The Vergecast - Verizon switches to Android Messages as default RCS / Jeff Bezos goes to space / Biden and Big Tech

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

The Verge's Dieter Bohn and Alex Cranz discuss Verizon switching to Android Messages as default for RCS, as well as the many gadgets from this week. Verge policy editor Russell Brandom joins to talk about President Biden's criticism of Facebook's handling of misinformation on their platform and the nomination of Google critic Jonathan Kanter to lead the Department of Justice's antitrust division. The Verge's Liz Lopatto and Joey Roulette talk with Dieter about Jeff Bezos' space flight this week. Further reading: Biden says platforms like Facebook are ‘killing people’ with COVID-19 misinformation Facebook pushes back against Biden remarks on COVID-19 misinformation Joe Biden says Facebook isn’t ‘killing people,’ but misinformation causes harm The Biden administration should take the First Amendment as seriously as Facebook misinformation FTC pledges to fight unlawful right to repair restrictions Biden to nominate Google critic Jonathan Kanter to lead DOJ antitrust division The space tourism industry is stuck in its billionaire phase  Blue Origin successfully sends Jeff Bezos and three others to space and back An on-the-ground look at Blue Origin’s motley crew Jeff Bezos appreciates your efforts to get Jeff Bezos to space Verizon is also switching to Android Messages as default for RCS Pegasus spyware used to target phones of journalists and activists, investigation finds Dish cuts a 10-year, $5 billion deal to make AT&T the primary service provider for its MVNO The Dish ‘fix’ for the T-Mobile-Sprint merger seems more shortsighted than ever Playdate hands-on: a Game Boy from a different dimension Apple AirPods update to arrive later this year with iPhone SE refresh coming 2022: report Apple releases iOS 14.7 just as MagSafe Battery Pack appears on shelves The first real photos of Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack are here Apple MagSafe Battery Pack review: convenience over capacity OnePlus Buds Pro announced, coming September 1st for $150 OnePlus Nord 2 review: focused on the essentials OnePlus is merging OxygenOS with Oppo's ColorOS Leaked memo confirms OnePlus will become an Oppo sub-brand Amazon will let devs compete for your Echo Show’s screen and everything else Alexa just added Alexa finally gets a masculine-sounding voice option Amazon promises most Echo speakers will get upgraded to Matter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Alex Cranz and I talk about a ton of gadgets. We have Russell Brandemond to talk about a bunch of policy news, including what the president said about Facebook. And of course, we talk about billionaires in space with Liz Lapato and Joey Roulette. All that's coming up right 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.

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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. Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Vergecast. I am your friend, Dieter Bone. You may notice from me entering the show that Nilai is on vacation, but we're not going to miss him because we have Alex Grant here. Yes, I am here in the office with you, looking at you right now. We're in the same room.

It is wild. And we also here are going to have one more guest. Yeah, that's me. That's my music. Our new guest is in a, I don't even know how to characterize that. Hey, Russell, how you doing? It's like a lake of cough syrup. It's like you're waiting through a lake of cough syrup.

I felt very mellow. That is a very, very chill walk-on song, Russell Branden. There you go. I have a very strict good vibes only policy, and I find the music really helps enforce it. That is amazing. Well, later on, we're also going to have Liz Lapato and Joy Roulette to talk about billionaires in space, which is great. But we always start the show by talking about COVID. And I actually don't have a ton of updates here. There are, of course, some cases happening at the Olympics in Japan.

And there's a lot going on there. There's a lot of drama going on there. But we also have a bunch more to talk about with vaccines. and their effectiveness and who is actually getting COVID cases. The answer is the unvaccinated. And that turns out to be a super contentious issue, which is why we have Russell Brandom here, because the president basically accused Facebook of murder.

What happened? Yeah. So at the very, very beginning of the week, we got this sort of message from the Surgeon General that was very, it wasn't super remarkable, but it did mention technology platforms. which sets up the later Biden stuff. So, I mean, he was saying, like, here's what school educators can do.

Here's what research institutions can do. Here's all the stuff. And it was all, like, very nice sort of nudgy recommendations. It was a message from the Surgeon General saying, look, like, misinformation is actually a problem medically speaking. Please stop it. Please figure out how to fix it. Yeah.

And here's, like, our sense of what would be helpful to stop it. And a lot of it, I will say, is stuff that platforms have generally already been doing, right? you go to YouTube, you see the sort of little COVID dash bar that is like sensible people saying sensible things about COVID. They've had that for a minute now. And so it was suggesting stuff like that. But then it kept coming up and they're like, well, what do you think? And they're like, well, there's sort of more misinformation on these platforms than we really want.

And by day, I mean like the press secretary, the surgeon general did a press conference. So Biden's leaving the White House to go to Camp David. And these reporters come up to him and ask, so what do you have, what's your message to Facebook about vaccine misinformation? And Biden says, they're killing people. And he says, sort of, you know, we only have a, it's only this new wave among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people. And so who is they? Yeah.

Well, they did just ask him about Facebook. But then we get into this whole thing of how carefully was he choosing his words. He's getting on in years. Well, and it's not like Biden has a history of speaking precisely in his entire life. So even at the time, it was like in our post, The Hill did a great job getting video up and we embedded their tweet. And we were like, look, you can see the whole exchange. We're not trying to hide anything like that's what he said. But they like immediately walked it back.

And he was like, no, no, I mean like the misinformation is killing people and we want Facebook to do a better job of restraining it. Yeah. But Facebook, as you can imagine, is like super sensitive to this stuff. And then another White House person sort of said, well, we need to sort of have consequences if they don't rein it in. And now we've gotten to the point where, you know, as we're recording this this afternoon, two Democratic lawmakers introduced this bill to. to sort of have the Secretary of Health and Human Services would have the option to strip 230 protections from tech platforms that are not,

they're being irresponsible with vaccine misinformation. I need to stop you right there for two reasons. Reason number one, if you get walk-on music, we also need to have audio stingers every time Section 230 gets mentioned. We used to have a Section 230 song, which is amazing. We could play that again. We won't do that. But just in the back of your mind,

just imagine like a thunderbolt sound like just every time 230 comes up for the first time so I saw some tweets about this can you explain why the idea that stripping section 230 protections has nothing to do with information like with misinformation why is that incoherent okay basically section 230 you know we sort of know it as the law that keeps Facebook from getting sued but essentially it's focused on things that are illegal

So there is some core crime. The classic lawsuit, which, like, Facebook has been sued for this dozens of times is, you know, this person from this terrorist group was on Facebook. And then my cousin was a victim of this terrorist attack. And the terrorist was using Twitter before the attack happened. And I'm going to sue Facebook for damages for sort of aiding and abetting terrorism. And this is the sort of lawsuit that Section 230 says, no, like, they don't have live. for the fact that this guy said this thing on Twitter, right? But the key thing is that it's, there is this crime.

And the question is just whether Facebook is liable for the crime. Right. Misinformation isn't a crime, right? Right. So you could strip the 230 immunity from Facebook for these particular sort of issue. Like, you know, okay, in this case, Facebook can no longer appeal to Section 230. Right, right, right. What is the lawsuit going to be?

Facebook has not actually, no law has been broken. Right. There actually has to be a crime in order for them to go after Facebook for allowing the crime on their platform. Right. And also, like, what is the claim of what Facebook should have done differently if there's no place where they say, okay, look, like a crime was taking place. You were sort of there. You don't want to be an accessory. It's your obligation to try to make sure, like, your equipment isn't you.

for illegal purposes, that doesn't really apply if it's just this legal thing. And then also, I mean, we must point out, okay, problem solved. We're going to outlaw vaccine misinformation. That's going to be a pretty big First Amendment issue. So this is one of those cases where people blame Section 230 for something that is really coming from the First Amendment. That pesky First Amendment. I know. Every time.

Every time. It's just every time. We've been talking about Facebook, so I must disclose that my wife works for. for Facebook Reality Labs, aka Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. That disclosure is especially important because on this very podcast feed, there was an interview with Mark Zuckerberg

by our former colleague Casey Newton about the metaverse. You should listen to that, but I'm bringing it up because, of course, he had to ask Zuckerberg about this thing that Biden said. Yeah. Can you tell me what happened there? It was sort of a judge dread metaphor where he's like, no one is out there.

trying to solve crime, which is obviously false because Judge Dredd is out there trying to solve crime. Like, he's like, you would never eradicate all the crime in a city. And Facebook's like that. There's always going to be some bad thing, which, like, by the way, we're all in New York now. If, like, the police commissioner got in front of a room full of reporters and was like, look, we're never going to solve, we're never going to fix all the crime.

Like, that's factually true, but it's not a reassuring thing to hear from, like, Yeah, you don't say that. That's not a great thing to say. Well, my thing is, like, if you're trying to find a comparison for yourself that people feel good about right now, I don't know if I'd go with the cops. Yeah, yeah, I would probably skip that one. Okay, so these bills are happening. When we see bills get, you know, introduced, especially about 2.30, some of them are just,

like, we know they're going nowhere. They're just there for show or they're there to try and move the conversation or score some points for the senator. I'm talking about Josh Hawley. What about the stuff that just like happened today? Will it actually happen? Yeah, I mean, I will say so far the reaction we've seen has been pretty chilly. I don't think that, you know, a lot of times you put something like this out there.

It's an idea you want to see what the response is. And if there's good response, you sort of move forward with it. I don't think they got the response they were hoping for. There's a real question of like a year from now, which is how long it's going to take to do any of this stuff. because Congress has a lot on its plate, is this still going to be the biggest problem we have with Facebook, right? Because if it's not, if a year from now we're arguing about privacy or we're arguing about sort of, you name it, right? There's 10 different things. I mean, a year from now, we'll be coming up on another round of election pretty soon.

And that's going to be a entirely different conversation, maybe. Well, and this bill only addresses like a specific kind of misinformation, right? Like, it's not all misinformation on Facebook. It's just COVID related. So they don't mention COVID. They sort of say misinformation in relation to an ongoing health emergency. But it's like, yeah, like, what could they be referring to? But it is like they wouldn't have to write another law for like the next catastrophic pandemic, I guess.

Yeah. But it is pretty specific. It's not great to like. I guess say what people can and cannot post on Facebook. Yeah. I feel like that's still Facebook's job. And I think, I mean, part of the weird thing for me has been like, okay, so everyone should get vaccinated. The vaccines are safe and effective.

I was telling this to an Uber driver the other day where I was like 90%. There are a lot of people sort of pushing back against the vaccines for whatever reason. And some of them are doing it unlike the most popular cable news channel in America, right? But I think there's a free speech norm of like if Joe Biden got in front of a bunch of reporters and was like Tucker Carlson is killing people. We would understand this to be like, even if, you know, I'm not actually disagreeing with that claim, but it would be a little over the line. It would be like a weird use of the sort of power of the presidential podium. Right. And I think we're not there with Facebook yet, even though I don't know.

that is what's happening. They're protected by the First Amendment in this situation. And like, even if you wish that they wouldn't say these things, you can't just sort of get up there and go after them. But because Facebook's so unpopular and I think because it's sort of, it feels like, and there's all this tech regulation up in the air. So they see this as a place to sort of apply pressure. Right. That's kind of where the conversation went. Well, okay, to sort of wrap this up, the big question is, is this, you know, the White House is finding several ways to apply pressure? There are even leaks that they had a frosty relationship with Facebook that, like, kind of preceded all of this. Is this just a little bit of a pressure campaign, but it sort of isn't going anywhere?

Or do you think that this is the start of like a big thing that is separate from the tech regulation we're about to maybe talk about? I don't think any policy changes are going to come out of it. I do think this is a sign of like Facebook is now a political football and it's just going to get punted every time like one team needs to score points. No, wait, that's not. I love the disagree. No, the punt doesn't. It's they're going to get field goal kicked. But anyway, it's bad for, yeah, it's bad news for Facebook.

It's sort of the punchline. So the other thing that the White House did, Not too long ago, we talked about it, is they put out a big executive order with multiple parts. We talked about this on the Vergecast. And one of them was Joe Biden instructed the FTC to do whatever they could to ensure, you know, the right to repair. And this was specifically talking about, like, I mean, tractor. He mentioned tractors, I believe, right? Did he mention farm equipment?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, yeah, he mentioned farm equipment. Yeah. I know you talked about farm equipment a lot. Yeah, I'd love to talk about it. But I'm like 90% confident that he mentioned it. And I didn't just insert it in myself. My understanding is it's an executive order.

He didn't actually specify do this thing. He just encouraged the, you know, hit the agency he's in charge of to do something. And now they are? Well, so they did something. They issued this policy statement. In some ways, what they did was like the FTC is now instructing the FTC to do something. It's a little weird. This is how my writing process works, by the way.

I instruct myself to write, and then I instruct myself to write again, and then eventually it happens. It's just like the outline gets more and more developed until the outline is the piece. Yeah, it's very much like that. So we're one step closer. It is meaningful progress. It shows the FTC is taking it seriously. I will say, like, there's a real world in which this was just farm equipment, right? Like the – we saw this a bit in the campaign where people would say right to repair, and then they would say, well, no, we really just mean tractors,

because they didn't want to pick a fight with Apple. Yeah, right. That's not what happened here. So the FTC basically said, we're going to keep a big eye on any incursions of consumers' right to repair and sort of use their existing authority against unfair or deceptive conduct by businesses to sort of prosecute those. So everyone's kind of on notice.

Right. And the next step will be actually, you know, prosecuting someone, whether it's, are they going to make the case? that Apple having special keys that shut out third party repair shops are like is that anti-competitive conduct like right they've sort of set it up to happen I don't know if I would I don't know what the odds are that that that's like immediately coming but this is definitely a step in that direction and will this come in the form of like a lawsuit or somebody else sues and the FTC is like yeah pay attention to that or the FTC sues or are they just going to issue a policy letter no no it would

This would be like FTC versus Apple in federal court would be, I mean, or some other company that's limiting right to repair. I mean, car companies have had a lot of issues with this. John Deere, the tractors is sort of the other. Like, there are a lot of sort of lower profile. And I mean, this is the other thing is if you were going to start somewhere like prosecuting a right to repair case, maybe you work up to the Apple case, like go after some little guys first just to get your. strength up. Yeah. But I don't know.

That's a strategy question. Like, it's going to be a really interesting thing to watch. Okay, there's one more thing. I definitely want to, well, there's a lot of things I want to talk about the policy space. But let's talk about this nomination of Jonathan Cantor to lead the Department of Justice's antitrust division because everyone was like, oh, my God, this is a huge deal. And then no one really fully explain why. So I'm wondering if you can help us out with that.

Yeah. Well, so Lena Kahn is the other one. I mean, there have been a couple of appointments that all the anti-trust people were like, okay, this is what we wanted. We're getting what we want. You know, Tim Wu is at the National Economic Council. Lena Kahn is chairing the FTC and sort of directly in charge of a lot of the right to repair stuff we're talking about. Jonathan Cantor is sort of like the third one of those. And he's taking over the sort of antitrust division of the Department of Justice at a time when we have all of these federal antitrust cases against Google. And he has sort of been outspoken in

taking on private clients against Google. I will say looking into this, one of the things that pops up is in 2016, he wrote in the New York Times like op-ed column about why we shouldn't let Google take over set-top boxes. Wow. This guy's going to fit right in and put the other folks recovering. Actually, can we? Somebody tweeted at me that other than on the verge cast, they had never heard of RSS, Real Simple Syndicate. and now it's just being taught in like junior college science classes in college. And one, thank you for letting me know that we are educating the children, Patrick Walker.

Two, as long as we're giving history lessons, Google taking over set-top boxes was a genuine fear in 2016. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the cable companies lined up to make sure that that didn't happen because they were terrified that Google was going to do to the television advertising industry, what they did to the online industry. And they didn't at all. You can thank Jonathan Cantor for leading the charge on that one. Yeah. I feel like we can thank Google's engineers for failing. I think they're the real winners here.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think it is tricky because, like, the sense one gets is that he's been involved in the background of a lot of fights that, like, if you weren't watching the trial and seeing, oh, that's the guy. Yeah. Then it would never really come up that, oh, it's, he's impressive. But, you know, he just fundamentally is one of the lawyers specifically who is at the head of the progressive antitrust push. Right. And he's now basically in charge of America's biggest antitrust case, right? Like, USV Google, like, we haven't tracked it a ton just because what happened is they filed it, you know, under Trump.

and then just immediately went heads down into like two years of discovery. And so at some point they'll come back out of it. But like nothing has happened. It's just been going through like enormous sort of Tupperware boxes full of documents. But it's hands down the most important antitrust case in the federal government right now. Like there's no contest. And this is the guy that all the antitrust people wanted sort of on the wall. And now he's on the wall.

Amazing. It's wild. I want to extend the Game of Thrones reference, but I'm let it go. I mean, there's one more big appointment we're waiting here because we're still short a regulator in the FCC. FCC commissioner. Yeah, FCC commissioner. Yes, we don't have the commissioner, much less like a full slate of people sitting on it. Everything's just in limbo over there.

There are a lot of things that you could do with the Democratic majority in the FCC. I mean, for one, you just off the bat restore the Tom Wheat. net neutrality order. That is probably going to happen at some point. It's one of these things. Everything's trying to cram through the door at once. Right, right. We're only six or seven months into sort of the Biden administration.

So, I mean, it's happening fast, but not that fast. Right. Last thing, we have to mention that DISH just gave AT&T $5 billion so that they could provide, they could be an NVNO on AT&T's network because T-Mobile isn't cutting it for them, which is the thing that T-Mobile promised to do, which is what gave them permission to buy Sprint, and it has already failed. Yeah. I mean, this is the classic thing is the promises they make before the merger are just not worth

anything. And everybody knew it. Yeah. Like we weren't, this is not a. surprise to anybody. The only surprise is that AT&T actually has enough bandwidth to give to dish. It's not good. Yeah. Well, Russell, when you get nominated to the FCC, we'll probably have you back on. Very excited. Oh, yeah, definitely. Well, I'll be the first FCC commissioner with walk-on music. That's when I'm going to bring to the commission. All right. We're going to take a

break, and we're going to be right back with Liz and Joey to talk about billionaires in space. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a host of helpful tools you can take advantage of,

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you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. All right, we are back, and we have with us Liz Lapato and Joey Roulette. Hey, you two. Hey. Hey, welcome to billionaires in space.

Dun, done. Shouldn't it be billionaires in space? Oh, word. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It should just be silence. Okay, so obviously Jeff Bezos and some other folks, including Wally Funk, went into space. Dot, dot, dot. Let's just give us the setup here.

And then, Joy, definitely want to talk to you because you were there. I don't know how close there means, but you were in the vicinity. So let's start with what happened. So I just want to like start with the petty stuff because this is what happens when you invite me on the Vergecast. So Jeff Bezos Blue Origin is like, yo, we're going to send a billionaire to space. And it's going to be Jeff and he's also going to bring his brother and some other people. Great. And then Richard Branson's like, I'm going to go to space too.

And I'm going to go sooner. And then Blue Origin was like, you're not really going to space because you're not going far enough up. And then there was some like goofy fighting on Twitter. Yeah. Anyway, we've recovered both of our billionaires. They're both back on Earth. but most recently was the Blue Origin flight, which I think Blue Origin has bigger ambitions than Virgin Galactic. And maybe, Joey, you can tell us a little more about that.

Yeah, yeah. Well, Blue Origins is like one of many different programs that they have, right? I mean, they have their whole New Glenn rocket program, too, which is designed to go orbital. And whereas Virgin Galactic spaceplane is, you know, just in the suborbital realm. So, I mean, what Blue Origin is trying to prove with New Glenn or New Shepherd isn't just, you know, that they have this space tourism business, but it's, you know, part of a bigger architecture that they want to tell everybody that it's reliable and everything. And they really need to do that, right, because, you know, they haven't really won a lot of contracts. They haven't, you know, won the Air Force contract that they, you know, once kind of sued over. And they lost, again, to SpaceX on the Lunar Lander competition, too.

So they're trying to really prove a lot with new shepherd and their space tourism goals. So it goes a little deeper for them. And to the space tourism thing. So obviously, Jeff Bezos brought his brother, which is cute. His official name is Jeff Bezos's brother. But I think Jeff calls him Mark. Yeah, that might be his name. I have to confirm that.

But the thing that I find myself very curious about was how the other two seats were decided. And because the other two seats were the oldest and the youngest people to go to space respectively, but that was not originally the plan. So we should hear a little more about who these passengers are, I think. Yeah. Well, so we have Oliver Damon. And I think this is like the most interesting, weirdest, most questionable story of the whole mission. He wasn't originally supposed to go on this flight. He was supposed to go on the next one.

but he was bumped up to this one because the winner of this massive auction that Blue Origin hosted the month prior opted not to go because of scheduling issues. He bid $28 million, but there was a scheduling issue that, you know, prevented him from going. And I put heavy quotations on that. So Liz, you think we had funny conversations about that. I don't know who's too busy to go to space. Like, no, I can't reschedule. I just, I have to, I have to be on earth for this. Sorry.

Also, what kind of person that can spend that much money can't make people reschedule around them, right? I mean, yeah, I'll say like rocket scheduling is the hardest thing ever, and it's hard to manage that. But I agree. I mean, like, why, yeah, it was weird. I mean, Blue Origin really wanted this date, too. It was July 20th, which is the anniversary for, you know, the first,

time the man stepped on the moon. And so that was a significant. It was part of the whole optics that they were trying to nail. So maybe that played in, but that, you know, again, is assuming that the scheduling issue was, you know, exactly what happened. You know, they weren't, they were declining to specify what kind of issues they were talking about. So, yeah. So the only thing that didn't make this whole launch feel like a disgusting display of wealth and ego was that they brought along Wally Funk to me. Can you talk a little bit about her? Yeah, a lot of people were excited about Wally Funk and it was, you know, it really is a cool story because she was one of the Mercury 13 astronauts, which was this informal group of women who were trying to become NASA astronauts. They were training.

They went through the training process. Wally Funk performed better than her male counterparts, but she was denied and she wasn't able to go to space because NASA didn't want to have women astronauts at the time. So that, that sucks. And, and she kind of then went on to become this kind of, you know, icon advocating for woman in space and kind of fighting the system that was preventing woman from getting there. And, you know, the whole move here is that she finally went to space and Blue Origin invited her. And it was this kind of justice, you know, and it was a great, great moment for Wally Funk. She's 82. She also became the oldest person to go to space. But it was a, it was a good story, You know, like Wally Funk finally met the final frontier that she's been working for.

So that was that was kind of cool. A lot of people loved that story. I got to be real. I kind of think that Jeff Bezos invited her specifically because he didn't want people to root for his rocket to like blow up. Because then you're blowing up this like feminist icon. That didn't really work that well, though. Everybody still was talking about that. And some people pointed out like, how do that?

could you like wish that when you know wali funk is that word but but yeah the the discourse remained okay so let's talk about what actually happened because i was a little bit shocked by how brief this trip was speaking of someone who's taken a fun ride on the vomit comet comment where unfortunately nobody threw up like i've been in zero g it's super fun but this was not like a lot longer than the vomit comet trip i was on so joey like what exactly happened how high did you did they go? Like, what were the logistics of this flight? Yeah, so it all lasted like, you know, only 10 minutes. And a lot of people were shocked right at my mom was like, oh, they're already back when I was telling her this story. And I'm like,

yeah, it was just a quick trip. But it lifted off early in the morning from this remote, you know, launch pad that Blue Origin has in West Texas. It soared like 66 miles high. That's beyond the line that they call, that they consider space and a lot of other space Faring Nations, believe is space, which is 62 miles. And at that point, once it got to that height, the crew capsule separated from the rocket. The rocket came down for a vertical landing, just like, you know, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets. And the capsule floated a little bit in microgravity for, you know, about four minutes. And, you know, everybody unbuckled from their seats and floated around. Jeff Bezos was like, who wants Skittles? He apparently had Skittles on him. And he tossed

went into Oliver's mouth. Yeah, they had activities. They had skittles and they had like ping pong balls or something. Yeah. Yeah, it kind of reminded me of this one scene in Children of Men where they were tossing around. I don't know if you guys have seen that, but they were tossing around like a ball. Like it was a fun experiment. But yeah, in that, they were kind of just having a good time. Wally Funk was like, oh, look at that. Like, this is crazy, you know. And then they buckled back in and then returned under a soft parachute landing. So it was a quick little trip. And you, Joey, like you were physically there in Texas.

So maybe you can tell us a little bit about like what the run-up to the launch was like and what happened after everybody got back. Yeah. So it was pretty interesting. Blue Origin trucked all the reporters out at like 2.30 a.m. to this press hangar. It was very nicely designed. There were nice couches.

It looked like an IKEA set kind of. And there was great Wi-Fi. But yeah. And so for launch, everybody rushed outside to see it in person. and we were maybe like five miles from lift off. And there were a bunch of Blue Origin executives out there too. And, you know, everybody was applauding and clapping. And some were crying when it lifted off successfully.

And the most, like, jarring moment of the whole thing was when the New Shepherd capsule was returning for a landing. And there were the sonic booms, which is this loud, cannon, like, noise that just pummel's your chest. And it was just deeply, deeply, like, loud and echoed throughout the whole. like region. And that was really, you know, interesting to see in person. It scared the shit out of everybody because nobody was expecting it. You know, you never know when it's going to happen. You know, it's inevitable, but but yeah, you don't, you don't know exactly when. So that was interesting. And then afterwards, you know, they brought us to the landing pad to check things out. There was also a press conference, quote, press conference that happened afterwards. It was more of

an award ceremony. But yeah. Did it feel genuine and authentic there on the ground? Because I have been increasingly struck by something Liz has been talking about a while. It's just the sort of choreography and optics of their live streams. SpaceX treats it like it's basically NASA. Virgin Galactic just leaned all the way into infomercial, like super hard. And then I found like Blue Origin was kind of somewhere in the middle. It had this infomercial moment at the very end of the live stream where they'd done all the stuff.

They pretended to be NASA. And at the very end, they're like, if you want to go to space, send us an email. I was like, oh, my God. I mean, did it feel like a genuine, exciting space moment? Or did it feel like pretty, I don't know, like as manufactured as the live stream kind of does? You know, personally, I think it felt pretty genuine. But I think that's because I was there in person. And for a lot of people, for Blue Origin's audience, they weren't there in person.

They were watching the live stream. And what you saw on the live stream was a lot of advertising, you know, kind of like Virgin Galactic. And, you know, they're, they organize these, these events and they cater these whole experiences for their potential customers. And Blue Origin kind of tried to do that, too, because space tourism is extremely dependent on that kind of stuff. It's an early kind of business, and they really need to generate that kind of excitement. But with, yeah, with Blue Origin, I mean, all the astronauts were wearing these like Omega watches that Omega was marketing and talking about. And it was funny because it was on the outside of.

their astronaut sleeves, which no one ever does. No one, no, you don't do that unless you're being paid to do that. They put it on Wally Funk too. Some people were disappointed. Yeah. But, but yeah, and then Blue Origin had their fleet of Rivian trucks. Yep. Um, which Sean, I think our colleague Sean had a story on. And I saw those in person. That wasn't something exclusive to the, to the live stream. They were, they were everywhere. There was maybe like five of them. And And there was this little barbecue that they did where they used the pullout grills from those Rivian trucks to cook food for the guests and everyone. So there were a lot of marketing opportunities and it was an important part role for

for Blue Origin. So some of the people I talked to, they were genuinely, you know, impressed and happy that this all happened and it was a huge moment for them. But the overall goal is to sell seats, right? And so you have to market into some that's a little not very genuine. The trip to space is limited, so please reserve your seat now by calling 1,800 Blue Origin. And then we'll make you sign an NDA to tell you what it costs to fly on it. And you can make that payment in four easy payments of redacted.

Right. And that's the other thing that I kind of, you know, was a little, was focusing on a lot because Blue Origin hasn't announced how much it costs to fly one of the. these things. Right now, for Virgin Galactic, we know that it's around 200,000 to 250,000, but that's expected to go up. We just don't know exactly how much, but Blue Origin hasn't said anything. They haven't given us a ballpark or anything about it. And when they hosted their press conference slash award ceremony for the passengers, you know, they didn't speak to that at all. And they only allowed three questions from press. So no one was really able to ask about it.

I went when Blue Origin took us out to the landing pad, Jeff Bezos made a surprise appearance for a photo op and someone asked him about seat prices and he just kind of laughed and did not answer at all. And then I was able to shout, you know, a question like, hey, you know, Jeff, what does it cost to fly one of these things? And he finally said, we'll be announcing that later. And I'm like, oh, well, how later? And he said, we don't know quite yet. And he said they're really focused on the private pricing. And so it's, yeah, so it doesn't sound like they're really trying to, to let anybody know publicly what, uh, what those prices are. But Jeff Bezos did make it clear that the public was participating, uh, in his little, his little post launch speech where he, uh, he said,

I also, I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all of this. So seriously, for every Amazon customer out there and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart very much. You're welcome, Jeff, from the bottom of my heart. Bezos has been, like, obsessed with space since at least high school. He was the valedictorian at his high school, and he gave the speech about creating permanent human colonies aboard space stations so the Earth could be a nature preserve. So, you know, it was a little astonishing to me to hear him say pretty point blank is that, like, Amazon was means to an end. So thanks to all of you for getting me to space.

I'm surprised you and thank the people who gave him tax breaks, but whatever. That's true. I think I've heard that the expanse, the Amazon Prime show that's in space was like he definitely wanted them to make that show. That was a passion thing for him. But we should talk about the, you know, because Blue Origin is for tourism. there's the other stuff for him to try and move heavy industry to space. Blue Origin is trucking along, I guess. Like, they managed to do it.

But it's as far as, like, moving, like, heavier stuff to space or, like, being, like, other customers, you know, big space customers, not just tourism. I have no idea where they're at. He showed off, like, the blue moon lander or whatever. But I can't tell if any of that stuff is actually happening or if it's, like, it's blue origin and a bunch of hand waving. It's blue origin and it. I mean, in a bunch of hand-waving, they need to get to orbit. You know, they have yet to launch anything into orbit. New Glenn is what will get them there, but they haven't rolled that thing out to the launch pad yet.

So the whole story about moving heavy industry into space, that's kind of the cover story. That's the PR thing that they want to say. Every company has that. And Blue Orge definitely has a long ways to go. I mean, they've launched this new Shepard rocket several times. like this was their 16th launch for that. But that doesn't, that's suborbital, you know, it's, and it's a little easier to do. It's a hard feat, of course, but getting into orbit as a whole other animal. So when they do that, then they can start building, you know, the infrastructure

to do what Jeff says he wants to do. I want to talk for a second about the response to all of this also, because I've been covering space, you know, for a while. And I have never seen any response so negative to a spaceflight and like from quarters I wasn't expecting. So I'm just going to read you a tweet from Dan Rather. Oh, no. Dan Rather? Dan Rather. I prefer watching the launches of independent bookstores.

They're a lot more entertaining and they actually occupy space. Oh, my God. How long did he spend workshopping that one? which is like first of all that that would be brutal coming from anybody but like i was genuinely shocked that it came from dan rather of all people yeah and there's been this sort of backlash to bezos in space in particular because it feels like he's dabbling you know like whatever SpaceX there are a lot of people out there who don't like Elon Musk which is fine but you get the sense that SpaceX is serious right like they're actually working with NASA

they've won a bunch of contracts. They're doing the thing. They're not talking about moving industry to space, although they are talking about Mars colonization, which is also crazy. But, you know, like they're doing the thing. They've been sending missions to the ISS for years. They're about to launch people to the ISS soon.

So I guess one of the things that I'm really curious about Joey is like, why is there such a different response to, Blue Origin and to Bezos? You know, Bezos doesn't really have that cult following that Elon Musk does. And I think a lot of the support for SpaceX that we see comes from, you know, Elon Musk's cult following. And, you know, people love watching SpaceX do these crazy things, you know, launching humans to the ISS, you know, in, I don't know, I think, I just think the identity of Elon Musk plays

a huge role in it, you know, which involves Tesla. and all of his other ventures and his crazy ideas. Whereas Jeff, you know, people just aren't, I guess, aren't as excited about it. And I think, you know, Amazon also has a lot of controversy, right? I don't cover Amazon and I'm not as, you know, familiar with it. But I think that also kind of plays a huge role. A lot of the criticism that people had of Tuesday's launch kind of spoke to that, you know, about, you know, how he manages Amazon.

So that might hurt him a little bit too. But as far as people and how they care about billionaires going to space, people just tend to gravitate closer to Elon Musk because that's just his cult, I guess. But also it's the fact that SpaceX, yeah, like you said, Liz, they are doing a lot more than Blue Origin. You know, they revived NASA's human spaceflight capabilities with the first launch of NASA astronauts in 2020 in, you know, over a decade. nearly a decade. So that is kind of a good narrative and a, you know, favorable story for SpaceX that makes them look almost heroic in a way. I will say that whatever the issues surrounding this launch, just watching the rocket touchdown vertically, I tweeted this. Like, it will never not be cool to watch a rocket just come back down and touch down vertically and land. It has like huge alien, like invasion vibes almost.

Yeah, right? Yeah. So it's, yeah, that's exciting for, people. Like it's, it's funny when SpaceX landed their first booster successfully, Jeff Bezos, you know, quipped to Elon Musk, welcome to the club, because they had been doing that with New Shepard before Falcon 9 was able to successfully do it. But you got to say, you know, the two rockets are different. Falcon 9 is an orbital grade booster, whereas New Shepard is suborbital. But, but, But yeah, it is a pretty cool, badass thing to do, right? Like, it's this rocket that blasts off, which is cool in itself, and then it comes back for a landing, you know, blasting, firing its engine again,

and then gradually slowing down to the pad and just kind of plopping right there and, you know, after it deploys its legs. So it is, it's weird. It all happens autonomously. No one's steering this. And that's another crazy thing because you're looking at this robot, do it by itself. So, you know, It is a pretty fascinating thing. I don't think that'll ever get old for me. So here's the money question for me, and this is open to both of you. If money were not an issue, if you had the money for it, would you take a flight with one of these companies? And if so, which one?

I would be conflicted, but if I had that much money, I would, it would completely change my personality. I would be an even bigger monster than I am now. And so, of course, I would do it. And I would do it with SpaceX because it goes the highest. I would go with SpaceX, too, because it goes the highest. But let me inform your rationale real quick. SpaceX is Crew Dragon. Their tourism architecture, as they currently have it, goes high, but for three days.

So you're going to be stuck in this capsule for three days, right? Whereas these suborbital flights are far shorter, 10 minutes. You're in microgravity for about four minutes on both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin systems. and Boeing hasn't really announced its tourism plans of Starliner yet. But on Crew Dragon, yeah, you got to think about how long you want to be trapped inside of a little capsule for three days. I mean, is the view, these stunning views of Earth going to get old after the first 24 hours? Are you going to have to go to the bathroom in front of people and you kind of have to tell people not to look? And will that smell bad?

And then will everybody get pissed off for the rest of the trip? and then there's fights. And, you know, I mean, there's things, there's cycle, there's a lot of psychological factors you have to consider when your tourist mission is three whole days long, you know, especially if you're going with people, you don't really know that well. Man, like, like day two, you're like bored and like, imagine paying that much money to go to space and like, let's just watch some Netflix. Right, right.

Because it would come to that. I'm curious, yeah, I can't wait to see how that plays out. And I think this is something that engineers are asking themselves to. You know, is this the right kind of service that we want to offer where we want to take people into space for three days? And we're going to see this play out in September or sometime in the fall. That's when SpaceX is going to try to launch their first space tourists. So that'll be a big step for SpaceX, but it'll also be a pretty big test to see how these people actually liked going into space into this little gumdrop for three whole days. And I don't know if they'll stream it a lot.

They probably won't stream it live the whole time. But yeah, it'll be interesting to ask them questions when they get back on land. I also would take SpaceX because send me around the fucking moon, man. Like, send me around the moon. Look, if Boeing gets its shit together, I would happily take Boeing. But right now it does not look like it has its shit together. And that just leaves me with SpaceX because, again, like, send me around the moon. Like, if you're going to send me the space, send me all the way.

You know, like, I don't want to argue about, like, what really constitutes space and how high up it is. I want to be able to see the planet, like that famous shot of like the earth from the moon. That makes me want to say one of the things that Wally Funk said during the little post-mission event, she has colorful, like very amazing ways to describe her experience. But one thing she said was that she got high up and she saw darkness when she was in the capsule. But she didn't see the whole world like she expected. So she kind of suggested she was a little disappointed at that. which was interesting.

You know, I mean, everybody else was giving really amazing reviews during the event, but Wally Funk was real. And she said, you know, I wanted to see the whole Earth, but I didn't quite see it. But it was still fun, you know. Well, shout out to Wally Funk, a real one there. Hell yeah. Okay, so we know that SpaceX is going to do its tourism thing in the fall.

If it can, is there any other big rocket launches or blue origin stuff that we should be on the lookout for next? Well, SpaceX, SpaceX is Starship. They're trying to go orbital later this year. They're trying to do their first orbital starship test launch. Everybody's thinking, as far as space tourism, everybody wants to see Elon Musk ride some SpaceX ship, right? Like, it's his turn now that, you know, Branson did it, Bezos did it. What about Elon Musk? But he hasn't really said anything or expressed any pressing desire to go up there himself. of course, until we have the capability to get to Mars because then he'll be like, I'll die on Mars, just not on landing, which is something he actually said.

But yeah, I don't know. Maybe we'll see Musk, you know, announce that he'll go next time. Well, this has been another episode of billionaires. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screen. screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.

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But instead, I mean, we've got a lot of gadget stuff to talk about. We got a lot of just random stuff, really cool stuff. And then RCS. Where do you want to start? I mean, I think we need to start with RCS because I'm still trying to understand it. So every time it's mentioned, I like to be like, Dieter, explain it. I mean, I'm going to, I was tempted. That might be just the rest of the podcast.

I mean, I was tempted when Neil I was off to just like say, you know what, this is my podcast now. It's going to be RCS, not just this episode, but all episodes. This is an RCS podcast now. So what happened was Verizon is the third U.S. carrier to formally adopt using Android messages by default on all of the Android phones it sells. Okay. And what that means is Android messages uses RCS. RCS's rich communication services.

It is the next generation version of texting that replaces SMS and it enables, you know, red receipts. Do you say red receipts or read receipts? Read. So do I. But everybody else has read. And I'm wondering if maybe. They're all wrong. Or young.

Yeah, yeah. They're all infants. Yeah. And, you know, better images, better video, blah, blah, blah, blah. It also allows for end-to-end encryption in one-on-one chats. And that's actually an Android messages feature, not necessarily an RCS feature. Anyway, it's better, right? But the rollout has been terrible because it's this supposedly open thing where if a carrier wants to implement RCS and use their servers to manage it, they can.

So it's all opt-in? Yeah, it's all opt-in. Or if they don't want to, they can license Google servers. And then eventually Google's like, look, if you're not going to do it, we'll just like, turn it on for users without you. And so that's like a third way that people can get RCS now. If they just use Android messages,

Google says, hey, carrier, do you use RCS? No, okay, we're going to do it then. But carriers were shipping Android phones that would default to like Samsung messages or Verizon Messages Plus everybody's favorite software. And so there was no guarantee

that you would, even if you, you know, you'd get Android messages. So Verizon's on board. Everybody's on board. Everybody that uses an Android phone in the U.S. starting next year. We'll have entered messages for sure, and then RCS will become the default. Actually, RCS is being served by AT&T.

They say, we do RCS, and I'm like, no, you don't. Like, yeah, we do. I'm like, yeah, but I can't send an RCS message to somebody in T-Mobile. Well, you know, blah, blah, blah. So there's this whole argument about you have RCS, you support the universal profile, which is like the spec. And then, even then, you don't necessarily interoperate. This happened with MMS back in the day. If you were on Sprint, you couldn't text somebody a picture if they weren't on Sprint.

I had never texted anyone on sprint. So anyway, we will have a more critical mass of users. There's already, I don't know, 400 something million worldwide, at however many million Android users are in the U.S. It's got to be like 150 or something, right? Eventually getting all on the system. And yeah, there's like a legit shot that RCS could actually supplant SMS and very few people would use SMS ever again, except.

Except who? Apple. They have not said peep about RCS. I have asked for comment. I have gotten like legit, no comments and not just radio silence from them. But in general, just nothing. No word. And so it raises this interesting situation where if you are on an iPhone and you text somebody on Android,

it falls back to SMS. And that is fundamentally insecure because it's totally unencrypted. It's sent over this completely wacky part of the way that SMS goes over the networks. It's basically data now, but it used to go over the special channel that existed for, like, configuring phones. Like, it was a whole mess. But that is what you'll be sending. And similarly, if you're on an Android phone and you text somebody who is on an iPhone,

you're a green bubble, right? Right. And so by not supporting RCS, Apple is actually potentially, like, causing, like, a security problem for its users or privacy. It's less private or less secure than people on Android that talk to each other or people on the iPhone that talk to or they do each other on iMessage. But it's also like Google's also like sending in secure SMS too on Android if you talk to an iPhone. But the difference is Google's just like, hey, Apple, if you want to join up, here's the spec, you're welcome to do it. Yeah. They've been increasing. They've been turning up the pressure more and more. Like so I tweeted

that Apple, you should support RCS. And like Hiroshi Lockheimer, VP of Android and everything else, like retweeted me, which I have to. admit is very awkward. It's weird. But like that's how you're going to pressure Apple is you're going to, okay, whatever. But I interviewed him for the story. And this was, this was his quote, the fallback messaging experience on, quote, the other platform will not have encryption if it's still SMS. I think that is a pretty interesting dynamic. And I would hope that as everyone focuses on privacy and security, it becomes an important part of the discussion. Yeah, because like, I guess Apple's thing is, well, we just want everybody to use iPhone and we're secure, so it's fine.

But that's not realistically how any of the world works. Right. That's not going to happen. So the onus is really on them to make it secure. Right. And they're already kind of dealing with security stuff this week related to messaging, right? Okay. Actually, you want to explain this?

This is the big, big Pegasus hack that happened to a bunch of journalists. It's one of the biggest hacking stories of the week. I think maybe you might be able to explain it a little better than I can. Okay. So there's this Israeli company that provides software that's supposed to help you hack into the phones of terrorists or whatever. And Amnesty found a list of a bunch of phone numbers of like legit journalists and people who are like in opposition parties in various countries on the world. And it was verified that their phones were infected with this spyware. Not great.

Not great at all. Yeah. Real bad. And, you know, how did this happen? What's what, how did they get, you know, infected? How did the hack happen? And it turns out that it happened via iMessage. There was a zero day, you know, hack where an iMessage would parse an image that got sent in without any user action or opening the message or whatever.

And then the message could disappear and that would invisibly hack your iPhone. I hate to bring that up in the context of like RCS because it's like it's a different thing. It's different. But it's also kind of showing that, like, Apple really, I mean, obviously they care about security. They care about privacy. Like, I think they've done a really good job with it for the most part. But this quest to be like, this weird hangup they have on IMessage is hurting them kind of over and over again. Yeah, it's hard for me to know.

Because, like, obviously people love it. If you're a green bubble, you're terrible. Yeah, I mean, I adore it. There's also, like, if you want to securely and privately text somebody who doesn't have an eye. phone, there's any number of ways you could do that, right? Just tell them to install signal or WhatsApp or whatever. It's just not the default. It's not the thing that's happening in the messages app.

Yeah, it's putting a lot of like work on you as the person you have to sit. You have to like walk them through it. Just like you'd have to be like, well, actually your Android phone isn't like doesn't communicate securely with mine. So I'm going to tell you how to get to the iPhone store and buy an iPhone to like fix it. Yeah. Like it's just putting way too much work on people when that's the whole point of Apple is to take that work away. Right.

If Apple's going to get pressured into doing it, I kind of feel like they're opposite enough where like it's not secure and this whole thing is just not going to, that's not going to work. I don't think so. I think it's more likely that all the carriers around the world are basically just using RCS and it's like, well, why aren't you just doing this? So they'll do it. It'll do it later when it's not a big deal and there's not any heat on it or something. Yeah, it'll happen like a little. little note during the WDC

we'll just see it at the end. I'm like, oh yeah, and you will be like, yes! Right, right. And that will be the whole Vergecast that way. Oh my God,

it's going to be one of those like, you know, they do the giant grids of features. Oh no, they do the, WWC, they do the giant wall of features of like all the SDKs and blah, blah, blah,

blah. Right there is a tiny text. And right there in the bottom in the smallest font possible. They'll just put RCS. And I will like flip a table. If it's in person, I will stand up and run around.

I'm so excited to not have to write about RCS when this is over. I'm excited for you, honestly. No, I wanted to be done. I want it to be over. I want to not be the person who's always... Guys, he's just like leaking it out of his chair right now. Can we...

Okay, let's move on. Let's talk about some fun stuff. Yeah. Like, specifically, the play date. Okay. It's almost here. Tell me what happened. Okay, well, so we actually got to play with a play date.

Yep. The pre-orders are starting next week. nobody pre-order because there's only like 20,000 and I want a chance. So nobody try. I'm really excited about it. So for people that don't remember what the play date is. It's a little, it looks almost like a game boy. It's like half the size of a game boy and it's a yellow like game machine thing.

It's got a black and white screen. And the big thing is it's got a crank on the side. Right. And I always thought that the crank was for like charging it. I was like, that's so cool. No, it's for playing games. Yep. Which makes a lot more sense.

Yeah, I mean, no, but yes. Yeah, yeah, I think both are cool. Yeah. Make it happen. And it comes from Panic, which is a company. They've done a lot of really cool games. Firewatch is one of them. The Goose game that everybody played a couple of years ago.

But they also were like originally a Mac company. Yeah, well, Mac app's Mac app company. Yeah, they made the best FTP app. Right. Yeah, no, it was the best, I mean, transmit, but it was overpriced, so you might use CyberDuck because you're cheap and whatever. And so that was mean. But once you got the money, then you got Transmit.

And you felt fancy. It's like a Cadillac. Right, exactly. And the little truck icon that I have. I love it. If you know what RSS is, you know what Transmit is. It's basically what we're saying. Right, right.

A lot of you are very confused right now. It's okay. But they're better known now for their games. Right. And so they've made this thing. And it's really fascinating to me. I was talking with Andrew Webster, who he's our games editor. And he got to play with this thing.

And he's been playing with it for a couple of weeks. month, over a month now. Yeah. And there's like four games on it. He still hasn't finished all of the games. So they actually take a while. Like some of them are story-based. They take hours and hours of gameplay.

And it's just like the idea is they're going to do an episode, like a flight of games. And you'll get a flight a year of brand new games on this thing. They're doing like seasons. So like every month or something, you'll get four more games and you don't know what they're going to be. And then you're like, oh, season four, you're getting these four games. And you get to keep them.

They don't go away. Yeah. But yeah. It's just, and it's just, weird to me because they're going into making this whole game system, right? Like it's a whole new console from a really small company.

Yeah. And like a really hip, cool company. Like, one of the reasons people are so excited is like, you just heard us talk about a 35-year-old FTP app. There's a lot of affinity for this company. Yeah. And so I'm fascinated by it. I have no idea how it's going to work out in the long run. Like, what's the end game for this is what I keep going to?

Is this like they're going into hardware now? It took a long time for this thing to actually come out. Like years. I played around with a early, early-ass prototype of one of these things two years ago. Right. At the XOXO conference, they had them outside. It seemed great then, but I mean, you know, pandemic closing down, whatever. I will say the screen is...

That's my favorite part of it. It's actually incredible. It's black and white. But it's black and white. It's one bit. Like a Game Boy, a Game Boy was two bits. Right. There's no gray.

Yeah, this is just black, white. And that's it. And it's fast. If you've seen black and white displays that are like, you know, not backlit, like LCD displays that are like E paper, like pebbles. Yeah. You could kind of have this vision of your head of being kind of like low contrast and kind of. This is not that at all. It's not like E ink.

It's very fast and it's refresh rate. I mean, it's not like, I don't know, it's not 120 frames a second or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it feels just like a normal screen except that it doesn't have a backlight. So you use whatever ambient light is around to see it. and it's black and white. Yeah. It's cool.

It is cool. And like the games in it seem really, really cool. Like they got the guy who made Katamari Damasi. I said that really, really wrong. But just ruin that. All those years of Japanese down the toilet. But, you know, there's a lot of really, really cool interesting games that have already been, that like Andrew's been playing and he's had a lot of fun with them. And they're even more coming.

And like, what's, are people just going to get really excited and develop games for it? Are we going to get, like, big game developers being like, yeah, this seems cool and, like, just whipping out a game? Yeah. I hope, like, I think that's the plan. Like, that's what it feels like is the end game. I think the interesting thing here is I don't know that there is an end game. I think they figured out that they want to make a cool thing. They're making a cool thing.

If the cool thing continues to be cool, they'll continue to do it. Yeah. And if not, shrug, I guess. Yeah, like, we're only getting one season of games so far, right? They could just be like, that was it, thanks. And that's still like 26 games. Yeah. That's better than like the NeoGeo pocket.

Right. Well worth your money, which is $180. Right. The cool thing about the pre-order process is the cable sasser who's running panic said that, quote, we're not going to close the door on you. Yeah. So who knows if their website will crash. I'm sure it will.

They've got a lot of experience with FTP, but who knows about running your everyday website. Fingers crossed. Yeah. But unlike all. all of the other consoles that are happening, it's not going to be just like a fiasco waiting to see if Walmart will get stock. And you're not going to have to join a Discord

or a Twitch live stream and find out if, you're just going to put your name in, get in line, and you'll get it when you get it. That's all I've wanted. How pre-orders are supposed to work? I thought the Steam deck was kind of like that. Yeah, okay, that's true. My experience with the Steam Deck was my order

never went through and I gave up. And then five hours later, I got a confirmation email. And I'm like, okay. I forgot about it. And five hours later, I went and pre-ordered it. But by that point, I'd found out that you could, like, change the hard drive and the cheapest one. I didn't know that. So, yeah, that came out later.

And I was like, yes. I'm getting, I'm going to get the cheap one. That's garbage. I bought the expensive one. Because I wanted the fast. Okay, whatever. What do you think about the fact? Andrew actually brought this up.

We've got the Switch OLED. We've got the Steam deck. We have the analog pocket, which, you know, we haven't really talked about a thing, but it's this Game Boy thing that looks sick. That is the one I'm most pumped for. And we have the playday. Yeah. Like handheld is, you know, I think part of it is, is there's a lot of people who are making these things now who grew up on the Game Boy and there's a lot of nostalgia there to like just hold it in your hands and not have it be a phone.

Yeah. Have you played Mario on like a phone? Yeah. You talk about the side scroller Mario? No, no, no, like an emulator. Oh, yeah, yeah. Just the worst experience. It's impossible.

And you're like, oh, no, I need buttons. Yeah. And so I think there's a lot of nostalgia there. and that's part of what's driving it. Yeah, so I bought the Razor Kishi for both Android and iPhone. It's good. Yeah. There's another one called Backbone that doesn't collapse as small.

Okay. But it has way better buttons. And so it turns your phone into a switch, you know? Yeah. None of them will give you a swappable USBC and Lightning. You've got to pick it when you buy it, which is frustrating as hell. But yeah, if you can get good games, like having the switch-style controller on either side of it that, like, clicks into the thing is really cool. Yeah.

But I think you're right. Having it not be your phone is like part of the draw here. Yeah, that was, that was like, I have a Pixel 3A and I said, you know what, I'm going to make this my game machine. I'm going to put like stadia on it when I was having a stadium moment and like whatever. We've all gone through our stadia face. G-Force. I was like, I'll put all the cloud things on here and like a Nintendo and an S-N-E-S emulator and all of this. And I played for like an hour because it was like, well, battery life on a pixel 3 is good, but like doesn't support that and you can't like charge it.

It just was like a gross experience. Then I go to my switch and I'm like, oh, this is how you're supposed to. Right. I still have my hands way far out because they're huge. But yeah, like, I think it's great that these are things are all coming back. And it's just weird timing. I mean, maybe it's like stuff is getting faster. You see that with a steam deck, you know, the battery is able to support it now.

Five years ago, completely impossible. And just technology finally caught up. Maybe that's it. Well, and like it's, you know, we saw the stuff. like Kickstarter thing where it's like, oh, hardware is easy now, but no. We know from Ashley Carmen that it's actually not. But there are a few companies that like, well, actually, if you take the time to do it well, it is possible to make a thing in a way that it wasn't, you know, 10 years ago.

Analog's a perfect example of that. Like, they figure it out. It takes a while, but you get nice stuff out of it. I got the superman one. It's great. On the other end of the spectrum is Apple. There's a bunch of rumors. There are, seems like, every week there's rumors. The latest is, um, There's going to be updated AirPods later this year, which, sure, we've been waiting for those. Also, a new iPhone SE refresh in 2022. That will be, it'll definitely be due. But the big news was Apple just up and released a battery pack.

Yeah, you were busy earlier this week. I had a hell of a time getting one. Yeah. There was like shipping problems. I'm in New York this week. And of course, you know, there's very few people in the office. And so like shipping is just confusing. and the FedEx people aren't delivering here as often.

So I wrote the wrong floor number. And normally that's fine because, like, how much crap gets sent to Vox Media all the time back in the day a lot. So they, oh, it's fine. We know where this goes. Yeah. Nope. Nope.

So I took an extra couple of days to get it. We sent Cameron Faulkner, one of our reviewers, over to buy one at the Apple store because he just was right next to it. So he picked one up for me and I paid him back for it. It was great. As he was buying it, the person next to him was returning it. That was incredible. Amazing.

Yes. The person who was returning, it was returning as it was too big. Right. How? Okay. It is big. It looks funny. Here's the thing.

I've reviewed it. It's probably going to be up on the website by the time you were listening to this. Everyone is like, oh, God, it's so big. Oh, horrible. And then everyone else is like, oh, God, it doesn't have enough battery life. The battery is too small. How horrible? And sometimes those are the same people.

They don't know a lot of people. about how things are made, I guess. Yeah. I don't want to be like a defender of this thing. I mean, I gave it a 7. Okay. I think that if you have an iPhone, it is the most elegant battery solution Apple has ever made,

and that might exist for the iPhone full stop. You put it on, it charges, it shows you the battery level. It tops, it maxes out your charge at 90%. It won't charge your iPhone above that because it knows that that is too hard on the battery, so it'll just stop there. So smart. It works as a MagSafe charge.

just plug it in. And so instead of buying a $40 magsafe puck, you buy $100 battery. If you think of it as a magsafe puck that happens to have a battery on it. That's a good deal? Well, it makes sense. I wouldn't say it's a good deal. Look, when you're getting really into the Apple ecosystem, a lot of things, you start to rationalize a lot of things. Yeah.

But everyone was like, you know, Anchor just released one of these things. It's, you know, a little puck that has a, like, it's not official magsate, but it has a magnets and it has wireless charging. And so I bought one, like a bunch of people did. And it's dependous. It's 50 bucks. It has a 5,000 millie-amp battery. We're going to talk about milli-amps in a minute.

But it also has USBC, and it can do, it can charge via the USBC, obviously, but it can also charge a device out of that same port. It goes both ways. Okay. Which is smart and cool. But, you know, the MagSafe battery, of course, uses lightning, which can't do anything. You can charge the MagSafe battery via the iPhone. So if you're like, oh, man, I need to charge my phone really fast.

You can just unplug the MagSafe battery that you're using as your MagSafe puck. Plug it into the phone. And then the phone will charge faster. But it will also reverse charge the MagSafe puck. But that's the only thing the iPhone will reverse wireless charge. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You know. All right. My AirPods. It'll charge your AirPods. The MagSafe thing will charge your iPods, but not your iPhone. Yeah. That's what I mean. Not so much.

Yeah, I can't just put them together and make magic happen. No, I guess not. Rude. Yeah. I don't know. Get Android and then, you know, be a green bubble. That's how that works. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm not going to begrudge anybody this thing.

It's very, very elegant. But we should talk about the millie-amp thing. Yeah, explain it to me. It's 1,160 milliamps, which is nothing. Right. It's basically nothing. But millie-amps are actually not a great way to, talk about battery size and battery power and longevity. It's not just like you never know how

much the processor is going to draw and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's also just the amount of energy that it outputs. There's a formula. It's electricity. And so a better metric is watt hours. Okay. And so the thing about the MagSafe charger is it can charge at a higher voltage, which means that it can push through more electrons, charge faster in some cases. When it's plugged in, it charges it 15 watts, for example. Yeah. It's 5 watts when you're not plugged in. But it's like the same concept of like warp charge on 1+, where it's just like it

cranks up one of the numbers in the equation and then you can get charged faster through. So the number that actually matters for this type of battery, since it has a different voltage than most things use, is I want to say it's like 11.13 or something watt hours. And the anchor, which has a lower voltage, is 18 watt hours. So it's this weird dynamic where the MagSafe battery actually isn't as bad as its spec number might make you think. And Apple, of course, buries it because they love bearing spec numbers. But that doesn't mean that, like, it's equivalent. And it doesn't even mean that like the 11, it's 11 versus 18, like, equivalent battery.

Because I just got to tell you, this thing charged my iPhone 12 mini from zero to 80. And that was all it could do. It just got tuckered? Yeah, just got a little, that was it. Sleepy. Yeah. That's not much. Did they at least do it quickly?

Relatively, it was like two hours, give or take. But that was unplugged, right? You know, it takes a minute because it's slower. And they don't want, if they did it faster when it was unplugged, it would have depleted the battery faster. It probably would have been effective. You know, there's reasons. Those reasons make sense to me.

But yeah, you need to think of this thing as it's not a lifesaver. It's a lifesaver in the sense that it'll give you a little bit extra battery. You put the thing on there and, like, you worry about a little bit less. Your iPhone stays charged for longer or whatever. but it's not the like weekend or battery, right? Yeah. And as far as it looking... Bring your cord with you still.

Yeah, exactly. As far as it looking dopey, sorry, take a battery that you don't think looks dopey and then try and tape it to the back of your phone and it looks dopey. They all look dopey. Just admit it. Do you remember there was a battery a couple of years ago and it had like six or seven little suction cups on the back? Oh my God.

And you would just stick your phone that needed to be wirelessly charged. I don't want to hear about this anymore. It was incredible. It worked for two weeks. It's sitting in my desk at home. Hopefully not on fire. Anyway, that's the thing. I prefer the anchor, but since I had to buy a bunch of them,

I'm going to hang on to one of the mag safes just to have it around. And there you go. Should we talk about the One Plus Buds Pro? I mean, speaking of Apple, like, these look familiar. Yeah, I mean, there's an argument that, like, they look exactly like AirPods Pro, Except the case opens like horizontally instead of at the top.

And there's more silver. There's silver on the stems. I love it. Yeah. Beautiful touch. The argument is like there's only so many ways to make an earbud, but like I don't know. If I buy that.

Yeah. I mean, I've seen a lot of like Bose does these giant satellites. Jabber just jams into your ears. And this is just an airport. Right. Or AirPod Pro. Excuse me. It's smaller stems.

Yeah. I mean, isn't it, One Plus that had a bunch of their headphones seized by U.S. Customs because they thought they were counterfeit. And they're like, no, no, they're not. They're not. And the U.S. Customs is like, they look like it to us. Was it these headphones? No, it was the standard One Plus buds.

Okay. That looked like regular AirPods. So this is just like reiterating on success for them. As long as we're talking about One Plus, I mean, there's also the Nortu, John reviewed it. You should definitely go look at it. I don't know if we've discussed One Plus merging, not

merging, admitting, going back to being part of APO? Yeah. We kind of talked about it weeks ago. Weeks ago. Yeah, because I remember talking about my APO Blu-ray player. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay.

It's just settled in for me. They admitted that they're going to merge APO OS, or Oxygen OS with Color OS, like those things are going to come together. And I actually feel like a kind of a sense of calm about it. Yeah. Everybody just sort of can talk openly about the thing that we would talk about before openly.

We weren't afraid of it, but it was, like, frustrating that, like, you know, Pontiac is different than Chevy. It definitely is, but it's definitely not. Yeah. Right. It's the same. Yeah. I guess the last thing before we round out is Amazon had a developer event for a Lexxite.

Yeah, they had this event for all of the developers. A lot of things happen there. We got a lot of news. And a big part of it is, like, developers are going to actually have access to the screen on the show. Yeah, yeah. So they'll finally, like, be able to kind of mess with it and tweak with that. Do something. Yeah, do something besides whatever Amazon.

Oh, that's really interesting. But, yeah, I think for me that the other thing that, like, happened at the same time as this, but I found much more interesting was this move for the, they finally offered a masculine sounding voice. This is way, way, way overdue. Yeah, it's so overdue. And I think it's, I think it's kind of telling that the thing was called Alexa. It's still called Alexa. We're very sorry for setting off your speakers. We'll do a rest.

Apologies, guys. It's my name. I have to deal with us all the time. But, you know, it still has this female sounding voice or female sounding name. Female sounding voice. Oh, and they use female pronouns and they talk about it at Amazon. Right. They all talk about she is a great little voice assistant.

And so now there's this masculine sounding one. And they also conveniently at the same time introduced a new wake word, which is a little more masculine sounding. I don't know a lot of women named Ziggy. I know a cartoon named Ziggy, a little bulbous sad man. This is another thing that you would know if you were old, by the way, Ziggy. I like very vaguely see him in the back of my head and he's gone now. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so it finally has happened, a new wake word.

So Amazon is doing the thing where they refer to these voices as original and new. I, from the very beginning, I have to say, I was never happy with gendering digital assistance. Same. And this was just like, it's not just like standard gender assumptions need to be fixed in our society, which they do. It's also like you multiply that by their not actual human things. Yeah, it's really, they have no gender. They have no agency. They're not, right?

And so, like, it always felt better to me. But the other thing with the voices is, first Google did the better job of they just, like, gave them letters or colors or something. And then Apple did voice one and voice two. It's just weird that Amazon took this long to sort of get with the program. Yeah. Like, I think it's because maybe they were, you know, they were really the first ones to make the voices. assistant would be a thing. I think Syria had come out before that. Google had stuff doing it. But

Alexa was really where we finally like embraced the voice assistant, right? And so much of that was because they gendered it, because they made it sound like a woman, they made it sound like a person. So that it felt more comfortable in your home to have a tiny ladies living in a speaker. And I think that was, they really struggled to kind of pull away from that. Because it worked. Like then everybody's like, oh yeah, I don't mind having a tiny person in a speaker, even though maybe we should. I have many in my home, so I can't say anything. I was going to say, I definitely have a lot of things. I have so many. Mainly Siri, though. But, you know, I think that there was always this, like, they were so clinging to that, and it was just kind of scared maybe to move away

from it. And now we get Ziggy. Sigi, sure. Although we shouldn't do that. We should not associate the male-sounding voice with the male-sounding. I feel like that's almost what they want. Whoever the bad guys are. I don't know who they are in this case. The other thing that got an is most echo speakers are going to get upgraded to Matter. I'm still not used to referring to it as Matter. Matter is the connected home over IP Alliance, which was for a while called Chip. I like to call it ChoIP because I thought it was funny. This is the new way for smart home gadgets to just communicate directly with each other over IP,

like every other computer on the frickin' planet does. It's more secure. It's easier to set up. There's a bunch of good reasons for it. It's basically the way that HomeKit worked. So anyway, echo devices supporting matter for sure is like a good thing because it means that like we might have less of this hassle of when a new smart home standard comes out. Is anything going to support it? Who knows?

I don't know. Amazon is willing to support most things and they're supporting this and you won't have to buy a new one and hooray. Yeah. It's just nice. I mean, they were always the ones who supported everything. So it was kind of weird that they weren't supporting matter. Well, God, I'm going to say it. Matter is going to matter.

It's just a question, is it going to be this holiday season or is it going to be next year? I feel like next year. Yeah. I feel like they got to ramp it up. Yeah. But once it's ramped up, I'm pretty sure that you could just look for the Matter logo and that's, you're done. You know it'll work with whatever digital assistance you have. You know it will probably work locally.

You won't have to think about the radios too much. The end. That's all I want. That's not going to happen. It'll still be terrible. But that's my dream. I love it. I like the stream. It's a good aspiration for all of us. That is a very optimistic, hopeful note to end the Verge cast on.

Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't listened to Decoder with Neli Patel, his relatively recent episode was the CEO of Blackstone products, which is not a creepy investment firm. They make griddles. Yeah. And I super want a griddle one. Yeah. I want one of these now. But they run into exactly the same problems that every single tech seat. CEOs runs into when they are starting a new hardware company. It's really fascinating.

Check that out. I also want to point you to a story that Sean O'Kane wrote about Boosted. It's a post-mortem of how everything went down and why the company ended up dissolving. It's very sad. So go check that out. There's much more on Theverge.com. I'm not going to point you to everything. You know how to type letters into a browser.

If you want to find us on Twitter, you can tweet at us. I love it when you do, even when it makes me feel old. I'm at Backlon. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Russell is Russell Brandem. Liz Lapato is Emma Slopato and Joey Roulette is J.O. Rulette. Thanks so much for listening.

And I get to say rock and roll this time. Hell yeah. Rock and roll.