initial idea, which had, you know, just been a raise. Although, to be clear, I still think all these people deserve a raise. Yeah. I think there's just the sense that they were just not getting paid very much money. So, like, what's the first thing you can do? And then you find the people who have the

benefits and who are getting paid significantly more, and it's still not enough, and maybe it's limiting the amount of total exposure you can have. It's some of these tools that Google is building that you wrote about, where you look at the videos in grayscale. That seems like the most Google approach to it. A hundred percent. The most technological approach to it. It's 41 shades of blue for the search box button, and it's like gray scale horrific videos for the moderators. But there's got to be other solutions. Like the reason that they couldn't just do a year is because of their scale, right? I mean, the scale is like driving much of the problem as far as I can tell. Right. They're also not really career paths for content moderators. Like, this is something that I

keep thinking about. You know, in other, you know, in journalism, for example, your first job probably isn't going to be your best job. Maybe you're writing about a subject that's not that interesting to you because that's what you've got assigned. But, you know, you prove yourself eventually you get a better assignment. In content moderation, there's not really anything like that. And I'm told so often by these contractors at every single company that their workplaces are rife with favoritism, nepotism, the managers sort of only promote their friends. It feels like it's impossible to get ahead. Of course, you know, the Googles and Facebooks of the world are not really paying a lot of attention to issues like, you know, workplace favoritism among their vendors. And so you just

get a lot of people who feel stuck. And I think that if you put a one-year cap on maybe moderating child abuse content, but then you were able to transfer that person to moderating, spam or something that was a little bit less hard on the eyes and on the psyche and then maybe provide them a pathway up into management or policy roles. This could start to feel like an okay career. And even if your first year on the job was really, really rough, there would be sort of a brighter future ahead. I mean, I've heard so many people respond to your work by saying every executive should do this. And I can't help but connect that dot to if everyone at Google spent their first year looking at the most horrific stuff that was uploaded to Google, like maybe the tools

would be different, maybe the system would be different, because it still doesn't seem like those, like YouTube is still not architected to stop it before it happens. Like this is still a reactive process that's occurring. Yeah, it's really true. And yet like if you believe as I do that some percentage of people who do content moderation will develop PTSD nightmares, a lot of really serious issues as a result of doing this work, do we actually want to encourage every Googler have to do this? Like, I don't think we do. I, like, I don't want the executives of Google to all go out and get PTSD, right? I want them to find solutions so that none of them have to do it. Now, I do think that they would be well served to, to spend more time with those folks and

to listen to their concerns. And yes, like, a lot of them should be taking shifts in there and really understanding that issue. But, you know, if you're talking about, I don't know, like, lead painter asbestos in the walls or something, like, I wouldn't say, like, oh, well, like, the landlord ought to, you know, sleep there for a week. It's like, no, fix the lead paint in the walls. Like, that's the solution. Well, have you come up, in the course this reporting, have you come up with anyone who has an idea for a broader solution than sort of individual management tweaks for these folks? No, it's going to have to be a basket of solutions, right?

I do think that machine learning will help over time. Ultimately, there's only so many ways to murder someone. There's only, you know, so many sex acts. And I think we're going to be able to develop machine learning tools that detect those those better over time and removes more of them without having them to hit moderator's eyeballs. But, you know, the moderators I speak with say that, you know, they think that that is many years away, given the very difficult judgment calls, you know, that they need to make. In the meantime, what else can they do?

You know, honestly, just spending more time with these moderators and asking them, directly. Every person I've ever talked to you has a lot of really good ideas. You know, for many of them, the issues have as much to do with the workplace itself as it does with the content, right? It's like, as we wrote about in Florida and in Arizona, it's like there's only one bathroom. I don't have enough break time to use the restroom. Or in Austin, it was, I have all these two-factor logins that I have to do, but I have to keep my phone in a locker. So I have to run from my locker back to my desk, like multiple times a day entering codes, right? Just like these sort of ridiculous things that you know no Google engineer would ever put up with

for more than a minute, but is the daily life for the people who are in many ways enabling their jobs. So that's where I'd like to see them pay some attention. And I think that there are ways that they can improve the workplace conditions that would, you know, make life easier on them. So I want to ask about two very specific parts of the story. One's a little more inside baseball than I. But the first one is, and I had not really considered this, Daisy worked on search, not on YouTube.

Yep. What is the, and I don't think people think of search as having a moderation problem. How did that, how did that go? Well, yeah, I mean, you may not realize that links are removed from Google search, right? We sort of think of, you know, Google has everything. It has the entire web. But there are a lot of countries, particularly outside the United States, that have banned certain forms of content, right? So, like, Europe has a right to be forgotten law where, you know, you can commit a crime and eventually, you can have your web results scraped from Google.

So somebody has to go in there and remove that, and that is illegal. requirement. There are also laws around terrorism. And if someone has posted terrorist propaganda, you know, France has decreed that that has to be removed within 24 hours of it being reported. And so that was Daisy's actual job. If the French law enforcement reported something saying this needs to be taken down, she had to get in there, evaluate it, look at it compared to policies, and then decide, you know, is this maybe newsworthy content? Is this a news report? In which case we're going to try to leave it up, you know, or is it just, you know, an ISIS propaganda video, in which case it would come down?

And where were those videos hosted? That's the, I think. On web pages. On web pages. So the French government would like find an embedded video on a custom player hosted on some French website, and Daisy would remove it from search. That's right. But she wasn't deleting it from the web.

That's right. That is such a nuanced problem, right? I don't think people think about search in that way. I think probably most people listening to this are familiar with, like, the EMCA notice on the bottom of some search pages. But the idea that the French government is reporting web pages that have terrorist content and then someone has to like watch it and make a call seems so far out of how Google even promotes itself. Right. And, you know, the way that Google promoted the job to Daisy was you're here as a defender of free speech. Like, you're actually here

to fight back against these requests. Because remember, before 2016, the most of the conversations that we were having about content moderation on the web was about times where platforms took something down that we thought should stay up, right? It was, you know, footage of the Arab Spring where people died and, you know, YouTube took it down and we got outraged because it was newsworthy or Facebook took down a photo of the Milay massacre in Vietnam, and we got outraged because it's a newsworthy photo. So they all built up these legal apparatuses that were designed to keep stuff up on the web. And that was still how Daisy was sold her job in 2015. And what we've seen since. 2016 is that the pendulum has swung and we are now firmly in the take it down era of content

moderation where people just want stuff to be taken down from the web. What do you think besides the obvious election Donald Trump that happened in 2016? In the Cambridge Analytica, you bear some responsibility news cycle that has consumed in particular your life since then. What has changed? Is there something that has really changed to drive that? I think that the press finally woke up to the unintended consequences. of social networks, but that was also in response to the rise of right-wing authoritarianism and

fascism around the world. These companies no longer could credibly say that they had enabled, you know, the sort of progressive world that they told us that they were building for us. And every time a journalist would run a keyword search in a box, they would find something that wasn't supposed to belong there, right? So a lot of it was just kind of, once we realized that we could start calling tech companies out on this, that they weren't going to have any good answers. And they were going to have to go back to the drawing board and figure out what to do. So the other thing I wanted to ask about very specifically is your first two stories about Facebook. Facebook employed a contractor named Cognizant, which after your stories exited the business of content

moderation, just couldn't take the heat of Casey Newton. But Facebook engaged with you. They let you talk to their executives. They brought you into the facilities. they surprisingly let us take photos of the facilities. They were like in it, right? And the story was still critical of their efforts and what was it was doing to people. But Facebook, to their credit, let you in the door. Google did not, as far as I can tell.

I mean, I read the piece before it published, and I asked you, so I know. But Google did not engage in that same way. Why do you think that is? Well, I mean, the sense that I got from them was they couldn't see the upside in it. You know, like they had read the Facebook stories, and I think they thought, well, what did Facebook get out of that?

Now, you know, I would say that Facebook got a lot out of that. We really did hear their perspective and added, you know, like more than a thousand words to the story where they just kind of explain their point of view. And, you know, I would have loved to have done that with Google. But for whatever reason, they decided that wasn't a risk they wanted to take. You know, and I think that's a shame. You know, I think that, you know, these people are working in quasi-public service jobs. And, you know, arguably people have.

a right to maybe not know the names and addresses because we know that people on the internet will, you know, harass and threaten them. But there needs to be some way of us having a better understanding of, you know, who it is that's cleaning up the internet for us. Google has a different contract, right? It's Accenture. Yeah. I mean, Google has multiple contracts with lots of, you know, big, it's like this industry is called BPO business process outsourcing. So Accenture is, I know. Well, I know. I know. I didn't put it in the story, but I know some people like lingo. So I'm just, you know, sharing a little lingo with you. So Accenture and Cognizant are two of the big BPO firms and there's, you know,

probably like a half dozen more really big ones. And, you know, they, it seems like they have contracts with most of them. So the thing about the BPO industry, which I'm now very familiar with, the reason that you hire consultants is because they're better at something than you, right? That's why these companies, that's why I'm not saying it's true. I'm saying that's like usually the business logic, right? Like, you're a small company, you're not going to hire the world's best accountants, you presume that Accenture has a lot of great accounts. You're going to hire Accenture to come in and audit you. That's the logic of the consulting industry.

They don't seem to be good at this when it comes to content moderation. No, they're not. That seems surprising as hell to me. Well, I mean, my strong sense is that what happened is in 2016, Facebook and Google and others started going around and said, hey, here's a $200 million contract to come clean up their internet, and companies like Accenture and Cognizant said, you know what, for $200 million, I bet we could figure it out, right? We've done customer service before.

We know how to manage a queue of tickets. Like, we'll do it. You know, Facebook in particular would also say, look, they could find moderators in places where we weren't, right? Like, we didn't have, like, you know, 300 speakers of the Sri Lankan language, right? But one of these BPO firms could find those for us. But I talked to another Facebook executive who just call these BPO firms body shops. And, like, their core competency is really just finding bodies to put in seats.

You know, the title of our second story wound up just being bodies in seats after one person described themselves to meet that way. It's like that's all we are to them is bodies and seats. I mean, isn't one of the other motivations here that these companies hadn't been hiring up the appropriate number of moderators directly from the jump? And so when they suddenly realized they needed it, they just had to get as many humans as possible as quickly. as possible. It was way faster to just outsource that problem. Yeah, faster and, of course, way cheaper, right? Like a big theme of my stories has been how little these people are paid. And it's usually a fraction of what the tech company employees are paid. Right. And if they actually did employ all these people with those rates,

they would bring down their, like, recruiting statistics of like the average salary of a Facebook employee. By hiring lots of bodies, you're sort of admitting defeat that you don't have technological improvements to this process, right? Yeah. And I mean, you know, every time. one of the executives has been asked about it, there's a reason why the first thing they go to is like, well, you know, we're working on AI, right? This is just like another case where it's the sort of magic

AI wand gets wave as if that will solve everything, but we're just not that close. They're not dog-booting their AI. I mean, they're working on it. It's, you know, like Google Photos can pick out a lot of things if you search it, you know, if you do keyword search, but it's just not perfect yet.

But does it even need to be perfect? I mean, the Google Photos example is a pretty good one. Google Photos will try. As a consumer, I see Google Photos try to do a lot of things every time I open the app. They're like, did you want this photo to be black and white except for this face? Like, I don't know, it's an idea I had. I'm a robot. Don't blame me.

Right? Like, we made this movie that makes no sense. I think that stuff is a consumer. It's great. It's fun. I always look at it. It doesn't seem like they're willing to just try. the same way they are with a consumer product or a consumer AI product.

We see it across the industry. We've deployed machine learning. It's like a little half-ass, but maybe you'll like it. It doesn't, but like they're iterating. They're obviously building a bigger data set. There's certainly revenue potential, if not cost-cutting potential, when they do it on the consumer side or even particularly the enterprise side. There isn't any of that benefit on the content moderation side, right?

It doesn't make it better or even necessarily cheaper because it doesn't work well. Are they iterating enough there? I think so. I mean, like, you know, one of the people I talked to this year who had the most, what he described to me is like the most boring job that he never had and could ever imagine having was he would just look at thousands of ads every day and he would just have to say, is this political or not? The whole point of the exercise was to train AI to do that so that eventually, like, the AI could just flag is this politics or not. And they have probably dozens of those projects around the world that are trained. what they call classifiers, and the classifier will eventually, you know, be able to do more of this work. One of the things that companies have started reporting now is how much of the bad

stuff that they catch was caught automatically. And it's good, I think, that they are reporting that. It's like, it's actually like a sort of a measurable demonstration of progress that they're now releasing. I can't remember if it's quarterly or twice a year. You know, but they are making progress. And again, it's like, where it gets tricky, and I think it's tricky. And I think it's trickier at Facebook and then at YouTube. At YouTube, like one thing that I found was the policies don't change that much. Like, they tend to have a very kind of slowly evolving policy. At Facebook, every single day, something was different. You could say this, you can't say this, you can do it, you can post this, you can put you, right? It was just constant confusion at Facebook over what you

could do. And that's why the people I talked to at Facebook were actually really pessimistic about AI there because it involves so many judgment calls. I'll give you one like example. This is like my favorite example. Girls, at some point in the last year, started using hoe as a term of affection. And so they would go onto a friend's page and they would say, I freaking love this ho. And so these comments got reported and the moderators who were doing their jobs, started removing them all because it was bullying that you can't go on there and call a girl a hoe. And then at some point, there was outrage from all these girls. There was like, I was just trying to get my friend a compliment. And so then they had to reverse the decision. And so now you're allowed to say,

I love this freaking hoe. A machine is never going to figure that out. Well, and what you said with the guy training, yes, this is political and no, this isn't political, like that definition's going to change over time too. Like any, like thankfully, the definition of a dog and a cat is not dramatically rapidly changing. And our classifiers are really good at picking them out. I would say they're 85% at cat versus dog. Some website every week runs a photo of like this this photo of a cat destroyed an AI again today. I can do you one better. When Google Photos was very early, I like slurped up all the photos I'd ever taken, which included some photos of Mark Zuckerberg.

I had taken when I'd been in the same room with him. And they moved several of the Mark Zuckerberg photos and they associated them with my face. No! Like I am Mark Zuckerberg according to like launch era Google Photos. I accidentally once imported a bunch of live blog photos into my Google photos. I should not have done it. It was an accent because I spray and pray during live blogs. I take a million photos and post like 1% of them because I'm a bad photographer.

Anyway, Google Photos just thought that Tim Cook was my best friend. That's amazing. That's great. Did it make you a little video of like you and Tim through the years? That's perfect. So Casey, what happens next, both in sort of where you're thinking about where the reporting needs to go? because we all want you to keep doing it. And then what happens next for these companies?

I don't know, man. Like, real talk, I sort of feel like I have told the story. It's not to say that there aren't more stories to tell, but I do think that we now understand what this industry looks like and what the lives of these folks are like. And there are a couple more kind of turns of this room I'm looking for. One is I don't think Cognizant's going to be the last BPO company to get out of this business.

I've heard whispers that another large one is looking to, get out. So that's kind of something that I'm trying to chase down. We've got a class action lawsuit. We have multiple class action lawsuits that are now developing. There are some worker organizing that's been taking place, particularly abroad. All those things combined, I think, are also why cognizant got out of the business. So as all of those things swirl, I do think this story is going to continue to be in the news. But I think with that kind of collective group of forces, we are maybe finally going to see some really positive changes. So fingers crossed for 2020. Do you think this is a change around the edges problem or is it a, wow, we should not

have done the call center model. We need to structurally rethink this whole thing. I think there's a lot of debate about that inside companies. What I find is that the employees who are closest to this work thinks it needs the most amount of change, which I think is really telling, right? It's usually the CFO that's like, you want to do what? You want to pay these people like we pay, you know, our PR execs? Like, no way, right? But if you're really down talking to these people, you're like, oh, wow, like, you're basically a police officer and we're paying you $15 an hour.

So that's why I hope those are the voices that get really elevated and that companies pay more attention to them. We had Alex Stamos on the show earlier this year. Alex Amos is the former Chief Security Officer of Facebook and Yahoo. He's not a professor at Stanford. And he was talking about there's like a market demand for this for the big platforms now, for companies to come in, actually develop the tools, use the economics of the software industry to have multiple customers at zero marginal cost, the whole thing. Are you seeing any of those companies starting to form?

I have been pitched by a handful of them. Frankly, I haven't had the time to dig in very deeply. As with most AI projects, it seems like the companies that have the most data are in the best position to win. And so that is like Google and Facebook because they already have millions and billions of images that they can process to kind of get a head start. But, you know, look, I think a world where Facebook figures this out

and, you know, really innovates with its AI and then is just able to release that as a commercial product, like, that's good. You know, so in a way, I'm rooting for these companies to develop those products and maybe take some of the, burden of the very worst stuff off of human beings. I'm of extremely mixed minds on this idea. Like, I do, I think that's what should happen, right?

Like, there's yawning demand for a better way to do this in the market at every level now. Someone should fill it. Great. Happy about that. Facebook commercializing its censorship engine is like, maybe not you, right? And then it's like, okay. And then once you hire the vendor to come and do it for you, you're still a little removed from the decision.

And when you screw up at scale, you just get to blame the vendor and fire the vendor. And it's not your response. And like, that's just a, it's a different set of tradeoffs like everything. Maybe it's a superior set of tradeoffs. But I don't think that has been particularly evaluated yet either. Yeah. I don't know that it has. Like, that's definitely more in the realm of speculation.

But yeah, I mean, the reason that I've been able to stay interested in it all year is because there are just so many tensions and tradeoffs involved here. There's not a simple answer. I had a guy write into me this week to say, hey, Casey, has anybody ever proposed just banning YouTube? And then he's like, I know how crazy that sounds, but hear me out. And then there was like 40 paragraphs underneath, you know, where he like laid out his case.

And the thing is, like, I am not a ban the social networks person. Like, I like Section 230. I don't think the internet would be better off. if platforms had to moderate every post before they were published, right? It would get rid of so much of what we all sitting around this table would love the internet. But the point that I've been trying to drive home all year is you can think that and also want to take better care of the people who enable the internet that we love, you know, and start there as opposed to from this place of like, well, you know, let's be on YouTube. I feel there's like a hunger for the reinstallation of gatekeepers. And maybe it's because literally our institutions are crumbling around us every day.

Like there's the constitutional crisis unfolding as we speak. It's just a fact. And it seems like, well, what if we just had like Walter Crowkeggen? And there's like one person and he was going to say all the news. And if you wanted some news, someone had to convince that guy who we all trusted together that this was the news. And I understand that nostalgia. I hear it from a lot of people. And I'm like, but the world was like, like, objectively more boring back then.

The kind of opposite of that is the, it's sort of like the white list. Like, I don't have to have somebody, you know, go to my library and burn all of the books that would offend me. I just check out the ones I'm interested in. And like, Casey, I think you wrote a little bit about this as sort of a trend of the past year of the group being the social network. The group chat. Yeah, the group chat. So like Discord, like I trust my friends that, and I'm in different Discord group chats and I trust different amounts. But I, you know, the ones I'm in, I trust those people to not put something that I would find objectionable in front of me. Yeah. I mean, I think like part of the solution to the internet is just don't put

everyone in the same room. Yeah. Right. Like, and like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter are places where everyone is in the same room, and context has collapsed, and everyone's miserable. And that's why Facebook is running as fast as it can to get us to all be in groups. That's why it's doing a Super Bowl ad I learned today that's all about having Chris Rock tell you to join groups. That's where they want to move it. You know, I will say, my favorite, like, I don't know, official is not the right word, but, like, maybe classic social network of 2019 has really been Reddit, and it's been because each subreddit sets its own rules. Like, there's a floor where Reddit says, all right, well, you can't do these things, but like after that, you can set any rules you want

for your subreddit. And what do you know? Those individual subreddits, they feel more cohesive. It feels like the context has not collapsed. People get along a little bit better. And I just think that there's a lot that we can learn from that. And like, you know, by the way, if you went back seven years and we said, well, at the end of the decade, we'll be talking about what a great Reddit's doing at content moderation that would sound crazy. But they sort of got there. So anyway, I think there's just like lessons that we can draw from that. Can I tell you my favorite Reddit? My favorite subreddit? It's wolves with watermelons. It's just photos of wolves eating watermelons because apparently wolves love

watermelons. It's like a vibrant community. I don't even know how I found it. I just like spent like an entire night being like, there's a lot of people here. My favorite part of Reddit is that it seems like every major subreddit that I enjoy has a spin-off subreddit that's a little too edgy for the main subreddit where it's like inside jokes and memes about the, I don't know, I just enjoy it. All right, well, good job Reddit.

Yeah. Casey will be pointing his expose gun at you next. But good job, Casey as well. Thank you for being with us, man. Thank you, y'all. All right, we're going to take a break. We're to come back. We're going to shadow the Z wave alliance. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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Upwork.com. We're back. I want to talk about smart home standards with you. It's just nonstop. I've been waiting for you to ask. It's a lot. It all seems so boring. We're going to make it exciting.

No, but it is exciting. Five years ago, we would write this article once every six months. The smart home is impossible. to figure out. Nobody knows what's going on. Zigby versus Z wave. It's all a mess. Cats and dogs. And we just got tired of writing it. We just stopped writing it because we just figured it would never get

better. But now it's back. Yeah. Can you guys give me just a little bit? Because I don't own any smart devices right now. Actually, I found an echo. I have an echo that is not it's not plugged into anything. That's the current status of most echo

dots. Like, I cleaned my room but I actually just put everything to a duffel bag. And the echo was in the duffel bag. I will say that I have Google Home minis just like still new in box, just strewn about my apartment. Because if you literally just sneeze in the vicinity of a premium Google product, they will send you a mini. Yes. You got one because I subscribed to FI.

I got one because I have YouTube pre. It's just like, here you go. If you signed up for the New York Times last year, they just like forgotten, like sent you four. Yeah. So right now you're basically a home kit person through Apple products. Like Apple, Apple is your gateway to communicate with home kit compliant smart home stuff. Of which there are three. Okay.

Or you're an Alexa person. That's probably the biggest one right now. Yeah. Um, or I guess you could be like an app person and control your Philip Hugh lights directly through the app. Yeah, that's the most chaotic way to live. Right. It's like, I have a screen of apps on my phone. each for every individual smart light bulb that I bought from a slightly different company.

Yeah. You're a monster. The news here is that Apple and Google and Amazon and Samsung Smart Things and Zygby, which also includes things like IKEA and apparently Zwave, all agreed. No Z wave. Z wave's still out in the cold. No. Zwave's parent company is part of the Zigby Alliance. That can't be true.

I refuse to believe it. Anyway, whatever. They all got together, and they agreed, you know, we should figure out this whole way that smart home devices talk to each other. The networking should be standardized, and it should use IP, the Internet protocol. And so every gadget should have an IP address, and that is how you can address it because we know how to secure that thing. And in principle, a year from now in late 2020, we're going to propose a spec for how smart home gadgets should, you know, work. at a base networking level. That is the news.

Super exciting. They've announced a plan to propose a specification. Can I tell you what's, Paul, to connect it to what you were saying, these companies all think of smart home stuff wildly different ways, which led them to build their individual standards wildly differently. So for Amazon, Alexa is effectively its operating system, its Windows. So Alexa is the most capable. It can connect to things the most ways.

So Alexa devices, like the Echo Plus has a Zigby radio in it, right? But there's also Alexa CAS. So it can, like, directly control a speaker. You can also do the bad, insecure way, which most things work, which is you talk to an Alexa, Amazon's cloud, talks to IHomes cloud, and your light turns on. Yeah, the smart device connects over 2.4 gigahertz to your home network. And then it talks to the internet, which talks to your device. Yeah, I would characterize Amazon as working with the most things, in part because of the three big platforms we're going to talk about and we're going to completely ignore smart things because that's what everybody else does. Of the three big platforms we're going to talk about, Alexa is by far, I guess I could say like the most willing to work with the most things and the least concerned about privacy or locking things down.

Echo devices can also control things locally, which is sort of like under remarked upon, but you can pair like smart switches and lights and stuff on your local network, and it will control them locally in a variety of different ways. And again, I think this is because Amazon sees Alexa as this operating system. So they just want it in your house. They just want it to be the most capable thing that the most things support, and they will just open the door to anyone in any way. Amazon.

Apple, which yesterday, Dan yelled at, at me when I said Apple was ahead of Google in the space. But there's a reason I make this claim. Apple has all the phones, right? Like that control center, they don't have all the devices, but it is true that they have, like, all of the phones of the people who might blow money on smart home stuff. In America. In America.

Fine. Maybe. But I think you're, you're, I, I, just go with me on it. I'm not saying the home kid is a success. I'm not saying whatever. I'm saying Apple has the phones. And I'm going, mm-mm, at that. But I think if you're the person who's going to buy 800 smart light switches, it is very likely that you have an iPhone.

Yeah, but if you're the person that's going to buy one, it's just as likely that you're going to have an Android phone. The point of this entire alliance is that the smart home is now here. The success of Alexa has meant that it's no longer a niche thing of a person who knows what Crestron is. Everybody is going to have some random smart gadget in their house. And so it's no longer just an iPhone, rich person, iPhone thing. Sure, but I think Apple, this is more about mindsets of these companies. I think Apple, which had HomeKit and thought it was a me thing, and it has the HomeKit Control Center interface is important. They think of this stuff as iPhone accessories, because Apple's entire mindset is that everything in the world is fundamentally an iPhone accessory.

Yep. Right? Like, that's just how they believe things are. So they're going to certify HomeKit devices with custom hardware. And if you want to talk to an iPhone, you've got to pay the Apple tax, get an MFI badge. HomeKit, HomeKit, HomeKit, this is not a success for them. That's all I meant, is like, they've got a lot of phones, and their whole world is, what if we've removed another port from this phone and charged you to connect to the phone?

Google's like solidly in the middle. They have a clear point of view on how they want things to connect to Google Assistant. They've reset, like, works with Nest to be more secure. More things support Google Assistant. Obviously, the Google Assistant is more capable than Siri. It feels funny just even saying it out loud. Like, I have to convince you that. In many ways, it's more capable than Alexa in terms of retrieving information.

It's like cast integration with TVs, I think, is really good. But it doesn't have all the devices, and it certainly can't do all the things. My favorite one that I just drives you bonkers is like you can't set a sono speaker as the default speaker. You can just easily do that with Alexa because Amazon doesn't give a shit. Yeah. Okay. So Alexa made the smart home happen. they want everything to connect to it.

I'm confident that lots of iPhone customers want to have an Alexa device that works with their phone and have an ecosystem of things that works. I think Amazon hears that. They care about their customers. Apple's like, nothing works with our dumb phone. That's how Tim Cook talks about the iPhone. We might as well join this alliance

because it'll let more things talk to us. And Google, I swear Google is just along for the ride because they're like, well, we have like four to five extra standards we invented that we can just like throw in the pot. Yeah. Like see what happens. So the motivation for each of these companies is really fascinating because I've heard. So there's lots of things I've heard.

Just because these companies have agreed in principle that the plumbing at a network level should be compatible, doesn't mean that they believe anything above that layer of abstraction, that level of abstraction should be compatible. So the thing that you just said, Nelai, is that iPhone owners want Alexa to work with their iPhone is nowhere near close to like being a kumbaya moment right now. The only kumbaya moment right now is I don't want my customers to have to worry about whether or not they need to buy a bridge for their light bulb, right? I don't want my customers to have to know whether or not there is a particular

Zigby chip inside their Echo Plus. I don't want my customers to have to know the difference between Zigby and Z wave and sidewalk and, you know, whatever else you want to throw in there. We just want everything at a very basic, do I see this device in the network? Can I connect to it and make a button appear in an app somewhere or make a voice command appear in an assistant somewhere happen? So it's about set up and, like, basic networking. I think it's very likely that these companies are going to continue to fight tooth and nail

at those higher levels of abstraction. So I don't think that we're getting anywhere close to a world where Alexa and Siri are going to, like, talk to each other. In fact, Amazon tried to create that world and nobody signed on. I've read this connectedhome IP.com website. That's really beautiful. I can't tell what it is. They talk about IP, right? Obviously, they have picked IP, the Internet protocol, like the IP address as a fundamental

aspect of their protocol. Like that is the key building block, the cornerstone of this. I don't know what this is, though. Like, I don't know what they're building on top of it other than to say, because it sounds like we've got all this code across all these repositories. We're going to contribute it. It's going to be open source and stuff like that. Deeter's going to try and then I'm going to try and then where you can judge who is who is who made more sense.

Yeah. So basically right now if you want to make a smart home thing, you end up having to make a choice of like not just like what the communication software will be, but also like what the specific hardware and radio and chip will be because they're tied tightly together. And so they want to disaggregate those things. And one of the reasons I think Google is involved is because they've been. basically picked something that looks and smells a lot like thread, which is their standard. But thread was a colossal failure in the space. No one cares about it except for the folks over at ERO. And even there, they haven't been able to convince anybody to use it. And so the idea is to separate out the networking software from the networking hardware. And just like getting everybody to agree to that in principle

was like, that took a minute. And that's why this thing, you know, in some ways, I think it was rushed out the door. Like, if you go to that connected home over IP website and you hit escape, you get the square space lock in. That's great. So secure. Everyone is super ready for these people to secure your homes. Just to clarify what you would you say, the physical versus the software layer, like

IP works over Ethernet, it works over Wi-Fi, it works over the backbone of the internet. I can address something on my local network and never leave my home. over IP, and I can also, you know, hack into Deeter's computer. Right. But so IP, we also know how to secure IP, right? We've gotten better at that. I talked to Charlie Kendall, who used to be over at Alexa, now he's over at SnapAV, which merged with Control 4.

You probably know Control 4 better. They're like a smart home integrator, right? They, like, they create another abstraction layer that makes it easier to, like, build a really, like, sophisticated smart home. And his take was, I actually didn't put this in the article. This take was like, look, this was basically all of the companies agreeing that, like 15.4, which is one of these wireless standards, is like here to stay. It's like going to be one of the main ways that these devices communicate with each other,

802.15.4. And so that needed to get standardized. Everyone needed to stop fighting over that. And then they're also no longer fighting over how they're going to address and also secure all the devices that are on these networks. Sure. And so, okay, here's my riff on this. And I was texting with someone at one of these companies, and this was basically the argument,

is the reason Zigby, which is something we literally never talk about in the show, unless we're going to make fun of the Z-Wave Alliance, which I promise we're going to do shortly. It's super coming. Zigby is like one of these classic smart home control protocols. It's been around for a long time. It runs over low-power radios. If you're going to put devices all over your house, they can't draw a lot of power. They might not have to run on batteries.

You need, like, low-power radio to happen in your house. Zigby is a low-power radio standard, but it's network layer, and it's, like, control command layer are intertwined. So you take Zigby and you split out the network layer and you make that IP. And then you take the Zigby control command layer and you make that the like the communication protocol. And then you extend it with all the other stuff everyone else is talking about. And then like the dream is that HomeKit goes from being this like integrated iPhone control

system to like Apple certification program. Now is Apple going to let that happen? Like who the hell knows, right? Yeah, that's so confusing about this website. Here's a paragraph. Who knows which hyper-optimistic member of this group wrote this paragraph and put it on Squarespace. The project aims to improve the consumer experience, yada, yeah, yeah, we believe the protocol has the potential to be widely adopted, Amazon, Alexa, Google System, Syria.

If the working group succeeds with this goal, customers can be confident that their device of choice will work in their home and that they will be able to set up and control it with their preferred system. That sounds like a lot more than just, we're all going to do IP, right, guys? Well, no, it's that command layer. It's a Zigby layer. So, like, right now, you send a Zigby command

that's like, turn on the light. And that is the command and that, like, literally the network addressing part of it are, like, wrapped up in the same packet. So I could just assume if I have hardware that can control one of these smart devices, it can control all of them, but I might need a different app to do it.

Is that what you're thinking? No, I'm thinking that, like, there's Wi-Fi in your house, right? And so you buy a Wi-Fi router, and it can, what's Wi-Fi 25 or whatever we're on now? But it speaks the same flavor of Wi-Fi, and it's on your local network, and then you buy a laptop, and it speaks the same flavor of Wi-Fi. And if you want to, like, send a file to another laptop, the Wi-Fi network will just have it, and you can send different kinds of commands across your network. So they're all in the same network.

They're sending the same kinds of networking packets in the same standard. And then the command layers standardized. So if you want to talk to, if I want my laptop to talk to your laptop, I ask the network, hey, Paul's laptop over there and network says, yep, I see it. And then I say, send it this file. It says, yep, okay. And that's two separate commands. Right now in the smart home space with a lot of stuff, it's like, hey, Paul's laptop where they send the command is like all one single thing. And so you need to separate those two things out to make it simpler for everything to work together.

And you're right. In theory, that both of the control and the networking layer will be relatively standardized across all of these companies. But I don't know that I fully believe that's going to happen. The dream is that you have an Alexa house and you buy any smart socket you want and you plug it in and it works. Obviously, in the real world, we have IP, networks, and there's HTTP and there's gop. You know. Yeah. Sure.

So they're trying it. And I think they're trying it because, A, Amazon is driving it, and B, if you're Apple and you need ecosystem size to work with your phones, this is a good choice. Standards are good in that sense. If you're Google, you can, like, contribute a lot of tech. And, you know, the CFO of Google can be like, yep, the thread team contributed to our success today. And they get their bonus for that quarter. They're fine. And then, you know, if you're Samsung and you make smart things, like, you remember that you've made smart things, that's a big win for you.

And you're already selling hubs and that strategy didn't pay off. But, like, maybe it'll integrate everything anyway. And if you're like, if your IKEA, you don't have to worry about this shit anymore because it's finally standardized. And you can just hire any bog standard developer who knows how to do this shit and then go make a thing instead of having to reinvent the whole damn wheel again. Like, that's actually the thing here. This is nice for consumers will, like, see the sticker on the box. I guarantee that it it works. But what this is actually for is any developer that wants to make a thing will have an easier time making the thing.

and most importantly, have an easier time making that thing that will stay secure. Because right now, if you're a developer, you need to support at a very, very, almost to the metal level, a bunch of different standards. And nobody can be an expert in all of them. And so one of them is going to get a little shoddy. And then you're going to make an insecure device. The best way to think about it is Wi-Fi for, like, not Wi-Fi specifically, but a standard that lives along Wi-Fi as a local network device that uses lower-power radios. and they're just going to standardize it there. And then, like, there's like, you're still going to need custom apps, right?

Like, if you buy a Hugh Light system and it can do 45 different colors, yeah. Like, that's not going to get built into the Amazon voice command system at, like, a native level. You're still going to need to, like, put the stuff on the top next to it in an app somewhere. Right. Now, the good news, bad news, before we get to Z wave, and this is going to lead us there, is this protocol, this whole proposal is meant to be agnostic to the, like, the communication system. So it can work over Bluetooth.

It can work over Bluetooth, LE. It can work over the Zigby Band thing, the 802.15 thing, the 15.4 thing. You know, but that's all that they're saying they'll support right now. Like basically those four or five things. They've said nothing about working over longer-range things, like Amazon's Wackadoe sidewalk thing that they proposed. Or, ba-da-da-da, Z-Wave. Oh, you got there. Okay.

Here's what we've learned about the Z-Wave Alliance in the past 24 hours. Here's the latest Intel on this in mind. So they announced this thing. It's like literally everybody in the world is part of it. I didn't realize ZWaves' parent company was part of it. Whatever. Where's ZWave? Like, it's the other smart home standard.

It's out. Our buddy, Chris Grant, is a house full of Z wave shit. Oh, is he really? It's amazing. It's like just not involved in it. Where are you guys? Why did you hear when Amazon put out the Echo Plus? They're like, we support Zigby.

It's like, what did you do to piss off the Z wave line? Turns out, Z wave alliance, a lie. Alliance. It's very good, dear. You did it? It's a monopoly story. So like the Z wave alliance is like, if I said I'm an alliance, like the Paul alliance? Yeah, the Paul alliance.

Their entire business model is that they have this spec and you can use it, but you can only use it if you buy the chips from them. So it's not a standard. It's a totally integrated like monopoly. wireless standard and they flooded the market with a bunch of stuff that people bought. So you have to support it. And the only way you can support it is by buying their weird radio chip. This is exactly how I operate in my personal life. Yeah.

You're like you want a little bit of Paul? $20. You get the whole Paul or nothing at all. Yep. So yesterday, Choype is Dieter. It's definitely just chip. Chipe is so much more fun. Connected home over IP.

Choip. Yep. It's actually, it's project. Choip. Oh, yeah, Project Troip. When actual alliance announces itself in this rushed fashion, presumably to cut the Z-Wave Alliance off at the pass. Yeah.

This is the rush. Because, you know, CS is around the corner. Yeah. So you got to get Choip out the door. I'm sure that Jeff Bezos called up Tim Cook and was like, look, I don't know where Sundar is right now, but Troip is happening. That's how the hell talk to each other. I don't want them muddy the waters, but the Zigby Alliance.

is a member of this new alliance. Yes, that's correct. Zigby is the core of the new of the choice. Zigby's actually running Choip. They're like, they're the ones that are administrating this whole project. Zigby, the administrator of Troip, that's a sentence you can say now as somebody who gives a shit about technology. Obviously. Okay, so then today, Z-Wave calls up Jake Castranakis.

Yes. Jake was like, who the fuck are you? No, ZWave is abandoning its business model today. Yep. Competition, driving us forward. They're no longer going to bundle the standard with the chips. They're going to make the ZWave standard an actual, quote-unquote, open standard. Now, anybody can buy the chips because they're running scared.

Wow. Yeah, so they're going to let anybody make a chip. The best part about this article from Jake is if you, once you've gotten through all of this understanding of the lie that is the Zwave alliance and everything else, you can read, the quotes from the executives, particularly a guy named Mitchell Klein, who's the executive director of the Z wave alliance. It's a commandant Klein of the Z wave alliance. With regard to not letting other companies make Z wave radios, he said, quote, I would acknowledge that that, that seemed to have been the only objection I was always confronted

with. And then later, when it comes time to, like, recognizing that this connected home over IP project exists and that its parent, Dewey's parent company, Silicon Labs, is part of the board of the Zygby Alliance. Klein said, I think it's important to note that at Silicon Labs, we see the big picture. Yeah, which is a choype is coming. You're going to get chipped. Which way for choype.

Anyway, I am dying to speak to anyone from the Zeewee of Alliance if you've been listening. just ignore everything we just said, send me one of your executives. We're going to keep an eye on Troip. Yeah. Actually, inside baseball. Typically, you know, these big companies, some of them will reply to emails. Some of them won't. Some of them will reply to your emails and then call you and then want to get an executive on the phone and talk to you right now.

Oh, my God. This time, they're all like, please go see our press release. Yeah. Like to a company, which is very interesting. I think they know that their plan is to have a plan. plan. Yeah. And that, like, there's going to be a meeting.

Don't you want to be at that meeting? I guess no one ever really wants to be at a standards body meeting. But, like, don't you want to be at a meeting where, like, the Apple engineer rolls in and the Google engineer rolls in and the Amazon engineer. And then, like, they're a click. And everyone knows that they're, like, the Power Center. And the Zigby guys are, like, trying to have a calm, cool discussion. And then someone starts screaming about 802.15.4.

I got to get in that room. And then the smart things person is like, no, we can't do this. I'm canceling this whole thing. And then the Amazon guy pounds the table and says, no, we don't have a choype. We have to. We don't have a choy. The Samsung guy's like, yeah, you want a Bigswee demo?

And everyone's like, no, at the same time. Actually, speaking of Bigsway, I just want to point out our friend Marquez Brownlee tweeted today, it's been 497 days since the Samsung Galaxy Home was announced. Oh, my God. Which is incredible. They even announced like a mini version of it. before they release the regular one. Yeah.

CS is coming. I'm really hoping they have them on display again. Yeah. Samsung will literally release anything. Yeah. Like anything. They're like, I don't know,

here's a nuclear submarine, here's a washing machine, here's a folding phone that doesn't work. Yeah. We would be remiss if we didn't talk, in all the smart home talk, we didn't talk about Thomas Rooker's great feature on IKEA. I call it IKEA 2.0.

And their giant shift towards serving the smart home with as much rigor as they make flat pack furniture. And they have done important things in smart home. They're like one of the companies that actually made LED bulbs cheap. And they're going in and they're making these shortcut buttons that are really great. They've already had this partnership with Sonos. And because they're IKEA and they're the first place you go to when you have an empty home, they have a good shot at being really powerful here.

Because while you're buying your smart from a camera, you can also buy, you know, a smart light bulb. Yeah. I think it's smart. I think it's, we can point it out they, like, they had like an early attempt with a TV that was a total failure. Yeah. And, like, they've, like, learned from it. I don't know that I buy the thesis that because the first set of smart things you buy or IKEA things, it will be an ecosystem.

But I do buy the thesis that if you actually get to a place where there's a standard and then, like, cheap IKEA things just, like, fit into the standard in a secure way. that that will actually drive really fast adoption of smart home tech everywhere. If your IKEA blinds work really well with your voice assistant and your phone, a lot of people are going to buy

IKEA blinds because they're so much cheaper than any other smart blinds I've ever seen. I think it's that kind of turn that IKEA can do. Yeah. Anyway, you should go watch this video. It's really fun. It's also, I think, Ricker's first big video with us,

and it is just a delight. Ricker is one of our founders, so it's wildly, has never made a video of this. kind before, but you just go watch it. It's great. All right, we're going to take a break. I'm honestly, I'm just like emotionally exhausted from the Z-Wave Alliance. So we're going to take a break. We're going to come back and someone's going to tell me about this extremely large Xbox. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online

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holding america together i want to just point out the obvious which is that america is not actually held itself together despite your valiant efforts but right i respect it so let's close out the or strong. Let's bring this nation some unity. Every week, America, I do a segment called To Charge the Time, Do a Dongle Crime. And it's about this really cool, but possibly criminal Apple Watch charger. Oh, yes, I love this thing so much. All right. So, okay, you know how you charge the Apple Pencil?

Well, you used to charge the Apple Pencil, and you still do if you have a lightning iPad, where it just sticks straight out. And that's what I mean by a dongle crime. The best dongles, which are all fairly bad, are, you know, flexible, you know, anyways. So this is a charger that sticks straight out, but it's a wireless charger for your Apple watch. So it wouldn't work if your iPad was laying down and you plug the charger in. I guess it could, you'd have to undo the latch. I don't know.

It would look really silly. But it looks really silly like this where if you have it propped up and the iPad's in keyboard mode then the charger sticking out the side but mentally this is very bad but if you look at it it's kind of cool

because you've got your iPad and then it'll tidy a little screen. It's kind of like you know when you have your big Mac and you put your iPad next to it as like a side display this is the iPad version of that and anyways. I'm excited for this thing because I'm going to plug it into Android phones

and I'm going to charge my Apple watch off Android phones. That's a dongle crime. That's going to be super fun. Yeah. I mean, why do you think it's a crime? If you have a dongle that is rigid, you know, like charging your Apple pencil or putting a wireless charging pad straight into your iPad. You're just begging for it to get snapped off. Oh, I thought it was a crime because it's unlicensed from Apple.

Oh, I don't know. I don't know. No, I just think you're losing, when you lose this much of the ergonomics, of your device. I mean, this is really one of the big things I hate, like headphone dongles make it slightly harder to use your phone in your pocket because there's like a kind of a distance of unflexible material now in there. Anyways, you know what I mean?

It's not Phil Schiller showing up to arrest you because you're charging your watch. What she does personally now. I don't know if you know where this. All right. There's a chonky new Xbox from what I've gathered. It is huge. It's a tower, and it has the name Xbox Series X. Actually, it's just Xbox.

This one is the Series X, though. Are you kidding me? No, we're only calling it Xbox, but this one is the Series X. That's like the full. So there will also be like a lower end Xbox that will just be called Xbox. Well, it might be called Xbox Series something else. Series. Because there's the Xbox OneX, but there's also the,

Xbox. All right. We're going to talk about its internals and what it can do and its size, quite frankly. But I just want to go through the name real quick. So once upon a time, there was the Xbox. Correct. And that was an executive of Microsoft called Jay Allard made it. It's a Skunkhorks project.

It was like custom silicon Xbox. Yep. Then there was the Xbox 360. The original sin. Yeah. The original sin. Not the Xbox 2. Greatest Xbox.

of all time. And they named it that because there was a PS2 and they wanted to be one more, bigger than before, right? Well, wait, the Xbox competed against the PS2. So the Xbox 360 was going to be competing against a PlayStation 3. Right. And so they couldn't have the two against the three. Yeah, yeah.

And that was an Xbox that was all around you from what I gathered. It was the 360 was for the red ring of death. Yeah. Oh, no. That's so bad. also Jay Allard skunk works outside of Microsoft custom silicon project then there was the Xbox one where Jay Allard then made the Microsoft kin which Joanna Stern reminded us all this week the worst phone ever made canceled before it was

launched the Microsoft can then he left Microsoft then the Xbox became part of Microsoft proper they released the Xbox one the original Xbox one was a VCR was a VCR Literally contained every dream Microsoft had ever had about the living room in one. Yep. Heavily focused on the Connect, had an entire TV experience next to it. I forgot to talk about video games, I would say, at the launch event. Just kind of left that out, mostly about how you're going to navigate Netflix with your voice, with your Xbox. It was very confusing.

We wrote a long feature about it. None of that worked. All those executives are gone. That's a true story. And Xbox has never recovered from that mistake. Has not recovered. But the Xbox won, importantly, left all the weird custom architecture, PC architecture,

just like the PS4, right? Yeah, that's all AMD stuff now. It's all AMD PC architecture now. PS4, Xbox 1, PC architecture, very similar. And then there was the Xbox 1S, the Xbox 1X, yep, the Xbox 1 smaller guy. Like the one without the disk drive that I can't remember what it's called. Yeah, I forget what the Xbox 1S disc list maybe?

I figured it's called. names all for Microsoft. Xbox One professional edition for workplaces. All right. So like the name's just like spiraled into oblivion. Yep. Okay. And now there's solution. Now their solution is to just

call it Xbox again. Series X. You're going to have a Series X. And potentially in the future a series less than X. My main concern is, I mean, I am very concerned about this naming scheme for the console, but I also do not know what X

denotes or even connotes. Extreme. There's only one thing and it connotes. Extreme. What about Windows 10x? What about the Surface ProX? There's like other Xs in the world.

X is Microsoft's Pro. It just means the more expensive one that you wish you'd bought. But there's a Surface ProX that's like it's a Pro Pro Pro? Yes. Duh. Okay.

It's the Surface ProX. The Surface ProX is that the that's not the arm one. That's a split. That is the Arm one. That's the arm one? I'm sure there's a fancy term for this, but if we try to figure out what X stands for

by looking at this device, we might learn something because it is not a console. It is a PC tower that is not as long as a typical PC tower. Yeah. It looks like nothing so much as a Macintosh Quadra 700

for my OGs out there. That's exactly what it looks like, minus the little lines that Apple put on everything. Yeah, there have been nonstop Photoshop's of it. My favorite one is just it is the size and shape of a fridge in a kitchen.

You don't even see it that it's a Photoshop. It's just a fridge and a kitchen. Oh. That tweet, by the way, got written up by like the IB Times slash Newsweek is real. Incredible. They had to issue a correction.

This is a real thing that happened. Okay. By the way, my other favorite thing about the size of it, and then we'll talk about what it can do. Microsoft, in their PR pointed out that you could use it vertically and horizontally.

And I was like, no one knows this. We should write a post. And Hy and very quickly wrote a post. You can use the Xbox Series X horizontally. And that was like our top post next to the launch post because this is so confusing. Yep. If you put it horizontally, it's still...

It's still very tall. It's like two VCRs tall. I think it looks absolutely gorgeous. I really like the aesthetic. I have no idea. I have a lot of large-ish devices in my home entertainment system. I don't know where to put this one. Have you thought about adding a drobo?

Because that is the choice you can now make with Microsoft. It's like two game cubes on top of each other, but bigger. I love it. I love how unapologetic it is. I wrote an article that was titled the Xbox Series X is the cyber truck of game consoles. Wow. And I will stand by that. Strong.

Yep. They're just not, they're not sorry. It's great. So, Paul, when it comes to questions, of architecture and what chips can do, I turn to you, my friend. What can this thing do? This can do about two Xbox 1-Xs

of graphical flops. Terrible flops. Terrible flops. So this is kind of a confusion that we all knew that Sony and Microsoft are kind of setting themselves up for by creating the pro or X versions of their consoles in the middle of the life cycle

to get some, 4K upscaling on their, for games that they were going to steal a little bit of the thunder of these new consoles and that is true. So this system is about yeah, so about double the speed at like 12 taraflops.

Now the CPU is going to be way faster and so the big change with the Xbox 1X was mostly was GPU related. And then obviously there was a new cycle a few months back, you know, both the PS4. Well, by the way, The PlayStation 5 and the Xbox, like, they're talking about the Series X.

This is going to be the most powerful console. But in some sense, it's all about, like, Sony and Microsoft are using, as far as I know, pretty much the same AMD parts. So they're just going to, it's going to depend on how well they can cool and overclock and if they splurge for like a slightly, you know, better run of the chips and stuff. But, you know, the technological generation and the genera, general provenance of the technology is pretty much the same. Really fast NVME SSDs and fast modern RAM and Zen 2 AMD architecture for the CPU and and a lot more at GPU than we've had before in

a console. So why do you need this all locally is I think one of my big questions, right? Like Dieter's been playing Stadia. I have. Microsoft has X cloud. Like, It seems like the answer to, oh, crap, this all might move to the cloud is, what if you had a PC tower next to your computer? I mean, what's at Borderlands 3 is coming to Stadia at 30? FBS? Like, Google can't even run these games fast in the cloud. And then it streams. And then so then you have to have a perfect internet connection to get a high bit rate. And you have the latency.

Like, there are just so, and there's problems. it is not, I think it's at least as much as a lift to port to Stadia as it is to port to one of these consoles, especially given the fact that these consoles are so similar hardware-wise. Yeah, here's what I'll say. I think Stadia, like, I have a perfect internet connection at home, and, like, it still chops. And that's actually not the thing that makes me mad about Stadia. It's like all the other execution problems that they have. They can't ship a hunk-up plastic and a spring to hold your phone on a controller.

Like, what are you guys doing? But the reason, even if you trust that all of those cloud gaming latency bandwidth issues get solved, and I kind of do weirdly, what a console sitting in the living room does is it is a thing that you own that does what it says it's going to do in your home the end. There's no questions about, you know, what will the frame rate be on the server? There's no questions about the bandwidth or the latency. It is, I bought this thing. I bought this disc. I put this disc in this thing and then it does what it says it's going to do.

That's great. And that also is its advantage over PC gaming in my opinion because it's like, here is the thing and its job is to make games good and that I don't have to think about anything else with it.

Right. It's an appliance. Yeah. It's just an appliance. It is mostly a PC. I have an original Xbox one and it's got like the fan and the power supply is loud.

Yeah. And the disc drive is failing. And it's always been big and ugly and the hard drive feels so slow. So there are tons of problems with it. But like in general, if you have an old console, they keep working. You know, if you have an Xbox 360, you put a game in the Xbox 360 and it has... There's no chance if you have an original Xbox 360, it still works.

There's a better chance that if you have original Xbox 1, I'll tell you that. Yeah. Ew. I've had so many Xbox ones die on me. Sorry. Yeah, okay. So maybe Xbox should have a product. You got a PS3.

two and Final Fantasy 12, you can have a great time. And I do think it's gotten tougher. Like now, like, if you buy, I think we're in a weird spot with this transition. Like, we're mostly digital distribution, but there still are game disks. And obviously, you know, the new Series X has a slot, it has a disk drive. So they are going to apparently be distributing games on a disc. But what you do nowadays is you distribute a game on a Blu-ray disc, and then you have like a 40-gigabyte download day-one patch.

And it's really awful. And even if you did do that patch, if you don't play the game for a month, there's like a mega download. And the fast SSD really solves a lot of like the load time stuff, which is going to be awesome. But it doesn't solve that like the day one patch and the ongoing patches problem. How much of that disk drive is just culturally a bunch of Console gamers want the comfort of having a disc.

And how much of it is somebody from GameSpot is bribing somebody at Microsoft? I don't know, but like, if you don't care about modern rosters, you can get Madden in 2017 for like $3 at GameStop, you know? Yeah. And what is it on the Xbox? I don't even know, but on the Xbox store. It's so like $60. Even Madden is like a, that has a whole grinder cards mode thing that you have to do. Yeah.

I get what you're saying. Well, and on the PC, there's a big sort of sales culture on Steam where people wish lists stuff on Steam, but you have this feeling like if I get something into my Steam library, that is going to be useful to me for a really long time. Whereas, yeah, if I keep on buying Xboxes, there's a chance that my library will be forward compatible, but it's not like a guarantee. So it feels a lot more like throwing money down the hole to buy a digital copy on a console than it does, for me, at least on a PC. That's interesting because Microsoft has made some promises about backwards compatibility with this thing, right? Mm-hmm. I think so. As far as I know, both Sony and Microsoft should have no problems with backwards compatibility because the last generation was PC architecture and this is a PC architecture. So I'm sure there will be little things with the software.

And I mean, that's kind of, again, it's interesting. Like these are more like a PC and that this is an upgraded way to play. Like just like the Xbox 1x could play a lot of existing Xbox 1 games, but in new 4K mode, you know, I'm sure that it's going to be a similar, you know, selling point for the series X or even for the, what you can call it? Because there's also going to be kind of a lower res version. That's not even as powerful as the Xbox 1X for the new X. It's real frustrating not having good words to refer to things by.

We just name them our own things. Like we should pick like, I don't know, like classic Chevy cars and just like, this is the Chevelle. Yeah. This is the Nova. And this is the weird one that was a pickup truck, but a car. This is the Al Camino. There's got to be a 4K newest Xbox and there's going to be a 1080P newest Xbox. is what it seems like to me.

All right. Do we know when this Xbox series X is coming out and what it might cost? Next year, who knows? That's the answer I was going for. I'm pretty sure it's next year. It's weird. I don't even know if E3 matters anymore. Typically, this is the sort of thing you would announce at E3.

But that would be, yeah, so it's probably holiday next year, right? $5,000. I mean, that was a big, Microsoft, it was a big issue for them that they came out of the gate $100 more expensive than the PS4. And so I am certain, well, I can't be certain. I would bet that they won't make that mistake again. That's probably with this cheaper skew. But the cheaper skew could be the sort of thing was like,

you know, the $400 PS5 is more powerful than the, you know, the $350 newest Xbox 1080P. I mean, that's almost certainly going to happen, especially like as the generations change and those old devices go on sale and then you're going to be really stuck playing Madden 17 for three dollars all right that's it that's our last Vergecast for the year thank you for listening to us all year it has been a remarkable year of Verge stuff

and I appreciate it we'll be back next year at CES that's how we're starting this thing it's going to just keep happening to us year after year we begin the year in Las Vegas looking at humidifiers with Wi-Fi chips and then. I'm excited. Yeah.

You can be good deal. You believe that. Super sincere. Thank you, Casey, for being on the show. There was a time when I used to be really excited by going to see us. That time has passed. Thank you for Casey to being on the show. You can tweet at us.

I'm at Reckless. Dieter's at Backelon. Paul's at Future Paul. Happy holidays. Enjoy your families. We'll see you next year. Rock and roll. Rock and roll.

Paul.