The Vergecast - This week's Section 230 hearing / gadgets go to QVC / Motorola Razr 2020 review

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

Nilay, Dieter, and Adi discuss the latest Section 230 congressional hearing featuring the CEOs of big tech. Ashley Carman stops by to talk about how gadget makers are turning to shopping channels to market their products. Stories from this week: San Francisco and Oakland phase out Verily COVID-19 testing sites White House officials considered Elon Musk for coronavirus ad campaign We need to rebuild America’s pandemic-fighting agencies Streaming was part of the future — now it’s the only future  Lime’s CEO on the future of scooters: ‘COVID has turned from a headwind into a tailwind’ Mark Zuckerberg just told Congress to upend the internet The latest Section 230 hearing showed that Republicans want to make the internet smaller The Right’s Regulator in Chief Gadget makers’ biggest risk could be a huge reward Influencers’ next frontier: their own live shopping channels Everyone on Instagram will soon be able to go live for four hours Facebook will test shopping from Reels later this year Motorola Razr 2020 review: 5G folding flip phone feels fine LG Wing review: learning to fly, failing to soar  Verizon’s Yahoo zombie appears again as a purple phone First iPhone 12 mini hands-on video shows just how tiny it is Mophie’s new wirelessly charging battery pack clips onto the back of your phone T-Mobile expands its faster midband 5G network, nearly doubling its coverage Microsoft Surface Pro X (2020) review: ARM gets more muscle Amazon Echo Dot (2020) review: have a ball T-Mobile expands into live internet TV with new TVision streaming service PS5 in photos: our first look at Sony’s next-gen console PS5 vs. Xbox Series X: the next-gen consoles in photos Astro’s Playroom is the perfect showcase for the PS5’s wild DualSense controller Control is coming to the Nintendo Switch today, but you can only stream it from the cloud Vizio and LG’s next-gen-ready OLED TVs are up to $500 off at Best Buy Meet the 24-year-old who’s tracking every broken McDonald’s ice-cream machine in the US We're a finalist for a Discover Podcast Award! Vote here: https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/5978795/2020-Discover-Pods-Awards-Finalists Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Eddie Robertson joins the show to talk about the big congressional section 230 hearing, which was a mess. Then Ashley Carman joins us talking about the new season of her show in the making all about hardware makers hustling on QVC. So fun. We do a little gadget lightning around, talk about the Razor review, the wing review, a bunch of other stuff 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. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Section 230 reform. Yeah, that's what I said. You're going to be in it. I'm Neil Epitale, your friend. Deeder Bone is here. I'm section 230.6. Subclause A. You want to be C1 or C2.

Oh, okay. Damn. Just going to go really in the weeds. Addie Robertson is here to actually help us talk about 230. Hey there. I'm C2B. Okay. These are very deep jokes if you're in the 230 game. And a little bit later, Ashley Carman is going to join us. She's got a new show that we're going to talk about selling gadgets.

There's actually a bunch of gadgets to talk about. So that's coming up soon. I want to start where we always start. You know, there's an election next week. This is coming out on Friday and then on Tuesday there's an election. Maybe just an important piece of information if you're thinking about your vote is that 33 weeks ago Donald Trump promised a website. I think five or six million Google engineers are working on this website. We can go get tested.

We can enter your symptoms and then go through a drive-through testing situation in the parking lot of major retailers, then get your results back on this website. It was 33 weeks ago. It's a long time ago. Yeah. There's no website. It takes a long time to implement a flow chart. Yeah.

When there's a flow chart, you got to like, you got to every single line you got to do something with. I feel like literally entire companies have launched and failed in the time. Like Quibi. Like Quibi came and went in the time that we've been talking about this flowchart. A little bit of news. We've been telling this joke for a long time. Underneath all that, there was a subsidiary of Alphabet, which is a parent company of Google, called Verily, that was indeed doing a website and doing a testing program in various ways.

It was always very small. This whole thing got way overhyped. But it did occur. And in San Francisco and Oakland, where they barely had partnered with those cities to roll out this website and the testing, didn't work out. In San Francisco, we have a story. Nicole wrote it. San Francisco and Oakland have actually phased out their verily COVID-19 testing program because it wasn't serving enough people in the right way.

And Deter, just before we started, you were saying the reason is because you needed a Google account to get testing, which is not appropriate. Yeah, well, it's not appropriate just ethically, but also straight up, if you're listening to the show, it's probably, you probably have a Google account, or it's not hard for you to get one. But we need to be able to test people that don't have easy access to a Google account. They really need to be tested, too. And so these testing facilities need to be more universal.

and they need to not have a weird requirement. I trust that Google wasn't doing anything nefarious with whatever information they were collecting in order to make this thing work. It was just the Google accounts are really secure. And so if Google wants to keep information secure, the Google account is a really good way to do that. It's just not appropriate for COVID testing, which should be accessible to everybody. Yeah. As with all things with the Trump administration, really just counting over time reveals an enormous amount of information. So we're going to keep tracking this.

to me, it's one of those things that it's just a microcosm of the entire COVID response so far as this website. Just another few little COVID updates before we jump into it. The White House considered using Elon Musk in a coronavirus ad campaign, which is the level, this is the most 20-20 sentence that exists. And then Nicole actually wrote a really, we have a package going up this week through Tuesday where we're all sort of just writing essays about what's at stake in the election. and Nicole wrote about our ability to fight pandemics and to do public health. It is very powerful. It starts with personal anecdote. I just encourage you to go read it.

I really really enjoyed it and was very proud to publish it. Then two more little, I keep calling them, the sort of second order effects of the pandemic. Julia noted that every major media company has gone through a dramatic restructure to become streaming first companies. That's Disney. That's AT&T. Time Warner. It's AT&T. ATT is like messing with HBO and CNN right now. That's what's happening. But Disney's done it. Netflix is actually going through a dramatic executive restructure. And they just raised their prices. And Netflix just raised its prices. Now I have to disclose Fox.com has a Netflix show. The Verge has Netflix show. Many disclosures all the time. But anyway, Julia wrote a great piece about how the pandemic has accelerated that trend to streaming. And all the companies are restructuring because of it. Check that out. And then Andy Hawkins has what I thought, one of the more you could see it coming, but it actually

happened pieces, lime, which is the scooter company. First, they went through a huge downturn because of the pandemic, and now they're on, like, just meteoric growth. They've actually doubled a bunch of their numbers, and the CEO said to Andy, COVID has gone from a headwind into a tailwind. So because people are not using public transportation, they don't want to sit around, they're using scooters. That's another trend that's just accelerated. Very interesting piece up on the side. Yeah, and those scooters, they don't go very fast, so you really do want a tailwind. Otherwise, you know, you just turn along. It'd be great if like, what's the one in New York City that was like Vespas?

Revel. We've got them. We still got them here in the Bay Area. It'd be great if, if, but the end of the pandemic, everyone was just like cruising around on a Vespa looking scooter like it was like Italy in the 40s. It was just like one of those moments. It's like men stopped wearing hats after World War II. But after the pandemic, we all just cruised down on scooters.

Okay. That is enough of that. Obviously, the pandemic is first and foremost in our minds we're covering it a lot. The election is a big deal. But the election to me is going to say, right into this hearing conversation. So, Adi, there was a section 230 here. It was actually the title of the hearing was very direct. It was like, Section 230, did it give you jerks too much power? And then Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg and Sundarpa Chai were in front of a

Senate committee. How'd it go? Not great. I mean, I feel like if this thing is, anytime you see a section 230 hearing, you can mostly be assured that it's going to be a weird nightmare. But this one was Facebook and Twitter and Google coming out with testimony that actually did open the doors to some pretty interesting questions, especially Facebook, which we're going to talk about. And then the entire rest of the four-hour-long hearing was Republicans trying to litigate really specific moderation decisions and Democrats saying, hey, it's ridiculous that we're doing this a week before the election. Let's talk about election security. And then a couple people just saying they're refusing to participate because it's an embarrassment. That happened, I think, twice. So what Adi is,

was mentioning was before these hearings begin, the witnesses at hearings release their testimony, their opening statements. So you can get them there a PDF. I think a lot of people looked at Facebooks and said, whoa, Facebook is making a play here. This is a big deal. Facebook is saying, let's reform 230. We have some ideas we want to participate in good ways and bad. Mostly bad. And so then you kind of expect the hearing to be about this big proposal from Facebook to reform 2.30. We'll talk about it soon, but the hearing was just a circus instead. I think there was one question or maybe two that were actually about 2.30. And the rest of it was just pure. I mean, Ted Cruz wants us to talk about this. And so I feel bad that we're going to talk about it.

But he obviously rehearsed it. He put out, he tweeted out a poster that looked like a boxing or an MMA poster, Cruz versus Dorsey. It was insane, right? So it's Cruz's turn to speak. And he says, well, look, I talked to, I talked to Sundar Pichai and I talked to Mark Zuckerberg yesterday. I'm going to use my time on Jack. And then he just started yelling.

And he literally at the end was like, who the hell elected you? And Jack was like, well, I invented Twitter. Right. Like, there's no other answer to that question. And it was just that level of theater the whole time. I think we have to also mention that Jack looked like somebody dragged him out of a cave. Yes, long beard. But like, the cave had great stylists in it. Yeah, for sure. But I definitely saw that picture of him and I immediately went and like cleaned up my beard a little bit. I was like,

I can't. I want to be nowhere near that future. Yeah, super long zizi top beard. And his hair was like messily come forward with like perfect curls on this. It looked good. But in a way that suggested that he either was about to just rip the solo from legs or look through your trash. It's like one or the other two was going to happen. Or institute a coup using wizardry in old Russia, right? I definitely watched. I've been watching really dumb movies to just distract myself. And I watched Transformers Age of Empires.

And I was like, oh, he's Merlin. Oh, my God. That's Merlin. Merlin invented the Transformers. Addie, did you, I mean, obviously there's these moments of chaos that we should just talk about. But did you gather anything from this four-hour adventure? I mean, the thing I gathered is largely in the testimony, which is that it looks like sites are, it looks like large tech companies are maybe going to be lining up behind this

one specific sort of bipartisan, maybe less objectionable than the other bills. Otherwise, it was a repeat of a bunch of decisions we've already heard from about. Also, it just kind of convinced me that a bunch of senators are. terminally online because it is bizarre how much time they spent on Twitter, a site that is just orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook and Google? Yeah, let's talk about that for a minute. This has been, I think, one of the more interesting sort of subplots of this whole year-long conversation about social media moderation, which blends right into the antitrust conversation, which blends into every other conversation. The last hearing, Zuckerberg was on the stand

and he was talking and somebody asked him a question and he was like, oh, that was a Twitter. decision, right? Like that, that was an exchange that occurred where Mark Zuckerberg was like, I didn't do that, Twitter did that, because they're all confused about the fact that these are different websites run by different companies. These CEOs don't even necessarily like each other, but Twitter just occupies this psychic space for our politicians that is crazy to me. So Facebook is huge, right? It's like two billion active users. Just everyone in the world is like in Facebook. They also own Instagram. They also on WhatsApp. It's just this massive company with this huge footprint around the world. Google is huge. Until recently, if you wanted a coronavirus test in Oakland or

San Francisco, you needed to Google. Google is massive. They own YouTube. They are the only general search engine that exists. Everybody encounters Google. Facebook and Google also have multiple other interlocking businesses. So Google owns Google Cloud. Yeah. Like, it's just a massive company with a huge footprint. Twitter is just Twitter. So Twitter, the last stat I looked at, Twitter has 31 million active users in the United States. And the States has about 32 million people in it. So one in 10 Americans uses Twitter. And the vast majority of people who use Twitter do not really post much on Twitter. Right. They're just consuming tweets. Yeah. I see this, I see this in like three ways. There's one, Donald Trump is on Twitter and therefore it occupies a whole lot

of people's attention in mindshare because he's very on Twitter. Two, in terms of the size thing, you don't get mad at the sky, you get mad at the rain. Like, Facebook is just too big to try and do anything about, I think, in some people's They just, they take it as a given. But three, there's this argument that we actually should probably get more into. I think you were going there at it is even if a tiny number of people use Twitter, it is like the seed for a whole bunch of things that happened in the news. It is the thing that you'll see it on Twitter and that it turns into cable news for

six hours a day or whatever. And so that is, I think, maybe where they're coming from. That's maybe giving them too much of the benefit of the doubt there. Maybe Addie's right, they're just terminally online. But you could make the case that Twitter has outsized importance in American politics because the people that are using it are the people that set conversations in broader platforms later. Yeah, I think that's totally right. And that's the thing I keep kind of turning over in my head because on one hand, like, yes,

it's very influential because it, like, everything that happens on people. Twitter often sets the conversation. That means it's very important to figure out who can participate and what they say. On the other hand, that's also just, that's like saying it's like a really influential newswire service or something. Like, I keep joking that eventually Twitter's final form is like Bloomberg buys it and turns it into a newswire because the only people on it are like PR people and journalists and politicians.

So it's just like a Bloomberg terminal, but everybody snarks on it. So it just raises this weird question where if the argument is that lots of people pay attention to this thing where people post news, is that putting it in the same category as something that just massive numbers of people use purely as like a service provided by a company? So this is the question. This is the reason I brought up antitrust. Usually when you want to impose some when our government historically is wanted to go in monkey with a private business, it is needed some reason. to do it. And so with antitrust, one reason is, well, you're the only company in the market, and we think you're foreclosing competition or behaving in some harmful way. We're going to come and do stuff to you. That's a pretty high bar. Like, this case against Google is the first antitrust case in like 50 years at this scale, right? To do speech regulation where the government is going to, you know, like set the First Amendment aside and say to Twitter what they can and cannot do,

which is what all of this comes down to is how should Twitter? moderate content on its platform. It's an even higher bar. And so you have to say Twitter is the only social media platform in the world that matters. And it matters so much that we can set aside the First Amendment, which is just Twitter is a chaotically run company that only one in 10 American use. Like, it's not a well-run company. It doesn't like operate in a rational or reasonable or stable way that any moment it feels like a careen off a cliff. And the thing that Congress, on kind of both sides of all is doing, is saying Twitter is so important that we can we can end run the First Amendment.

I feel like I should also, like the thing that makes this even weirder is that this entire debate was largely about Twitter adding warning labels to tweets and like maybe making you click through to them or limiting their reach that this entire thing isn't even about takedowns for Twitter, which just like I understand again, like reach is on the internet like that's a part of speech, like making something very difficult to see that does absolutely matter. But on the other hand, we're not even talking about deletions. We're having this giant conversation. They're not even taking down the tweets.

Yeah. What was the Mike Lee line? He was like, now when we talk about censorship, and I define censorship as adding labels and doing fact checks, do you censor stuff? And all of them are like, no, that's not censorship. Like all three CEOs. And he was like, well, I am using censorship with a different day. definition. And it was, it was one of the most insane moments of that entire hearing where

United States Senator decided he had his own definition of censorship that they should all agree to and then admit that they were doing the thing. And it was like, they're very smart. They're the CEOs. All of them are billionaires. Like, you can't just fool them by being like, here's what I'm saying. I have to find murder is blinking your eyes. Have you murdered anyone? It's like, no, they're not going to fall for it. I mean, it's like, it's, like a monkey's paw where everyone is having a debate that I think is very interesting and they're doing it in such just the stupidest way possible in the worst faith they could possibly do it. Well, so actually, this was my big question is we need to talk about the potential substance of 230 and what Zuckerberg said about it. Disclosure my wife works for whatever they're calling Oculus now, which is a division of Facebook.

Facebook Reality Labs. Thank you. Facebook Reality Labs. I should know this, but I don't report on it. So anyway, the question that I have is. is there a charitable read on the circus itself, on the purpose of the circus itself, beyond a bunch of people wanted to be seen on social networks, yelling about social networks and being censored on social networks right ahead of the election? Like, that is the, to me, it's like that's the obvious cynical take of why they wanted the circus. Oh, I think it's worse than that. I think the obvious cynical take is three clicks worse than that.

Okay, sure. But is there a non-cynical good faith? There was a point to the circus take. Okay, I can give the good faith, and Neela should give the bad faith. I think the, if you were going to be really, really charitable, you're still mostly just taking a weird utilitarian view. And it's that the idea is to get this on the table, is to, yes, maybe it's a circus. It's really loud. But everybody thinks that the way that tech companies moderate their platforms is a huge issue. And this draws attention to it. This is kind of the reasoning behind a lot of the loose consensus between left wing and right.

right-wing folks who hate big tech is like, yes, I disagree with them, but at least they're bringing up the issue. Yeah. I think the three clicks worst bad faith interpretation, which if you ask me right now in this moment of extreme election anxiety is the nightmare scenario is election day comes and goes. The votes aren't counted. We're still waiting on a winner. And Donald Trump tweets, I won. I'm the president. And Twitter puts a label on it. Right. Saying this is not true. And I don't. I think this entire exercise was for the Republicans on the committee to try to work the refs to make that moment of massive outsized importance such that Twitter doesn't do it. Or, you know, there's some other set of nonsense that happens.

Vladimir Putin sends the Internet Research Agency to tweet and put ads on Facebook saying both Biden and Trump won, you know, like to destabilize the whole election. and the platforms are shy about moderating that stuff. That to me is, that was the goal of this, was to work the refs because the election is so contentious. Now, were they successful at that? I'm not like a fan of how any of these companies run their moderation teams. I don't think they do a good job.

And we've written how many features from KC about how simply operating YouTube and Facebook at scale means that some people get PTSD, right? There's just like a fact of Facebook. Like if you want to run Facebook at the scale, you need some moderators. Those moderators have to look at horrible things. They're going to get PTSD. That is just a fact.

You should start there with your moderation decision. Do we think that they enforce their rules well? Do we think that they write their rules consistently? We do not. So I don't want to give them all too much credit. But at this hearing, all of them made it seem like they are thoughtful and rigorous and consistent above the fray and they are not going to back down. So was this hearing even successful at doing it?

that? Like, I don't know. It is crazy to me that Jack Dorsey came away from this looking like he had it. He's got a handle on it. This is what we're doing. This is how we're doing it. And you can actually see Twitter's moderation decisions are getting more aggressive over time. They're absolutely getting more aggressive over time. They are more confident in what they're doing than they were previously. I don't know if it's the same for Google and Facebook. But for Twitter, which is where all of the psychic energy is located, yeah, they're just being way more aggressive than they used to be. So I don't know if this hearing was effective in working the refs, but if I had the bad faith interpretation, I would say that's what it's designed to do.

Addie, do you think it's that dire? Which part of it is that dire? I mean, everything's dire. The work the refs ahead of election misinformation. I can't tell anymore because I just, I am in such a tech policy bubble that we all understand the extreme nuances of all of these things. And like, we get why what Ted Cruz said that was ridiculous this week is different from how he was ridiculous last week. I keep suspecting that there's just this large contingent of people for whom the tech lash and like the anti-big tech section 230, whatever, is just this ongoing stream of nonsense they don't really care about that like, yeah, maybe they probably like us think that tech companies

and like web platforms screw up all the time. But they're just like, oh, yeah, no, okay, it's another thing where big tech wasn't good. And like they're not going to see this as even a new beat in the story. Yeah, I feel like the nightmare version of this coverage is always like the local news headline that's like, should Twitter have to abide by the First Amendment? And you're like, well, we're just on different planets where on my planet, the First Amendment only applies to government. I don't know about yours. And like that, I think that just amount of noise in the system certainly allows for a lot of policy decisions. To me, look like terrifying speech regulation. I am surprised nobody's brought up the utilities argument. I will say. Everybody. Everybody. keeps trying, like, everyone in the Trump administration keeps trying to say, like, these companies are basically utilities, but no one will come out and actually say it. Yeah, their magic word is the modern town square, which is very funny because it implies that, like, the town square previously was a well-regulated place where everyone was constantly just exchanging opinions

instead of, like, just a place where people were yelling on some soapboxes and other people were trying to buy apples. Like, that's my impression of what old town squares were like. I don't, I know, I never once one. If we did refer to them as town squares, we could start calling Jack Dorsey a constable instead of CEO. That could be phone. He did kind of look like a constable. Let's talk about the actual 230 proposal that Facebook floated before this hearing. There's a lot to 230.

I think the way I just want to set it up is I think the First Amendment prevents even the most aggressive Republicans from saying out loud, here are the moderation policies that I think Twitter should have. right? I mean, they're just very direct, like, Congress shall make no law respecting freedom of speech. Like, there it is. They can't do it. They're Congress. They can't do that. But 230 is this big weapon where if they take it away, Twitter becomes liable for everything published on its platform, at least until some sequence of court cases solves that problem for them, or at least provide some boundaries. And if they take it away, Twitter's costs go up, their liability goes up, and Twitter might have to shut down. So it's like this existential threat. for platforms of all sizes. Somebody who works at Apple Insider, like, retweeted me yesterday during the hearing and was, like, if 230 goes away, we have to shut down the Apple Insider forums. Like, the liability risk is too high. I assure you they're not a monopoly. Like, there's, like, right?

So, 230 is this huge, huge weapon. It's an existential threat for a bunch of companies. And so they keep threatening and take it away so that they will impose speech regulations voluntarily that are whatever you might want to have. But there is still some like 230, the PACT Act, which is what Addy has been saying, seems to be the 230 reform that everybody settled on. So, Adi, what is the PACT Act? So the PACT Act is, it is sort of a collection of different pieces, but the main thrust of it is that it's focused on, okay, we won't tell companies how to moderate exactly, but we're going to make sure that they publish what they're going to

moderate for and, like, give you extreme transparency into, like, their terms of service and how they're moderating. And you have an appeals process. So if you think your ban was unreasonable, you can call a customer service line where a live representative will help you. And also, if a court orders that something is illegal, they have to take it down within 24 hours. So that's a pretty moderate set of reforms, right? That's like Twitter needs to have customer service. Right. Compared to, say, any of the really strange Section 230 bills that are like the FTCC see should create a speech commission that you have to apply to, or the Earnet Act, which was like the DOJ gets carte blanche to just make rules. And if you don't abide by them, then too bad.

Yeah. But the Earnet Act was also like, you don't get to use encryption on your messaging platform. Right. Wasn't that the trade? No. So that was the thing. It never actually came out and said that. They made a big deal out of like, no, it doesn't actually say that. It just says the DOJ can do whatever it wants. And then Barr comes out and he's like, you know what's terrible? encryption. So what's the connection between screaming about individual tweets in a hearing and the PACT Act? Like that's a pretty broad range, right? So if you want to, I'm being sort of charitable here.

If you want to talk about it, then a lot of the hearing focused on trying to prove that Twitter's moderation was inconsistent. So it would be somebody would bring up, hey, there was this horrible dictator who'd said something horrible and you didn't label that. but then Trump said a different thing, and he labeled that. And then Jack Dorsey would try to explain like the state monopoly on power or something. Like he distinguishes between saber-raveling internationally and violence against your own people. But the point is they were trying to establish that like they were being unfair.

And the Pact Act, the point of it is to mandate that companies are in air quotes here fair. So under this rule, Twitter theoretically has to publish its standards and Donald Trump has to be able to go in appeal to those standards and get a really good explanation or have his tweet unlabeled, I guess. A long, long, long, long time ago, I got put in charge of the forums at Trio Central. And we were talking about the Trio smartphone. And, you know, like every website with a forum, you publish moderator guidelines. You say these are our rules. They're relatively vague, but like you kind of know what they are.

And then there's moderators. And then because it was small, I got to say, look, if you want to appeal any of these things, you just email me and don't argue about it publicly. And I'm probably not going to litigate it with you publicly because then that's all anybody will talk about ever. So it sounds like what they want is for just like this endless opportunity to nitpick moderation rules out in public and like make it the, focus of discussion around these things. Like that, I don't know, that just sounds like a nightmare to me. My original cut of my very first moderation rules was my decisions are final if you don't like it, go somewhere else.

And like, that could have worked. But the problem now is you can't go anywhere else, at least if we're talking about Facebook. So this is the thing that's really weird and hard is that it feels like there is a fundamental difference between something like the Apple Insider forums and Twitter. They feel like just fundamentally different services. One of them's kind of like the phone company and others, like some kind of random hotline you can call and like chat with people. Yeah. But they're trying to make laws that cover both of them.

The PACT Act has this like small business exemption, but it's kind of narrow and hard to tell exactly how it would be enforced. But basically they're trying to make law that's going to affect both these incredibly different kinds of services. And they're basically doing it only by ever talking to the people who run the general. gigantic services. And that's really frustrating. And I just continue to point out that Twitter is not, it's not even in a category of gigantic. Okay. It's not even, it's bigger. It's, Twitter's still like a really big company. It's, it's, it's a very big company. It's not a community. I feel like we could just, that's like hours of conversation. It happened to us too. We're like focused on Twitter. But I, I think I've said this on like every episode of the show that

we've talked about YouTube on ever. Like, YouTube creators are always, mad at YouTube. They're always mad at YouTube. And what happens in YouTube chat, like live stream chat? I watched the hearing on YouTube yesterday and the live chat was up. And I was like, this is horrible. I was like, someone should moderate this chat. Like YouTube has an enormous scale of moderation problems and content monetization problems. And they're all hyper specific. You need to know the language of YouTube to understand what is happening on YouTube. I don't know how you could take any particular law that you've written for the problems with Twitter, glue them onto YouTube and actually make life better for the individual YouTube creator or the member of the YouTube community

that just wants a nice place to watch videos and talk to other people in that community. That seems impossible. Well, Eddie, you brought up in your piece. I mean, there's YouTube, but you also brought up, I think you brought up Reddit. Like, Reddit has got, like, subreddit is where they set their moderation rules? And so, like, does each one of them going to be subject to the rules of the PACT Act? Is Reddit as a whole going to be? Like, it sounds like a fiasco.

Yeah. Well, this is the problem is that it's really hard for me to answer those questions because they put out this bill. They actually did have a pretty good hearing on it where they invited mostly a bunch of legal experts and they kind of hash things out. But it's really difficult to tell what this would practically mean for a bunch of companies. Because, yeah, it's all, it's this very angels dancing on the head of a pin kind of

scenario where they're making these rules. And then those rules have to get translated through not only individual moderation decisions, but the fact that a bunch of these decisions are made by AIs, and so you have to assume that you can, like, make a bot that understands the spirit of this law, or you just have to prepare for this gigantic flood of people contesting the rules. And I feel like nobody is prepared for that.

I think that the issue underlying all of this is when Dieter ran the Trio Central Forums, his first instinct at a rule was if you don't like it, go somewhere else, right? What was your big competitor? at Trio Central Forums. There were a bunch. Paul Minfo Center had forums. There was also a Gronauts.

Dieter's so in it. He's like, here they are ranked by their dangerous to me. Howard Forums was a big one. Oh, Hofo was great. Hofo was great. Right. So that's a competitive market. If you're mad on Trio Central, you're going to go to Howard Forums or you're going to go to

Trio Nots. And that is a reasonable thing to say. If you are mad at Twitter, are you going to go to Parlor? Right. Like, I don't know that that is the answer. None of these companies are one-for-one competitors with each other. If you're mad at Twitter and you go to Facebook, you have a wholly different kind of experience. If you're mad at YouTube and you go to Vimeo, you're going to start making very art-y movies for a very much smaller audience very quickly.

Isn't the real problem here that there's just such a lack of competition that we feel comfortable making what is effectively speech regulation? I can't. That's a thing that sounds so incredibly reasonable. And it's the thing I feel like I said for a really long time. And the more I watch people try to make alternatives, the more it just, it feels like there is no world where there are three separate but roughly equivalent Twitters that you can move between or like it seems like when competitors show up their stuff like TikTok, which yeah, is not a one-to-one substitution. And I don't know anymore. Like it feels like also the more people talk about tech as just these three big companies, the more they will never see something like the trio forums as viable again. that like nobody's going to bother joining independent sites because they only define themselves

as either we don't exist or like a Facebook group or hey, join us specifically because you hate Facebook, which is a dumb reason to join something. Well, I mean, there's a scale issue. Like, like discords are super popular right now, right? Like, but they work because they're smaller. So there's always something, but there's never like going to be, I don't see Discord taking Facebook on anytime soon, for example. I mean, Discord and Reddit are.

interesting because so much of them are self community. They're like community moderated and they work. They're more like software. Like discord is almost literally software. It has central moderation, but it's the I really like the idea of social networks as being software and tools that then moderation ends up falling to communities that has its own share of gigantic problems. But it, it's the thing that like feels good to me and that makes me happy and very little about social media makes me happy. Have I said the thing about the ERO subreddit on this show yet? I know I talked to Deuter about it once, but there's an ERO, the ERO router, there's a subreddit of passionate Eero fans on Reddit, and it has insanely strong moderation. It was very funny to me. So you can't

even post in the Eero subreddit unless your account is of a certain age and you have enough karma. And those numbers are not disclosed because they don't want people to game it. So they're like high numbers that are secrets by the mods. And they're like, we don't understand why we need this. But in order to keep the ERO subreddit peaceful, we're gating the community and moderating very harshly because, like, Nighthawk fans show up and, like, troll the Eero forums with bots. And every time we have one of these earrings, I'm like, I feel like we should ask the mods from the ERO subreddit to tell Congress what it's like to moderate their mesh Wi-Fi router

community with that. And, like, we're going to take those tools away from them. I want that so bad. Sadly, I want them to hold those, like, when they were doing antitrust reform, they were like, hey, we're just going to call up a bunch of companies and they're going to tell you how, like, Apple screwed them over. I really, I would kill for a hearing where they would just bring up people who are actually moderators or, like, runners of small services that rely on 230 and let them talk. I would actually love for them to call up some people whose businesses and livelihoods were affected by Fasta Sesta. Yes. They've been, like, news about them.

opening investigations into seeing what the effects of those were, and I haven't heard anything about it since, and I am super curious about it. Because, yeah, it's the test case for any kind of change to Section 230. Actually, we should probably, in case people unfamiliar, explain, you could probably do it better than I can, what I was referring to there. So Sesta Fasta is, which maybe we refer to it as Fasta Sesta. It's a law. And it just, there are a couple of things that Section 230 just doesn't protect against. So the one before the best known one is like copyright, that there's just a carve out. And so Sesta Fasta used that same logic to add a carve out for anything related to anti-prostitution or anti-trafficking laws.

And the result was that basically anything related to sex work ended up becoming ridiculously dangerous for sites to host. And they just kicked off sex workers. And I mean, that is complicated by the fact that it's a bad law in general. Like, I might totally believe that anti-harassment laws are valid and that therefore, if we're going to talk about keeping harassment and libel off a platform, that's a conversation. Anti-prostitution laws are bad. And so it's hard to make a one-to-one comparison. But, yeah, it's not a good law. The Sesta-Fasta.

It's a bad carve-out. We have had a little coverage, but you're right at it. We should take another crack at it in the after period. You know, the future is coming. I'm told that there's a future after Tuesday. I just can't quite see it. but we should probably take another crack at it. I wanted, we said we were going to talk about this.

We've gone a little bit over in this section, but Facebook did put forward a proposal in its testimony. It seems very aggressive. Can you just quickly give people of what a sense of what it is? So it was aggressive, but it's sort of more rhetorically aggressive than specifically. So the paragraph that they, that Mark Zuckerberg has is the debate about Section 230 shows that people of all political persuasions are unhappy with the status quo. People want to know that companies are taking responsibility for combating harmful

content, especially illegal activity on their platforms, and they want to know that when platforms remove content, they're doing so fairly and transparently, and they want to make sure that platforms are held accountable. So then he says, okay, look, changing. It's a significant decision, but they should, quote, update the law to make sure it's working as intended. We support the ideas around transparency and industry collaboration that are being discussed in some of the current bipartisan proposals, and I look forward to a meaningful dialogue. The do not mention PAC specifically, but transparency is like the PACT Act is the highest profile transparency related to 30 bill somebody called it out in the hearing um so it seems related to that it feels like facebook is saying yeah make

change the law we can pay to comply with it and other smaller competitors might not be able to and this is great for us i mean facebook already puts out these ridiculously detailed transparency reports every quarter and has these gigantic policy teams that are all working on similar things so yeah Yeah, I think, as Zuckerberg said, at the hearing, right now, they're like moderation and compliance, the amount they spend on moderation and compliance is more than Facebook's revenue at the time of its IPO, just to give you a sense of how much Facebook spends. So that is one of those moments where you see the big company saying, yep, pass the regulation we can pay for it and our competitors might not be able to. And people have read that very aggressively. I think Mike Massington TechDirt was like Facebook declares war on the open internet. Throwing them under the bus, slightly less active.

Throwing the open under the bus. Do you read it that aggressively? I can't tell. I think it's sort of that. I think throwing under the bus is not a bad comparison. It doesn't necessarily, I don't think that like... Is it a school bus or a greyhound? No, it's different.

Like, I guess more like allowing it to fall under the bus. I don't actually think that there's this conspiracy where Facebook is trying to shut down Discord or something. But I think it's like, look, people aren't going to stop complaining about Section 230. We should do something to get them off. our back. Let's do the thing that we can deal with and it's not a huge problem for us. And other companies, sorry, too bad. There's the bus. The bus is coming. Okay, we got to wrap this up. One thing I do want to call out, regardless of what happens in Congress with 230 in these laws,

the Trump administration did put out an executive order asking the FCC to reinterpret 230. Sorry, clarify, clarify. Clarify. It's just amazing. Again, you can just read it. We started the show with jokes by the subsections of 230. 230 is remarkably easy to read. I encourage everybody listening to this. Just go read it by the Kossaf book. The 26 words that created the internet, go read that book. Like, just read, but read the law.

You just Google it and read it. It's very short, very easy to read. Anyhow, the Trump administration asked the FCC to reinterpret, clarify the law. This caused enough consternation to see that a Republican FCC commissioner who said, this is a little First Amendment meet for me, got yanked and replaced. this happened. Trump did this. And Ajit Pai, who was a little iffy about it, finally decided to do it. Brendan Carr, who's a commissioner kind of next in line if Trump wins to be the chairman, is like all over Fox News, like shows up on Tucker Carlson and rail about Twitter all the time. And McKenna wrote a profile of Brennan Carr and his big shift from sort of Reagan-style small government limited regulation to like Maga Warrior, let's regulate Twitter.

That's like a big story. That's a big shift in the way. the party, that's Josh Holly, that's all these characters that we talk about, saying we should regulate companies directly in a way that sort of previous conservatives did not want to. Read that profile, it's very good. It's up on the site. Kind of puts a lot of this in a perspective. Okay, we got to stop talking about 230. Adi, thank you. Yeah. So much. After the election, I'm sure this is all going to come up again. We'll have you back on soon. But thank you so much. All right, we're going to take a break and come back with Ashley, and we're going to talk about some gadgets. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new, is

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We're back. Ashley Carman's here. Hey, Ash. Hello. I was just saying it's been like we've talked a lot in Slack, but it's been months since we've actually talked. This is very nice. I know. I was really excited. I got to come on because I haven't talked to you or Dieter in what feels like in eternity. It's been a long time. Here's my new, here's my new COVID management style.

If you want to talk to me, you got to launch a video series. It has to be in the sales contract that you get to talk to Eli today. It's become a real monster of quarantine management. It's great. No, but you in the making is back. That's your video series where you talk to gadget makers about making stuff. You know what? I love hustlers.

This is some like true hustler coverage that you're doing. Your first episode out, it's about people trying to hustle their way into live shopping. Tell us about it. Yeah. So for people who don't know, it's called in the making. It's on YouTube. It's about all the challenges that independent hardware startups face. This season, we're just doing a couple episodes doing it during the pandemic, which has been an interesting challenge.

But the first episode covers, I'd heard from gadget startups before that they had gone on QVC and HSN, which like shocked me. shocked me because I don't know about you guys, but I definitely think of grandmas when I think of QVC and HSN. And I'm like, grandmas are buying like Mofi battery packs on QVC? Okay. Like, sure. So anyway, I was like, you know what? I really want to dive into that. So for this episode, I spoke to a bunch of different companies, including Zag, which owns Mofi. Also a smaller startup named Somnox, which makes a $600 sleep robot, which we can talk more about if you're interested. And another company that we previously covered on the verge that makes a bunch of different stuff, but one of the things they make is something called the Sobro, which is a connected coffee table

that has like a refrigerator in it and like Bluetooth speakers and charging ports and all the things. So I talked to them about how QVC works and whether it's been successful for them. And there's some mixed stories. But the wide agreement seems to be that QVC and HSN, the secrets of selling lots of gadgets It's a minutes that you probably never knew about. Who is buying the gadgets from them on QBC and HSN? Do they know? Well, so this was kind of like the thing that's a little difficult to get because I talked to

QBC and HSM first of all. And I was like, okay, grandmas. And they're like, no, no, no, no. Our main age demographic is between 35 and 60. And I'm like, hmm, that's a large range. It's a large range there. And a lot of the companies didn't really want to speak to it. But one of them did.

it's not actually in the episode, but he said, yes, the buyers are definitely older. But he's like, but don't think that's bad because they have tons of cash to just spend and they're like willing to watch the segments and they need to buy things for people. So he's like, it's great. We don't reach them on Instagram or Facebook. So actually, this is super awesome for us. Is it like old people and like very stoned young people? That's my sense of the split where you're like, I definitely need a coffee table with a refrigerator in it. It's 3 a.m. I'm calling that number. Well, according to QVC, they are one of the top Facebook live streamers as well. They have a special deal with them.

So it is entirely possible that, you know, someone shares that link or you have a fond memory of QVC and you just go check it out and all of a sudden you're hooked in and you're like, oh my God, I'm watching this on Facebook Live or in their app or wherever. They're actually everywhere. All of this just makes me a little bit of afraid. My dad was the night shift ER doctor when I was a kid. So my mom worked in a day and my dad worked at night. So that was just like the deal.

they had and she could never fall asleep when he wasn't working and my house was full of kvc stuff like food dehydrators coming out of our ears like oh my god if it was as seen on tv my dad was like yeah that seems great because he was just like it was like wisconsin the 80s there was not a lot of other content to consume amazing at like three in the morning when he couldn't sleep and now i'm just like this is horrible like we're about to get so many zag battery packs i'm about to say you should check in with your mom Yeah. One element of your story that I thought was really interesting was how much of a performance, like how much of a show QVC is for these companies? Do they feel, were they like, I got to get amped up to hustle out some battery packs? Yeah. So one aspect of this video that I also mention if people watch it is we also talk a little bit about the psychology slash the techniques that QVC uses to sell you on things. So like you're kind of mentioning this idea of we only have 15 units left.

Better by now, like things like that. But the, so what QVC does is they invite the companies to have a spokesperson, a host, to come on with QVC's own hosts. So for a lot of these companies, they take this really seriously. So the one who makes the Sobro, for example, hired a former Broadway actor as their host. And he, you know, is obviously very charismatic and personable. So for him, he's just a salesperson. But they are really, he's a full-time employee.

Like this is an investment for them. Wait, really? Like this company has a full-time. MQVC guy. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Like this is a huge part of their business.

And for the sleep robot company, they just happened to have a really charismatic CEO who was great to talk to. And he goes live himself. But obviously he's a huge proponent of the product. So he gets kind of almost like interviewed. And then the salespeople do their job, which is like, wow, that's amazing. We always talk about retail for these gadgets in terms of Amazon being a huge monster. Sure, right? Like, this seems like a really big lucrative, not Amazon sales channel, but it is only, there's only like the two companies. Do they have the same kind of relationships with the QVCs and HSNs as we hear about so much with like Amazon?

Well, I will say I think they're a little bit afraid of QVC and HSN because they're the gatekeepers in the sense of like, if QVC doesn't book you, you're not booked and you're not going on QVC. And they're scouting products. So like one of the companies we interviewed, the one behind the soap. was saying they went through a trade show and QVC came up to them. It was like, we know, we see potential here. Like this could sell. And so it's kind of like talent scouting on QVC's end, but then once you're hooked in, they don't want to lose that. So there's still, though, that comes to some major risks, actually, for some of the smaller startups. So this sleep robot company, for example, did great their first time on QVC. They sold, keep in mind, this is $600 sleep robot. And you guys have talked to enough hardware companies that I'm sure you've talked to about retail where you know, honestly, I heard it from a company, they're like, we do great.

We sell like one unit a day at Best Buy. And I was like, that's great. Like what? You have to really like start thinking about this on the scale. So for this dude to sell out the first time he went live, 60 units of a $600 sleep robot, that's like their year, you know, that's amazing. So he got totally hooked on it and was like, you know what? Next time we go, 250 units. Wow. And because they're a small startup, you know, that's why startups use crowdfunding a lot of the time, is to front that manufacturing cost, get the money. So they're bootstrapped and they don't have a ton of cash, but he fronted the cost for manufacturing only to not sell out. And so QVC, I guess, they don't like to talk about their deals. But according to him, QVC does have a

clause that they have to buy back any product that doesn't sell. So what ended up happening is he had to buy back all the units that didn't sell. Oh my gosh. And that's a huge problem. The thing that I think that I vaguely knew, but you really explained really well, is when you sell in Best Buy, you know, Best Buy buys it in wholesale and then it's theirs and it's their problem. But when people go on QVC, they literally have to give their products to QVC, sell them, and that buy back the other stuff. So there's like an extra layer of buying and selling that happens behind the scenes that turns out is very beneficial to QVC and not so much to the people that come on. But apparently the chances of getting a big payday are so hot. are so exciting that they're willing to take that risk. Yeah.

And I mean, so this company behind the Sobrough, for example, they're not a startup. And a lot of the things they sell are like mini muffin makers, which, yes, it's cash to front, but you're also probably going to, like, be able to sell those. It becomes especially risky when you're talking about a wild-ass gadget, like a $600 sleep robot. Wait, can you just tell me more about the $600 sleep robot? It is a robot. It's a pillow. It looks like a pillow.

but there's, I guess, a motor inside that kind of like vacillates, like it moves. So it's supposed to sync up to your breathing so that it's like you're holding, as if you're holding like a human or something, you're holding it. It's like breathing. So you're supposed to kind of like follow its breath and then fall asleep. I don't think you would have sold any of these on TV. And this is why. I'm like, I don't.

Yeah, the Terminator is in bed with you. So you also cover Instagram and you and I have been talking about this a lot that Instagram is just slowly turning into a catalog. Feels like decades ago that we talked about your like first Instagram purchase. I'm why'd you push that button? Yeah. I have a whole story about griddles that I'm like thinking about in my head. Oh boy. Like dad Instagram and dad TikTok went crazy for griddles at the beginning of the pandemic.

It's a real thing. I'm not going to talk about it now. But if you're interested, just you know, tweet at me. But Instagram is basically doing QVC now on their. lives. Yeah. So this past year has really been huge for live shopping on the tech platforms. So Instagram rolled out live. They've always had live, but now you can tag products in live so it can be like live shopping. That was the summer. Amazon rolled out its live influencer program. So now influencers can go live on Amazon, basically like UVC. Google, this isn't live, but Google's kind of

starting to dip its toes into this idea of like influencer shopping. They have a app called Shop Loop that is not live. It's more like shoppable stories, but I can, I'm sure they're heading that. Like, you know, they're probably heading that way. So, and then Facebook also has shoppable lives. So, yeah, I mean, this is becoming a full-fledged thing where you can just, I imagine soon, we'll be seeing a lot more lives where you're going to be shopping from them. And it's going to be like QVC, but on your phone. I noticed on Prime Day, like, that if you opened the Amazon app, like one of the first things you saw was something that looked exactly. like QVC. And like Prime Day is so overwhelming that for Amazon to hire its own video host to just like get you through it seems incredible. There's a part of this that seems very connected to what Julia covers, which is QVC is a cable channel. I don't know how many people have the QVC app on their Roku or whatever. Is there like a just an inflection point coming where enough people leave cable behind and the tech platforms just sort of take over the function? It seems possible, but what I will say is I've watched, you know, a decent number of Amazon lives. And obviously, all of us have seen Instagram lives before. Really, I think what makes QVC work is they have these amazing studio setups. If you watch the video, you'll see, we have one of the B-roll we use is them jump-starting a car in the studio. Like, they have resources. Their hosts look good. They're in a real set. They have a professional camera person. There's lights. When the influencers go live,

some of this looks like trash. Like in their bedroom, trying stuff on. And I'm not going to say that won't work for some people, but I think for a lot of people, you're kind of like, why would I buy this? It makes sense for YouTube to tag videos, you know, like you're doing your thing. I just don't know how the live is a whole different beast. You have to keep people entertained.

I think you really have to be professional. So some people will probably be able to pull it off, but I have a feeling it won't be as DIYs, it looks right now. Yeah, I just wonder what the future of the day that QVC is like Amazon Prime streaming has a QVC like channel on it or the Amazon app live stream host is killing our business. It just seems like that's the day that's coming for us. Yeah. I mean, the difference is that, I guess in this case, like QVC is the retailer, right? So QVC has a vested interest to sell these things and they're curating what they sell. Whereas with Instagram, it's not, they're not a retailer.

They don't really care. They're like, just buy some stuff. We don't care what it is. We just want to take some points off the credit card fee. Exactly. And same with Amazon. Like, they are a retailer, but I think the way they're doing it now more is like just the influencers can tag affiliate links. So it's just interesting different dynamics in retail versus the platform should be like, anyone can go live. Just we'll get a cut of whatever you sell. We don't care what you sell though. Yeah. All right. What's in the making? You got another episode kind of. What's the next episode? Yeah.

So the next episode is about Chinese entrepreneurs. Obviously, this year was a lot of discussion around TikTok. And we chat in the government and in the U.S. We're not focusing on software, but we're talking about the unique challenges that Chinese entrepreneurs face when they want to break into the U.S. Oh, that sounds amazing. Do they have thoughts on TikTok? Oh, yeah.

I'm done for it. Okay. Ashley, stick around. We got to take a break. We'll come back. We have like a lot of gadgets. We're going to do a gadget lightning round. I just want to hear your take on the many weird phones that we have.

We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace

where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell direct. to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, What Not says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month.

You can visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start. selling. That's W-H-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-C-com slash sell. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. you got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid-compliant, enterprise-ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code.

Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right. There's like a lot of weird phones this week.

Yeah. You know, we have been, I've been saying, I'm excited for phones to get weird again. Weird phones are back. Different form factors are coming. Get ready for excitement.

And the very first wave of them has crashed upon us. And I'm just going to keep waiting for the next one, I guess. It's like, there's a surfing metaphor in here somewhere. But yeah,

I don't know. So I'm, I reviewed the Motor Razor, the 2020 edition, which has 5G. And they fixed all of the problems from the first one that they were capable of fixing. So it doesn't creak anymore when you open it. It doesn't make a cracking noise. It does make a little bit of like a slither noise. You can like hear the plastic screen sliding.

Weird. But it's fine. It's like a totally perfectly good fine phone. It just costs $1,400 and the camera is mediocre, right? But, you know, it's prettier than the LG, not the LG. not the LG. It's pretty other than the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5G.

Got it. Made it through. I feel like part of your job is just remembering really horrible phone names. I just want these folding phone prices to come down because right, I'm tired of talking about them in this context of if you got a whole lot of money to throw away on a phone that would otherwise cost you $400,

go for it. But that's what the Motorola razor is. Every time I look at this razor, I think, if that phone had a good camera, I'd buy it. Yep. I'm so taken with it. It has a good camera, like, one out of four times. It's like, wow, got that.

That's great. And then the other three times you're like, why is it doing? What is it doing? There was one night mode shot where the Z flip, regular Z flip, took the shot at, like, 800 ISO and wasn't in night mode. And the Moto Razor saw that, and they're like, oh, yeah, this needs to be 3,200. And we're turning on night mode also. It's like, what are you doing?

This is grain city But for no good reason Ashley does a razor entice you? Here's all I feel like a few of the stories We're going to talk about are literally Look like headlines from 2006. Yeah Yeah

No, it's that season of phones again 100%. Every time I see I'm like, wait, what here is it? I actually don't know. No, this is, I mean, this phone is really cool And it's funny because I remember when we were doing Circuit Breaker, I was always like, I want like a cool flip phone. This was my whole thing. And now it's here.

And I'm just like, me. Okay, you guys proved me right. You could do it. And now I'm like, yeah, I just want my eye message. There's that also. But the thing that I'll be curious about is what phones like the razor do in response to whatever happens with the iPhone 12 mini. Because if the point of the iPhone 12 mini is that it fits in a pocket or a person in a better way or whatever, well, a folding phone actually can make, in theory, a better case for that. They just haven't done it yet.

So if the iPhone 12 Mini turns out to be wildly popular, I think we can expect maybe a bigger push for folding phones next year. Yeah, and there was an iPhone 12 Mini hands-on video. Yeah. Not in English. I think it was Italian. It was a very strange video, but the thing is very small. Yeah.

The LG Wing came out. Heim reviewed it. We got a hands-on of it in a video that you can watch. This phone to me looks sick. Like, I definitely want a phone where you just like flip it. it out. It makes a T for some reason. And then you can brandish it in like any one of six configurations. It does seem like the software is kind of all over the place, though. I mean, it's an LG phone. What do you expect the software to do? But this is one of those where it's like, if,

if not, this is, this is the I message phone. Like, we just had a whole thing about Congress. Like LG should go in front of Congress and be like, look, y'all, if I message ran on this phone, everyone would buy this phone because it looks crazy. Right. This is the competition you're not getting Ted Cruz and then Ted Cruz would like scream at LG like that is that the moment you want? Yeah, I don't know if the LG wing is the standard bearer for that

moment. I would love that. I mean LG is fully in the like Honey Badger phase of its smartphone life, right? It's just it has been trying weird stuff forever and it's just getting weirder. So this thing is nuts. Like you remember they had they like had the thing

with like the modular batteries that had a removable battery and like this like bottom of the phone like unlatched and you could like attach other modules to it along with like spare batteries. They just do this stuff. It never lasts more than a year or two. But someday one of these things is going to land someday. I believe in it. I'm just telling you, there are people out there right now who always want the weirdest phone.

And they can't get it because they want blue bubbles too. Yeah. I'm telling you Congress should just be focused on my message. Give up on blue bubbles. Let it go. This is, I think, the headline that Ashley was calling out as being straight from 2006. Verizon made a Yahoo phone. I literally thought this was like,

I don't know, like someone vetted it and I was like, what, you guys? Like, this is such an old link. Why did you even like, how did this end up on your Twitter? I was like, what? How did Tom get duped by this? The only reason I want to bring this up

is to just, right, all the carriers are doing media stuff, right? AT&T bought Warner, Time Warner, turned into Warner Media. Julia spends all of her time tracking the politics of Warner Media and the slow destruction of whatever it was

to be replaced by AT&T executives. T-Mobile, we've got one of our lightning around headlines here. T-Mobile just launched a new TV streaming service called T-Vision. Which is relatively inexpensive right now, as all TV services are in their introduction. And then it'll get more expensive over time. And then T-Mobile also has all kinds of deals. Famously, T-Mobile gave away quibby for free.

So T-Mobile, I would say, has content efforts, but not at any particular scale, but they're doing bundled content stuff. Verizon, I just need to disclose I used to work for an gadget, but Verizon like bought AOL, they bought Yahoo. That was all wrapped up in the Huffington Post. All of it has failed. They took an oath. They took an oath, and then they renamed Oath into the Verizon Media Group.

They own TechCrunch. Like, their media efforts have just been so weird and wacky, and they're trying to sell the Huffington Post now. No one at AOL knows what they're doing. And they're like, what if we do a Yahoo phone? Meanwhile, ATV's like, we own CNN. Like, the difference in scale between those two approaches is very funny to me. And I'm just going to say this right now. I would use the Yahoo phone.

PureSplay. We were talking about battery packs. MagSafe is a big moment, I think, for phone battery packs. Mofi made a battery pack that just clicks on the back of your phone. I love this thing. Yeah? I love it so much. So it's actually not just a battery that clicks.

It is a battery that clicks to your phone, but what it actually is, what's the ring on the back of the phone? The pop socket. It's a pop socket. So it has a little ring on it, but it's just a square that you 3M tape to the back of your case. And then what the battery does is it just locks onto that square and has a Chi charger inside it and she charges your phone through the square. Which means that you get a pop socket, you get a little phone stand, and when you want to have a spare battery or put a battery on your phone, you just like slide it on to the back and you're charging and you're done. You don't have an extra case sticking out of the bottom, covering up the port, and like, hassles and fiascos. You just, like, slide the battery on, and you're charging your phone.

It's the best. A great product for a pre-pendemic time. Dieter, T-Mobile is expanding its 5G network. What does this mean to you? You know, go outside, and if your phone shows a 5G icon and you're on T-Mobile, do a little happy dance and hope that it's not slower than LTE because it might be. But the networks aren't very saturated yet, so it might be okay. I feel like a lot of people who have started getting iPhone 12 on AT&T have realized like AT&T says it has a millimeter wave. Yeah.

It does not. The AT&T 5G logo versus real 5G logo is also very funny to me. Oh, by the way, actually, AT&T, when it does have a millimeter wave, I think I believe it shows 5G plus. So if you have an AT&T iPhone, it's either 5G, which is LTE Advanced, or it's 5G, which is sub-65G, or it's a 5G plus, which is millimeter wave. Yeah. They also own CNN, which I would just point out again. It's ridiculous. Service Pro X review and an echo dot review, the new ball-shaped one. Go read them. I think Dan was a little less taken with a ball-shaped echo dot. The dot shouldn't be a ball. The bod should not be a sphere. It should be a disc.

Spheres are hot this year, man. Yeah, it's not to say. Orbs are the thing. Yeah, but you want to hang the dot on the wall. You want to put it in a weird corner. You don't want to set it on the table. It's a design piece. Yeah. Yeah, but that's what the big echo is for. I literally was upstate in an Airbnb and every light was an orb. Wow.

So. Box on's building a giant orb in the middle of Wisconsin for me. I think the orbs are in. They should make it an echo. Oh, can I just say one Foxx something before you talk about VAS five? We press release today. San Francisco 49ers launch first 8K instant replay system in the stadium with Fox on industrial internet, which is the Wisconsin subsidiary.

So they got to 8K. Wow. I don't know if that stadium is 5G. Like guarantee you there's no, yeah. But it's just funny because, like, it's a huge scoreboard instead of Levi Stadium. And then, like, the Foxcon logo is there. And it's like, this is all just a waste. Okay.

The PS5 is rolling out in very strange, like, staggers, right? Like, people have done unboxing. We played with the controller. The same thing has happened with the Xbox. Yeah. Series X. And, like, this is how the surface came out. People would do hardware hands-ons without that.

This is, you should get ready for more gadgets, too. be unveiled in stages in this way, going forward, I think. I think it's just like pandemic times, right? Maybe. Anyway, we have a bunch of photos of PS5. The thing looks enormous. It looks ridiculous. Every time I look at a photo, this thing, I'm like, I'm going to buy an Xbox.

I'm going to be honest. Yeah. Like, I'm a PlayStation person. I'm like, I don't want this. So I went over to Viren's place to look at it and play a little bit of Astros Playroom. It is huge. It's just gigantic.

You eventually are like, you become a little bit blind to it, eventually sort of, you know, in the same way that like you become blind to, I don't know, the notch on your phone, which let's be honest, still looks really dumb. But yeah, it's, it's so big. Ashley's just shaking ahead. It's horrid. I watch Ashley in the Google Doc like click on a thing. Her name popped up.

And then I know what happened. and she looked at the picture, and then she started shaking her hands. I just pictured, like, I just pictured what would happen if, like, I walked into my boyfriend's apartment and he had this, and I was just like, no. Like, it would just be a flat, no,

you need to put that away. Like, no, it's not allowed in this apartment here. But, so, okay, I played Astros Playroom, and there's, like, two things I talk about with it. One, you know, it's a little, you know, cute little game. The graphics are very good, as you'd expect. The ray tracing is very fun.

You can, like, see reflections on things and move them in the shadows and everything's real time. And that's all fun. I think we'll find out much more about graphics in the games closer to the full review. But the Dual Sense controller is bonkers. Yeah? It's, you know, it feels like a controller or whatever. But they have put a louder speaker in it,

and they have put stronger haptics in both the hand grips and in the middle, I think. Maybe it's just on the two sides. And so the very first thing that you do is, like, they show a graphic of these cute little robots, falling into the controller on the screen, and then you tilt it left and right, and you can feel them moving from one side to the other, because it's just adjusting the haptics, right?

So it's just tricks with, you know, taptic engines or whatever. But they do really clever things. So when the little robots running around, you, anytime anything that your avatar in the game does something, the noise comes out of the controller. So, like, you hear its footsteps, and the sound of its footsteps change,

depending if you're walking on glass or sand or grass or whatever, and they literally give you a little of each leg as it hits the ground in the controller. Like it's completely like, it's a tech demo, so they're like showing off. But there was just like a little like,

oh, I love this robot now. I love this robot and I identify it at this robot because I can hear it walking around on the sand right now and I'm hearing the little crunch of its baby little feet and I'm feeling it. All right, now I actually get a PS5. Even though it 100% looks like a space helmet,

fine. I'm going to get one. I want to bring this up the Xbox and PS5 are going to kick off a TV upgrade cycle. It seems very obvious. That's going to be a mess. I'm just telling you right now it's going to be a mess. Like all those fun TVs, like the OLEDs, Dolby Visions,

most of them won't support these consoles at their highest settings with variable refresh rate with 120 hertz. It's a mess. Like just the HTML standard. Like all that stuff, we should just do a whole episode. I should just bring Welch on the show. Yeah. And maybe Tom too. But the TV upgrade cycle that's about to happen is.

is going to be very confusing. And so there's like one Sony TV that will do it. There's a Vizio TV. Vizio always is like the head of the curve. With HTML 2.1 and variable refresh, not all the ports on all these TVs will support the consoles. So like you're going to buy a new TV that supports 2.1 and then plug it in the right port, which some like a lot of people listening this are like,

yeah, that's pretty normal. But just imagine like the regular PS5 customer buying their PS5 and being like, why doesn't it work because they plugged in the wrong port in their TV? It's a little mess. I'm just calling it out. I'll have watchback. We're just going to do an hour long in HTML standards. It's going to be great.

That'll be the most popular broadcast episode ever. The last thing I want to call out, because as always, we've gone over our self-imposed deadline that nobody but me cares about. Monica wrote this incredible story about a 24-year-old who is tracking every broken McDonald's ice cream machine in the United States. Hero. It's just incredible. It's just one of those like weird, wacky internet.

stories, it blew up, she saw it. Just go read it. It made me happy. It's a very confusing time. Read about the guy who's obsessed with broken ice cream machines. It is very upsetting when you walk to a McDonald's that's near your apartment, let's say, and their machine is broken. It is upsetting. So I appreciate this person. But isn't like the broken ice cream machine, like just like a well-standing cultural phenomenon? Yeah, it's just weird though. Like, why are they always broken? I don't have an answer. I thought it's just like they don't want to use it. I don't know. The ice cream is just there to lure you into the French fries. That's where the money is.

Right. Yeah. But go read that story. Monica did a great job. I wanted to call it out. Okay. Last thing. Absolutely last thing.

We are a finalist for a Discover podcast award. There's a link in the show notes. Just go vote for us. We like winning awards. It makes us feel good. All right. You can tweet at us. Ashley is at Ashley R.

Carmen. Addie is at the Dexterarchy. Dieter's at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. Deere, you got a Tuesday show kind of up, it seems like. We have one more Tuesday. show coming, and then we're going to take a pause, and that Tuesday show is going to be a different kind of director's cutter reviews. We're going to do the reviews that happen that I fix it.

They review stuff in a certain way, and we're going to talk to them about how they do their takedowns. We're going to talk to them about how they do their tear downs. I suspect they're going to want to talk about right to repair a little bit, and, you know, see what's up. Yeah, and then after that, Decoder is launching on the 10th. That's my new show. Yeah. But you can go subscribe to that right now on Apple Podcasts, you can listen to the little trailer I made. I stole a trick from Casey Newton and just said, here's what I believe, which is a very hard thing to do. It took me weeks to write that script.

I had to edit out so many Mustang references, and this is what I believe script, you wouldn't believe it. Look, as an official pickup truck owner now, all I do is talk about my car. That's just who I am. But now, go check it out and subscribe to it. We'll promote it when the first episode comes out. I'm done self-promoting now.

That's it. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ash. Thanks to Addie for talking about. Congress with me. Thank you. Someone has to do it, Natty always does it.

Great. We'll be back next week. Talk to you then. Rock and roll. Vote.