The Vergecast - Wixen vs Spotify, problems with Siri, and Breadbot

Episode Date: March 16, 2018

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul are back in New York City after being at SXSW last weekend. To kick off the show, they welcome back senior writer Sarah Jeong to explain a $1.6 billion lawsuit between Spotify and Wixen Publishing. In the second half of the show, the trio discusses recent reports of the inner workings of Siri — including the history and how it stands today. There’s a lot more in between that — like the segment Paul does every week, “Untitled” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 02:27 - A $1.6 billion Spotify lawsuit is based on a law made for player pianos 31:45 - What went wrong with Siri 47:38 - Paul’s weekly segment “Untitled” 48:45 - Never forget a letter value with this Scrabble-themed keyboard 49:13 - These gargantuan ‘headphones’ massage your ears 49:43 - Google’s NSynth Super is an AI-backed touchscreen synth 50:28 - BreadBot is an insanely over-engineered gadget just for baking loaves of bread 51:03 - This Japanese startup is making a hover backpack to augment jumping ability 52:05 - Bose is developing augmented reality glasses with a focus on sound 57:04 - Fitbit takes a second swing at smartwatches with the $199 Versa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It could be monumentally improved. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship audio experience of the internet, and the verge. I am Nilai. Is it an interactive audio experience? No. You can play it and pause it. You can skip around.

Tweet at us. Paul is here. Hello. Dieter is here. Hello. Sarah Jong is joining us. Hi. Can I tell a story about the...

Sarah's going to talk to us at Spotify, but I just want to tell a story about the flagship thing. So last week we were at South by Southwest, which was an experience. Thank you to everybody who came live to the show. It was amazing. You know, line around the blocks to come see us.

It was wild. And why did you push that button? Caitlin and Ashley did that, and it was great. So thank you. Everybody came to swap both of our shows. But we were the first thing that happened in our, like, brand house. Yeah.

That's what it was. And so our CEO, Jim Bankoff, like opened the house. He was like, welcome everybody. Thank you for being here. And then I sat down and I'm like, we're starting. And I confidently said the Vergecast, the flagship podcast. And I was like, I don't know our CEO knows that I make that joke every week. Okay. What did he say? Huh? Nothing. Nothing. Zero response. Stone cold silence. I also referred to Ezra Klein as my hated rival. Yeah. That's true. It was a real, real son of emotions for me. You can listen to the top of the show. If you hear my voice wavering, it's me thinking, Oh, I just got fired. Maybe, maybe Jim, the CEO, does like a podcast, like a gardening show or something that we don't know about it. He calls it the flash. That'd be great.

Anyway, it was really fun. Thank you to everybody who came. I was there for 36 hours. So it was a real whirlwind. A bunch of people came to our party that night. It was great to meet a whole bunch of fans. Thank you, everybody. Okay.

So Sarah is here. Hi, Sarah. I want to talk to you. You just wrote a piece that you've been working on for weeks. It basically tortured you into writing about Spotify's lawsuit. So if you don't know, Spotify is being sued for $1.6 billion by a company called Wixen, which represents, I believe, Tom Petty and a whole bunch of other artists. Oh, man, rage.

Can you just imagine Zach Taylor Roker right now? Spotify has this historic controversy about how much it pays artists. Yes, lots of artists are very mad at them all the time. And it's IPOing now. It's like going to happen. So it's supposed to become a public company. There's a lot of scrutiny on its business model. And there's just been, when that lawsuit was filed,

there was just a lot of headlines about how it's about royalties and the artists are finally getting up on Spotify. And I glanced over it. And it didn't seem to add up quite right because she doesn't, we'll get into it. And so Sarah, who is just one of the smartest legal thinkers I know, I said, hey, you should write about this. And then she made frustrated noises.

at me through Slack for weeks and she finally published the piece. I mean, I was like, it'll be so simple, Neely. I'll have it turned around to you so quickly. Yeah. That definitely, that definitely happened. Because it's super complicated. So Sarah, can you walk us through

what's happening here? Because, I mean, I just read your piece and it seems so dumb and so complicated at the same time. Well, where should I even begin? Do I start with 1909? Or player pianos, 1909? Start with what they're being sued for.

The very specific thing, because it's so silly. The very specific thing. Yeah. Yeah, so the very specific thing they're being sued for is not paying something. Well, it's not so much not paying something, but they're saying that these licenses that were supposed to be paid are missing. They're called mechanical licenses. They're licenses that go to songwriters specifically, and we can get more into that

in a bit because there's a difference between the recording artist and the songwriter. But the sort of core of the case, like the theory of the case isn't that, hey, you don't have this money, you're not willing to pay this money, people like you're infringing our copyright. It's that you forgot to send these notices that are required under this section to let people know that they're in the Spotify catalog. Yeah. Literally mailing pieces of paper. So they they're not contending that Spotify didn't pay the songwriter. They're contending that Spotify didn't send a letter. to the songwriter saying, hey, we got you, we're going to pay you.

Is that, is that right? I think that they're contending that the money's missing, but like no one knows where the money went, but there's money, there's definitely money set aside. Like Spotify put it, like every time it streams, like, all right, here's some money. It goes into this account. It's going to go to someone eventually. And then they hire like a third party to go find the person. And then it's supposed to, it's supposed to go to all these people.

Like Spotify isn't just like, ah, we won't pay them. Just no one knows what's happening to happening to the money. or, and apparently, according to Wixen, their artists weren't even told that they were going to get paid. Like, they didn't receive that special piece of paper that they're supposed to get according to the law. So if I'm a songwriter, I write a song, and then I get a check in the mail from Spotify saying, hey, thanks for writing this song, here's some money. Does that count as a mechanical, like the notice that is from this law? I kind of don't think so. Well, to be fair, there's like a couple different ways you can put notice.

You can also file notice with the Copyright Office, and apparently, like, since the last year, 45 million notices of intent have been filed, like, from various tech companies, right? And the Copyright Office is, like, they've got some technological debt right now. Like, their computers are, like, not totally up to date. Like, they're trying. You know, they're trying, they're trying the best that they can with what they've got and with what Congress lets them have. So the whole situation is just sort of super borked right now.

So I want to, we've been doing the show for six minutes and we are already hopelessly in the weeds. Yeah. Right. Like that is the state of this law. It's the state of Spotify's business. It's the state of how musicians get paid. So just to like simplify it, Sarah, would this, tell me if this characterization is accurate. You stream a song on Spotify.

The person who recorded it gets some money. Yeah. The person who wrote the song is supposed to get some money. Spotify by law is supposed to mail. the songwriter a piece of paper saying, you're in our catalog and we owe you some money. Yeah. And then presumably pay them. And the reason that the lawsuit is $1.6 billion is not because that is the amount of money,

Spotify owes and royalties. It's that if you don't mail the piece of paper, they can ask for extra damages. So the money they're asking for is, it's like $150,000. It's not extra damages. it's statutory damages. They're asking for maximum statutory damages per song infringed. So it's like, as you know, Nelai, when you infringe copyright, there's like a statutory damage.

Like instead of calculating out actual damages, like, oh, I was hurt by this much because you infringed my copyright. It's you get sort of this automatic liability. Like it's, and it's, it can be tens of thousands of dollars. It can be like over $100,000, depending on how a jury. returns to you. And I believe the maximum is $150,000. So Woodson is asking for $150,000 per song that they didn't send out the notice of intent for. Because they're missing paper. It's not a royalty. Wait, so what about these pre-negotiated rates, the 9.1 cents per composition?

All right. So now, wait, before we go into those weeds, just explain. So I just want everyone to know, Like that the money here, that huge flashy number is not based on what Spotify would owe artists if everything was working perfectly. Right? That's not what they've cheated out of artists. It's you failed to mail paper and we can add up these extra statutory damages to $1.106. This is like getting a parking ticket. Why do you keep trying to dunk on paper, man? It's okay.

I just want to point out that's that number. What Paul is asking about and what I want Sarah to explain is how it's supposed to work. Like if everything was working perfectly, who's supposed to get paid what? So the song, like the recording artists get a cut, and that's negotiated through the record labels, who presumably also get their cut on the way out, right? So the Spotify's paying the record labels who are paying the recording artists, so they all get their cut. And supposedly that's a much larger cut than the songwriters,

because the songwriters, their cut is determined by law through the copyright royalty board. Although I've also been told that. They're also paying the songwriters through another middleman, which is the PROs, which like BMI, ASCAP and so forth, they also administer royalty through radio. So they're paying those folks and they're paying the mechanicals, which is that's a complete, these are two separate regimes entirely. But the money eventually goes through middlemen and then back to songwriters. So I saw you tweeting yesterday, the only good canonical example,

song to use to explain this is is it girls just want to have fun? By Cindy Lopper, yeah. So go through the specifics. So Cindy Lopper is the recording artist. She's the famous, the person everybody knows, but somebody else wrote it. Robert Hazard wrote it.

Because he made a demo like a couple years prior where he sings from a man's point of view which makes it a very different song. The girls just want to have fun, man. Yeah, yeah, it's really, it's a very different song. It's much less cool. actually. So he wrote the song. He's the songwriter. He's the only songwriter listed.

Cindy Lauper is the only recording artist listed and they don't cross over. Like they're not, like a lot of the, a lot of songs are like, oh, Taylor Swift is the recording artist featuring also this person, featuring also this person. So there's like five different recording artists. And then Taylor Swift is also the songwriter plus this other songwriter plus this other songwriter. And so you've got overlap and all of this complications and who gets what percentage is like, you know, presumably negotiated out in contracts. So that's super complicated. But if you want to understand mechanicals, let's start with the most simple song possible.

It's girls want to have fun with recording artists. There's only one. The songwriter, there's only one. And they're two different people entirely. And on top of that, they're both post-1972. So they belong to the same copyright regime instead of two different copyright regimes. Oh, my God. Yeah.

This is incredible, isn't it? All right. So walk us through, girls just want to have fun. So I play it on Spotify. What is supposed to happen? What is supposed to happen? All right. So a cut, let's say, first goes to BMI, and BMI gives part of that cut to Robert Hazard, the songwriter.

Let's set that aside because that's... BMI is the publishing company? No, BMI. BMI is one of the middle men that represents songwriters from things they played. There's BMI ASCAP and CSAB. It's like boys and men interests. Oh, my God. Their performance royalty.

Yeah. Let's try to pretend they don't exist for now. It's impossible to talk about. We haven't even gotten to the old-timey pianos. I know. And keep going. Keep going. Keep going.

So then you have the recording artists, right? So the record labels, Spotify has deals with all of the record labels individually, right? So we don't even know what they're paying the record labels because all that is pretty hush-hush. Because that's just they're dealing one-on-one with those people. So the record label is getting a cut. And the record label is giving part of that cut to Cindy Lauper because she's the recording artist. All right, now we've got the mechanicals. The mechanicals are already set by the Copyright Royalty Board every five years.

The rates are set. And I believe in the period, like last period it was something like 10% of revenue, right? So they're taking like 10% of total revenue or something, like one of those formulas because there were like three different formulas and they had to pick one, whichever was larger. it was basically an SAT math problem. And they take that and they give that to the publisher who then gives a cut to the songwriter. So the songwriter gets paid twice? Presumably so.

Okay. And Dieter just mentioned old-timey pianos and you just said mechanicals and I want to connect with those things. Yes. Right? They're called mechanicals because when player pianos came out, the role that the player piano played, was not considered sheet music. Correct. And so there was a law passed to provide, when you

play a song, the songwriter gets credit. The songwriter gets paid. Right. Because of player piano. Per play? Well, on Spotify, yes. On Spotify, yeah. Per piano role. Per sale of piano role. Yeah. And like, this is like a big

deal. This is what you're saying like 1909. Because before there was not recorded music available. Right. So songwriters made money by selling the sheet music. Right. And we're still in that world. We're still in the world where the legal foundations of how Spotify pays people is angry songwriters who want to kill the player piano.

Right. And that is the foundation. So it's called mechanical. And there's a great part of Sarah's piece where she mentions, like, no one knows why it's called mechanicals. Like, there's a lot of ways you can get to that word. I always thought it was just because player pianos are mechanical. Yeah. I actually thought that too.

Yeah. But then while doing research, I found out that it could also mean that it's an automatic license. So like a songwriter can't stop you from using their song, right? Like a songwriter can't stop you from using your song as long as you pay up. And the thing that you pay, they don't negotiate. It's pre-negotiated through the government. So there's an automatic rate set. It's mechanical.

So it could mean either player pianos or that. It's ambiguous. If you really want to fall down this hole, and we won't talk about this too much here, but the history of this is really contentious. It involves John Phillips Sousa telling Congress that player pianos will be the death of American culture because we won't just sit around on the porches and sing to each other anymore. And look at us now. He was right.

Shut it down. It was deeply controversial in its time, and now it's here. So I want to keep talking about a lawsuit for one second. And there's something else I want to bring up from your piece. I thought was interesting. But in regards to the lawsuit, you. point out that it seems to be happening because there's a movement afoot to change this whole legal foundation? Is that going to affect this lawsuit? What's the change coming and how it would affect the lawsuit?

So there's something called the Music Modernization Act. It was introduced in the House and in the Senate this year, and it has wide industry backing. So the RIA is all for it. The NMPA, that's the National Music Publishers Association. So they're the people who are supposedly representing songwriters. They're all for it. Spotify is for it. Pandora is for it. There's a industry coalition called Dima that also represents Spotify, Pandora, and Napster that's for it. So Napster and the RIA are in league to try to get this law passed. And one of the things that it would do is it would revamp mechanicals, and it would create like this sort of centralized clearinghouse for mechanicals to try and fix this problem. The other thing that it would do is that it would shield companies like Spotify

from basically lawsuits like this $1.6 billion wixen lawsuit as long as they're setting aside money in like an account to pay for mechanicals if mechanicals are missing. Why if we modernize music, why would we even need mechanicals? Because you still want the song artists to get paid. But they are getting paid. This is their second payment. BMI and ASCAP don't work with. like people who press CDs or or with like people who sell mp3s like iTunes store or whatever that doesn't apply to them so Spotify for some reason both of those things apply to Spotify at the same time yeah it's just I'm going to ask you a question you can answer however you want right are Pandora and Spotify the same thing no because Pandora's like radio except except you're correct and so

Pandora paid different fees as I believe however they bought Ardeo which sounds like radio but isn't They became In addition to Whatever the radio services They also have got it All You Can Eat streaming service Or you can pick your song

So they're not this What is Spotify? It's a streaming service No but what is it? Well it's kind of like a Corporation Corporations are people God damn it

No I mean like People have to be held responsible Sure It is actually Really hard to answer the question of what Spotify is. It's like radio except you're the DJ. So now it's like radio.

So now the radio laws should apply. Or is it like having access to iTunes or you buy things or access to CDs? Like the metaphor's underlying, the metaphor you would use to figure out how to pay somebody completely breaks down when you're like paying per stream. Especially because Spotify also has a free service that I don't, did you figure this out?

Because we were talking about it. The free service, might be under a different, because it has restrictions of what you can do. Maybe this will be a helpful illustration. One of the things Spotify is very famous for, for me, in my mind, Spotify is the place where you type in the Beatles and you get Beatles cover band. You type in Led Zeppelin, you get a Led Zeppelin cover band. So that's a case where the songwriter should still get paid, but it's a different performer.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And the thing that would get paid is a mechanical royalty. But also this BMI shadow organization. So Sarah, man, I defer to you. I should get a mechanical every time someone downloads an RSS feed of VERS article that I wrote. Yeah. You know, there's all these weird people on YouTube who just have robot voices read our stories to like YouTube audience of three. Yeah.

Where's my cut, man? So Sarah, so this is very complicated. I think we are in agreement that the whole system is broken. You raised the point of this should just be automated, right? Like, we know who all the people are. We're tracking them in a database. We're tracking plays. Spotify's already automated, presumably,

the like transfer money when a song is played to some account piece of it. The payment part of it should be automated. Is it just the mess of all these weird middlemen organization? Is that what's preventing it from being automated or is there something else? I think that that's probably what's going on. I mean, people I talked to were just like, well, there's something wrong, clearly, with between all of these lawsuits and so forth. Clearly, there's something going wrong. But, you know, no one wants to, no one wants to take responsibility for what's going on.

As far as I can tell, there's just five too many layers to this whole business, right? And, and at each layer, you know, someone's messing up. No one seems to be, you know, quite doing 100%, right? And that just racks up after a while. And a lot of stuff just goes, where'd everything go? Where's all the money? Like you have these stories where once someone hires, like, a firm to basically chase down all their money, suddenly they see like, oh, look at all of these like thousands and thousands of dollars pouring in.

There was a story in the Times a couple years ago where McCartney paid a company to administer his rights. and then within 12 months, their revenues increased 25%. Wow. That's great. It's just, money's just missing all over the place. There's this great line in the... Paul, I'd like to pay you to just go find my money. Oh, absolutely.

But not... And then I'll keep it. A smaller amount of money. There's this great line in the Wixon complaint. Because there's yet... You're ready for another agency? There's the Harry Fox agency. Take it!

Are there bitter rivals with BMI? They're like... friend of me. They're different. They're different. They're in different layers. Harry Fox does. Are Fox is Harry by default?

You should only have to specify the bald ones. Wow. Wow, Deitor. So, Harry Fox is what's supposed to administer a lot of these royalties. So Spotify has just been like telling the Harry Fox. I don't know why. Wait, what is the telling Harry Fox? I just like written into like the regulatory law of the United States.

I don't know where it came from. Harry Fox Agency represents songwriters. It's a true thing, and they're supposed to administer some of these royalties. Everybody's supposed to just go through it. It just exists. If you know why it's called the Harry Fox Agency and whatever, let us know. I think it's a private entity. It's a private entity.

Just to make things more complicated. They're a private entity that owns 90% of this market. So they're like a protective monopoly, like the United States Postal. Sarah calls it a cartel in the piece. I call BMI and ASCAPA car. I didn't call Harry Fox a cartel. They're a different solo cartel. Anyway,

to tell you, this is bonkers. So, Harry Fox exists, and they own 90% of the market. Spotify is just telling Harry Fox. But Wixen, in their complaint, is like, Spotify should have known Harry Fox is not capable of doing this work. And that's bonkers. Because they're the only ones who do it. Spotify sent Harry Fox a letter saying, hey, we got this money. And Harry Fox is like, yeah, we do 90% of the market.

market, but, and then the Wix, Wix, first of all, who's Wixen? Why do they get to sue Spotify at all? They represent all the songwriters. But I thought Harry Fox represented all the songwriters. No. Well, Harry Fox is basically like a phone book for all of the songwriters, and they handle mechanicals for every, like, 90% of the market.

And the rest of the market that they don't, they don't represent. They're supposed to be able to go out and find those people. Okay, so if you haven't been following this, who's going to win? It's fine. Because it's crazy. Yeah, who's going to win? Do you think, uh, I look, I think it's probably like I don't, I don't like to speculate, but I think probably Spotify, but they might, they might settle. Like, they've settled like,

like, like, because Wixen is a spinoff of a suit that's settled that has a different spinoff. And the, that the suit that it's a spin off of, like they settled that one for 43 million. And that was a spinoff of another settlement for 30 million. So it's like there's, there's layers and layers upon these suits where people are alleging more or less the same things. They're like, where are our mechanicals? Where did our mechanicals go? And Spotify's like, ah, we have them somewhere here. Here, have several millions.

Here's $30 million. Right? Is it work this way? It doesn't work this way in other countries, right? It's simpler? I really do not want to get into it. I barely understand what's going on here. I don't know what's going on in France. Is this a uniquely is Spotify the only

one accused of losing mechanicals because there's also, you compared to iTunes a lot in your piece, but you're talking about like purchasing songs on iTunes, but like there's Apple music, there's title, there are other streaming services in this weird, not radio, not downloads. Well, maybe those

lawsuits are coming. Maybe a big wave of lawsuits are coming, but I will say the R-A and the NMPA, so that's the recording industry, and the song publisher, so like the songwriters and the recording artists, right? but the guys in suits essentially.

They sued. They settled back something like 10 years ago. They had their own settlement because the songwriters accused the record labels of not paying their mechanicals. So it's just, yeah. It's on and on forever. Okay. So it's a this. This is crazy.

No, no. No question. Yeah, go ahead. This is kind of tangential. But this music modernization thing. will this make sampling easier? Because one thing that bothers me is that the big artists that can afford the really fancy samples

get to do all the cool sampling. And like new up-and-comers have to put everything on SoundCloud and not charge anybody for their music because they can't sample cool things. But if you had a perfectly automated system, no, I don't. And trickle down royalties. Think about it.

Sampling arts are different from, Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, it's all just a mess. So if you've been listening to this, we've made it sound crazy because it is. But there's a piece, just a, Sarah, you might have written this as a throwaway, but it was the thing that struck me the most as I read the piece yesterday. Sarah, point out, this is why there are no music startups.

You can't, you have to be at that scale with armies of lawyers in order to just navigate paying the people. And so we always talk on this show about just like monopolies and big companies and lack of competition. And there is, like, you can't, if you're listening and you're like, I want to do a music startup with a better user experience. You just basically can't, right? Like there's no way to navigate this unless you have that scale. Do you think there's a way to make it simpler? Woof.

Burn it all down and start over? Yes. Look, is that something that someone noted earlier? Like how do you classify Spotify, right? So under the law, it's an interactive streaming service. Kind of. I think in like previous years, it might have also classified as maybe even a digital locker at some point.

There's all these terms being thrown around. None of them are in like the law, the law. Like the reason why Spotify is on the hook for mechanicals is because technically it qualifies as a DPD, which is short for digital phone records. delivery. Like that's that's what we're dealing with. We have like a structure that's so, you know, bits are tacked on to other bits that we're still calling things phono records. Like that's what these technically are. We're talking about phona records versus compositions. We're talking about things that we're supposed to be sheet music versus like literal records that go in gramophones.

And you just sort of update it so that it's like it kind of works. And then you update it again and you update it again and eventually you have this. In my heart, what I know to be true is that all of this complicated falderall is the reason it's so difficult for me to find my downloaded music in the Spotify app. Probably. Also, I think they've also won, and they're the only ones who can deal with this. So they're just like, we'll stop innovating this interface. I actually do think that's true, right? Like, they don't feel the heat.

I mean, they might feel a little bit of Apple music heat. But around the world, they don't have competition because it's so hard to do this around the world. and I keep thinking that what we should do is burn it all down. And there has been a little bit of, I mean, there's a little bit of momentum around a new copyright law. But even that seems like it will be an iteration on this existing stuff, not to burn it all down and start over. Right, yeah.

No one wants to burn it down because when you succeed under the system, like you want to protect the system because you've figured it out, right? like now that you've gone through like the tests and the trials and the labyrinth uh like no one's coming in after you they're all getting like eaten by the minotar sorry to keep making this this metaphor even more complicated but yeah like you've made you've made it to the end now you're sitting at the top and all of your competitors have to to go through the whole thing the rigamaral so like why should you change the system and make it simpler why not just sit sit pretty on top of it all It feels like what I really want is for there to be a white label, like, back end that gives you access to music and does stuff.

Yeah. And then anybody can figure it out. And then... On top of the white label backend. Right. Yeah. And that's always kind of how I thought it worked. Because, you know, for several of these, like, rights agreements, everybody gets the same deal, right?

So, like, Spotify and Apple Music have largely the same catalog outside of exclusives because everyone just makes the same deal. streaming TV services all largely have the same channel sections because everybody gets the same deal. But then there's this other dark world that you just can't navigate because you can't pay all of the other people. Maybe the rule should be that no one can record a song that they haven't written. Wow. Yeah, that's my idea. Patel for president. My friend replied to the article saying, like, this is like when you, this is like if you opened up your television and instead of finding a bunch of electrical parts you found trained my son.

flipping wooden switches and then they all look up and yell at you to please leave them alone. You see that they're working. That's a really good analogy. Wow. I love it. I will say that the lawyer Twitter went crazy yesterday because people have tried to write the story and they've failed.

It's just really hard to understand. Sarah, you did a great job. I love the story. Please go read it on the website. It also has helpful animated visuals to guide you through some of this complexity. I really appreciated that. It's great. Thanks for joining us, Sarah. It was great. Thank you. I am going to

read an ad, and then we're going to talk about Siri, which is another Hellfield. Yeah. Burn it all down. This episode of Virchcast is brought to you by HelloFresh. HelloFresh is a meal kit delivery service that shops, plans, and delivers your favorite step-by-step recipes and pre-measured ingredients so you can just cook,

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If you use the promo code, Verge 30 at Hellofresh.com. All right, we're back. Hello. Big story this week about what's up with Siri and the information. It's an incredible story. I think you can read it if you don't have a subscription by giving you your email. email address? Yeah.

And this is the one to use your email address on. Yeah. I mean, the information is great publication. The whole thing is like deeply reported deep dives, investigations. It sounds, so the HomePod just came out. We all did the HomePod reviews. Yep.

Every HomePod review is basically the same. Sounds great, pretty expensive, series of joke. Right, there's fundamentally my review. And I harp on things like, can't set two timers at once. But like, there's a million reasons, and that's good. I would say that the thing that came out in the information piece that struck me was the fact that inside of Apple apparently, there is an argument, a long-running argument about whether they should just burn it all down and start Siri over or whether they should try to fix the brokenness of Syria. Right. Which is bonkers to me.

The even more bonkers thing is the number of... Like, since the day Siri started, they've been having that argument. Yeah. I think I might be on team burn it all down. Here's the thing, according to the information. Core Siri and Spotlight are both powered by the company they acquired Tofsy and Siri Data Services. Siri Data Services is based on older search technology ported over from iTunes Search, but modified for Siri. Yeah.

Paul's proud of you. I bet on the right horse. I mean, like, okay, maybe that's a cheap shot. iTunes, for all its foibles is one of the, like, I think most widely used, like, there's a giant database of a corpus of data and, like, keep that data organized and make it parsable and searchable, right? I don't think that the searches you could do on iTunes are, like, that complex. It's like, artist, this, blah, blah, blah. But when you have structured data, you can start to do really interesting things with it.

And Siri, like all intelligent assistants, works way better when it's aware of structured data. Google solved this problem by looking at the web and be like, well, there's no structured data here. this sucks. And so they made their own structured data based on the web that's called Knowledge Graph. And so that is what allows the Google Assistant to know things, because there's no thing unless it's in a structure, which is our argument about semiotics, which I could make for quite a long time. So if there's no structure, there's no thing. Well, but people have a real incentive to tag their stuff for Knowledge Graph because it improves their SEO. Well, they've created a virtuous cycle in that regard.

That's correct. But what's amazing is some of the anecdotes in this story about Siri. So when Siri was, they handed it over, Scott Forsall handed over to, what's his name, Williamson, who had been running maps. And apparently there's this big debate about whether or not he wanted Siri to be updated on an annual cycle like the rest of iOS or continually updated in the background. So the team's like, he wanted it once a year. Screwed that guy. So they emailed them for comment, and he replied via email. That's not true at all.

And then he, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he says, quote, the man in charge of Siri for a time says, quote, Apple employee. Yeah. Says, quote, former Apple employee, says, quote, after the launch, Siri was a disaster. It was slow when it worked at all. The software was riddled with serious bugs. those problems lie entirely with the

original Siri team certainly not me just does he mean the original Siri team before the original Siri team before Apple bought and then on Twitter Guy named Kitlaus

who was one of the original creators of Siri yeah now works for Samsung because he made another intelligent assistant afterwards and then Samsung bought it yeah but Dad Kitlaus who was the CEO of Siri responded this statement, holy false, was made by the architect and head of the biggest launch disaster in Apple history, Apple Maps. In reality, Siri worked great at launch, but like any new platform under unexpectedly massive load, required scaling adjustments in 24-hour workdays.

So everyone just is blaming each other. They didn't expect to be on the top of hacker news, and so their services crashed. How could Apple have unexpectedly massive load on anything? It's like, how many phones are we going to sell? That's how much load your have. It's like, we didn't know we were going to sell new iPhones this year, guys. This is just true of Apple right now. There's a lot of questions about their...

I mean, we complain about their software every week on this show. Yeah. But this is the sort of thing where I've just seen this bubbling up on Twitter a lot recently about forced all leaving, right? Just like ex-Apple employees, Apple fans. developers, like the sense that losing Scott Forstall is the thing that made Apple worse at software or product designer, whatever. On the one hand, I like buy it, right? Like he was passionate guys, real smart, like model himself after Steve, whatever. On the other hand, it's like, yeah, one dude.

Yeah, right? Like one dude left and like Apple's other 100,000 employees weren't like, we should make that good. Like, I don't know how to, like, parse that, but I see that sentiment a lot. Like, a lot of this piece is Siri went to hell after Forstall left. Yeah. Right? Like, that's one of the theses of this piece. And I just, I can't quite, don't they use, they use their own problem.

Like, Tim has to know it's not good. But, like, okay, for example, let's see if this works now. I haven't tried this in a while. What time is it? I wish I could help. But you don't seem to be connected to the internet. Well, that's your problem. Well, that's your problem.

Well, no, because you're not connected to the internet. get an Android phone on and ask, take, put it in the airplane mode. And you put it in airplane mode on purpose. Yeah, you put, you can ask the Google Assistant to do hundreds of things when it's in airplane mode. Alexa can't, my Wi-Fi went down the other day and Alexa couldn't set an alarm. That's just weak sauce.

That's pretty depressing. So back to Forstall, this is one of like the anecdotes that really stood out to me. It's talking about Forstall who's really into it. He played around with the technology every day and would often, come into meetings and say, here are 10 things I found last night. And that's how I feel that's what's always puzzled me about

Syria. It's like, okay, it launched. It's not amazing. Super easy to improve. Every time you ask it something and it gets it wrong, add it to a list, and then it gets better. Right. No, there should be like an internal version of Siri with like a fix this button.

And every time Apple executive tries to use Siri to do something, it doesn't work, they should be like, well that's dumb. And they get priority fix this button. And hundreds of trained mice gets to work. That's how software works, right? It's easy. No, I mean, like, the real question,

here's, I'm just looking at Daring Fireball, here's John Gruber's summation of the information's piece on Siri. The gist of this story is that Syria has existed for seven years without cohesive leadership or product vision, and the underlying technology is a mishmash of various systems that don't work well together. If you run one of the most

valuable companies in the world, and you're out there, talking about, you know, your phones are revolutionary product and AI and AR the future, and you have machine learning papers and do all this stuff. And the face of all that effort is a product that you've given a name to and that you put in commercials. Yep. And you don't know who's in charge of it and that person doesn't know what it should be. Like, like, what? Like, how do you get there? Yeah. And like, that to me is like just really emblematic, I think of how people think about Apple right now.

Do you think? Because there probably is somebody in charge. Do you think Apple has the courage to start over? Oh, my God. No, I'm serious. The word is courage. And they've done this. They did this to unbelievable effect with the original MacOS and the conversion to MacOS 10.

Yeah. They handled that conversion brilliantly, like perfectly, better than anybody ever expected them to. They did an incredible job. We've actually been living longer. Like the just one guy theory. No, I just, last point. MacOS 10 has been like the operating system of Macs for longer than the original MacOS. That's crazy.

That is bonkers. Yeah, sorry. Hard to believe. You're old. I'm really old. No, but like this goes back to the, like, is it just a handful of dudes? Like, is it Avi Tavian and Rubinstein and Forstall? Like, is that?

Those are the dudes that? Those are the people who managed that transition at that time. But a bunch of old ex-next people. Yeah, yeah. And now they're gone. and we're looking at like, Siri can't set two times at once. Yeah.

Is that, that can't be it. Like, there are other smart people in the world. Yes. And at Apple. Yeah. Yeah.

So what, like, I'm, I read this story and like, we manage, we don't manage hundreds of thousands of people. We manage, like, 70.

Yeah. And like, just thinking, like, if we, if our core product was broken every day, like, one of those 70 people would notice.

and they would presumably try to fix it or like tell someone but we also we also like we do suffer from like some inertia like we're still using Trello not well and like we should switch off of it we should optimize it originally based on the iTunes search system we should fix it

like we're just our Trello has gotten very messy and very bad but we're still using it even though nobody likes it everybody hates it it's not that we could fix it by cleaning it up or we could fix it by switching to something else if we wanted to and like start fresh yeah but Nobody has the gumption to be like, all right, everybody, I'm in charge of our productivity software now. You all have to deal with the pain of this transition. It's going to be great.

And I feel like Siri could be in the same boat. Like, uh, fixing fixing Siri is just going to be a lot of work. It's not like Trello is fundamentally broken. It's not how we are using it is possibly a not of the correct fit for the technology. Because Trello is not the product that we sell the consumers worth $1,000. Also true. It's just like, this story is. struck me. I really, if you're Tim Cook

and there's Amazon in the world, and whether or not you care about your stock price or whatever, you are basically racing your competitor to, one, be the first trillion dollar company in the world, and they're basically neck and neck. Amazon, I'd actually beat them. Amazon has all this heat around Alexa, people love it, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're out there...

Except when it laughs. Except when it... That story, I don't know. Why did Alexa have a human laugh in it, and why was it going off accidentally? And they're like, Amazon's answer makes no sense. Their answer is they code funny things in it because it makes kids happy. And so they

had a person laugh and then they set the thing to that to Alexa laugh and then Alexa laugh apparently, like their AI for hearing hot words was screwed up and it like heard Alexa laugh when people said like Rudebaga. Yeah, I don't believe that. That's what I'm saying.

That explanation makes no sense. The explanation makes sense. You just think it's a lie. Yeah. Okay. Whatever. Tim Cook. You're Tim Cook. No, I'm not. You're soft-spoken, handsome southern gentleman.

And you're looking at Amazon. And all the heat is on voice assistants, and CS is all about assistants, and now there's light switches and whatever with Alexa in it. And you've got this product that every time your phones, every time your new speaker gets reviewed, people point out, hey, Siri isn't great. Yeah. It's the ding on all of your latest products.

Siri is not as good as these other things. Shouldn't he be spending every day just asking who's fixing this or assigning someone to fix it? Yeah. Shouldn't Apple be publicly putting the person in charge of Siri out in front? He probably tried to set a reminder with Siri. He just poor. Well, no, it's just like when Apple Maps failed, they just fired Scott Forrestall. Yeah.

And Williamson, who was also running Siri? It's just like, I don't, there's something there that I don't get with Apple in a way that, you know, other companies we cover fail left and right. So the other big rumor is that the next version of iOS, they were thinking about like redesigning the home screen, maybe they touch up notifications, they do a bunch of stuff, and they decided, no,

no, no, we are going to like just, this is going to be like a bug fix release. We're just going to clean up iOS a little bit. Do you think that that's code for fix Siri? I think it's code for the right thing that they should, because I think if you're on the Siri team,

it's like, well, do you want to show up at WWDC or the next iPhone event with some hot new features to show off? or do you want to break everything and rebuild it from scratch? Which is not, I mean, that is not a certainty. When you are building, I wrote a piece a long time ago about Photoshop based on me talking to an Adobe engineer who said,

if you started Photoshop from scratch right now, you may never arrive at the current point of photo. Photoshop functionality. Because when you build something, when you keep on adding fixtures, you're adding this certain quantity of complexity. And building from scratch is not a guarantee. It's a very dangerous thing to do in software.

Yeah. It sounds really exciting, and I get excited when I hear people are doing it. But you have this, well, what if we slip even more? You know, we're going to spend a year not adding features while our competitors keep adding features. And by the time we're done with our rewrite, were even further behind, and maybe our rewrite doesn't even, like, isn't even a better architecture.

I think there could be some fear like that. Look, OS 10.6, Snell-Leppard was the greatest operating system ever released. And that was the one where they took a year off of features and just focused on fixing it. Yeah. That is the truth. Also, I was ripping CDs because we're throwing away the thing in my house, and I have an external superdrives, and I was ripping CDs on the internal drive, my old IMac and the super drive at the same time. And I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get a CD in it, and I hit eject.

And it was a pirated DVD of 10.6. Oh, my God. Because I just hadn't used that drive since then. And I seriously considered installing 10.6. I was like, what if I just roll it back? Anyhow. By the way, you know something iTunes can't do? Just everything.

It cannot rip two CDs at once. Just too complicated for iTunes. Oh, my God. Anyway, I'm going to read an ad. And then we've got like a special. extended Paul Miller time situation going to happen to us. Basically. This episode of Vertcast is brought to you by Simplsafe.

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Every week, you bring us a terrifying video of you sitting on a pile of seroton. That's what he did last week. That was great. But you asked in the rundown and says you want some extra time. What's going to happen? Okay, well, I don't have to, you know what? This, like every week. Wow.

It's a lot. Like every week, this segment will be completely different because this one's called Untitled. Because there's a lot to say. and a lot going on. I've been reading a biography of Claude Shannon, the inventor or discoverer of information theory. It's called A Mind at Play. I think it really captures why I value dumb things.

Because Claude Shannon, in addition to, like, inventing the information age, also like built unicycles and like maze-solving mouse robots and things like that. So anyways, personal hero of mine. So I just wanted to run through a few of the weird, things that were south by southwest that are very exciting to me and also some weird things that showed up on circuit breaker There's a Scrabble themed keyboard. This is very exciting from a collaboration between MassDrop and Hasbro

It's a Scrabble aesthetic of keycaps for your can you rearrange them? Well, they do have like triple word scores That as as as independent keycaps so you could like swap out like your favorite letter with a triple word score so yes, you could definitely Does it score you as you type? I hope so, but no. Okay. That'd be great. Let's see. What else we have? We have a headphone massage.

Oh, this is... Have you seen this? I've not. It's a pair of cans that massages your ears for you. Oh, my God. Relaxing, nope. Relaxation and ovation. Nirvana.

Oversized headphones that literally look like somebody put, you know, like some regular headphones into a jumbo-sizer machine. So they're just comically oversized. And they massage your ears somehow. I think that's great. That's great. I'm really excited, but Google came out with this EnSynth Super. Have you guys seen this?

No. So Google is using some of its machine learning technology to meld sounds in some sort of like synthesizer. So you take two sounds like this is the sound of a violin and this is the sound of an oboe, and then their machine learning combines them somehow, and so you get a grid that you can play with like four quarters. The four corners all represent different sounds, and then you use like the touchscreen to like merge between the different sounds. Unique audio, and they're released as an open source project so you can build your own. I'm hoping it will come out as like an

iPad app because it's all on open stuff. Then at South by Southwest, there's a breadbot. It's a robot that makes bread. Love that. It's not quite pods, but it's not not pods. Yeah, you just throw in your dry ingredients. It'll measure them out for you and make one look at a time. But the idea is like your bodega will get one of these bread bots and you can like wake up and go and then like order the particular bread recipe you like and then it will bake that bread fresh. And then like when you're finally ready to leave the house, you could like go and pick up the bread.

This is very exciting to me. On-demand robot made. bread. There is a lunavity hover backpack that improves your jump height. So it's like, it's kind of like having a drone connected to a backpack, but instead

of flying, because it's really dangerous to fly, you just jump higher, which is great. I have no idea when that's going to come out. Can they actually like just attach it to like an actual hiking backpack so that I don't have to carry as much weight because there's a, just a

permanent thing lifting it? via a drone. See, that's so smart because exoskeleton, well, see, the thing is you're going to run out of battery probably pretty quick. You think so? But exoskeletons, I wonder if that would be more efficient than an exoskeleton.

Yeah. How many jumps do you get with a hoverbackback? It's not like a finish product. I see. Okay. I'm hopefully a lot. That's my new favorite, like stat, like spec. Yeah.

You know, it's like the new screen to body ratio was jumps? Jump. Just per charge. Jumps per charge. JPC. Yeah. I'm looking for about 10 JPC. Bowes made AR sunglasses, but instead of augmenting your vision, they augment your hearing.

Yeah. So they could possibly, like, describe what you're looking at. So that's exciting. I don't know. I just feel like we're at a real, and then Sony made a weird projector so that you can feel like you're a mosquito. No, the projector is really cool, though, because it uses that dope little... They really got Paul, by the way. A dope little laser projector?

The Vive tracker. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like a pika projector. There's a little Sony pico projector, which I have, and it's great. And then they attach it to motion tracking. And then it shows, like, as you look around, it shows you a projection of what a mosquito would see if you were a mosquito, basically. Yeah. Yeah.

It's very exciting. Also, I wrote a piece recently about the joys of projecting a horse on your friend. Yeah. So it really spoke to me in that sense. It's really like, it's AR, but it's a different kind of AR. I'm proud of us for just walking right by the joys of projecting a horse on your friend, as though that was a totally normal thing for me. Paul to say.

I published it on the verge.com. It is a totally normal thing for Paul to say. That's true. Anyways, I'm just excited. Congratulations to all these companies for making really weird stuff that has limited utility, but I think could inspire the next generation. You know, we were, the circuit breaker show this week, we had emotional text supports. People called us.

One of our callers was, guys, like, I'm really frustrated with phones. Yeah. And we lasered in on was that phones are so exciting for so long that he feels betrayed by there's no thrill left. Right. So we're trying to come up for other things that he could be into. I suggested that he should just go to Canon forms and tell him he's a Nikon fan. Ooh. That's just waiting for you.

You say he needs more drama. You need more drama. Wait, dude, I'd love to hear you. Because your favorite show got canceled and now you just have a GalaxyS9. Dieter, what's like one section of the technology industry that feels like hip and exciting to you where, like, Every couple weeks, there's a new development. Every couple weeks? Yeah, that's what phones used to be.

I don't know if it's every couple weeks. Every couple days, HTC in 2009, HTC put out a phone. Here's another one. Check up these sick widgets. By the way, this is still true of phones in countries like India. It's just here, whatever. We get the three. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that weird tablet, laptop, hybrid computer thing and majigs are still interesting to me. Yeah. Like, what's the hinge going to do? How do you get the keyboard out? How do you hide the keyboard? Can you get rid of the keyboard? Can you touch the screen?

How do you touch the screen? What operating system does it run? They don't run mobile apps. Like, all that's like, like, nobody's doing a good job of it. Nobody is doing a good job of it. And that's, but everybody knows they can see in their mind's eye what a good job would look like. And so they're like, if we did that, it'd be amazing. So we're going to do this.

Which is not that. But people might think it's that. And in the meantime, maybe we'll figure it out. That is the story of like every tablet touchscreen thing right now. By the way, Dieter is currently using a Surface Pro. I am. I used an iPad Pro for a while. I used a pixel book for a while.

I used a touchbar on a Mac for a while. Yeah. I, uh, I am... Oh, my GPU's on. Just in case anybody was wondering. I'm using an iPad Pro, trying to make it my daily driver. Please don't do that ever again. Don't, don't say I'm using iPad Pro.

Use the the. We're not Apple. We use articles when we refer to their products. I love you. I think you just mumbled it. Okay. I'll be honest with you. I'm using iPad Pro.

God damn. It just seems weird for me. I don't think I would have said that. I'm using the iPad Pro. And if Apple added a USBC plug in addition to the lightning plug? Why in addition?

Just switch it over to USBC. I don't know. It would be so much better. I just thought that would be cool. Yeah. That's great, Paul. I will say using a surface like multiple times

on this trip, I've been like, oh, I need to charge this other thing that I have. Oh, wait, I don't have the USBC charger that I used to charge everything else in my life. It's infuriating. Interesting. Yeah. I had a switch.

I was like, I had charge a switch. Oh, I didn't bring, okay, I'll trickle charge it off the surface, I guess. Right, right. Because I didn't have like a big USB-E-C power brick. Oh, man, I got to get one of those. Yeah. I'm thinking about it. I normally just have like a big USB power brick with a one USBC, one USBA,

and that will charge a laptop. It'll charge my switch. It charges my phone. It's great. Yeah. And then you accidentally plug your USBC headphones into it. It's a wild experience. Okay.

Sadly, we are out of time. on this episode. I was going to try to drop the article, but how's that iPad Pro is like a totally fun thing. How iPad? How iPad am I? A pretty iPad right now. I'm pretty iPad.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I am inappropriately excited for the Fitbit Versa. It's going to be terrible. Oh, we didn't talk about the Fitbit. I am inappropriately excited for it because it's a little bit pebble-esque and it's a smart watch that might actually be cross-platform, which I know nobody really cares about, but I care about. and it's cheap

200 bucks and it looks really really ugly but it looks a lot like an Apple watch I'm married to somebody who wears a Fitbit charge 2 every single day and I'm going to ask her I'm going to show a picture today and we'll see what she says yeah okay because the the smallness of the charge 2 is what attracts her to

I'm always like do you want an Apple Watch she's like no I just want to count my steps leave me alone anyway that's it but there's other great shows to listen to you why did you push that button also it was live at South by Southwest last week they did a new episode on whether technology and able's ghosting a wild episode They had the head of the head sociologist from Bumble was there.

She had like actual science. The head of iOS engineering for OKCupid was, great show, great episode. Listen to that. Lauren Good is doing Versus again. That's on YouTube. Her series were head-to-head. She did Kindle versus Real Books today, I think, which is wild.

She also does a great podcast called Too Embarrass Task with Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher does recode decode. Peter Cofco does Recode Media. All of that is available on Apple Podcasts and Google Play. In Spotify, everywhere the podcasts are served. You just go listen to that stuff. The Apple Podcasts. The Apple Podcasts.

That's an Apple Podcasts. Find a podcast app and then download our shows. It'll be great for everyone. I insist. You tweet us, you can talk to us. I'm reckless. Paul's future Paul. Deer's Backlon.

Sarah, Sarah, John. Sarah's got a great Twitter feed. You should go to that and read her article because it's great. Thank you to her for being on. And that's it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul.

Promocode. A poll. The Paul. Thank you.