The Vergecast - Uber’s CEO resigns, Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality, and Bixby first look

Episode Date: June 23, 2017

Here we go, another classic episode of The Vergecast. There were a lot of little things that happened this week, and we wanted to discuss them all, so Nilay, Dieter, and Paul go through their list of hits on the site. Also, to continue our weekly summer interview series, Nilay sits down with culture reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany to talk about her recent piece on Tumblr’s relationship with the fight over net neutrality. There’s so much in between all of this, so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 01:17 - OnePlus 5 4:29 - Scott Forstall breaks silence to talk about the iPhone’s creation 10:34 - First look at Samsung’s Bixby Voice preview for Galaxy S8 13:58 - Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 will reportedly be announced in August 17:10 - Amazon's new Dash Wand is half magic, half boring 21:12 - You can now watch your smart home camera from an Amazon Echo Show 27:48 - Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality with Kaitlyn Tiffany 45:36 - Travis Kalanick resigns as Uber CEO 1:00:00 - Paul’s weekly segment “My Dinner with Andre” 1:02:59 - iPad Pro 12.9 review: a great iPad, one I won’t buy 1:03:57 - 3.33 years after its release, someone actually beat Threes 1:04:58 - Microsoft now lets Surface Laptop owners revert to Windows 10 S 1:07:11 - You won’t be able to use your Surface Book if you want to take the bar in Tennessee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. The flagship podcast of the Verge Radio Network. There's only one podcast. I'm still not over control all the leap being over. Still thinking about it. But anyway, look, this is the Vergecast. The flagship podcast of the Verge multi-channel media experience. I'm Neil I Patel and the editor-in-chief of the Verge.

And I'm joined by kind of an OG crew today. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter Bone is here. Hello. Oh, how's it going, Eli? It's going. I was putting together the rundown.

This was a very, it was like a lot of news this week, and all of it was of medium size. I was unable to help you with the rundown because I was yelling at Samsung. The executive is about Fixby, which I think we should talk about later. Yeah. So there was big tech news. We'll get to it in the middle. Travis Kalenick has resigned as Uber CEO. I mean, that's like huge news.

Caitlin and I talked for a while. you'll hear it coming up on the show. She had a big dive into Tumblr. Tumblr is now owned by Verizon. That has lots of changes coming out for Tumblr. But I don't want to start with like the heavy stuff. I want to start with some like good uplifting podcast. So Dieter.

Oh, wait. Oh, and I want to point out, I don't think we're going to get to it. But Dan went to China, Dan Sefer went to China and wrote a huge feature on the 1 plus 5. And then we reviewed the 1 plus 5. Paul, you were just saying you enjoyed the press conference. Yeah. So what happened? illegally auto played on our website and we're very mad about.

Oh, that was the worst. Yeah, that's what bad. To assure everybody that that's against our ad policy and that's being looked into. Yeah. But I can. That's what you need to know about one plus. As a frequent visitor of Thebirds.com, I got to watch the one plus five press conference. And they, there was a lot of things that happened.

There was, there was a dog. Oh, yeah. There was Emily Radikowski, who explained how the dual cameras work. But my favorite part was the headphone troll. They showed the bottom of the phone, and they showed it with a USBC plug and speaker grills. And they're like, we couldn't do a headphone jack. It was so important. We're so focused on every design, detail and so many iterations.

We wanted the most streamlined slick phone or whatever. There's no headphone jack. The future is wireless. And they got like two minutes into this. And then they were like, just kidding. Of course there's a headphone jack. And like the image literally changes and it shows where the actual headphone jacket. So they photoshop their own phone.

So, yeah, I'm pretty happy with that. That's great. I'll take it. Yeah. I feel like Android, the essential phone is the last high profile Android phone with that headphone jack. Right? Like, you can't count whatever nonsense HTC is doing. No, there's Motto Z.

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, man. But, like, isn't it, it's not all of them. No, right. The Z play has one, but the standard Z does not. Well, why do you Z if not to play? Yeah.

He said confidently as though it was a phrase. I will say, I mean, you've noticed, I don't, I'm not living the don't go, I'm not living the Donga Life anymore. Yeah, it's true. I have, you got AirPods? What are you doing? I got cheap. cheap Bluetooth headphones on Amazon.

I got cheap wired headphones on Amazon. Lightning? No. Okay. To use with my laptop, which still doesn't have a lightning plug, if you'll recall. And then I've got my lightning air pods if I forget to charge my Bluetooth headphones. But you have, oh, the lightning earbuds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.

The lightning earbuds that still, they're like messed up in one ear. Yeah, yeah. Those headphones are not. So I basically have three pairs of headphones to get through a day, technically. I was talking to somebody last night who told me that they hate AirPods for music but love them for phone calls, even though they are fully aware that they look completely insane because they're just walking around talking, like loudly to no one. It sounded great. Did you seem to be like the ideal thing?

I just don't like the idea of spending that much money on headfirst. phones that don't sound amazing. Yeah. Anyhow, Dieter, you had an adventure. You went to a thing. You saw Scott Forstall this week. Yeah, I went to the Computer History Museum, which is in Mountain View, California. If you have never gone, you should go. It is awesome. I recommend you go with my dad, who used all the computers in the Computer History Museum. I could tell you all about it. He's available for a small fee. Actually, I have no idea. But they do these events, and they've been doing, you know, for the 10-year anniversary, like, little things of people who, like,

worked on the iPhone. And so the big deal was Scott Forstall, who has not talked about Apple basically at all since he left five years ago, 2012. That's right. If you don't remember, or you weren't around, or you're too young because you're a teen, back then there was this thing called Apple Maps, and it was awful. It was as bad a piece of software as Apple has ever shipped, I think. Yeah. And they, you know, they took off Google Maps. They put on Apple Maps. It was terrible. Everyone got real, real mad. People drove into lakes. Everything was terrible. Apple fanboys, am I right? The great thing about that was the screenshots of their, like, fake 3D photographic. Fly over. Like, looked like these natural disasters.

It was just perfectly illustrated this. So anyway, he got ousted in the fallout of that. Well, or he left, but he got ousted. Because one of the reasons was he refused to sign, like, the apology letter about Apple Maps. And so he left and, like, Johnny I took over design and Federi took over, like, the other stuff. And he just went away and started producing Broadway plays, which is a thing that you can do. And so before Forrestall came on, there were three other. engineers they told them using stories about developing the iPhone.

Nothing that was like, oh my God, I had no idea. Like all slight variations on the stories that we've heard before. And then Forrestall came on and didn't actually tell us anything new either. But what was interesting is his version of events is Steve Jobs version of events that Steve Jobs told at the Code Conference, which is, yeah, Steve and I were hanging out. and Steve said, you know what? We should make a tablet. He told this story that Steve had a friend of his wife's friend's husband, worked from Microsoft, and was just a huge asshole.

And Steve would have to hang out with this guy, and this guy would try to rub Steve's face in Microsoft's tablet strategy. And he would just come home and call up Scott Forrestall, be like, this is bullshit. I hate this guy. We should make a tablet. I love that story. I love that story for any number of reasons.

Yeah. Not least of which is the moment in time when like your significant other makes you hang out with somebody you hate. And then that person is like, I'm better than Apple. That's just a fantastic story. Yeah. He also told the story that he had never told before was apparently he got this insane virus and was throwing up every day and then every half a day, every twice a day. and then eight times a day, and then down to like every 15 minutes,

just like in the hospital, couldn't stop puking, doctors couldn't fix it, was going to die, had lost like 50 pounds. Steve called them every day. And at the end of months of this, Steve calls him up at like 11 o'clock at night.

It's like, I'm going to, I've got the best acupuncturist in the world, and I'm going to bring her to you, and she's going to fix you. And Forrestal is like, sure, I don't care.

Whatever, anything to stop this, I want to, sure. And if Steve, He was like, if they don't let me in, they won't like that I've got this acupuncture coming. I'll just dedicate a wing, and then she'll be able to come. And he claims the acupuncturist healed him in like two days.

Huh. I think there's a significant, you know, we had Brian Merchant do a special episode of the show. Last week, his book is out, it's something 10 years. I think there's going to be a lot of stories coming out. I think the sort of who's on the side of the accepted existing canon and who's trying to fill in the blanks is that. There's just going to be ever more and more of that over time. I think it's merely fascinating.

But the important thing, or the thing that struck me the most about watching Forrestall is, like, if the guy, the guy, like, talks like he's on a keynote stage. He's very personable. He's affable. He makes funny jokes. He knows how to tell a story. He knows how to hold your attention. Like, the knock on Forrestal was always like, oh, you're, you're just trying to be, you know, a little mini Steve Jobs. but he does have that kind of or some portion of that sort of natural charisma.

So he's really impressive. I'm not deeply saddened that we don't have him in the tech industry. I won't go that far. I'm not saying he's a genius of all things, but it would be kind of, it would have been cool to see that kind of personality up on stage talking about products. And we just don't do that anymore, don't have them anymore doing that. He said he's not working on anything.

Yeah. I think he's happy making plays. Yeah, and swimming in the ocean, spearing fish and getting attacked by sharks. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it would also have been interesting to see Apple with, like, I don't know, super aggressive product people. Like, they have good product people. Like, they make good products.

But if you had one knock on Apple, it's that Steve Jobs was, he had this huge team of executives who were all fighting. They all don't, they didn't like each other, but he held them together because he was Steve Jobs. and then obviously when he is gone, they all started fighting, and Tim Cook, his instinct, was to make the fighting go away by pushing all these people out. And I think that is to Apple's detriment in some things. They're not as aggressive inside of the product because they don't have that internal competition. But who knows. Speaking of bad products, let's talk about Bixby.

So Bixby is out in beta for the S8. You have an S8. Have you tried it? I have not. They have not flipped the switch. on the preview for me yet. So I haven't actually personally tried it, but I literally just walked out of a demo

an hour ago of it. And I can, I don't know, I can tell you a little bit about it. Let me just give you Samsung's line. Samsung doesn't believe, especially now that this is in a preview, that you should be thinking about this as a head-to-head competitor

of Siri and Google Assistant and Alexa and Cortana. They think it's a intelligent interface. It's a new kind of interface more than it is like trying to like be smarter than you know, Siri. So it's not, it's not so much

about grabbing stuff from the web and interacting directly with services. It's about if you want to do something on your phone, you can just ask for it and it will do the thing on your phone. I personally think that's very confusing because it also does a little bit of that other standard assistant stuff just

not as well. But they, you can do stuff with Bixby like, hey Bixby, find all my pictures from New York last month and put them in an album and share that album with my mom. And it will like jump through those steps automatically by like, you know, magically hitting the buttons on the interface on the back end and then do that thing. So their goal is if you would have to hunt around and tap crap on your phone to do it, you can just ask for it now with Bixby.

And just to be clear, the new thing. that's rolling out is doing it with their voice. Right. That's the thing that's, well, it's in preview for however long it's going to be in preview. But yo, like Chris Welch tried it. We've got a hands-on up with it. And it's definitely a beta. Yeah.

It's a super beta. You know what I noticed, and I don't want to, Samsung and Apple have diverged quite a bit. But he, in, you just watch the video. And Welch asked for the weather and shows in the weather. And that screen looks exactly like. like Siri showing you the weather. Like, and there's no reason for it. You don't have to use the same blue gradient.

It doesn't have to look exactly like Apple's thing, and it still does. And it's just like, why do they keep shooting themselves in the foot like this? Like, there's literally infinite ways to design a display of weather. What would be interesting to me is if I ask a buddy to do something for me, I'll probably just say, no, do it yourself. But if I ask someone for information, he'll probably give it to me or say I know someone who knows

or I'll like search for it on the web. Like, could you have a stack of assistants? Like you talk to Bixby and Bixby's like, I don't know, I'll ask Alexa. Oh, God. No, I asked this question. And they're like, well, it sort of goes to Google already. But what about the assistant?

Because like they don't have skills like Alexa has yet. Like it only is with apps on a phone and only a very small handful of them plus Samsung stuff. But I would love a world where, just like you said, like, hey, Bixby, ask Google to do this thing. And Bixby, like, I don't know, fine. I hate that guy. A little bit of other Samsung news, which is interesting to me, because it's not a brand name

you thought they were going to lean into. Galaxy Note 8. Yeah. Portly arriving in August. That's like a, are they just assuming that everyone thought it was the seven that was bad, right? Like, that's a big move to, like, come back out with this brand that literally exploded. I think it's just as likely that people thought it was galaxy as that people thought it was note, that people thought it was seven. Yeah. So, so any combination of those

things was dangerous. It's just, you, I don't know, what's the value of the note brand? Like, they could have named it anything else. I think it's super valuable in Korea. Uh, yeah. People love it over there. I mean, people, we loved it here before it started to explode. We did. If they named it something else but offered the same product, it would seem like... And they won't get the local news headline that's like, Samsung is back with the Galaxy Nodeate, this time it won't. Like, you can't do that. They were going to get that headline no matter what. If they release another phone with a stylus in it, they're going to...

I don't think the local news is like, no, it's the one with the stylus. We got to run the exploding package. No, they'll do it, but then they'll have to say, but they change the name. Like if they just, if they just like grit their teeth, muscle through it, and release another note and accept the local news bad press that's more likely to succeed than renaming the thing. That's true. I get the thinking. Have I ever told you how much I hate the local news? When I think of bad sloppy coverage, I always, my instinct is to talk.

When we were launching verge science, we were watching all the videos for the up and we're talking about it. And Liz was like, dude, you keep on just dissing the local news. and all of their science coverage. But I would say, I had a bank that loaned me some money. Yeah. And at one point, the bank did something really bad. Yeah. And then they, like, mailed me.

And like, if you think you're part of this class auction, you should let us know and things like that. And then, like, like, a few months later, the bank's like, hey, we got a new name now. Yeah. It's like, oh, you did something really bad, didn't you? The reason Xfinity is a brand name exists. is because Comcast, I know, five, six years ago, realized that their brand name was so bad that they were just going to start selling Xfinity.

Spaceport? I don't know that it worked for it. The reason they renamed Charter and Time Warner Cable Spectrum because they were like, no one will ever know. But everyone knows. I finally got the mailer for Fios. Yeah. Like, it wasn't a guy showing up in my house.

This is inside knowledge for people who've listened to past episodes. Yeah, yeah. You've got to be deep. It's a promotion. $80 for TV, phone, and internet. Is it a gigabit internet? Verizon's definition is gigabit, by the way, is 800 per second. It's like, yeah, that's not even close.

It's not even like $9.50. It's all the way up on this pedometer. There's nothing past that. It's literally the fastest. It's like a two-year contract. I'm probably not going to do it. Just letting people know. It's just like letting Verizon people know right now.

A couple of Amazon echoy things. I actually, I reviewed the Dash Wand, which is their new little deeper. I got one. I just opened it up yesterday. It is, I would describe it as a spectacularly boring product. Yeah. If you glued that to your shirt.

Yeah. It's basically Star Trek. Yeah, then people can walk up to you and just beep barcode scan. Vertically on your chest. So here's what I think is interesting about. This is actually a third generation of this hardware. So there was the original dash, was just a barcode scanner.

Then they put out the second generation. They made a little smaller. Added a button in voice. And it used a weird proprietary voice thing. Now, this is the third generation. And really what they've done is swapped out the weird proprietary voice thing for Alexa,

which makes sense. They're giving it away for free. Well, it's 20 bucks, but you get a credit. You instantly get a... No, no, no, no. It's 20 bucks. It's 20 bucks if you're a prime member. and then you immediately get a $20 credit to Amazon.

Okay. So it's just directly free. And then you get three months of Amazon fresh grocery delivery for free, which is usually $50 a month. So it's actually they're paying you take it in the end if you use the grocery part. I think we've talked a lot on this show about Amazon is just going to start giving echo devices away for free. So this is the first stab at it. It's limited.

It can't play music. It can't set timers. There's a whole bunch of stuff it can't do. Oh, can't set timers? You cannot, which is weird because it's like for cooking. cooking. Yeah. That's the thing I used Siri for the most is timers.

But it can control your smart home stuff so you're like put it by your bed. You can like wake up in the morning and like hold a wand to your mouth and be like, lights. And it'll like do it, which is cool. And it's really good at like identifying barcodes and adding it to Amazon cart. Here's the thing I noticed that was it occurred to me that we don't think of any other assistant like this.

Because you have to push the button to engage. it and it's designed specifically for shopping you don't have to use verbs like you can just hold it up and be like grapes and then I'll like buy grapes. Instead of saying

Alexa would you please add grapes to my shopping? Right like in that like you don't need to say please and thank you to Alexa all kinds of people do like my sister has basically told her kids to say please because she doesn't want them to right the robots to enslave us because of lack of courtesy but because you're not at all

speaking in sentences. There's, it doesn't even, the instinct to be fake, polite to the robot is gone. And it's wild. Like, I immediately, I noticed, like, I'm being very rude right now.

I'm just walking around my house, shouting nouns. It's like, seeing if they will be shipped to me. So I, do you buy anything? I mean, I was, the weird thing about it is,

like, it's primarily designed to scan things you have. Right. Yeah. So, like, I was like, should I buy this? And I was like, wait, I have all of these things. So it sticks in the fridge. Deeter points out to me that it is wild that you can get a best-in-class AI assistant for free now.

That's Amazon's big secret. They're just going to start, I think the dot, which is 50 bucks but regularly discounted to 40. And this thing, no one else is competing at that bottom of the market, which is where the disrupt. happens. Like Casey wrote a piece for us this morning about how no one's making the smart speaker anybody wants. Like the home pod is the closest thing to it, but it only supports Apple music, so it's obviously very limited. And the comments are just people saying, just buy an echo dot and plug it into some good speakers and you get the thing that you want. That to me is, that's the real story of the dash wand, is they're just saturating the market with like free

versions of this, such that when you start to buy your smart home ecosystem, it's a no-brainer to pick the Alexa one instead of the home kit one or whatever. Another piece of news, Echo shows coming soon, and the flood of press releases about it are coming, and the thing that they promised was that you would be able to just talk to it and display, like, smart home devices. So there's already a bunch of smart home cameras that you can just talk to it. And that's not like huge news. I don't, it's not a reason to buy it.

But it's just one more. There's like ecosystem pieces for Alexa that literally no one else has. And Google sort of has it, but your TV has to be on. Well, your TV doesn't have to be on. Yeah. You just have to have HDMI CEC enabled so that the Chromecast will, you know, activate. Yeah. Yeah, but the Chromecast that's built into my Vizio wakes my TV up.

Well, sure, because it's built in. But you have to, your TV has to be right. Right, it's not like a default. And I think the Echo shows just. Although, I will say, Chromecast has been doing this thing. I haven't changed my network's configuration at all. I just Chromecast something from my phone from the official YouTube app. And it plays for like 20 minutes.

And then all of a sudden it flashes like, sorry, we forgot what we were doing. The message is literally something like that. And it's like, hey, I'm grateful for the convenience that Chromecast allows me and stuff like. But I'm not going to build my like real setup, like my core of how I get entertainment around Chromecast if it's going to do this all the time. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the Chromecast's flakiness is it's just there, right? Yeah. They need to build into the, is it the home app, the cast app?

They renamed it. It's the home app. Home app. they just need to build controls into that app. Well, they're there sometimes. The reason I can't use Chromecast and we just always end up bailing and going back to the Apple TV, talk about this before. It's one, we want to pick up what we're watching together instead of just me looking at my phone.

And two, the controls in like the notification area on Android or, you know, it's on iPhone and a weird spot, tend to disappear. And it is very, very difficult to figure out from app to app how to turn on closed. captioning and we're old people that turn on closed captioning on certain shows. I'm all in on closed captioning. Don't understand British accents. Like, did you try to watch the Crown? It was impossible. I think the era of prestige.

Wait, here's a pitch. Do you watch close captioning for British shows? Do you really do that? Yeah, of course. Like, almost all shows. I don't have to for a great British baking show. You can usually pull that one off. Here's what I'm saying.

Prestige TV is enabled by close captioning. That's my pitch to you. Yep. No argument. People mumble a lot more on premiere. Prestige TV is all about quiet, slow mumbles. You should turn on the captions. I want to live in a world where the original version of the Batman movie with Bain in it is released.

Here's the thing. I misunderstand people all the time. I have a hard time understanding people. And I'm a mumbler. Yeah. So I know I'm part of the problem. So it breaks my immersion if I know what everybody's saying. You're like, this is way too much unlike reality.

Like I watched the new train spotting. I didn't understand a tenth of the word said in that Scottish accent. But I wouldn't know. Like the shows where everybody's talking really quietly and like mumbly and like you have. It's like that asshole that talks really quietly when you know that they don't have to, but it forces you to like. lean in and pay attention and they actually like command of the room by speaking really quietly because everybody has to shut up to listen to them that's that's the crown that's the

whole show you have to pay attention to me it's like what if i want to what if i want to get up okay fine i'm listening you just have to like lean in and stare at it and focus it's really annoying sometimes you just want some crap on yeah then the crap you've chosen is the crown uh all right here's what's what going to happen This was the light chat segment of the Vergecast this week. Just some stuff going on. Hang in my buds. We led with dessert.

Yeah. And now we're going to go into the heavy stuff. So I'm going to read an ad. We're going to run. I talked to Caitlin Tiffany. She doesn't like it when I call it her a superstar reporter. So I didn't at the beginning of the segment, but I'm telling you now. She's a star reporter on the verge.

I talked to her for a few minutes about what's going on at Tumblr, which is super interesting. Tumblr was a huge supporter of net neutrality. in 2015, David Karp basically yelled at President Obama and convinced him to like shift his policy position and like push the FCC. Now that shit's owned by Verizon. So like there's a lot going down there. So talk to Caitlin. And then we're going to come back.

We got to, we have to talk about Uber. It's a huge story. So we're going to do that. But first when we read this ad. Do you have internet at home, which I think is a question for purchase listeners is almost a resounding yes. But look, if you have an air home, you probably have a Wi-Fi router. If your Wi-Fi router, that means cybercriminals can hack in your home network, including your Wi-Fi, access your credit card information that may be stored on the laptop or your family photos, stayed on your phone.

They can even hack your baby monitor, which is all pretty creepy. So Norton, by a semantic, the leader in digital security for over 30 years, has built a secure Wi-Fi router called the Norton Core. It looks wild. It's like a spiky circle. There's a name for that. It probably is with like a hedron. It's a fidget spinner tetrahedron. That's what it is.

Look, underneath that exterior, the Norton Core is powerful security technology that helps turn your Wi-Fi network into a digital fortress. It discovers your personal connected devices. It identifies vulnerabilities. Help secure them. If a device is breached, Core can quarantine the threat. It has parental controls that you decide when and where your kids can go on the internet. And there's a 1.7 gigahertz dual core processor inside deliver blazing fast speeds.

So get the security you need and the speed you want in Norton Core. Go to Norton.com slash a Vergecast. You save $30 if you pre-order before July 1st. That is Norton.com slash Vergecast. The thing you're looking for, by the way, is, oh, it's not a decahedron. It's icosahedron. Oh, yeah, spiky circle. Okay.

Now, anyway. Let's listen to Caitlin. We'll be right back. So, hey, I have Caitlin Tiffany here. Hello. The Verge's own reporter. I decided a phrase. I was going to say Star Reporter, but I don't like make you nervous in the jump.

A reporter. Just a regular. Yeah, just like one of a dozen. That's not true. But anyway, so you, I'm going to say one line here. I used to work for a company called AOL. That company was bought by Verizon. Yes.

That company then bought Yahoo. Yahoo owns a company called Tumblr, which they bought for a billion dollars. Is now worth like 10 cents. They literally wrote down the value of Tumblr from a billion dollars, like twice. I think it's worth like 280 million now as of last year. Yeah. So they're merging AOL and Yahoo into this thing called. oath, which we have made fun of on the Vergecast many, many times.

Tumblr will now be part of oath, which is very confusing for everyone. Tumblr is really important to people. You cover Tumblr a lot. Yeah. Just describe what it, like I'm not like a huge Tumblr user. Just describe the import of Tumblr to like particularly young people. Okay. First of all, I'll say there is an old episode of What's Tech called What's Tumblr, which people can listen to.

I don't hear more in death. I guess like so the side of Tumblr that I've covered is more like the culture side the fandom side I think they've done a really good job the last couple of years is becoming like the official home of fandom on the internet so it's important to people who want to participate in a community that's not toxic like the ones that you might find on Reddit and I think like a big reason for that is just like the basic structure of the site is very like to participate you have to do a value ad like to be in a conversation you have to re-blog something and add something to it that's like cool or interesting or funny enough that someone's going to reblog what you said. It's not like just an open comment thread. So I think the reason it's important to a lot of people is that it still produces a lot of culture and it does so in a way that's not horrifying, which is vanishingly rare on the internet. It is. Tummers run by a guy

named David Carp who founded it. In 2014 and 15, Verchcast listeners, now we covered the hell out of net neutrality. We're covering the hell out of net neutrality again now in 2017. But in 2014, but in 2014, 14 and 15, Carp was a big fighter for net neutrality. I actually attended like a secret meeting at Tumblr headquarters. This is a ridiculous story where they told me what their big plans to rally the New York tech scene around net neutrality were. All the people who ran that meeting are gone from Tumblr now. David Carp is still there. And now it's part of Verizon.

And you just did a bunch of reporting about how Verizon appears to be changing what's happening inside a Tumblr. Yeah. So I guess, like, in the first place, this story was one that's, like, pretty obvious, right? Like, Verizon is a huge ISP. Verizon hates net neutrality. I mean, well, they try to twist the words, whatever. But, yeah, I don't want to. We need 45 minutes with a net neutrality explainer, and then we can have the conversation. No, it's so bad. But it's, like, fairly obvious that their political aims are directly at odds at each other. So basically asking people, like, what's going on? Why aren't you talking about? about net neutrality anymore, they're like, we're not allowed to. Like, it's just like pretty, it's pretty obvious. So people were, I think a lot of people at Tumblr that I spoke to are like nervous about it because one of the main draws of working there is that it has an emphasis on community. And they do a lot of political stuff. I mean, and like David Carp has a huge public partnership with Planned Parenthood. He's on their board.

They talk about stuff that's even kind of sensitive, like gun control. I know they were like really on the travel ban thing. were really vocal about that. So I think it gets worrisome to people, even if they aren't personally invested in net neutrality, like having that taken off the table is kind of like, well, what is Tumblr now if we're not allowed to talk publicly about the things that we care about? So you talk to employees. What were they saying to you? Well, they basically said that they had kind of asked in recent All Hands meeting, like, what's going on? Why aren't we participating? There's a big, like, day of action coming up. And Tumblr is the only notable, like, New York City

tech company from the 2014 coalition that's not participating, so they asked. And this Yahoo VP who's been promoted so that David Karp is reporting to him directly, was kind of like, I don't know, it's not my problem. It's above my pay grade. Above my pay grade, the best phrase to hear from your boss. Yeah, yeah. And I guess like the whole tone of that conversation was like really disconcerting to people. One person I spoke to you, I didn't quote this in the story because it and really wasn't really relevant. But this executive said, like, Facebook is a failure. And, like, basically argued that Tumblr's content is so valuable, which I agree it is

valuable, but that Tumblr's content is so valuable that it should be, like, it should be a player on a much larger scale than it is. And he kind of, like, joked that they should be replacing cable TV, which I don't really understand that at all. Especially if it's built on fandoms. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

They require the TV shows. Yeah. And then one of the engineers who works there told us, basically, that David Karp said in a weekly meeting with the engineering team, because he's still basically a product person. So he meets with them, and that would be, like, his closest group there. He said that he's not allowed to talk about non-neutriety in public anymore. Yeah. Which makes sense, right? I mean, Verizon really is the dual track of what Verizon is doing.

So they're advocating against net neutrality over here. but then they're buying basically all these web pages. That's what buying the Huffington Post. That's what buying, well, A.O. bought the Huffington Post, and they bought AO. It's tangled web. And they bought Yahoo, which has tons of web pages, and they want to put ads on all those web pages.

That's Verizon's media business model. It just doesn't seem like, like you said, the story is really obvious on its face, right? You got bought by a big company. They pay your paycheck. Your personal policies don't align with the company's policies. Your paycheck is at risk if you run around saying that you're part of the organization is going to change. But I think there's a lot in your story about Tumblr being a company or an organization,

I guess, now. It's not a company anymore if it gets bought by another company, is it? Is it a verge of company? This is very confusing. Anyway, but, like, to say that this group of people has a shared set of values and those values feel under attack by Verizon, like, how, is there a sense that they can change it? Is it just over?

Like, what was your sense of the course of action here? Well, I got the sense that people were still hopeful. I think David Carp is like really a beloved figure. I think like he has a pretty good public persona, but I think within the company, like there's a lot of loyalty to him. And I think like people believe that he wants to do the right thing. I don't know. I don't know if it's like naive to think that he's suddenly going to be like, whatever, I don't care. I'm going to talk about neutrality all the time.

I don't know if that's like realistic. But I think like I got the sense that there's still a lot of people there who like consider Tumblr, like more of a community than a company. which sounds like a BS line, but I mean, I think there's some merit to it just based on the way that David Carp has run Tumblr. I don't think, like, he's ever somebody who wanted Tumblr to be a huge company, and that's, like, probably part of the reason that it didn't make any money. And, like, has reportedly slowly been dying, but, you know, I've been on it since I was a teenager, and it still exists for now, so that's something. Is it the same?

Like, have there been big product changes to Tumblr over the course of the time that you used it? I don't think so. I know like they're always, they're always going back and forth and we're just talking about one of these changes yesterday on like how to make, like Tumblr used to have this reputation of like it's all porn. Like no matter what you do, you're going to be porn. So like they've, like fiddled a lot with adjustments as far as like how to get rid of NSFW content or how to like not have it pop up on people by surprise. And they just like made a change where you have to be logged in to see sensitive content, which I think has not gone over well from what. We've been seeing... But no, to be fair, no platform ever makes a change that goes over well. That's true. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think Tumblr's had that many huge product changes. I know, like, the app used to be terrible. People hated the app for a long time.

It seems like it's gotten better. It seems like they've dedicated a lot of resources to the app. It used to be, like, the only place on the internet with GIFs. And I've kind of gotten away from them as, like, their trademark. But I would say, like, yeah, I know Tumblr's pretty much the same website. I can't remember anything that was notably different when I was, like, in high school, derping around on Tumblr than now when I go home from work and derp around on Tumblr. Perfect.

The reason I ask is you quoted a blog post in your piece that I think it was like the protective purgatory of Yahoo. So Marissa Meyer, who just has not a great reputation, I think, with ex-Jahoo employees or Yahoo employees. She spent a billion dollars on this company. She bought a million other companies. She installed the CEO of a company called Flurry over a Tumblr, which is crazy if you think about their relative value in the world. It's just like you bought Tumblr and you bought this weird app analytics company and then you're like, that's weird. But she did it. It just seemed like they didn't know what to do next, right?

She bought it and she had no idea what to do next. So it just got to be by itself. Yeah. And people weren't paying attention to it. And now it feels like Verizon's paying a little bit more. attention or too much attention and that means change is coming and that feels terrifying. Yeah. From what I heard speaking to people about this story like Yahoo had done some things to Tumblr that didn't go over well. Like I know they changed the

sign-in process so you had to have a Yahoo account to sign in. Everyone's got one of those. Yeah. Yeah. And like the engineer I spoke to said it took like two years for them to implement it and like David Karp was fighting it the whole time and it was a terrible disaster and they had to abandon it. like months after putting it on the site. And I guess like there's been a hiring freeze there also, especially in the engineering department. And like he basically said like things break all the time.

Yahoo didn't care. Like Yahoo just kind of was like letting Tumblr rot. So like I don't know if like negligence is necessarily like better than a strong hand. But like I feel like it completely like remains to be seen what Verizon even plans to do with Tumblr. I don't understand why they would just sell it. But whatever. I don't know what they want to do with it. Caitlin knows this. I've advocated to Fox Media by Tumblr. It did go anywhere. Usually I get replies to my emails at this company. No one replied to that email.

Yeah, I don't know. I think it would be a good idea. Well, I think the question is like, is the future of Tumblr more like Craig's List, which is like happy abandonware that continues to putter along and it's fine. And it's just always going to be that thing. Or are they going to try to make it Facebook? And the argument for trying to make a Facebook is actually quite strong. the biggest apps in the world are all based on communities. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. It's not media people programming stuff and putting on your home screen. It's like you tapping into networks and communities.

So you can see the argument. We could probably get an app on your home screen if we just make Tumblr bigger. But that changes its essential character. Yeah, I think the problem with trying to scale Tumblr in that way is that like Tumblr is like opaque by nature. Like there's, you don't see people's follower accounts. You don't see how people are interacting with each other outside of like individual posts in your dashboard. It's very hard to get a sense of what's going on on Tumblr unless you really invest like a ton of time in it. And the communities are like pretty insular.

So I would be surprised if Verizon tried to do something big with Tumblr without making like follow accounts public or something like that. Because it's just like it's really hard to see. It's really hard to see through Tumblr. It's very dense. Right. But those are the changes if you have to make that change the essential nature of Tumblr. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I think that would be, I hope it goes, I hope it just becomes Craigslist. Yeah, I would just kind of like. Or like V-Bolitan or like whatever, like all like the nasty form software that just like powers weird forms on the internet. It'd be nice if it just got to hang out. That'd be nice for me personally. Verizon starts layering all the play ads on it. I don't know if this is coming through. I don't trust Verizon at all.

I think their plan to do with this huge collection of scale is, I don't think it's rooted in a notion they need to make great things. I think it's rooted in the notion that they just need to get big and put ads on the Internet that ruthlessly track you, which is why they, for example, supported a bill to cancel data privacy profession. If you think about what AT&T is doing, and I'm not some great lover of AT&T, but AT&T is like buying Time Warner. They're trying to get HBO. They're trying to get Game of Thrones. They're trying to play at that in like, I don't know, prestige level of content, if that's a phrase. Comcast, which disclosure owns a chunk of this company, but NBC Universal.

Like their version of prestige is basically like gluing minions to everything. But they're happy about it. Right, like they're operating on that level. They own NBC. They own literally universal. It's the name of the thing. Verizon is buying dead web properties to try to get scale. And I think it's just a very different attitude.

And I think it's dangerous for some of these, like, beloved things. Yeah. Well, like, Tumblr is also, like, unique to Tumblr more so than I think, like, Facebook or Twitter or even Reddit is that, like, people actually make stuff to put on Tumblr. It's all, like, real user-created content. It's not just, like, dumb tweets. And, like, using that, I don't know. Sorry, Twitter.

F you, Jack. I mean, like, people make art. People put their art on Tumblr. People share their music on Tumblr. Like it's like using that to make money for like a huge ice. Like that I feel like it's just it's a little weirder. It's a little like more it feels like insidious to me. Like the way that people have and that's not unique to Verizon like or even like Tumblr fandom.

But like that people love exploiting people for the things that they love. Like movie studios have people design Snapchat filters. for free now because they'll do it because they love Star Wars so much, they'll do anything, you know, like coming up with a strategy to make tons of money off of the stuff that, like, teenagers are doing for free on the internet is, like, a pretty broad trend. And it's unfortunate. So what happens next? I mean, besides us ruthlessly exploiting teens, what happens next for Tumblr?

I don't know. Someone tell me. Someone hop in my DNA. Yeah, get that. We have like, we have Secure Drop. You can go to the pitch page at the verge and get a hold of us. Caitlin has an email. What's your Twitter?

K-A-I-T-U-T-N underscore Tiffany. Okay. Well, I want Caitlin to pursue this story because I think ultimately what happens to all of the things that Verizon bought with Yahoo and AOL is going to be very interesting. And it's going to, Verizon's a huge company. You can't ignore them. There are huge swaths of the country where they're your only choice for ISP. This net neutrality thing, regardless of whether you've heard our 45 minutes. Exploring episodes on it.

By the way, there's a great episode of What's Tech called What is Neticality. It's happening, right? The train's coming, and Verizon's going to be a major player here, and it's going to affect a bunch of properties that I think people take for granted. So we've been talking about Tumblr this whole time. Verizon now owns Yahoo Fantasy football, which is like a crazy thing for an ISP to own. They own Yahoo News. Like, they own a news organization.

So there's just so much that they have, and they're going to try to figure out how to make it more valuable than the price they pay for it. And that means change is coming. So you hear about any of this stuff, particularly Tumblr. Get out of the Caitlin. She's on it. All right. Thanks, Caitlin.

Okay. So that was Caitlin. Caitlin's great. I want to add to this whole net neutrality thing. It's just a little fact. So all of the ISPs claim that they need to reverse Title II because it's hurting their investment. But this week, Jay-Z announced his new album, 4-444. And it's a Sprint exclusive.

And to get that Sprint exclusive, Sprint bought 33% of title, which just implies that Sprint has enough extra money lying around. I've been reading a book about economics. Uh-oh. And when you have a scarce resource, uh, no. Let's see. He almost got there, buddy. So the idea, the idea would be that.

You see a higher return on alternative investments because you don't see as high of a return as you would want on this infrastructure. That is the argument. I'm just saying I can read books. And almost get there. Big takeaway. No, it's a fair argument. It's just funny that they're all like, we can't. But hey, would you like a JZ record?

We bought a lot of those. We bought a record company. Shouldn't Sprint be spending its money? I don't know. On its network? Yeah. Shouldn't you first have a competitive network? Are they really like...

When was the last time these like... I feel like these weird tie-ins with like carriers were things that were happening like pre-i-phone. Yeah, yeah, all over the place. These weird branded exclusive... I mean, you could buy like an ESPN phone. Like it was like stupid stuff. But this one is to me, it's like, are not...

network is bad, but do you like Jay-Z? You'll deal with it. Like, that's a weird. Anyway, that's not the point. Okay, we got to talk about Uber. We just have to. So I'm sure if you're paying attention to any news, because this is like front-paid, like New York Times is sending breaking news alerts about this. Yep. Travis Kallnick and Uber have had a monstrously bad run. Andy Hawkins, the Virgin's transportation reporter, just looks exhausted because his entire life is dominated by bad news coming out of Uber. And one day he'll get a break. But that day is not coming soon. So obviously, I think as you know, we wrote a great piece about it. Actually, Andy wrote it.

There's a woman named Susan Fowler who had a broad post about pervasive sexual harassment inside of Uber. Four months later, basically the entire company, the entire top of this company is wiped clean. There's no head of technology. There's no CFO. There's no C-O. There's no CEO. the board is changing over. And the question I have, you should go read the news, but like, Travis was supposed to be on stage of the code conference, pulled out, Kara wrote a blog post. There was, I don't know if there was some chance that it would change, but then his parents were in a boating accident. Yeah. One of them died.

Like, then he took a leave of absence, and then his board, his investors pushed him to resign, like just fully resign and walk away. So he's going to stay on the board. And now there's no, like this machine in our economy, like one of the great, I think it's the most valuable private company in the world. Right? This like huge thing that we think about. One day you're going to push the button and the robot car is going to show up. Like that's the Uber promise has literally no leadership whatsoever. And to me, the question is just like, do they survive or they just pave the way for a company like Lyft?

right like how do you how do you reboot that thing how do you route and like the engineers today like there's 12 000 employees like they have a petition circulating to reinstate him so there's like controversy within the company about him leaving again he's still like on the board he's still a huge shareholder etc etc etc but i i think that that question is is basically how much of uber's success was based on like sort of this outloss or scofflawed like style. Like there was a story like I don't know six months back of like how they sort of evade like regulators.

There was this whole thing that they did with saying her our self-driving cars are totally great. Yeah. And then they were not great. They were not great. And they were illegally running anyway. Yeah. So like they didn't want to get the license for them.

The license costs like 400 bucks. So how much of Uber success? And and also I think one of the important like interesting things that Uber did like the the surge pricing. Like a lot of the things that Uber has did and has done that inspired, like, competitors like advertise on. Like when you're riding the subway in New York, you see a bunch, you don't see Uber ads. You see ads for other car companies that say, unlike Uber, we don't do search pricing.

So how much of Uber success is based on like that really aggressive move or, and how much of it is it's just being like a first mover and and they'll just like dwindle over time. Yeah. So actually I think you're right. I think that the question of how much of Uber's success was based on it being, you know, a company that like did what it wanted and ignored regulations and just pushed it through. I actually think a fairly significant amount, but all that work is done now. and it seems like it's not that hard

to make a ride hailing app that is like 80% as good as Uber, right? How many of them are there in New York? Like a million. In Austin, Uber and Lyft got kicked out and there were like three the next week and that's what we used at South by Southwest. Yeah, but then they let Uber and Lyft back in

and now those apps are gone. Yeah. Right. So the question of if Uber keeps flailing, is someone going to swoop in? To me, it's like, does that last 20% of, like, of Uber's technology that made it slightly better matter?

And then the knock-on question, the next question is the end goal for Uber was to replace public transit and have self-driving robot cars and, like, change the world. And you can't do that without a massive amount of money and a massive giant company. And I do not see even Lyft, you know, going down that path anytime soon. Maybe one of the, you know, frightful five big giant companies will decide, ah, sure, we'll do a ride-hailing and, like, Google will do it or something.

But I think the most likely outcome is we're just going to have a bunch of competitors that are like 80% as good at their technology as Uber. Uber is going to kind of like flail around for a while. And this idea that there's going to be a unified, coherent ecosystem of like car sharing and, you know, getting around via an app or via even self-driving cars is just going to take a little bit longer. And like the,

unless it like Ford or, you know, GM figures it out. If Uber, let's say Uber is, is not at all affected by this keeps on the, their exact same path towards self-driving cars, which they do not seem to be the leader in currently.

No. I mean, their big move was to hire a guy from Alphabet who stole like 16,000 pages worth of files. Yeah. It came out that they maybe new. Yeah. So, but let's say they're on track and they like get a self-driving car up and running, and now you can hail it from the app.

What is stopping any of the other companies who are, spending billions of dollars on makes self-driving cars, partnering with one or multiple of these, like, 80% apps. So that's already happening, right? So GM has a huge investment in Lyft. They have a huge investment in cruise automation. Ford has its mobility. Like, all the car companies know this is going to happen, right? And Mark Field, who was the CEO of Ford, is gone now.

His argument, basically, at the time, was we have to make these investments, we have to do these things, because ultimately we will end up selling more cars. Like when I sell you the consumer car, most of the time, it just sits there. Right? But if I sell the robot car to the fleet, it's a mechanical thing.

They're just going to use it up way faster. It's going to be on the road more. So, like, they see that as part of the big sweep of their business model. I think the real question is the push the button have the robot car show up. literally anyone who can get their hands on a self-driving car first, like wins that race, right? Like, there's that.

But Uber has already deployed them. So a bunch of people from our company were just in Pittsburgh for a big offsite. And a bunch of them took rides in Uber's test fleet of self-driving cars. And they all sent me Instagram stories or Instagram messages about it. And I was like, put it on the site. But they don't work for me. So they didn't. Which is a real pain of the neck.

but like they're already doing it right like they're already making that move they see it Ben Thompson who's a terrific analyst has actually written a bunch about this that like Uber's big network of drivers is its main asset right now so if you like here in New York there's there is Juno there's like a million of them if you open them they're kind of empty even all the drivers have everything it's still not as many drivers as Uber so it's like faster to get a car because Uber has the cars in the road, and then they have the drivers in the cars. That doesn't mean they're going to have the most self-driving cars first. And I think that's like the, that asset needs to change.

And like literally right now, the company is absent all leadership. Like, it does not have a C-suite. What do you think, like this whole Uberification, like there is something like Uber is just huge, has been hugely important to like all of culture and this idea that almost, any service could possibly be solved by putting an app on your phone where you push a button and then you're served. Is that, is that like, is everything going to keep on getting Uberified? Because I feel like there's been a lot of these stories of startups in Silicon Valley that,

like, put a lot of money up front early on to try to make it easy and it kind of doesn't work out. Like, is that maybe not the perfect business model or? I think it's a lot hard. I mean, here in, I was just talking like Casey Newton about this. Maybe I should just have Casey talk about this next week on the show. But here in New York, like this city runs on Seamless. Like you push the button and food shows up.

And restaurants somewhat hate it. They somewhat need it. So there's like the tension, but Seameless like dominates the market in New York. That as far as I can tell is not the case, Casey was saying in San Francisco where like food delivery is just like very competitive market with startups coming and going. So I think it's just hard. I think part of it just depends on population density, right? Like, seamless is not great if you live in the middle of the country. Because there aren't as many restaurants, there's not as many people,

and you've got a lot of, like, resources and length of all. I think what's really interesting is Amazon just spent a whole bunch of money on Whole Foods. Yeah. $13.7 billion. And now they're going to have this network. If I had to bet on anything of the Frightful Five getting into this game, it's like Amazon is going to just deploy the robot cars. and when the robot cars aren't shuttling people,

they're going to be shuttling things. We're going there anyways. Want to ride? Yeah. We're delivering these whole food groceries, but you can sit in the back. If Amazon were to unveil a self-driving car, like they must be working on one, right?

They need to deliver stuff. That's their whole model. They're like the drone beehive. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. They still need cars. I think it would be, it would actually be,

like a nuclear bomb, because it would affect trucking. It would affect FedEx and EPS and the UPSS. Postal Service. It would be a really big deal if Amazon got serious about doing self-driving cars and actually got into that game. Because right when we talk about self-driving cars, we forget that the most important thing for a self-driving car to do is like move a shipping container around. It's not moving me to, you know, the bar. I mean, I think that's most important thing.

But it turns out it's shipping containers. What if you put a hundred people in a shipping container and put a bar in it? And then I think that's actually just a buttlight commercial. And then you put the shit on a boat. I will say, Paul, if you can't see out. What was that? When you asked what the Uberification, I thought you were going to go in the other direction,

which is, wouldn't it be nice if we were talking about like the future of our infrastructure for our cities and small towns, not run by a private company with either an asshole or no. in charge and instead we, you know, built like trains and public transit and, you know, bikes and I don't know, there's a coarseness to it. Like the MTA? Yeah. Well, so, right, but the MTA has done a terrible job.

Yeah. Like, how long does it take to get anywhere in New York right now? Really bad. What if, I'm going to say here. What if we put our energy to fixing that? Ferries. A fairy is wonderful. Well, what if we put our energy into, I see, I think there, I think there's something that Uber

show that you have to be good at business to pull this off. It is not just the idea that by making it such a transparent transaction, you have to... For transportation. For transportation, thank you. You have to be pretty efficient in some ways. And sometimes you've got to forget to pay a bunch of people in New York. I don't know about that. All right, let's end this heavy middle segment. We are going to be covering the hell out of Uber. The team member we could, Kara and Yohanna are covering the hell out at Uber. We should call out Mike Isaac, who is just blowing this beat up at the New York Times.

He's doing a great job. So Uber News is not, there's not. It's not going to end. It's not over, especially as they start to hire and rethink what that company should be. And I'm interested in how a company that has, you know, clear, seems to clearly have harassment problems and, like, a toxic workplace to use that word. How do you fix that? Yeah. And it's hard.

And I think that's like, I think many people who listen to this show are interested in, like, working in a startup or starting a startup. That scale moment from the way you act when you're small to the way you act when you're big, like, they failed that moment. Like, that's a challenge that companies face when they're successful and they blew it. But let me ask you this. What if you can find anything in seconds? Now you can with Tile, the tiny Bluetooth tracker that makes finding things easier than ever. Just attach Tile to your keys while laptop, even your bike, anything you don't want to lose. And finding things is easy.

You just open the free Tile app on your phone. You see your lost item on the map. Then you can quickly find your item by making the Tile ring, and you get it back in seconds. And if it's your phone that missing, you just press the tile and your phone rings, even if phone's on silent. Every day, Tile finds over 2 million lost items. So join the millions who have used Tile to help find that. a lot of stuff by acquiring and then using a tile. There's like steps involved.

But they're easy steps. The steps are go to gettile.com slash verge. You save up to 30% per tile if you buy a multi-pack. You get free shipping. And it makes a perfect gift. So for a limited time, you get a free gift box with a multi-pack order. So go to gettile.com slash verge. That's gettile.com.

One thing. Slash. Verge. All right. So we got to end. This is a little grab bag of stuff here at the end. We usually got to bang through it. But first, Paul.

Every week. Every, without fail. The consistency of this segment. Do a little segment. I like to call my dinner with Andre. What? When I was off the internet, I watched my dinner with Andre on Blu-ray. And I was found that really.

What does Blu-ray add to dinner with Andre? I'm just clarifying that I wasn't. that I wasn't streaming it over the internet. Okay, okay. The resolution, higher bit rate. I mean, I would imagine I'd be happy watching that on VHS. Yeah, it's not like a good. Well, there is an explosion at the end.

A flavor. Part of, one of the things in the conversation in my dinner with Andre is Audrey's talking about having, or no, the other guy's talking about having an electric blanket and being like unsure if that's like a good thing because in the sense it's like you know shielding him from reality he's not like and it's just you know it's a weird technological thing to have so close to your body and stuff like that so anyways all that to say that the smart

duvet is back with a sequel called the smart duvet breeze so the smart duvet is basically an inflatable duvet. And it makes your bed automatically by inflating to be rigid enough to unfold and cover your whole bed. So now they added this thing where you can set temperatures for each side. So in addition to the airflow that you'll use to inflate, it also has a separate thing where it can flow hot air or warm air through the duvet to control your temperature at night. And also you can choose. separate temperatures for each side if you are so lucky as to have someone who loves you. Yeah. And shares a bed with you.

Is this the bed that makes itself? Because we covered one of those, too. Yes. This is a second take on that. I might be buying the hell out of this. We have lots of fights about the appropriate sleeping temperature. The problem is the appropriate sleeping temperature is warm under the covers, cold air on your head. Yeah.

This doesn't achieve that. I'm more of a full burrito kind of dude. That's where I live. It's a full burrito. You just make yourself a little burrito. Do you make yourself a burrito? It sounds like you're eating a burrito. I'm just like you were preparing a burrito for consumption.

I'm not going any further with this idea. The listener is free to come to their own conclusion. But I, that's where I live. All right. Deeter, Lauren reviewed the iPad Pro 12.9. Her headline was a great iPad. One I won't buy. Yep.

I watched her use it for like a week or so. It, I forgot how just, it's massive that thing is. I told her your angle should be that this is a desktop iPad. He's like, no, it's not. Like, it's, you carry it around. And it's a pain to plug into an external monitor, blah, blah, blah. She was right. That's not the angle.

But man, it is silly big. If you don't need a giant canvas to draw on, you are crazy for not buying the 10.5. Huh. Strong words. That's where I live. Yeah. I don't know.

I saw a designer here up in our design for using one the other day, and I was like, wait, I want one. Because it's so, like, it's such a bold thing. It's just, it's so confidently huge. Anyway. The 12.9 should allow for three app, windows instead of two in iOS 11. There you go.

That would be a reason to get it. Yeah. Deeter, this one's just, I'm just throwing it at you. Someone has beaten threes. I know, probably strikes directly at your soul. I have hit a plateau in my three score plan lately. I can't get up above like a 3070. I got two 3072 so I couldn't get them combined.

I'm real sad about that. My claim to fame, and I can't find it now, but there is a way to get. the minimum possible score in threes where you never match anything that was like a tweet you get an award yeah but twitter search is garbage and so i can't find it what yeah you can't like because you know the threes works by matching three to three you're like one to two makes a three blah blah blah blah blah but if you start if you start the board you can you know play the game and never match anything until the board is full and to get the minimum possible score

And I did that. I like that. Twitter search does suck. It's real bad. It's so bad. Last little two things, which are somewhat unrelated, but they're both about Microsoft. They're now letting surface laptop owners revert to 10S, which I think is fascinating. But you have to factory reset, right?

Yeah, but why would you do that? Just to like sell it? I'm so confused. You do it to sell it. You'd do it if you had upgraded to pro. in order to get that one app that does a bunch of garbage in the back end that ultimately slows your computer down. Creative Cloud. Sorry.

And then they finally released a version for 10S that goes through Microsoft's processes so that it's actually able to be managed by the operating system to not kill your battery. I don't think anybody will ever do this because I don't have faith that they're going to get all the apps they need in the 10S store or the Windows store for. not don't call them Metro, don't call them modern, whatever the hell they're called now, Windows Store apps, but it's a nice idea. Yeah. And I think also it's probably for like IT managers who like made the mistake of letting one of their employees install some crap on a company computer and then I realized that they made a terrible mistake when they need to hand it on to the next person.

What if this was just a toggle? What if you just said, I want to be an S mode? Like shut down everything that I've all the garbage. Oh, like safety mode. Yeah, kind of like a, like a, yeah, like a booting to safety mode, but you just like push a button and like it just shuts down all non-approved non-S processes, non-like Windows store mediated. Yeah. Right. And like I just, I just need to be in S mode.

I know I got to make it. It seems like a lot of engineering work for dubious value. Probably. Yeah. Well, also though, like it's Windows. That's my whole task. You can still run, you can still run stuff that like ran on Windows 3.1. one on Windows 10, right?

So I don't know that that's an easy thing for them to do. Yeah. It'd be nice. And then last one, just not really related, but I think it touches on data your sort of future of computers. We still need a better term for that. Like thread, dream pads. Dream tabs.

Yeah, dream tabs. Dream tabs. This story has now popped up for us every six months, like on the dot, another board of bar examiners ban certain devices. is. You can't make me talk about this. I can. Well, it's not, the lawyer part of it is actually not that interesting.

But so there's this terrible software program called soft test. It's made my company called Exam Soft. It's what kids in universities used to take written exams. And it is what you, I actually, I hand wrote my bar exam when I took it because I'm old, which is sad for me. But it's when you take the bar exam exam, you write your answers on exam soft. It's basically a lockdown word processor. You push the button and sends it. you can't run any processes.

Six months ago, they would not let people with the MacBook Pro with touchbar use it because the keyboard has suggestions so you could just program in macros for the answers. Right? Then they figure that out. They issued instructions for locking out the touchbar.

This time, hilariously, they don't have a fix for Windows 10 creators update, which is an automatic update that came out three months ago. Right. So you got to like, they're, it's a real mess. And a bunch of things.

States, I think Tennessee is the one that we covered in particular, have banned the Surface book and Surface Pro devices because they have detachable, detachable keyboards, and that means you could, in some theoretical universe, put on another keyboard with macros. So would you be able to take... Would you try to keep you from cheating? Carry in an IMac and use a Bluetooth keyboard? It has to have an attached keyboard. It has to... You cannot have a wireless keyboard or mouse. That is a thing. Why can't they just rent people?

Like Chromebooks for the day. I don't know. They just want to let you do it. I don't know. Because they're not like the board of bar examiners. And it's like a wealthy. Like right? Like it's a very, I don't know.

But how much does it cost to take the bar exam? I don't know. It took it 10 years ago, man. But it's like multiple hundreds of dollars, right? Yeah. It's like 300 bucks. So anyway, my point here is that. They require everybody to buy a $150 Chromebook in order to take the bar exam.

It's $800 in Wyoming. It's $250 in New York. Yeah. There's a wide, there's a huge range for state to state. That's real, by the way, that what you described is like supply and demand. Like,

there's a lot of people taking the bar in New York's that price is low, but there's not a lot of lawyers in Wyoming, so the price is high. Oh, man, this is crazy. Yeah, they're all, 50 in Kansas, and you can never have failed it in Kansas.

Yeah, and you're not allowed to take it again. No do-over? Yeah, but so the point, the only point I'm making is, there are so many assumptions baked into the world about what a laptop is, and this new wave of devices

is breaking those assumptions in ways that people have not yet considered. And that is like literally every six months, we're doing a story that's like, the bar exam is fucked up for a lot of people because this one company, this one software provider, cannot keep up with the furious rate

of hardware innovation. I just think that's super interesting, but again, I hand wrote the bar exam and would have killed to type it, So there's that. But I just think it's interesting. Like, we don't, we just had Panos Penae on the show and he was like, this is what a laptop is, this is what people want. And it's amazing to me how many cultural administrative assumptions are made based on the form factor of this device that is the form factor significantly changes.

Like, Walt has always said, the phone is a new personal computer. There's a world in which you walk in and you take the bar exam on your phone. because you're a wireless keyboard, but right now the world is... Not with the macros. Right, but like right now, that is not allowed. So anyway, I just thought it was interesting. Last little note. There's anything else we need to talk about this week?

There's a lot going on this week. But like I said, it was all little news, all little bites. Thanks next week is also going to be crazy. Lots of little news next week. Hey, I love these shows. I like hanging with you guys. We'll do some segments. I'll do something with Casey next week.

Like I said, I'm down to... We're down as a group to one podcast, but like me personally, I used to do this twice a week and I do it once. So my instinct to just talk to people on the microphone on Wednesdays is like very high. She just carry one around. Yeah. So you're going to see a bunch more experiments happening. Speaking of experiments, our engineer Andrew Marino is doing a bunch of weird stuff on Anchor,

which is a new kind of audio platform. So go download Anchor, subscribe to the Verge. Check that out. Give us some feedback. A lot of that stuff is going into the Verge Extras podcast feed. so if you don't feel like downloading anchor and doing the new app stuff, you can just subscribe to that feed.

I would only ask that all of these things are pilots, they're new ideas for what Verge shows could be or grow into. So just give us feedback. Tweet it me. I'm at Reckless. Tweetre, he's at Paclon. Paul's Future Paul.

Andrew's Andrew Marino. Just tweet at us. I'll make sure Andrew knows. Yeah. Andrew Marino, but it's Andrew. is with a you. Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, listen to the stuff. Give us some feedback on it. We're definitely going to have more shows. We're just trying to figure out what the right thing to do is. It's hard to replace the show like Control Outplete. So we're trying to get it right

and we're trying to try a bunch of ideas and make sure we pick something that, you know, speaks to people. Can I do a thing? Can I do a thing? I want to say, I want to say thanks to everybody at the Computer History Museum

who were a verge cast fans who came by to say hi. I had to re-explain why we say Paul at the end of the show. Yeah, we have a lot of new listeners and a lot of old jokes. I just want everybody to know that I'd be fine if we stop saying Paul. I get it that it's been a really long time since that joke made any sense. And it could be ostracizing for new listeners who I want to feel very welcome.

Yeah. But it's also hilarious to say my name at the end of it. I think it's fine. It's lore. Maybe we'll just do a joke catch-up episode one of these days. Anyway, if you do want to listen to other stuff, there's other great stuff from our friends at Recode. Lauren Good, our great senior editor,

does too embarrassed to ask with Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher herself does Recode Decode, which is wonderful. And Peter Cofka does Recode Media, which is for a media nerd. Just listen to that one because it is absolutely fantastic. So that's all on iTunes. It's all everywhere podcasts are. Just go find it. You can go to iTunes.com slash The Verge.

We ask you, just like, leave reviews. We love your reviews. We actually pay attention to the feedback, although this show might not seem like it at all. But we do, I swear we do. Wow. I'm just saying, I know we do.

So with that in mind, go review our show. I'm dying. All right. I want to say thank you one more time. Definitely five stars. Five stars. Well, I listen to the five star ones. The ones that are like keep doing it exactly the same way.

I know. We listen to those. I listen to the One Star 1. All right, look, and I want to say thank you to Norton. If you have internet at home, you probably have a router. If you have a router, then you've got to protect yourself from the cybercriminals. So check out the Norton core, secure Wi-Fi router. Go to Norton.com slash Furgcast.

You save $30 a pre-order before July 1. I already said the Twitter handles. That's it. That's a show. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul. Snip.

Snip.