The Vergecast - The Selfish Ledger, YouTube Premium, and One Plus 6

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

The Vergecast trio comes together this week to discuss an internal Google video that was obtained by The Verge titled “the Selfish Ledger.” That topic takes up a good chunk of the show, but there���s a lot more after that. Nilay, Paul, and Dieter jump into other Google-related topics, like what’s happening to YouTube Red, Google Duplex theories, and a list of gadget news. They were able to fit in Paul’s weekly segment he does every week “Don’t block my chain,” so if you listen to it all, you’ll get it all.  04:04 - Google’s Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering 19:02 - Apple Watch behavioral science 19:47 - Google Duplex demo, or say whether the calls were edited 23:56 - Google Chrome is removing the secure indicator from HTTPS sites in September 28:12 - Entire Nest ecosystem of smart home devices goes offline 30:16 - YouTube Music and YouTube Premium announced as YouTube Red replacement 39:28 - OnePlus 6 announced with a glass back and a notched 6.3-inch display 41:42 - The RED Hydrogen One is coming to AT&T and Verizon this summer 44:16 - Onkyo’s receivers will work with Sonos, thanks to upcoming June firmware update 46:33 - A new Wi-Fi standard could let different mesh routers work together 48:41 - Paul’s weekly segment “Don’t block my chain” 52:46 - Microsoft’s Surface Hub 2 is designed for an office of the future 53:29 - Microsoft reportedly working on $400 Surface tablets to compete with the iPad 53:44 - The desktop belongs to Electron 1:01:38 - Uber CEO: our future won’t just be cars Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, this is Casey Newton's Silicon Valley editor at The Verge, and if you're listening to this, I'm already dead. Just kidding, I've got even better news. I've got a new podcast for you. It's called Converge, and it's an interview game show featuring the biggest personalities in tech. Each week, a new guest steps into the hot seat to talk about their wildest dreams. It is a lifelong dream to be on a game show.

And I tell them not to stand on my chair. This is the most fun I've ever had on a podcast. We'll bring you fresh games, new ideas, and a sense of what it's like to build a company from the people who are actually doing it. Then, at the end of every episode, we solve a murder. The first episode drops Wednesday,

May 23rd, wherever you get your podcast. You've never heard a text show like this. Hello, and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge and everything. I have some news based on what Paul just told me. We are now an ASMR webcast. That's where the buddy's out. You can pay for us on Twitch Prime.

Paul will just be whispering your name. whatever he wants. No, no, no. This is a show about technology, culture, mostly Google, Duffinit, which is what today is going to be about. But before we begin, by the way, just three of us today. Old school, I'm Neelai. That's Paul.

Hello. Deeter's here. I was the one scratching the microphone. I'm very sorry. Well, you just made somebody very happy, Deeter. Someone got tingles. Before we begin, I want to tell you all that we have been promising on the show for months, literally months,

that Casey Newton I was starting to lose faith would launch a podcast called Converge. It's happening. We even do like a fake pilot on this show and then we made people

weeks after that. But it's happening. So Converge is a play on words. It's great. And I know Nealai's about to give you like the actual details of how to subscribe and so on and that's all really important.

But I just want to point out that there's another meaning of Khan which is like anti or bad. And so I think the Verge cast is like Angel Verge and Casey is going to do the ECHS. Evil Verge. Oh.

Yeah. Like, we're pro-Vurge. He's Converge. He's like Dark Matter. Casey is literally assigning people scores for how well they do as he interviews them, which is amazing. So Converge is a game show interview. We've got the trailer before the show. You probably already heard it.

But I just want to tell you, go find Converge on the podcast app of your choice, Apple Podcast, Google, Spotify, whatever. Hit subscribe. First episode comes out next week. It's super great. It's with the CEO of House Party, which is a video chat app. Spoiler. I've heard the show already. It's one of the privileges of my position. I laughed and laughed. I laughed and laughed. It's great.

He's mostly interviewing like startup people in Silicon Valley. Yeah. So one of the things, T-Saintiff talked about this bunch, the news is usually overwhelmingly negative. But there are still people out there in this world who are making stuff and who have ideas and they have ideas about how things should work. They have ideas about how they should sell those things to people, what they should make, why they should make it, what they should not be doing. And Casey really wanted to bring that energy to a show, and we thought a game should be a really fun way to do it. So he's got all kinds of games and segments to just let people into the world of how these people who are building technology products think. And then he's also really means. Oh, so he sells murders.

Also, he sells murders. So just check out Converge. It's really great. I also want to congratulate Ashley and Caitlin, who wrapped up the second season of Why'd You Push That Button. And I will tell you this. Caitlin just sort of confidently promised that there would be a third season at the end of the season of the Valley. I really want another season. I think it's going to happen.

I'll tell you. It's going to happen. I love that show. So congratulations to them. That was a great season. That will be coming back soon. But right now, that's over. So why did you push that button?

Filter's out of your life. Filter converge in. See how this is going? Everyone else is smarter than us. But don't sleep on the flagship. Well, it's like everyone else has these like seasons. Like they begin and end. They take a break.

We've just been doing this every week for like a decade with no end in sight. But here we go. Let's begin. I got to say, I said Google duffed it this week. Vlad published a huge scoop today about the selfish ledger, which, Deeter, can you pull this apart? Again, I'm still, by the way, technically on leave. So I read this story, but I kind of have no idea what the context here. Dieter, can you explain what's going on with the selfish ledger?

Okay, so in 2016, the person who is the head of design at X, which is the moonshot factory inside Alphabet, but in 2016 they were part of Google. He also is in charge of this thing called the Near Future Laboratory, or he co-founded, I don't know if he's in charge. And so they like to do this thing where they make these speculative fiction videos or like write stories or whatever of like what the future might look like. And this is one of these videos. And so it's not a thing that Google's actually doing.

It's not a thing that they proposed to do. Google contends that this is a thing that they were using as a thought experiment for stuff that they won't do or what, imagine. what would happen if they did do it. I don't know if I fully buy that angle because watching the video, it doesn't really like read so terrifying black mirror dystopia that you think that the people who made it actually think it's a bad idea. Yeah. Here's the gist of the video. Like, look, there was this failed pre-Darwinian explanation of how evolution works.

And it was wrong, but there's an interesting idea built into that, which is what if there were these genes and the genes are actually. the thing that matter more than a person's individual will as they live their life. And there's a parallel to that with the data on your phone. And so what if we treated the data on your phone like a gene? And so as evolution continues, the data itself is the thing that expresses its will at a population level. And the user of that data just happens to be another person that happens to have that data, have those genes or whatever. Wouldn't it be easier to just grow people in pods and combine them with a type of fusion to create energy for the robots.

I'm almost done. So if you think about data in that way, then a bunch of interesting things happen. You can pass that data down to your children, like your genes. When you design, you don't design for the user. You design for the data, and you manipulate the user in service of the data in the same way that, I don't know,

my genes manipulate me into liking ice cream, even though it's not good for me because it makes it more likely that I will get enough calories to survive. I don't know, whatever. And so it just runs through all of these implications and ends with like, I mean, it's got like bees being creepy and insects and blah. And then it ends with like, you know, what if we change the whole world by subtly giving people prompts on their phone based on the needs of the data such that we can change human

behavior at a population level and make the world a better place? One of the great most practical things that happens in the actual video is the algorithm realizes that it doesn't know the weight of a certain user. And that obviously can't stand. You need the data because the data is the most important thing. So the algorithm, I think it starts shopping for a scale. I don't think it finds any scales to its liking. So it basically creates a device that it can advertise to the user

at a correct price that obviously they know the user will go for it. to get the user to buy the scale in order to add that data point to this. Okay. Yeah. So then you'll have a scale. So let me just because this was an internal video, it was not meant for public consumption. We asked Google, we asked X about it, and this is their statement. We understand if this is disturbing, it is designed to be.

This is a thought experiment by the design team from years ago. It was only two years ago. That uses a technique known as, quote, speculative design to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate. It is not related to any current or future products. So Google's very strong contention, and, like, this is true, is that they didn't actually intend to do anything with this. But I still think that this was one of the most boneheaded things

that that company has produced in a while, second only to duplex. Google has not had a great week. And, you know, the larger context, I actually took all the Facebook out of our show today, because we've talked about Facebook so much. But the context is Facebook has just had this incredibly rough run. And the entire time of that run, there has been this quiet chorus of people saying, hey, Google does all this stuff too.

And the reason we get Google a pass is Google's utility is higher to the average user, right? The tradeoff you make with Facebook is, you know, you see your ex-girlfriend's family and it makes you feel bad or you see some fake news or. whatever, and that the value you're getting back from Facebook in exchange for the value that you're giving them and they're aggregate and selling is like, it's hazy, so you can, it's easy to make them the villain. And the utility you get from Google, which provides probably your email, which provides search, which provides YouTube. Because of the value of that trade is higher, we're not looking at it as closely. But it's always been coming. I would add to that,

I feel like Google doesn't have a virality problem where I give Google some information and then it seems to like leak out everywhere else. I'm sure it does in lots of ways, and obviously it does majorly with advertising. But it was a lot more tangible with Facebook that if you told Facebook something, it might be used by a random company do a random thing. With Google, you feel like you're giving Google the information

so Google can do something. No, so I refuse to use Facebook login, and I happily use Google login. I could not tell you why. I do think there's a sense where that one of the things that Google hasn't had to deal with, but Facebook has, is that there's the news feed and people spend hours analyzing the news feed and is it showing fake news and is it showing real news and is it making people biased and is it putting people in bubbles, et cetera, et cetera. And I've always

sort of been, not as loudly as maybe I could, but sort of saying, hey, you know, Google has a news feed too. Just no one pays attention to it because it's just sitting on most Android phones. And now that news feed is very explicit and very public and potentially very influential, at least as influential as Apple News, if not more, depending on how successful it is, because they've got a proper Google News app that has a feed that's called For You, that shows you stuff, and that is making editorial judgments on another section called headlines that will just show you everything from everybody and Google picks the stories. And so this whole question of, is Google affecting society or not, is going to become as sharp

or could become as sharp as the Facebook newsfeed. And that has already been there with YouTube, right? You see dodgy Facebook videos instantly after every event. It has already been there in Google Auto-Complete. There's been a wild range of stories about that. Adrian Jeffries did a bunch of great autocomplete stories when she was at the outline. I mean, it's there. So I bring that up all is just the context, right?

Everything that's been happening to Facebook, you can apply to Google in, like, pretty serious ways. And I think it hasn't happened because of that much higher-perceived. utility that you get from Google in exchange for giving it your data. But when I hear that statement, this was just a thought experiment designed to make people uncomfortable. What I think about most of all is, A, that's what science fiction is for. So, like, you, okay, you have a science fiction team, but, like, science fiction authors don't usually have the world's biggest AI company sitting next to them being like,

oh, that's a good idea, right? They don't have the ability to turn their bad ideas into reality at the scale and ambition that Google does. In second, science fiction is supposed to serve as a deterrent in those ways. You don't want to build the matrix. Black Mirror is supposed to show you dark realities. 1984 was supposed to be a dark reality after the end of World War II, right? It's like Facebook bought Oculus. Oculus very famously used to give everybody a copy of Ready Player 1 when they got hired at the

company, you know, the conversation on Ready Player 1 has changed dramatically, right, in terms of how people view it. Is this just entertainment? Is this a vision of the future? Is this actually just like a weird, deeply flawed book about one man's wish fulfillment that, like, is actually really exclusive, like exclusionary to a lot of people? To use that kind of fiction is, like, difficult, right? Like, the way we contextualize fiction changes over time again and again and again.

So to create your own fiction, be like, that does not explicitly say, you know, it does not explicitly say this is the future we are trying to avoid. But instead, this is just an you should watch this video. If you haven't watched the video, go watch the video. It's on the site. It is a pretty happy video. It is a pretty charming video. I will say to bolster their claims that this is just

speculative. I feel like the music is a little foreboding. It's not happy. The music is a little foreboding. It's not happy ukulele. Yeah. But it's not one of those like cartoon. Here's a new app videos. If you're a futurist and you want to make these Black Mirror videos and you want to

like have it be artistic and, you know, compelling to watch. I get that. But to Neelai's point, if you're Google, in particular the idea that you care more about the data on the user's phone than you do about the user itself is goes to the very heart of whether or not people trust your company. And you should consider that thing radioactive. And you should never approach letting anybody in your company express that idea without immediately also expressing the other thing. And this isn't about censoring Google internally in their internal communications. whatever. It's just like it's shockingly naive to think that someone would make this thing and not

realize that what he's done is like grabbed hold of the third rail of like Google and its trust problem, potential trust problem, and shook it. To make them more concrete. So the way it's explained in the video, they're referencing the selfish gene concept. The idea that genes, it's not survival of the fittest as far as like individuals or species. It's the survival of the fittest genes. And therefore, genes, you're kind of personifying them when you're talking about them in this way.

But genes will value their survival over the survival of their host. So the video makes it pretty clear that they're talking about valuing the data that's collected about people over the people. Yeah. Let me just do. Well, let me say one more piece of criticism about this. And I got one more. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

I mean, they're not you. I've been working on a sci-fi novel on and off forever. Recently pivoted to a new one. And I was very sad when we ran the story because I feel like Google stole my thunder. So my concept was called the algorithm. Yeah. And the whole world was run by like a single algorithm that was designed to maximize happiness. and it was based on the desires that it could detect of humans.

So you're writing a sci-fi novel. Of course, it's got to have some sort of dystopia. So it's like, well, what's my dystopia here? Like, I'm trying to create, like, something that's as utopia as possible. It seems like this is the best case scenario, the best algorithm ever. What's wrong with it? Mysanthropy. If you base an algorithm based on what everybody wants,

what companies can, or what gadgets and AI, algorithms can detect about what people actually want. Some people want to hurt other people. Yeah, they really do. And anyways, that's where I'm at with my sci-fi now. Well, if you are a book publisher, you got half a pitch that has already been upended by reality. But Paul's available at Future Paul on Twitter.

So I'm with you on that. I think it's not only that people want to hurt each other. It's that this implies that there is an objective best life for you to live. and that a computer system can nudge you into it. And that is just not true. Like the reason we bang on about diversity and inclusiveness is that the world is like better when everyone is living slightly different lives and like creating things that like change us as opposed to an army of like wage slaves who are buying things.

Like how did Google expect to make any money off of this? Like, they sell ads. Like, how do you target ads when everyone is the same because the algorithm has nudged them towards total conformity? Well, I think this is an important, this is an important thing for all people in power to understand. Because I think we've learned a lot. There's been a lot of recent research about how humans may or may not do things that are against their own interest. And I think that's true in a lot of cases. And it kind of depends on like maybe it's against your short term interests or it's for your long term or it's for your short term and it's against your long term.

But just because people do things that are against their own interest does not mean that an outside third party is going to have a very good shot at doing something better for that person's own interest. Yeah. All right. Who wants to play devil's advocate and make the case for this video to exist? This video is great if Google says, hey, this looks like exactly where we're headed as a company. Do we want to do that to people? Yeah. And if it was explicitly presented in that sort of context, like, you know, we need to have a conversation

because we're trying to learn everything about people and we're trying to mold their actions. You know, Google presented a lot of stuff trying to help people, you know, use their devices less or be more, you know, more what's called mindfulness. this at the recent Google I.O., you know, Google is interested in not just collecting data about people, but also helping people shape their actions to be, quote, unquote, better for those people. So Google is on this path. And so it's something Google should be thinking about, and I hope it was presented in that context. Yeah, if this was a... Yeah, we just don't know the answer to that question. Like, it was an internal thing, and maybe it was presented like, all right, let's have a symposium on shit we should never do.

They kicked it off with that video. Like, that's totally possible. Yeah, I think that, but that's the moment we're in now, right? For every tech company. Like, obviously Google and Facebook, because of their data collection, you know, the focus is on them, the scrutiny is on them. But if you think about just behavior modification as a goal of tech companies,

A, they all want to do it. They all want to make you use their app more. So they're definitely trying to make your behavior sticky. And second, you know, if you have an Apple Watch, it will literally tap you on the wrist and be like, stand up. Yep. Like that's wild, right? Like, it's the same thing. And there's just this

idea, Liz Lepado wrote an entire piece for us. Amazing feature, you should go back and read it about behaviorism in the Apple Watch and how it's designed to adjust your behavior towards what Apple believes is a more healthy outcome, what might objectively be a more healthy outcome. But they're all trying to modify your behavior in this way. And that's like a new, you know, I was joking at the start of the show. Like we've just been banging on in this show in one way or another for like 10 years. Like 10 years ago, we're like, new laptops are here.

they have rectangles for screens inside of squares. Where will Netflix come to the Xbox? And it's like now we're like Apple wants you to stand up and Google wants you to be a human in a pod. We're a little bit off the rails. All right, so that's one Google thing. There's also a great piece, Dan Primeck

in Axios wrote about Google Duplex today. And he did something which is very smart. I wish we'd all done it. He said, hey, what hair salon and restaurant did you call? Because it's pretty weird that they answer the phone and they don't say, hey, you called so-and-so restaurant. They just say hello. Yeah.

Do you have any follow up on that, D-Dird? No. They just, like, Google refused to answer. They just, you know, and, like, I really get the sense that they made this thing. They were really happy at the, like, during the keynote reaction, and then everything since then they're like, oh, God. And, like, they just, they don't, they would really like the conversation and move on. And so they try to no comment it.

And it might be because the answers are like, not great. Maybe it wasn't a real demo. maybe it was staged in some way. Although, like, I know, someone asked me if, like, am I now on board with all of these Google Duplex truthers? I don't know if it was real or not. I mean, I guess I assume it was and they just edited it. But, I mean, at some point, like, the thing isn't going away.

They should just have somebody come out, say some stuff, answer some questions, and then they can move on. Because this, like, hoping we're all going to stop talking about it is not. working for them. Yeah, I mean, it was the star of their show. Like, how do you... It would be like if they put out a trailer for the next Avengers movie and they're like, okay, now everyone stop.

Stop all speculation about this blockbuster movie that we've... Like, this was the thing. It was the highlight of their, their I.O. presentation. And to not have anything ready to follow up, I think is kind of awkward. And I think a big part of this... I'm very proud of the edge computing piece. I did a few weeks back just because I just see more and more these software companies plan to be responsible for the end to end everything of everything. And so when you launch or announce a product that is somehow is so large, it has such a large reach and has so many implications, you have to think it through.

If the selfish ledger video or the Google Duplex thing, if they're tech demos, if they were explaining like, yo, here's how we could store data for passing on to your kids, you know, as a technology. Instead of a here's how we change the entire world because we as an ambitious company want to run the entire world. Well, so Ben Thompson, who runs trajectory, which is a great newsletter, website, media experience that you can have. But well worth it. He wrote a thing after all these developer conferences where he was like Apple and Microsoft and Google and Facebook occupy different ends of a spectrum. Apple and Microsoft make you tools. And Google and Facebook want the tools to do things for you. Right.

And like that's why their approach to privacy is just like radically different. Right. Apple, once you buy the tool from Apple and Microsoft, they kind of don't care. They would like some data to help improve the tool so that they can make better tools. Right. But Google, I mean, literally, their tagline is make Google do it for you, right? So in order to do things for you, they need to have this vast amount of data so that can predict what you might want done and how you might want it done. And I think that is the framework for both the selfish ledger and for duplex. Like, how much do you want your tools to go out and do things for you? And that's in, you know, the history of technology, all technology really ever does for you is, like, automate things, like just up a chain of complexity.

Right. And at some point, you're like, okay, stop. Like, we got as far as please encode the video for me. Like, right, like, please bring me a selection of videos instead of me going to a video store. Like, you've automated that process. But I don't need you to literally film me all day, every day and then make a selection of videos for me out of my life, which is something that Google will happily do for you. Well, they love to. Like that, all that is like...

It's true. Like, there's certain things where it's like, hey, that's part of, that's part of what I think of is living on earth. Again, so you could just grow the people and vats and then combine them with the type of fusion to power your AI construct. All right. So that's like all very heady. But Paul, I want to ask you about something.

There's a bunch of actual Google things happening. And I want to start with, it's going to sound very weedy, but I think it's important. they're removing the secure indicator from HGTPS websites. So they're flipping the user expectation. So right now it says secure. Right. In September, you get a little lock icon in Chrome, just in Chrome. But what's going to happen is they're taking away the lock icon.

So your expectation is that everything is HTTP. Yeah. And if you go to a non-secure website, it will say not secure. So Google's trying to push the whole web towards HTTP. From what I can tell, this is actually much more controversial than it seems. because I would like everything to be HTTP but that like has some like A there's like certificate authorities in the mix

There's a little bit of web centralization It's a big move for Chrome To just like impose this on the web I don't know I feel like The HTTP transition has been Pretty well engineered There is this big effort called

Let's encrypt Because yeah I've I've like Help like my dad has a graphic design company And they make a bunch of WordPress sites Right I have called a certificate authority on the phone and got like a certificate to put HTTP on a site because it needed it for like an online store. And it was a pain in the ass and it's not a pain in the ass anymore.

Let's encrypt is software. I think Mozilla helped a lot with it. A lot of big tech companies were part of this initiative to make it basically an almost automatic part of spinning up a web server. So anything that is built now and new, it's almost by default that you have HTTPS. And there are so many reasons and so many vulnerabilities when you don't have HTTP that it's just too huge of a liability to. I mean, well, I'm happy that nowadays it's hard to find a non-HTPS site. I think it's a great achievement of the tech community.

And, yeah, Google's going to be a little heavy-handed with it, but I feel like they should be because it is such a huge security hole. Do you see the flaw here? I mean, in theory, you are making it harder to make a web page. And that's bad for, you know, indie people who want to make something for the web. In theory, makes the web slightly less open. But in practice, I think Paul's right. It's not that hard to get HTTP. And, like, if you really think about it, maybe we would have been.

better off if it had sort of built into the fabric of the web in the first place. So, like, they're more heavy-handed about it. It may cause a few problems, but I think the scale of those problems relative to the scale of the threat of not having HGBSB, like, the default makes it so that I'm, I don't know. I was not upset about this at all. Well, maybe I'm the only one. I'm not really upset about it. I think I'm just upset about, I like the lock indicator, right?

Like, switching that default. But it's taking up some of that you, the browser bar or real estate. That switch from we are promoting security to we're punishing those that we don't do secure enough is very punitive to me, right? The lock icon is like a reward. It's like, look for this and you'll be happier. And like there's a lot of ways Google can promote that and make that a thing. Or they could have the lock icon and then.

and also have not secure, but to say, like, this is the default and the other option is punitive, I think is, it's one of those things where Google runs the web, and we just have to, like, get over it sometimes, and this is what they want to do with it, so this is what's going to happen. Like, this is what I mean. Again, it's like Google's doing stuff. I wish they had one of these icons on their new text messaging platform. Well, actually, technically, I do believe it is end-a-server. encrypted. Yeah, but then the selfish ledger can read all your text messages and being like, stop talking to him.

He's a bad influence. I can tell you feel sad when you text this person. Yeah. All right, two more Google things, and we've got to read that and move on the next stuff. The entire Nest ecosystem went down. Yay. Google's like duffed it a lot this week. They just put out their smart locks with Yale.

They have the new Nest Protect security system. I have a nest thermostat. They have, obviously, the cameras just all went offline for a while. And then they tweeted their follow-up was like, we're working and bring it back. The physical controls still work. That's just rough. Like, it makes me really uncomfortable to think that suddenly, like, the reason you invest in this stuff is, like, remote authority and, like, management, edge computing. Edge computing.

And then, like, the servers go down and, like, now it's not a computer anymore. It's just a doorline. I got a text message today from my niece, whose Minecraft realms. server wasn't working. Like Mojang, creative Minecraft, owned by Microsoft, sells like Minecraft servers to,

I mean, at this case, it's a kid paying money for a cloud service that went down. And I was like, man, I wonder how hard it would be to teach her how to set up her own

Minecraft server and get away from this centralized control. I mean, it all just comes back to how much do you trust as more and more things become more and more monopolistic. Like, I bought blink video cameras, and they got acquired

by Amazon, and now literally the entire app is covered in Amazon logos. Like, you open the app, it's like, blink, powered by Amazon. And it, like, you get a, like, motion detected. And you're like, go to watch the video, and the loading screen of the videos, blink, powered by Amazon. It's like, I gave you the money. But as everything kind of gets swallowed up, you have to put a lot of faith. Like if your life, if your door locks are Google, your cameras are Google, your thermostat is Google, your email is Google. Like, I like Sundar. I think he's a good CEO, his heart's in the right place. If he leaves and like someone evil takes over, you're like, oh, fuck.

I just gave you everything. All right, one more Google thing. And this one to me is the most confusing. We have talked on this show a lot about how YouTube read is like the best, one of the best products we pay for. for. I pay for it. Do you pay for it? Yeah. I hate ads and it's $10 a month to not see ads. That, as far as I can tell, is now $12

a month. Well, I'm a grandfathered in, but yes. And YouTube Red is going away. You will not be able to buy YouTube Red anymore. Right. You can buy YouTube Music, which is a music service. YouTube Music Premium.

No, there's YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. No, YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium. No. I'm pretty sure. That's what they're called. Can, don't they, can an AI just name the things for them? So this is true. YouTube, from the CEO on down, has always thought of YouTube read, bizarrely is a music streaming

service. Uh-huh. Yep. Very unclear why, because they run a music streaming service. They also run another music streaming service. Google. Just Google. Google doesn't want, they would, they would be happy if every.

everybody forgot that Google Play exists. In fact, they are, I think the plan is they're going to replace Google Play Music with this one of the versions of this YouTube stuff, right? Yeah, so they should. So, like, the idea that you have a YouTube music subscription instead of a Sada Sysi subscription makes sense. Yeah. Some sense.

Their problem is Google Play Music is kind of like a Google Reader situation. They might not have a huge user base, but it's a decent size of user base of people who use it because it's a very, it's very particular to their interests. They want to be able to upload MP3s to the cloud and listen to them. Well, I think that there's like, there must be, yeah. Do you think that there's a thing where I know YouTube is part of Google, but they've got their own CEO, and maybe there's just some straight up, like, power play dynamics going on between YouTube and Google, where YouTube's like, yo, people listen, more people listen

our music than your music service. So we're just going to do our thing. And Google's like, wait, but we have the brand and the, duh. And they're like, well, we did it. And they're like, okay, well, we'll figure out Google play music later. Yeah, or it's just like a focus problem. Like, I mean, again, you've talked to Sundar. I've talked to Sundar.

I couldn't tell you what Sundar listens to, right? Like, is he, like, deep in the weeds of his, the music experience? Like, maybe he is. Maybe Sundar has playlists. He's, like, deep in it. He's got a vinyl collection. Like, I don't know the answer. But I do know that if the answer is he's more interested in, like, AI, which is

he talks about the most, then the vagaries of how something is seemingly simple as music streaming works, he's not giving it the attention it needs. And you could have like a total political power situation or you can just not have focus. Yeah. I will say that at Google I.O. Was that only last week? Good Lord. I saw Spotify mentioned more often than anything else. Like in all the demos, like, and Spotify. And it'll blah, blah, blah. It was the examples on a bunch of Google Home stuff. They just straight up memory hold Google Play Music just completely. Yeah.

So it was pretty clear to me that the writing was on the wall there. I mean, look, a lot of people, you're sitting in a computer and you want to share a song with somebody, the easiest way to do it is to send a YouTube link, just by far. Everyone's guaranteed to be able to, like, go watch a song on YouTube. That's, like, a big thing to build off of. YouTube Red, with its premium video stuff, I think their only popular show is Cobra Kai, which I haven't watched yet. but people tell me it's somewhat interesting.

My whole thing with this is I am actively offended for every penny YouTube spends on original content trying to compete with like Netflix and HBO and Hulu instead of giving my YouTube red money to content creators. But they are, but they are, right? They're paying content creators to make that content. Yeah, there's a bunch of YouTube red shows. Nobody watches them. But like the most popular YouTubers are getting YouTube Red money. It's true.

It's just not in the way that you want it to. I get like promoted. I get promoted an ad for, it's not an ad. It's like YouTube's weird like semi-social feed of what's happening on YouTube right now, which their app is turning into. I'm scrolling through YouTube on my phone

and there's like a thing like, hey, watch this YouTube Red original. And it's like, It's like a naked man on top of a naked woman. It's like, here's a cool, sexy new show, right? Yeah. If I was a YouTube, a regular YouTuber, and I made a cool, sexy new show with a naked man on top of a naked woman, that would be demonetized by YouTube. Right.

Yes, it would. And YouTube is taking my YouTube red money, now my YouTube premium money, whatever they want to call it, to make shows that I have no, I don't care about it all. And I, you know, compare that to the Twitch model of directly. supporting the creators. You know, like, the percentage of your money, like, where it goes to. It's pretty frustrating. Yeah. I mean, I think they've, what YouTube is in is a competition for obviously finite attention.

Right. So they have to compete with Netflix. Like, if you decide to spend all of your video watching time on Netflix, like, you only have so many hours a day to give to, unless, again, you are born in a VAT. I was going to say, if you're in a pod, they can. They're just programming you and then you have more hours. This is why they build self-driving cars. You're just going to be in a self-driving car, temperature controlled, watching YouTube

Red Originals for $10 a month. Do you think Google's pod design has like a firewall and you can't hit up Netflix or who? Oh, yeah. Why do you think they're so quiet in net neutrality lately? No, that's horrible. They are suspicious quiet. Anyway, it just seems like the simpler thing that they should do is advertise YouTube with no ads for some amount of money. YouTube music or new competitor to Spotify.

And that's it. And what they're trying to do is figure out where YouTube original content that you subscribe to belongs in that mix. And so far, they haven't had the answer. And I think what they're realizing is so many people watch music on YouTube that they can convert those people into paying for no ads. And then they can provide some other product. And that is distracting them from what any other human would understand is going on. Yeah. So their data is driving them away from what their users are intuiting.

I get the sense, though, that some of YouTube Red is also about placating music labels that are unhappy with how much free music happens on YouTube. And so YouTube Red isn't just about converting people into paying a subscription. It's also about being able to say to music labels, no, no, we're a paying service to, and here's a slightly larger cut for you. Please don't get mad at us. Yeah. Yeah, YouTube music, and correct me if I'm wrong, mostly feels like it's like half of what I'm listening to is like, like, quote unquote, illegally uploaded stuff. It's stuff, music that is uploaded by not the copyright holder, let's say that.

But they're able to detect it. Yeah, they are. But it's not like the great, it's not ideal either. I don't know. Well, I mean, you can definitely like pitch shift your way around it. Anyway. Go 90. Verizon, it's your chance.

Come on. I want to come back and be like. Give Phil DeFranco a billion dollars to do whatever the hell he wants on your platform. lead a YouTube back to this because people are ready for it because YouTube does not understand their creators. I think the creators are ready for it.

The users might not follow them. I think that's like the this is like being like we should build a better eye message from better in the United States. Like all you, there's one piece of content on YouTube that you need.

You're not going to open some other app. At least whatever. I'm ready to open. Well, that was a long list of very confusing things Google was doing. That was the first 45 minutes of our show. This episode, Verchast, brought to you by TransferWise. Do you ever need to send money internationally?

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Some phones, some gadget news. I'm just going to say them out loud. Okay. And you tell me what's going on or how you feel. I'm going to say a gadget. You say an emotion. Ready? One plus six announced with glassback,

notched 6.3 inch display. Happiness. Yeah? The notch is just here. Yeah. It's not going away. Ashley pointed out in the, if you didn't know, the Verge does a daily newsletter called Command Line. Ashley points out that Dan Sefer, who does a lot of our reviews, points out that he's used a million flagship phones and every one of them has some sort of problem.

And those problems are always more significant than a notch. Yeah. Well, you've got to put the sensor somewhere. Mm-hmm. I just don't know that, I mean, this phone, it's an OLED, but it still has a chin. If you're going to have a chin, you can have a forehead. Most faces do. We're just not getting a lot out of the ears.

You know, the iPhone 10. It's been a while now. I don't get a lot out of the ears. You get the status bar up there, and so a bunch of icons, and so you end up getting an extra, call it 50 pixels. And if it's well designed, I was going to do a whole video about this for processor, but I decided I actually don't have five minutes of things to say. It looks fine.

It doesn't look great. But you get an extra 50 pixels. If they manage the status bar well, then you get some more usable space up there. And it's fine. And you know what? Like a bunch of phones are going to be notched for a while. It's a design trend. All this stuff happens with design for other objects.

And so this is the trend of this thing. And it's not that big a deal. Like I really am not worked up about notches anymore. Okay. I just, I never really was, honestly. So, Dieter's emotion was a Deeter face. Oh. Yeah. Which is kind of struck.

The smiley emoji with the straight line format. All right. My bigger question is if there's a, like, we've also seen phones with notches at the bottom, but you can't call a notch at the bottom a notch. So if the notch at the top, is it like a top notch, like a top knot? And people hate top knots. And so they're annoyed by that. Is it a bottom notch?

Is it a crotch? So a bottom notch would be a goate? I don't think we should call it a crotch. It's hard disagree. that one. Bottom notch. A botch. A botched.

You botched it. All right. That's horrible. All right. Next one, Deter. This one's for you. The Red Hydrogen 1 coming to 18T and Verizon this summer. I will say the CEO of Red said this one's going to be delayed because of carrier

certification and the way he explained the problems of carrier certification was I believe, explicit saying, we have no idea what we're doing, which is great. I love that. Like, whoops, we didn't know how hard this would be. this phone to me seems completely insane, but I love the I want to see this holographic screen. I want to know. I also have, let me count the amount of faith that I have that their modular system is going to matter, like very low. Maybe they'll do something cool with their cameras and people just end up buying these as like accessories for red cameras.

But this screen, man, I got to see it. My sense is like, we saw Amazon try this with the fire phone. This is clearly something different, but am I really going to want to buy a phone strictly for, you know, this thing that you can't see unless you see it? I don't know. There's just a whole lot of unanswered questions here. Shouldn't Red know that cool displays without content aren't going to do? I mean, they're in the content creation business, right? They make cameras.

Are they going to make a weird 3D camera to shoot for the holographic display? Like, I don't know. But I do think the Firephone was a disaster because it ran Fire OS. The Firefox had run Android, and they sold it for cheap. It might have been a different thing. This is going to run Android. Yeah, I don't know. Mostly I'm mad at Red because seven years ago at the Verge launch party instead of hanging out.

I'm mad at Red because seven years ago. That's right. Seven years ago. They launched some freaking camera. Dragon, something. I don't know, whatever. But they were launching it with a terrible live stream that wasn't well supported. And nobody knew it was going on.

And they didn't tell anybody what was going on. It's like a very, there's like a thing about L.A. companies, like Elon Musk does this, too. We're like, yeah, we're throwing an event. We'll figure it out as we go. And everyone's like, okay, I guess we'll figure it out with you as you go. Anyway, I couldn't go to the Verge launch party because I had to sit in a cold alley in the middle of New York on my hat because the concrete was too cold to just sit on and try and put together a post about this camera that they had announced. Wow. And I've never figured it for. I feel like we've got to let that one go.

knowing what I know now I feel like that post did not make or break the verge at that time I was a very dedicated person we were dedicated everything felt like life or death but everything is everything is so this you gotta sit on your hat and cover this phone

all right Alonquio's new receivers will work with Sonos thanks to upcoming June for more update I think this was for Delai this is for me this makes people very sad so here's a thing I don't quite understand Sonos is business because of this. So right now, if you have a sonous system, I have one.

The only way you can make Sonos stream music wireless with your house is to buy Sonos hardware, which is a business I think we all understand. You give them money. They give you a thing. Their service continues to operate. Presumably Sonos' entire business is predicated upon their customers buying ever-increasingly larger houses. So you have to buy more and more speakers.

I'm sure in a deck somewhere that's listed as a contingency, like customers have finite home sizes. But you have to like pay them some money to buy more speakers or, you know, they roll out their Alexa update and it doesn't work on the old play one, so you got to buy a Sonus one. But it's a hardware business that they're in. They're licensing out the software to make receivers do this. Now they're in a software licensing business and those margins are weird. And also, you know, their hardware will be competitive with other people's hardware that

runs. Like that becomes a much more complicated business to be in because this is effectively the OS for streaming music in your house. But what I will say is that for a decade, I have bought pioneer equipment. Ankiot owns Pioneer. And I just bought not Pioneer stuff. I bought a Denin.

Denon has their own broke-ass-so-no's competitor called He-O-S. It's true. There's a whole line. H-E-O-S. It's awful. All caps, of course. And you can buy weird

HIOS speakers for your house. There's a whole thing. And I'm never going to do shit. Yeah. And so, but because they have it, they're never going to do this Sonos thing. Because then you won't brother their broke-ass, Heas speaker.

Just give up. And just got to throw it away. But anyway, I'm actually very happy about this. I think Sonos saying, okay, we're going to be the layer for music and all these devices, and we're to expand this ecosystem is the only way they can compete with Amazon. And there's sound bars leaking all over the place. I think they're finally realizing that they're, they need to compete, and they're moving a lot faster than Sonos ever before.

But come on. I just bought the thing. I'm so sorry. After, anyway. Sorry, Neely. Here's one. New Wi-Fi standard

to let different mesh routers work together. Do you believe this will ever happen? I feel like there will be three companies that will support it, and then there will probably be important companies that don't support it, that you will prefer their mesh routers. Well, it's like, will Eero let Linksys add on to an Eero system? I mean, it really sounds nice. I'm in a real

situation where I have my own Wi-Fi router and my roommate has his own Wi-Fi router. How did you end up in that one? Because we have a railroad-style apartment that is just not a good layout. You can't get, we also have the backyard and we also smoke out front all the time. So we have really, we have a real long situation.

And you can't just put a Wi-Fi router in the middle of our house and have it work in the backyard and in the front. Yeah. So now he has the room in the front. So when I'm walking towards my house, my phone jumps on his Wi-Fi network. And so by the time I'm in my room,

my phone's having trouble using Wi-Fi because it's on his Wi-Fi network. I don't know. So anyways, I'll have to say. Aren't there hundreds of products now that can solve this problem? I clearly need a mesh network system. But it's like if these were interoperable,

he could buy his own mesh router. I could buy my own mesh router and they would work together. And then if we ever like break up his roommates, we still have useful components for our future mesh networks. You could buy your own ERO and he could buy his own ERO. You're saying you don't want to like force him into an ecosystem. Yeah. This is horrible. Every Vergecast comes back to the same problem.

The network effects of ecosystems. This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by IBM. We live in a world that's creating AI enabled everything, a world with more IoT. devices than people. Today, technology has never been smarter, but smart only matters, and you put it to work where it matters. When we put smart to work, we can help save species, increase crop yields, and make progress, not just for a few of us, but for all of us. So let's get to it. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at IBM.com slash smart. Okay, we're back from the ad. Let's make fun of the HTC fund. Okay, well, first, let's do a segment that I do every week. Oh, man, we're really making people wait for it. It's called, please don't block my chain. Oh, I said. Look, HDC officially.

announces a new blockchain power. That was the whole point. I was just mad at you put my segment, which rarely happens into the official list of real news. This has got to be the silliest news a week.

So I think it's silly, but it's also I'm very interested and excited about. Obviously, there's a lot of buzz, and that makes it really frustrating and difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. But I do think there's something very fundamentally interesting about a Bitcoin and Ethereum.

And one of the biggest barriers to the whole ecosystem is the problem of where you keep your private key. Right. So all a Bitcoin wallet is is basically a string of random numbers that you dreamed up that you can prove ownership over. You can prove that you generated them because you know this private key. Anybody else gets your private key, they have your money. So it, and so, but the private key is always going to be like longer than an easy to remember password, if it's going to be secure. And so you have to find a way to securely store the thing that could get access to all your money. I don't know if a phone is the right way to do that.

But there's also other interesting things. Like if you can securely, like, hold on to your private keys. There's something called local Bitcoin. People, you don't have to use the actual Bitcoin network or the, you know, the blockchain, like, ledger to transfer Bitcoin. You can just trade somebody a private key. So there's other interesting, like offline things that can happen that can happen. But basically, a huge problem with technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are usability. And the biggest usability problem is key management.

And I have no idea how this phone might do it, but were this phone to have a good solution for private key management, that would be a good thing in the world. So those are some good ideas. Here are HTC's ideas. To start with the Exodus phone, the phone's called Exus, will have support for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other major networks with more partnerships expected to come later.

HTC envisions a native blockchain network that uses Exodus phones as nodes to support cryptocurrency trading between users. Yeah. This to me sounds like it's going to be doing some compute because it has to in order to validate exchanges, which is why I said I think the battery life is going to be terrible. HECA is also reportedly allowing considering people

to purchase the phone of cryptocurrency, which has nothing to do with the phone. You can just buy anything with cryptocurrency. So their whole idea is they're going to build a network that's centered on the phone in some way. And that to me seems like they're an iced tea company that put blockchain in their name. That's what I said. In order to generate some nonsense hype on the stock.

You mean the drink, not iced tea. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Cryptocurrency trading between users. That's why I was saying if it's something like local Bitcoin, if all it is is phones in like a one-to-one setting facilitating a secure exchange of keys, then that might be like the nice thing to have.

Because the problem with local Bitcoin is muggings. So that's what the, that was my optimistic spin on what that could be. If they, if they're, if they're just going to make their own coin and call it HTC, H.T.C. It's a bad idea. Poor HTC. My tweet about this was how many times can HGC kill itself. All right. Last few things.

Paul, you mentioned your electron piece. earlier. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Because Microsoft put out a new Surface Hub 2, which looks amazing. It's like a giant TV computer that you can rotate from portrait to landscape in meetings. I always say every time Microsoft puts out one of these things, they show off meetings that look like the best fucking meetings in the world. And like no meeting.

Like I have sat here being like, I'm going to buy a Surface Hub 2. You know, it has a camera on top so you can video conference with somebody who's like the size of a real person. And I just imagine me and Dieter just having those meetings all day long. Like, that seems amazing. And then I kept on trying to think, why would I ever rotate this from portrait to landscape? And my entire workday now is just going to be finding reasons to rotate giant displays. But so that's Microsoft.

They're also thinking about new, reportedly thinking about new cheaper surface tablets. Microsoft's really pushing ahead with desktop computing in this way after, you know, all this stuff happening with Windows. They're trying to put computing in new form factors. But your point in your piece was that all of desktop computing is moving. to Electron, which is sort of undifferentiating all this hardware. Or a very significant portion. I just feel like, to Microsoft's credit, Microsoft has done the most as far as I can tell. So Electron is basically uses parts from Chrome to allow people to make something that's

kind of like a website, kind of like a web server, and package it together, basically using HTML, CSS and JavaScript to make a desktop application. And those desktop applications are very portable, and they work very well, in my experience, on Mac, Windows, and Linux, which is something that's very hard to do otherwise. So now that Chrome OS is supporting Linux applications, I discovered myself, I'm just installing electron applications. And it's so silly because ChromeOS has a really great Chrome browser, but that's not the Chrome browser that I'm getting in Electron apps because it's repackaged and it's not accelerated right now. Chrome OS, all that stuff. And I just like, I've been a complainer about Electron. I feel like a lot of Electron apps are inefficient and slow and are like Slack.

And sad. But at this point, it's very clear that developers want to do this. And they want to make cross-platform applications. It's happening on mobile, too, to a huge extent. They want to make cross-platform applications using web technologies. But a big question here is, aren't progressive web apps supposed to solve some of the problems with Electron because they use the operating systems native HTML renderer? Is Electron better than Progressive Web Apps because you can have some of that extra server stuff attached to the app in a way that you can't really do with the PWA? Yeah, well, progressive web apps are, see, and now this is a really interesting, like a twist to the open web thing.

Progressive web apps are going to be limited by the particular operating system's support for progressive web app standards. But also the amount of stuff that they can do in the back end, like I use Visual Studio code, which is an electron app. And it uses like Microsoft's compiler technologies to like look over your JavaScript and like hint like new things to you. And it can do and it like knows the get status of your different files. It's doing a lot of back-end work that wouldn't really work in a progressive web app. You basically... Right. Electron apps are based on Node.js, which is a way to basically talk to Linux or a Linux-like computer,

which has been adapted to also work on the Mac and Windows from JavaScript. So you can basically do anything a computer can do. And progressive web apps, while they're getting way better, are really... really far from being able to touch your file system in that sort of way. At the same time, there are a lot of electron apps that could very easily just be progressive web apps right now. Yeah. It just seems like the idea, I was telling Paul this before we came on the air.

My mother-in-law was visiting to help with the baby. It's great. It was really helpful to have her around. But she has this, like, ancient Lenovo PC. It's horrible. And I was like, I'm just, I'm going to do the same thing I did with my mom. I'm just going to get you a Chromebook. I'll get you a pixel book.

It'd be great. and she's got one nasty Windows app that she needs to use her work. And it's just the grossest app. And they didn't build a web portal for it, which it should. I just looked at the app for five minutes. I was like, why isn't this just a website? And there's a mobile app, but it only runs on the iPhone. It doesn't run on the iPad.

So if I bought her an iPad, I was like just use websites and then use this one app. She'd have to blow it up from the, it's so horrible. You can't, you want to have a good relationship with your mother-in-law. and being like, please use this blown-up iPhone app for your job is like a bad way to start that off. So like she's got to have a Windows PC. But if that app was an Electron app,

I could do any kinds of, I could get her a Mac. Yeah. I could get her a Chromebook and install Linux on it. There's like, there's like just this broader range of hardware. It's becoming way easier now. Yeah. And that to me, that is both the promise for the user,

but it's absolute peril for these desktop hardware manufacturers, right? Like, I think John Grubber has written about this a lot. If all the Mac becomes is the best host for electron apps, then Apple's advantage starts to slip away. It does, and I don't know, it's just, I mean, it's kind of frustrating to me. But at the same time, there are aspects where I do think they can compete in the sense that if a desktop vendor was making, because, you know, electron still touches a lot

of the Chrome, like electron can be, you know, in your menu bar. Electron can use, like, a lot of native features like touchbar and stuff like that. If companies like Apple and Microsoft were putting their best, hottest new APIs in a very easy to use way, so electron developers are getting like the baby's first touchbar experience with Electron, maybe they could turn into a selling point. I also think that this is kind of a tangent, but the stuff that Google's doing of sort of decomposing an application where it's running in Linux, but it's viewed in ChromeOS, kind of like, it's not actually a browser tab, but it's kind of like a browser tab.

It might solve your, I forget exactly your relation to this person. My mother-in-law? Your mother-in-law. That's an important one. Yes, my child's grandmother. It might solve your child's grandmother's problem if Google went all the way with it, because you could just say, hey, Google, install this. EXE in your cloud and let me use this EXE from any browser tab anywhere.

Yeah. Google does a lot of that. All the cloud providers do a lot of that stuff for enterprise. But consumers don't have a lot of that experience. Yeah, I just, but even that is like one step too much of like personal management of applications in that way. Like that company that makes that app, they should do that, right? It should be more incumbent on them to address a wider range of endpoints than for one person to be like,

in order to get away from this nasty Lenovo notebook, I will now build a cloud server to run one EXC. You have to like really hate an app to do that. Do you trust this company to do all that work before Google does it? Look, we're all just going to live in pods anyway, man. Just give up the trust. I just think, you know, because I'm putting these Linux applications on this pixel book for like the millionth time. Like I've been doing this so many times. Every time I have a new computer, I like spit up a new cloud instance or I install the applications natively.

It's like I need Visual Studio code and I need Rust and I need Node and all these things. I just like, you know, the back end of this could be kind of abstracted away in my, I feel like you could Chrome OSify a digital. desktop operating system a lot better. I know Microsoft is doing a lot of stuff with containers and putting applications in containers. I've been reading up on Docker, learning what Docker is. It's all over. It's Kubernetes.

No, we can. We can. We're done here. I think there's a world of server administration and enterprise application usage that I think some consumers, maybe myself, could benefit from it. And there's a world in which the second Docker is mentioned on this podcast that we shut it the hell down.

No, if you're a docker, then you're doing just the Lord's work out there. Okay, I think that's it. We're a little over time. I got a baby to get back to. I want to tell you all real quick before we go, Andy Hawkins, our great transportation reporter, interviewed the CEO of Uber, Dara Koshwaroshahi. I got that wrong. But he interviewed him.

Yes, he did. He said, do you know it, Teter? No, I'm not going to try. I'm not either. But Dara, CEO of Uber, is on our website. Great photos, by the way. It says, Feature won't Just Be Cars.

Exclusive interview, please go read it. Andy did a great job. He's been working on with that. Please check it out. Want you read that. Check out the last episode of Season 2. Why did you push that button? That's great.

Again, congrats Ashley and Caitlin. Subscribe to Converge with Case to Newton. That show is going to be a ton of fun. And you can listen to other stuff. You can listen to Recode decode with Carrey Swisher. You can listen to Recode Pete. Recode Peter. Recode Media with Peter.

Kafka. It should just be called Recode Peter. It should be called Recode Kara and Recode Peter. Like that should be the show. They're both great shows. Great to listen to. We'll be back next week with more Virgcast. Oh, by the way, you should watch Processor with one Mr. Dieter Bone. Deeter, would you like to tell the people about your

YouTube titling fiasco? Oh, so the last episode was about why you should try to have a custom case. We talked to Ashley Carman, which is great because she has a million just bonkers cases, but she has a really good attitude towards them and has really good reasons for why you might want a bonkers case.

So I talked about that. Anyway, so in my head it was like, oh, well, this video is about the best case for you, because you should have a case that feels custom to you in some way. But everyone just read it as the best case and forgot the for you part, and they were real mad at me that I didn't tell them what the best case was because that's all anybody really wants to know. So we changed the YouTube title. Sorry about that, everybody.

I wasn't trying to trick anybody. You can watch theater in a backyard, sand down. down an iPhone case, which is A-plus. All right, that was the Verchcast. Thank you for listening. We're back next week. Rock and roll. Yanny. Promo code. Or was it Laurel? Oh, God.

Yammy. You can hear them both. Yeah, you can hear them both. It's super easy to hear them both. None of the words are yeah-me. It's yammy. You should stop the rails. Goodbye.

This episode of the Vergecast was brought to you by IBM. By the end of this podcast, nearly 10,000 new malware variants will have been launched. But now AI can help protect your data from threats wherever it lives with IBM security. Let's put Smart to work. Learn more at IBM.com slash smart.