Meta and Reddit prove the social web is over

25:45Right? Like that's how that worked. That's not how Twitter works. That's how Instagram threads is going to work. I think there's still a follow graph there. Like no one's going to find your like furries Mastodon and be like I'm in it now. I will. Right? And so the question of defederating is really just a question of whether you want to be connected to meta's version of this at all. Well, that's true and it isn't, right? Like I think one of the interesting things about the way that the Fetaverse works is you can have things like tags that actually do work across instances. And there are people out there who have really careful systems for how things get tagged and how we think about topics.

26:22And you can sort of be in your own space but also have access to through things like tags and topics, the other stuff that's out there. It's definitely a smaller part of how it works, but I think because it's still such a power user tool, there are definitely a lot of people on Mastodon who have curated tag sets that they use. And all of a sudden, do you remember when this happened on Instagram? All of a sudden, everybody got nuts about the tags to try and game the explore page when people are going around. I think that's the kind of thing that people worry about. And it's exactly what you're describing.

26:51I think it's definitely less likely than it would be if something like this were to happen to, say, Reddit, like you said. But I do think that risk is real here. That's fair. Well, see, I think this is among the most interesting versions of this to happen, right? The parallels to lots of other things are there. And what's interesting is that many of those things have played out. Microsoft attempting to colonize the web played itself out, like from start to finish. We see how that went. And actually a little bit of intervention, a little bit of competition, they were unsuccessful at doing it. And now they're a big baby.

27:30And now they just want to own Call of Duty. Why won't you let them have it? Gosh. You can see how Google's various attempts to colonize the web have been successful and unsuccessful over time. Another great example actually is Apple and open source kind of in a general sense. Like they showed up with an open source kernel in OS X. Everyone thought they were going to pick Linux. They picked another project. That project does not have a life outside of Apple, right? They just took it and they made it their thing. They did the same thing with the rendering engine inside of Safari. They took an existing one.

28:04They built upon it. Now that Apple dominates that environment, right? Those are all good things. I don't think no one's looking back and saying, man, WebKit really ruined our open source project. Yeah, Apple adopting Unix really destroyed everything. Yeah, we've just seen these cycles come and go in various different ways. And I think fundamentally they're not good or bad, but the parallels are there and the negatives are there and people are like extremely wide open to them. And this one is particularly funny because it is the oldest of them all. Right. It's the big service providers dumping users on a pretty closed system or pretty small system.

28:44And like they're having the same reaction as a bunch of people in the 90s had to it. Yeah. I suspect some of them are the same people from the 90s. Yeah. Yeah. Which is pretty good. I'm going to be I'm going to be on the other side again. Yeah. Because like I've got my Mastodon account. I barely understand how it works. And as soon as the Instagram threads come so long. Yeah. I'll give it a go because the user experience will likely be a lot easier. Yes. And at this point in my life, I'm not interested in tinkering with that. I've got a whole smart home to tinker with. I don't need to tinker with my social media.

29:15Yeah. So like, yeah. OK, I want to go experience it this way and see what it's like when you have all of those resources. You have like very good user interface designers and stuff participating in this. Yeah. And we also just don't know what level of interoperability there's going to be. Yeah. It may suck. Right. Like it could just be garbage and it doesn't even touch most of the rest of the Fediverse. And then it's like, well, boy, we sure panicked. Well, so is it you can post and people can follow you? People on a different server can follow your Instagram account. You can follow people from different servers.

29:49That seems like the basics. Right. There's a lot of other things you can do. You can build custom moderation services. That's what Flipboard is doing with Blue Sky and others. You could – they could have it moderate not with Mastodon but with these Reddit alternatives like Lemmy and KBEN. There's a lot of ways. So from what we understand, Instagram is like starting to have meetings. The meetings are under NDA, which is also extremely contentious in this community. I'll tell you when we go have meetings at these companies, we're journalists. We don't sign the NDAs. I always just look at the iPad they have and I say no.

30:24And then there's a sigh and they go and get me a different badge. And that badge is like, don't talk to this person. Don't look at this person. So I get it. I don't sign the NDAs. But I think these conversations are basically meta slash Instagram is trying to be a good participant. And like what they're facing is we don't want you to be here. Yeah, I do think one more sort of broad point I would make is I think one of the things that is a real worry is that the Fediverse is absolutely not ready for this many people. I think you could argue that the Fediverse isn't ready to have as many people as it currently has.

31:01it's it's been a really interesting thing to watch both with twitter folks going to mastodon and with reddit folks going to things like lemmy and cabin those products are not done they're like beta tech projects that everyone who works on them can make you a long list of the things that's wrong with them and they're now trying to figure out and it's just complicated and slow work to build one of these things and then all of a sudden like it's not an accident that like nobody was talking about cabin and then all of a sudden a lot of reddit users start looking for somewhere to go they find it and even on cabins website it's like this is alpha software but people are showing up because they just need somewhere to go right and i think one of the things on this fedi pact that a lot of people are signing which is this like incredible hot pink website it's beautiful one of the very first things that they mention about why this is a thing that you should sign and you should not let meta on is about content moderation and it's partly about content moderation based on the assumption that meta is bad at it and won't do it for its own stuff, which will then pollute the rest of the Fediverse.

32:03But it's also about the fact that no one has figured this out because this got to scale so fast that most of the content moderation is done by the people who own the specific servers, which is just like a dude in his house for the most part. And figuring out how to do content moderation at this scale has been tough. Like when I wrote this story about ActivityPub, I think it was a Neil Dash that I was talking to who was like, if Instagram shows up and just dumps 30 million people into the Fediverse, the whole thing is going to collapse. And I think that's a real valid fear. Like Mastodon is by no means a finished product that is ready for this many people to be interacting with it.

32:39Right. That's fair. I just, you know, you know how I feel. It's impossible. This is an impossible task. And the thing that they are saying about content moderation is not Meta is bad at it. I think Meta is exactly as good at it as it wants to be. Yeah. And it's actually like if you take the politics out of it, Meta is very good at it. You get to the politics of it, specifically what speech, what kinds of speech will and won't be allowed. Meta has made some decisions that I disagree with, that other people disagree with, that many people agree with, disagree with on the other side of the coin. And really what people are reacting to, what almost everyone is always reacting to is those decisions on the margin.

33:20And so the position of Mastodon as a collection of people is we wish to be so tolerant that some people are banned, which is really where you come back around to. Like Donald Trump Jr. is not welcome here is like a very tolerant position in its own weird twisted way. OK. Like Meta is going to make a very different kind of determination. And that's the content moderation they're talking about. Yeah. I think that's where I'm always the most interested in the Fediverse is lots of different servers can make lots of different decisions and you're not tied to them forever. You can go somewhere else.

33:56You can follow people on different servers with different rules. The market, such as it may ever exist, is actually making those speech determinations and not the government or one guy, one guy who's delegated to a bunch of lawyers that you never hear about. That's where the mistake has been. I just don't see that that's their real concern, those who are fighting against meta. Because, like, what's the point of the Fediverse where every instance can determine its own content moderation if you don't let people determine their own content moderation? Like, I get that it's a big company coming in.

34:31And I think that's certainly a thing to be fearful of. But, like, it stands on content moderation, isn't? Because, like, that's the point of the Fediverse. They get to decide that. They get to decide that for their users. and all of those 30 million or whoever, 10 million, five people that join Instagram threads or whatever it ends up being called. Yeah, but you don't have to contribute value to it. Yeah. Right. You're like, this is my club and you can't just like take the content out of it and put it into your app. Right. In many ways, you kind of end up right at this weird Reddit situation. Yeah.

35:04Where like my server's content, which is really what my users have contributed to, I will control the boundaries of. Right. I will not let AI scrape it and I will not let it interact with Meta's product. And I think we're just in for a few years of the internet re-figuring out that dynamic. Yeah. I think that's going to be fun. Yeah. I'm excited for that. I mean, this is like, again, I think this is why The Verge exists. Because covering the stories, A, you have to start with Usenet, which is perfect. and B, it's as much of a technical capability story as it is a how do people behave on the internet as it is a what is meta's product going to be story.

35:45And I frankly challenge you to find another group of nerds that will pay attention to it as much as we will. All right, we need to take a break. I need to watch this video of Mark Zuckerberg and Jiu-Jitsu Mets one more time. We'll be right back.

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37:13Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

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38:27All right, we're back. I'm going to stay on the social media tip for one second longer. Just a second. Is that okay? And it's done. It's passed. It's done. You know, there's gadgets to talk about. Yeah. There's a trial going on. All right. We do need to talk about Reddit, though. Jay Peters has been just owning the Reddit story top to bottom. He interviewed Steve Huffman. That interview went. It went. Sure did. Haunted car. It's fine. Reddit is, you know, they're staying the course. They're not backing down in any which way. I would say the protests have gotten increasingly hilarious and true Reddit style.

39:02At one point, Reddit said this needs to be more democratic. It can't just be the moderators. I think Steve Huffman referred to the moderators as the landed gentry of Reddit, which is very funny. so the moderator started holding votes many subreddits including i think our others said okay we're only allowing pictures of john oliver our users voted on it there's nothing he can do i think not just pictures but sexy pictures of john that's a very important part of it john oliver has been like he uploaded a folder of photos for them to use which is very good other subreddits allowed not safe for work content which is very funny right it did not like this at all just various other protests did you know the the female fashion advice subreddit is only doing posts about 1700s fashion now it's so good that's very good some reddits have made everybody a moderator into like true democracy also very good i don't know this is accomplishing anything because all these people are still using reddit right so going dark is like a direct attack on Reddit because new users, search users can't access the communities.

40:11Everyone's going to show up and post pictures of John Oliver. What's Reddit going to do? Enjoy the engagement. I don't know, though. I think people on the internet have learned at this point that just saying we're not going to use this product anymore doesn't work, right? Like you can't organize traffic killing. But what you can do, and one of the things I think has been very clever is like all of these subreddits categorizing themselves as not safe for work which means they don't get monetized in the same way and so that's like there's a direct hit to what yeah reddit actually cares about which is its money these things with john oliver like it's you just at the same time steve huffman is at can trying to get more advertisers to come on reddit is just making a joke of itself as a platform which in a way i would actually argue is a much more powerful version of protest which is to say like, oh, you think you actually run this platform?

41:05Like, hell no, you don't. We run this platform and you can try and fight us all you want. We're actually in charge of what happens here. And I think like to me, that has actually come through like loud and clear. Yeah. But does it mean anything at the end of the day? No, and it won't. And all these apps are going to shut down and Reddit is going to go about its business. But at least it feels like you can feel like you tried. Well, so here's the thing that's really, I think, happening. Reddit is now imposing its power over this community. They sent an email to a bunch of the moderators of the subs that had gone private.

41:41The email was a threat. Like, I don't – I'm not going to beat around the bush. It's not in the language of a threat, but the email was, hey, if you want to get rid of the moderators who have chosen to go private or you think they're not doing the job, let us know and we'll help you get rid of them. And like, that's what, how, how else should you read this? If I'm a moderator that is choosing to stay dark, Reddit is emailing my fellow moderators and the users of the subreddits and saying they can get rid of me if I stay the course. Right. And it went even further. In some cases, there was a there was a thing they were saying to moderators that was essentially by taking your subreddit dark, you're actually violating the terms of the code of conduct on Reddit because you're not being good to your community by not letting people use it, which is a leap.

42:29But then the threat there is that the consequence for not taking care of your community is Reddit will remove you as a moderator and put somebody else in. So they've been making abundantly clear that, like, play by the rules or we'll just throw you out and find somebody who will in every way they can. Which is, again, they wrote the rules. They're allowed to say you should play by them. But the attitude and the posture here are extremely aggressive. And, you know, if you are communicating, one responsibility you have is to help people feel about how you're communicating. And so if the moderators are telling us they feel threatened, those are threats.

43:01That's just how that works. That's life. And what's so weird about this to me is Reddit's been around for 18 years. Where has this been? At least when Twitter went insane, it was because somebody bought it. At least something changed. And I think part of what has been so strange for Redditors is this sense that, okay, there's a guy in charge who's been on Reddit literally since the beginning. He is a co-founder of the thing. He loves this more than anybody. And all of a sudden, just like on a dime, just decides to totally screw over the entire community all at once. And I think like the actions have felt bad, but I think this like total surprise of it all is the worst part of a lot of it for some folks.

43:40Because for most people, it really did come out of nowhere. It was just like one minute. It was that New York Times story. Like all of a sudden, it's just like, oh, Steve Huffman wants to make money. And then everyone on Reddit is like, oh, shit. Yeah. And just fury. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and killing the app. I mean, that's the real thing. Like the rollout, that's the precipitating factor. But this we are in control of Reddit is new. So here's the thing I wanted to bring up. We have been reporting on this left and right. Jay Peters on our team owns the story. He's the one who interviewed Huffman. Lots of mods are talking to him.

44:11Lots of Reddit people are talking to him. Like good journalists, we go to Reddit for comment on all these stories. Reddit is very unhappy that people are talking to us. they have decided that their official position is that they will wait for us to make mistakes and then issue corrections in order to discredit our journalism that's straight up what they're doing i know this is what they're doing because we have a statement because they told us because they told us tim rashmitt who runs comms at reddit says their blanket statement is will no longer comment on hearsay unsubstantiated claims or baseless accusations from the verge will be in touches corrections are needed.

44:50Oh my God. I've been playing this game a long time. We'll wait for you to make a mistake. So then we can correct you and say your reporting was wrong is the oldest trick in the book. And we were just not going to fall for it. So we're just going to print this statement in every story from here on out. Like that's the way it's going to go. And if they want us to get it right, they can, they can tell us what is actually happening, but I will come back to, we're going to take the people on the ground. We're going to take the users. We're going to take the moderators. We're going to take the employees every time.

45:16And if you think they're wrong, You can tell us and you can explain why they're wrong, but we're not going to stop because you're running like a 1920s press playbook, like whatever. Like we're just going to burn you every time. And it's that attitude. It's this aggressive posture where people are worried and they're coming to reporters and saying, here are our worries. Here's the communication we have received that makes us feel threatened. And Reddit's response is shut up. That's what breaks your community. And like that story is easy to tell. We don't actually need your help to do it. And I think they're misjudging all of that because when Instagram decides to launch its Lemmy clone and start that drama, people will just go.

46:00When Google decides, crap, we need something like Reddit to exist for search to be good. Here's a Reddit clone that we'll kill in five years. People will go use it. And the danger here is this posture. I don't care. We'll just print the line. We print the poop emoji from Twitter in every single story. Like, who cares? Right? We're like, this is what we do. This is what you said. We're going to print it. Your users are going to take a very different message from that than we are. Like, we will just keep doing journalism. And I don't think that anybody quite understands that term. I think they understand it and they don't care.

46:34Straight up. Yeah. I think for them, they view this as a relatively minor problem and something that they can just brute force their way out of. And so they don't care if all of these things are going crazy right now because they're hoping, OK, in a month or two, it'll pass and we'll go back. And hopefully now we'll be able to sell ads because we'll have a much more predictable community that we can more easily monetize. Like part of this is taming it and getting out all the people that would make it more difficult to monetize. This is like Elon firing all of his staff, only it's Reddit firing all of its users.

47:10Right. And so it's like, OK, we're just going to get rid of all of you who makes it more difficult for us. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's a pitch that they're doing behind closed doors, because that's a pretty compelling one. If you're an advertiser and you want to avoid risk at all costs, Reddit right now is a super – Reddit even before this was super risky, right? Because they say no not safe for work stuff here. And you would still occasionally be like, oh, I didn't need to see that this morning checking Reddit. And they can get rid of a lot of those people and have a much calmer, easier to sell, easier to control community.

47:44And I think that's the point. I think that's probably the plan is that these people will tucker themselves out or they'll leave. I totally agree with that. I don't think it was the plan. I agree with every other part of that. But what seems clear to me now in retrospect is that Reddit thought it could do this relatively easily, that making these changes would cause some pain because it always causes some pain, but that it would get through it relatively quickly. Right. And then Christian Seelig, the Apollo developer, starts making a lot of noise and a lot of people get angry. And this just gets worse and worse.

48:18And then I think at some point, Steve Huffman and the executives at Reddit decided the only thing to do is just rip the Band-Aid off. And then I suspect what it seems like at any rate happened is they basically just decided to like put on a bunch more band-aids and rip those off too. That it was like, okay, this is a moment we're going to go from rage over one thing to like just get all the rage out now. Like let's have this hard reset with the moderators that Reddit has had forever. It has had the admins at Reddit and the mods at Reddit have had this contentious relationship forever where the admins wish the mods would run it as a platform more the way the company wants.

48:55And the mods wish they got more tools to run it the way that they want it. And this is Reddit, like, absolutely. I think you're right. Exerting its authority and saying this is the hard reset. And I think at some point you just have no choice but to fight through it. Like, I don't think Reddit wanted it to get this bad, but I think at some point they looked at each other and said, well, it's going to be this bad anyway. Like, let's just go to war. Yeah. They can't back down at this point. Yeah. This is never let a crisis go to waste. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I think you're right, though. They probably didn't intend this, but now that they've got it, they're like, okay, let's lean in.

49:28Burn it to the ground. The other way of saying that is that chaos is a ladder and you really want to find the line between the two. Like, one of them ends with the king being dead. Not the show being good, but the king being dead. Reddit's going to win with the power of stories, you guys. Okay, that's enough Game of Thrones on this episode of VergeCast. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about some gadgets, do a little letting around. Wrap this thing up. We'll be right back.

49:59Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

50:33promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants at the end of the day the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates and with linkedin you can feel confident that you're getting the best based on linkedin data 72 of smbs using linkedin say that it helps them find high quality candidates find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use linkedin for hiring today find your next great hire on linkedin post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from 1Password.

51:13Think for just a moment about the Herculean tasks that your IT security department has to handle. There's keeping identities, devices, and applications safe. Then there's dealing with shadow IT, securely onboarding and offboarding employees. Oh, also there's meeting compliance goals. The point is, it's a lot. If you want to help lighten that load, you can try Trileka by 1Password. Trileka by 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance, and it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. 1Password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users in over 150 ,000 businesses from IBM to Slack.

51:55Plus, 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third-party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged shadow IT. Learn more at 1Password.com slash VergeCast. That's the number one password dot com slash VergeCast. MARK MANDELAVICIUSSKI - We're back. We're going to clear the air from all this social networking talk until a little bit later. It's like a little between courses gadget palette cleanser. MELANIE WARRICKS - A little grapefruit. MARK MANDELAVICIUSSKI - When I think of Amuse Bouche, I think of the Google Pixel tablet, the light, refreshing Google Pixel tablet.

52:47MELANIE WARRICKS - I think Dan would probably agree with you. MARK MANDELAVICIUSSKI - I think he would agree that it is light. MELANIE WARRICKS - Yeah. MARK MANDELAVICIUSSKI - I don't know that refreshing. I don't know that we've actually refreshed the Android tablet strategy, but Dan reviewed the Google Pixel tablet this week. That's the Pixel tablet that has the dock that makes it look like a giant Nest Hub. Yeah, it's an Android tablet. $500 Android tablet. Which we should say is not nothing. One of my favorite things about this was talking to Dan through this whole process. He just kept testing the thing and being like, Google made an Android tablet that is actually like a kind of good tablet for the first time in a really long time.

53:22Is that anything? And we just kind of were like, we spent the whole time he wrote this review and I was editing it with him. It was like, is this anything? Because it is. It's a good tablet. It's a nice device. It has a nice screen. It has decent speakers. The dock thing seems to be really clever. There's a lot of little details missing in the way that you would expect a first generation product to be missing. Extra docks are too expensive. It's missing some of the smart display stuff that people might want, but it gets most of the basics right. It has no big ideas about what a tablet should be, which to some extent I love about it.

53:55It's not, there's no like heady thesis about tablets being the future of anything. It's literally deliberately just a screen for you to look at. And sometimes you will look at it while you're holding it. And sometimes you will look at it while you're cooking in the kitchen and it's sitting on its dock. That's the whole story. And the thing Dan and I spent a long time talking about was how you think about$500 in that context, which I'm very curious what you guys think, because I've gone back and forth a million times on whether this thing is a good deal or not. It depends on whether you think it's a tiny portable TV or an iPad.

54:29That's how I think about it. So iPads are very cheap. They have really good software ecosystems. Apple will update the software every year on time without fail for like a decade. It's$329. There's an ecosystem of cases. If you break an iPad screen, you can walk into any mall kiosk in the world and get a crappy replacement for that screen for not a lot. Like the iPad is an ecosystem. And I will just come back to this. And Apple updates the software on that iPad. Apple is going to make iPads next year. Is Google going to make Pixel tablets next year? I hope they don't make iPads next year. It would be amazing if Apple was like, eh, we're doing a Google.

55:12No more iPads. I'm just saying, like, if you think about it as a competitor to the iPad, this thing loses left and right. For$500, you can get an iPad Air, a superior product to this, with a documented history of actual support from the company that makes it. But no doc. Tim Cook knows they make iPads. Has Sundar Pichai ever held the Pixel tablet? You know, at this point with Google sprawl, they are narrowing it down. But like if you think about a competitor iPad, like just on the merits, that's tough. That's a tough comparison. And Google has a lot of baggage. If you are like, this is a TV that sits in a dock and shows me my Google photos.

55:48And sometimes I can turn off the air conditioner with the smart home controls. 500 bucks is actually not so bad. Couldn't you do that with an iPad? There's no iPad dock for a kitchen. That's fair. Right? If this is a slightly bigger Nest Hub that also happens to run an ecosystem of video playing apps. Yeah, the doc's the part. You talked to David about how there's no big ideas here. But the doc feels not really a big idea. We've seen Lenovo and other people experiment with it. But it seems like a well-executed version of a very old big idea. And that's kind of exciting to me because everybody kind of sucks at these docs.

56:24Yeah. And this one seems to be good. Yeah. One of my favorite things that Dan told me was that he has a magic keyboard for the iPad that he literally just uses as a stand for his iPad to just dock it in and out of, which is also a thing that I've done. And it is the most ludicrously overpriced iPad stand you could possibly imagine. But for all the ecosystem stuff that there is in Apple's world, there actually aren't that many things you can attach to an iPad. It has the little plugs on the bottom, the smart connector stuff, but that hasn't really turned into anything. So we have a seventh-gen iPad that we bought for Max.

56:59It was her first iPad. She's on her second iPad now. Just flick it. She's five. But we still have this one lying around. It basically just, like, got too old. Like, I bought the cheapest one when she was born, and then she got to about three, and I was like, I'm so sorry, kid. Like, you deserve a reasonably fast computer. So we just had this thing, and what's it there for? It's there to, like, show photos and, I don't know, sometimes be a kitchen TV or whatever. And I went looking for a dock that uses the smart connector on the bottom, and there are zero. Yeah. Zero. There's one. Logitech made it.

57:32It was called the Logidock. They sold it for like$129, and they stopped making it because it charged too slow and got the iPad hot. It's also like three inches thick for reasons I never understood. But yeah, it's bad. Is it like a technology thing? No. I think Apple has claimed the smart connector is open and does not require licenses. That can't be true then. That does not seem to be the case. Because otherwise Belkin would have 12 docs out there. Yeah. And they have zero. I think the reality is the smart connector might not be that great. Yeah. And there's no way to test it because there's nothing that runs the smart connector.

58:06Or the made-for-iPhone mafia. Like if anybody tells us the answer, like they're dead. Yeah. And I would say it's been 10 years of me asking for this story. I have been trying to write a story about the made-for-iPhone program, the MFI program, and what it's like really like for 10 years. It has destroyed reporters. The wreckage, the human wreckage of me asking for a story about the MFI program is vast. But if you want to tell us about it. Several Apple employees just showed up outside the studio, as you were saying. It is the most tight. Like, we're like, we're going to do a whole episode on HDMI.

58:44And like, people are like, yeah, we'll talk about that. And it's cutthroat politics. A whole episode at USB. We're like, we want to do a whole episode about MFI, about the lightning connector. and like darkness falls. Say that again. It's like, oh, Merta. It's not happening. But I think the smart connector is wrapped up into that. So that's why there's no dots. There we go. That's basically the answer. I like that plan. That's a good idea. But I will say I am very enthusiastic about the idea of a good fancy kitchen TV. I wish this thing didn't cost$500. I think if it was like$349, I would have bought one already.

59:18That feels right. Right. It's just a smidge out of the range where I can just like feel like it's an obviously good idea right now. Like I have an iPad and I can just carry it in and out of my kitchen and that basically works. Also, there's no remote for it, right? No, I'm firmly on. You got 10 remotes on the end of your arms. Yeah, I need so many remotes. You have like you're in your kitchen. Your hands are dirty. You don't want to like dry. Like I want a remote that can get all grubby in my kitchen and also then be cleaned. so I don't disease people. Like throw it in the dishwasher? I didn't wash it in the sink without electrocuting myself.

59:56This is a point in favor of the Pixel tablet because Siri is garbage and Google Assistant is not garbage. It's very exciting. All right, I found you something called the Slim Seal 5-in-1 Universal Waterproof Remote Control. But does it work for the Google Pixel tablet? It's just a stylus you use to touch the Pixel tablet. I don't like it. And I will say that Google's AI search results are like, what are you doing? This is the most useless AI. Never mind. Every now and again, I look at what AI can actually produce. I'm like, I'm not worried. That's how you know you're going to be first against the wall.

1:00:38Look, that's the thing about the TV in the kitchen. It's what everybody wants. It's what everyone's trying to build. It's been the pinnacle of technology since the 50s. And everyone's still kind of like looking at their phones. Also, the fact that it's like Android on the back end, I don't think that processor is fast enough to support like fast users switching in a way that would make having actual Android apps in your kitchen like useful to you. Right. Like if this thing is actually signed into my Google account, it's just like sitting on the dock in the kitchen. Like Android tablets are not swift.

1:01:09It's switching to my wife's account or whatever. And there's just like that piece of it. Why would you need that speed in the kitchen? Oh, because if, at least in my world, if the other people, if it's not instant, it will just never be used. Right? If I was like, here's what I want you to do. I want you to get into, walk into this room, and then to use this huge screen, I want you to push some fiddly buttons and wait. And it takes like 30 seconds? Nope. Yeah, but Becky's like, I'm going to use my phone. Instantly, without question, she'll use her phone. But, Neal, I would remind you again that, do you know what the iPad has in terms of multiple users?

1:01:44Nothing.

1:01:49yeah true and that's why max has had two of them no i i think like this is one of those things that i i sincerely hope google stays at this because i think there's a there's a version of this a couple of years from now that's maybe a little cheaper and a little better and fixes some of the little things that are missing like you're talking about and this starts to get really compelling um i have absolutely zero faith that that is going to happen but i sincerely hope we like that i live to see the google pixel tablet three i'm gonna like send you a sign print that says i hope google sticks with this and you can just like hang it above your desk it'll go right next to my rick osterlo dartboard remember when there was like a 27 inch android tablet that was supposed to be a tv for your kitchen like in 2014 putting a tv in your kitchen is the only dream the tech industry has ever had they suck so much chat because they haven't figured out the waterproof remote it's the remote you figure that out the rest of it'll fall it's like can we run windows on your tv and can that tv live in your kitchen and everyone's like you've got bad ideas no no thank you other gadget news a bunch of vision pro stuff is out this week apple officially released the sdk to let developers start playing with it they're going to have open developer beta zones you airlift into them you drop out and then they put a headset on your face and you're allowed to test your apps.

1:03:12You have to send an Indy A. Very complicated process. I really like imagining that there are going to be like planes and like you know how the oxygen mask drops down? You're going to like sit in your seat and a Vision Pro is just going to drop down from the ceiling. Apple has chartered a number of 747s and they will circle the globe letting people try the headset. It's perfect. This is true. It's all right there. The previous section was like an impassioned plea about how to make journalism. this section I'm lying to you and telling you that Apple's going to fly developers around the world wearing headsets to build apps that's just the bird chest you never know what's going to happen but we've seen some apps from this SDK because people have gotten it they're able to like start building in the simulator the simulator is very funny because all the apps are in like a fake living room you just like look at the photos and all the screenshots are like what if you had a beautiful living room do we know whose living room it is that's some Apple living room the number of beautiful fake living rooms in the Apple campus is off the charts.

1:04:06It really is. I was just wondering if it's based on anyone in particular. Is it Tim Cook's living room? It's too small to be Tim Cook's living room. You know Tim Cook, his living room is like a gigantic expanse of granite. He's got a conversation pit. I think he's got the pit. You think he's like, step down with me? Yeah. Big fireplace. It's like, welcome, welcome. Come down. Come down into my conversation. Step down with me is Tim Cook's memoir title. Step down with me is amazing. Anyway, so we've seen the apps. The apps are pretty interesting, right? I saw a version of pCalc. I've seen a few other apps.

1:04:39Some interesting things we've discovered already is the concept of dark mode seems to make no sense in, like, spatial computing. Yeah. Then there's two ways to get an app into the simulator. One, you can take an iPad app and go that way, or you can build it in the Vision Pro SDK. And the iPad apps are just floating iPad apps. I love it. It's just here they are. And the Vision Pro apps are like frosted glass about depth. And it's just very clear that like that's how you should do it. I mean, this is like back to when the iPad first came out and there was a thing you could do where you would just hit the 2X button.

1:05:17Do you remember this? You could run an iPhone app and you would just hit the 2X and it would blow up to the size of the iPad. You can still do that. That's how the majority of the people are running Instagram on their iPads. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think the Vision Pro is going to have a long run of being just like that, where it's just going to be like, we took a rectangle. Here it is in another place. Do you like this rectangle? Well, this is always back to Apple's initial strategy with anything, which is you like apps, right? Here are some apps. And they did it with the Mac. Remember, they're like iPad apps now running your Mac.

1:05:48If you are the person who runs iOS and iPadOS apps on your Mac natively, I would love to hear from you. I was so excited about this concept and I did it once with some like. I do it with my air conditioning app. That's good. Do you ever like imagining how many Apple engineers are employed full time so that you can control your heating and cooling from your laptop? I suspect it's one. Also, you should do that in the home app. No, it doesn't work. It doesn't work with HomeKit or Home Assistant. I'm working through it. Medea, call me. You have to move, Alex. That's the only answer. It's time to move.

1:06:26Other Vision Pro news, the information has a report that they didn't show us everything. There are fitness features, which we've been talking about since it came out. We knew it. It will guide users through yoga and Tai Chi. So like crummy supernatural. Do a kick. is that what tai chi is nila nila can you just can you just do us do some tai chi for us right now real quick just for a couple minutes do a cake it's also yoga wave your arms around do cakes uh apparently and then let you interact with content on a stationary bike is it weird that i'm very excited about that specifically like for some reason in in this very good information report that was the thing that jumped out to me is like oh i would use that.

1:07:10I mean, if they do it well, that would be really cool. Yeah. Like I often, the only way I will ever use a treadmill or a stationary bike is if I can also watch a television program because otherwise God helped me. And so I'm, I'm the guy who like brings my iPad to the gym and just sets it up in front of me and like watches the league for an hour while I run on the treadmill, uh, or stand on the treadmill and watch the league. And, and the idea of having a headset, it's kind of like the, the plain example, right? It's this, it's this very sort of specific episodic thing where I would very much like to not be here.

1:07:41And I can totally see why something like that would make a lot of sense on a stationary bike. I'd be very into that. Yeah, but you're still on the bike. The part that sucks is being on the bike. That's the problem. I like resent it. Like I was trying to watch Ted Lasso one day on the stationary bike and I was just like, I'm on this bike. I could be watching this on the couch. It's just right over there. Stupid moving. Stupid moving. Well, look, here's what I'm saying. Do a kick. Have you thought about kicking more? Do a gentle kick. I think we all agree that this is one of the killer apps for these devices.

1:08:14I don't know how I feel about riding a stationary bike with a wired battery pack in my pocket. Yeah. Or mounted to the bike in some way. Getting all hot and sweaty. Oh, gross. And then the back. Ugh. Gross. Just kick that right off your body. You're definitely not sharing that headset with other people. Yeah. Gross. But you can see that there's an expansive vision for this. I think the fact that – I mean we know that they released it at WWC so developers could get into it. The fact that the SDK is out so quickly afterwards and that people will be getting to use it well before it actually launches next year.

1:08:49There is an amount of confidence in this device that I think is fascinating. It's – I'm still – the more I think about it, every time I think about it, I think of that picture of the guy taking a picture of his kids wearing the headset. That's the use case. Yeah, there's a version of this where they're already assuming people are bought into wearing a headset and they're going to do all the things in the headset. And it's like, no, step one, they got to put on the headset. Like you got to tell them something amazing is going to happen in that headset before they put it on. Which is why fitness is so powerful.

1:09:20Like fitness is the reason wearables worked because people will put things on their body to track their health and fitness. I was going to say it's the reason the meta headset has done one of the reasons. I just started doing Supernatural again. The boxing absolutely kicks my ass every single time, but it's so fun. You're like, oh, it's only 10 minutes? Whatever. And then you're like, fuck. Just wrecked at the end. It's great. I love it. Speaking of do a kick, there's kicks in Supernatural boxing. Literally. There's a thing. It's like, I'm going to kick it. And then you kick it. It's great. It's perfect.

1:09:47Do that, Vision Pro. Yeah. Well, it sounds like they will. Only you'll get a calming Apple voice. It's going to be great. It's going to be Johnny Ives' voice. I really want to watch you do Tai Chi. I will buy a Vision Pro if you guarantee me that Johnny Ives' voice will be like, do a kick.

1:10:04You want me to wear the headset? I'll wear the headset. It's ridiculous. But yeah, I think that's where fitness comes in. I think that's where this other stuff comes in. But I think Apple's entire approach to this is like they've skipped the first step of like, why do you want to put this on? We'll see. We got a long way to go. More news out of our friends in Europe. They just keep passing laws over there. I love them. God bless them. Well, so this one is tough. Barbara wrote about this. She's super into it. A new regulation that will say phone batteries have to be easily replaceable. It makes sense.

1:10:36This is like we've covered every twist and turn of the phone battery story. Apple got into a lot of trouble for actually rattling its phones as the batteries got older. A justified reason. Maybe you got to tell people you're doing it. A lot of trouble for that. They've launched a battery repair program. They've launched all these repair programs due to regulations around the country and the world. and now we're at actually just from the beginning you have to make the battery replaceable. Yeah. This has pretty huge implications for how phones are designed. Yes. And we should say it hasn't been passed.

1:11:06It seems very likely it's going to. The initial vote was, I think, let's see, Barbara said 587 votes in favor, nine against, and 20 abstentions. It's a pretty strong majority. But the thing I think is most interesting about this is the phrase that it uses is that portable batteries have to be designed, quote, in such a way that consumers can themselves easily remove and replace them. And the phrase easily remove and replace is in bold. And you can just tell this was so carefully worded so that you can't get out of it by saying, OK, we'll make it easy to go to the Apple store and replace it or a third party manufacturer.

1:11:40It means no, a human being needs to be able to open up their phone, remove their battery and put in a new one like that. That is clearly the outcome they're looking for here. And I think that's really fascinating. Couldn't Apple argue that they can do that now? No. You can't argue that someone could remove the battery from their Apple. Oh, my God. I love when you pull the adhesive in there. Yeah. Very slow. The most satisfying thing in the world. It's like the way that phones are designed and structured. Right. The batteries are actually, in many cases now, like a component of the structure of the phone.

1:12:12Yeah. Okay. Like all that's got to change because now you can just like take it out. I don't think we're going to go back to plastic tab batteries that pop out when you drop the phone. I miss this. And you might still have to be able to unscrew the phone. We'll see. It would make the phone thicker. It would make the phone thicker, potentially. Potentially affect waterproofing. It really just depends on where the connector for the battery is. Is it outside? Is it exposed? Or is it still inside the case and you just unscrew the case? I think if it comes down to you can remove two screws in the bottom of your phone, pop up in your phone, swap out the battery with a weird little connector that's pretty delicate, and you screw your phone back together.

1:12:48And then they get all the money from everybody bringing it in because they broke the delicate connector. Yeah. Boom. It's easily replaceable. You just suck. Yeah. I think we're going to hear Apple go to war against this. Yeah. Like they didn't go to war against USPC. You know, they're like, oh, no, we have to use a connector we designed. Ooh. If you don't know, Apple basically designed the USPC connector. It's like a real thing. Fine. They're like, we don't want to do it, but we get it. We're already putting iPads. This is like, you're going to blow up the phone market. Yeah. How many Apple lawyers are currently en route to the EU?

1:13:27747s full of lawyers in that sense. Just going, getting over there. All right. Let's do a little bit of lightning round. Let's wrap this thing up. Here's my lightning round one. I want to talk about this Gary Vaynerchuk interview on Decoder. So I interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk. We're going to allow you to talk about Decoder because you're using it as your lightning. David said I'm allowed to do DVD liner notes for Decoder on the broadcast. I just want you to know that this is two weeks in a row that you have talked about this on the Vergecast, and I'm outraged. Well, I'm the person who's always like, the fish never talk about the water.

1:13:54This is like a phrase he used all the time, and I just did it to myself. Because if you have been in ad-supported media for a decade, you are aware that VaynerMedia is a gigantic ad agency that basically invented the concept of social marketing. Like the brands are at it again is the thing that VaynerMedia like dragged into existence. Thank you, guys. It's not. Whatever. It's just true. I'm not saying. Without Gary Vaynerchuk, the phrase, sir, this is a Wendy's may not exist. And their clients are like real clients like Pepsi and TikTok and like huge car companies are like VaynerMedia clients.

1:14:32So this is something I just like know because they're just – I work in ad-supported media. I'm aware of ad agencies. It's a thing. Our audience does not know this. And I completely forgot that this thing that is just like baked into my job of like knowing what ad agencies are. It's like obviously nobody. They know the NFT guy. And I forgot to like say it out loud. Yes, I think. I think. Is anyone confused about how I feel about NFTs? How do you feel about them? They're dumb. What do you want from me? I think they're dumb. We call them scams for the whole time of NFT summer. Great. The thing I'm interested in is the end of the social web and the fact that being a content creator on a social platform is a fundamentally tenuous and hard way to earn a living.

1:15:19And all the biggest creators in the world, they hit a point of their fame and they pivot to something more stable. Like fighting other people in a cage. Legitimately fighting other people in a cage. Fake boxing is a more stable career than being a YouTuber. That's weird. Right? Selling – we'll stay with the Paul brothers. Selling prime energy drinks is a more stable career than being a YouTuber. Weird. Just weird outcomes left and right. You just go down the list. The D 'Amelio sisters are selling shoes. I think it's because her dad used to be a shoe guy. But like they've pivoted to – and they're like, we're going to innovate in the footwear space.

1:16:01And you just listen to that sentence and you're like, but why are you doing that? And it's because it's a more stable business. And then you see what's happening with a lot of platforms and all the change. And so my interest is, oh, I want to go talk to the person who makes the platforms money. So when we talk about Facebook's revenue or TikTok's revenue, it comes from companies advertising on those platforms. And ad agencies sit in the middle of those transactions. So Facebook makes money because ad agencies like publicists or whatever spend money on Facebook on behalf of their big clients. VaynerMedia invented a bunch of the stuff.

1:16:35and I just forgot to say it out loud. So I know people are mad at me about this interview and maybe I should have had him arrested on site. Maybe that's how you feel about Gary Vaynerchuk. But the thing that's interesting to me is like, here's the company and here's a person who mastered that moment. And his view on where it's going is super interesting if you think the moment is ending, which I do. He's at Cannes this week, the big ad agency thing in France. And he's giving speeches on stage. like AI, we're going to ruin our creative with AI. That's the part of him that I think you don't see where he talks to his people on the ad agency side.

1:17:12Like I said, I wish I'd reframed this interview. Dave and I have been talking about it since it came out. Like, oh, I just forgot to say the thing I know. Yeah. Not everybody thinks about ad agencies as often as I do. I mean, yeah, Gary contains multitudes. He's a complicated dude. I think NFTs suck, by the way. I don't want to be like, I will say he does not make a compelling case for NFT. he makes a compelling case for creating cool collectibles that people want. Why those need to be digital things on the blockchain? Don't know. But I just want to say - Because it's faster and cheaper. Is it?

1:17:45I'm not even sure that's true. It's just worse is the only thing I know for sure. But the one thing I want to say, people should listen to the episode. However you feel about Gary Vee, it's a really interesting episode. But he says this one thing to you, Eli, that has really stuck out to me. You're basically talking about kind of where to go on platforms. And he is just ruthless about it. He's basically like, I go where the attention is. I have no other metrics. I want to be where people are. And you essentially are basically asking about how to sort of monetize as an influencer and what, whether you should worry when one goes away or just go where the attention is.

1:18:17And he says, that would be like saying running commercials on Seinfeld is not sustainable. No shit. Once it hasn't got the attention, you have to move on. Like, that's just it. Like, done. Just ruthless. It's like, I will go where people are. And when people go somewhere else, I don't care where it is. I'll be there too. That's the internet. That's the internet. Yeah, but it's also to me, that's why I keep saying like the influencers aren't making money. Like being the most famous TikToker is not a great business. It's certainly not like long-term sustainable. It'll burn you the hell out. Like all these platforms reward scale.

1:18:47I was talking to James Vincent today about just AI and what it's going to do to the web. And what we were talking about is if you are a YouTuber and you make four perfect YouTube videos a year, you're not going to make it. If you make two crappy YouTube videos a day with garish YouTube thumbnails, you're probably on your way to success. One of those things is going to burn you out instantly. I mean, no question. Every YouTuber will tell you it will. Doug DeMuro, one of my favorite YouTubers. What's he pivoting towards? Cars and bids. What's cars and bids and the big investment in cars and bids allowing him to do right now?

1:19:21Expand the number of hosts on his channel. He's still going to make as many videos. He's the first person to tell you. But like he's spreading out the workload to make the amount of content that YouTube demands of him. That's just a weird place to be. So you listen to Vaynerchuk's approach. He's not trying to monetize the content. He's trying to put ads near attention. And that's the internet. Like that's how all the platforms are monetized. They are ruthless. And so I just think there's a turn in there where it's like if you don't know where the money is going, you actually don't – you're not going to have an understanding of how the next platform shift will happen.

1:19:55happen again i forgot to say this out loud wish i had said this all out but that's the impetus of this and you know every day we will strive to be better but that's to me it's i i really think we're at this like crazy moment in the social web and talking to people who built it involves talking to the marketers who have built it because they're the money like we they have been you know that what's the saying if the thing if you're not paying for it you're the product yeah we're the they're the ones buying the product. And there's just something in there that I think is like, are they ready for this?

1:20:30Is that world ready for this too? I'll tell you one other quick story and then we can move on to the next sliding round. This is the longest sliding round entry in history. I was with a CMO of a gigantic financial services company. And we were talking about the whole bloodlight kerfuffle. And the worry is that the internet has pushed marketers towards ultra-targeted advertising. That's what internet platforms sell, ultra-targeted advertising. You're going to make a piece of creative to sell Bud Light. You're going to find an audience for that creative that because that has been precisely targeted to them, they are going to be more likely to buy Bud Light.

1:21:04And then next to them, what is constantly happening is total context collapse where like the precisely targeted thing becomes a culture war issue in some other way. And so just the way that people are thinking about even that, like the main thing you sell, targeted advertising is, oh boy, there's danger here that we weren't aware of because of the politics of the country. What are you going to do when targeted advertising is no longer a good idea? Right? Like is that a Virchast story? I don't know. It's boring. It was boring just saying it out loud just now. But like I'm just – like that whole thing, this whole like apparatus of the social internet is straining under the weight.

1:21:41and like I personally think I can do a better job of explaining why I'm interested and talking to people who built it but when they change and when that money moves these companies are going to shift like that overnight to combat sports the way the platforms are going to change overnight they're going to shift to combat sports and everything's going to be fine alright Alex let's throw it in round one Microsoft who's just a little baby yeah they just they're so ineffectual and they're so small and tiny they are increasing the price of Xbox Game Pass and the Xbox Series X. Not in the United States, but in a whole bunch of other places, including the UK.

1:22:17So naturally, our resident Brit, Tom Warren, wrote all about it. The price is going up a little bit for the Xbox Series X. And then it's about a dollar for Game Pass. It's kind of weird because how they're changing the prices. So if you have never subscribed to Xbox Game Pass, you've got to do it before July 6th to avoid the price hike immediately. That's when the price hike goes in for new customers. And then if you're a current customer, you don't have to deal with the price hike until August 13th. And people are kind of upset. They're a little bummed. But Microsoft has been telegraphing this for a while now.

1:22:54And this is all happening the exact same week that they are going to court with the FTC over whether or not they can acquire Activision. And part of that fight is that they have to say that they suck and that they should totally be allowed to buy this company because they're terrible and they suck. and they're the worst in the world. And so they said that they lost the console wars, which I think is a massive, massive thing to drop into a legal doc. Even if it's like just to win a fight, I feel like that's going to have some lasting impact for the company. Yeah. We'll see what happens in this trial.

1:23:30Yeah, it's ongoing. It's like five days. Yeah. Today was day one. Tom has been covering all of it. There's a really great stream. You should totally go watch it, read it, because he's just giving minute-by-minute updates, and it's wild. But for the most part, they are really aggressively being like, we suck the most. We're just babies. We've lost the console battle. Yeah. I don't know how this is going to shake out. Obviously, there's this trial. It'll go one way or another. In the UK, the Competition Markets Authority there has already said no dice. Yep. It feels like Microsoft should walk away.

1:24:03It does. It's a little perplexing that they keep going for it because it seems like it's not going to work in a lot of places. And how does that work? Yeah. Do you just stop operating in those countries when they say, no, you can't acquire it here? Like, do you make a ton of little splinter companies? Yeah. It's just messy. But I think both sides really want this to happen. They want it to happen because they've been on a buying spree for the last few years, buying every single gaming company. So they want it to happen. And then Activision wants it to happen because everybody hates Activision.

1:24:32They would like to stop being Activision. Yeah. Although they get$3 billion if the deal falls apart. So it's a good spot to be in for Activision either way. I would just remind everyone, I'm not saying this is the same at all, but remember when AT &T was going to buy T-Mobile? Do you remember this? And the government stopped it. It's a real thing that happened. And T-Mobile walked away with a breakup fee and then became T-Mobile. And then bought Sprint. Less good. Remember when our nation had four wireless carriers and now we're down to three in Dish Network? Different times. But a little competition goes a long way.

1:25:02All right, David, what's your lightning round? Mine's very quick because both of y 'all just took forever. Which is just that the TikTok CEO, V Pappas, is leaving the company, which is a big deal because they are kind of the American figurehead of TikTok. For a minute, it was Kevin Mayer who was going to be the American figurehead. That was a hilarious disaster. He basically took one look around the room and was like, never mind. And so V has been the COO and the CEO, Shu Chu, has been more visible in recent months. But V leaving is a big deal and I think continues to be more and more evidence that TikTok is not going to get its way and be a happy company in the United States for very long.

1:25:47I cannot imagine being the American symbol of TikTok is a particularly fun job. And so I'm not super shocked. But it is yet another bad sign if you're a person watching to see how TikTok fares in the United States. so tiktok ceo shochu sent an email to the company saying vpapas was leaving and then the spin is don't worry we've hired 20 year disney veteran zenia mucha to join the company in the new role of tiktok's chief brand and communications officer which is not the same thing not very different and you can it's like where is the challenge the challenge is talking about what tiktok is to a bunch of senators not operating tiktok rough yeah we're gonna try to get all these people at the code conference by the way including our friend steve hoffman there you can correct us in person but i i agree with you david i think that the the signs are ominous i would say around tiktok right now yeah agreed the vibes are bad i don't think project texas is gonna go we're about to hit a presidential campaign and i think this is about to flare up again in a pretty big way and i suspect v among other people saw the writing on the wall on that one one last lightning round I want to end on a high note DP Review got purchased by Gear Patrol it's gonna live it's good we love that site we love the work they do weird behavior from Amazon trying to shut it down before selling it for what I assume is just like nothing to Gear Patrol which was happy to take it and they're right home for it but good it's good DP Review is great if you are a camera nerd it's probably already your favorite website if you're not a camera nerd go and you will become a camera nerd you will yeah i'll get that rico one day yeah pr3 oh it's pretty it's so pretty all right we're gonna go and shop for cameras that's it that's the verge cast uh wednesday like i said we'll have full coverage of this microsoft trial that has literally been going on in the background while we're taping there's a live stream on the site tom has been covering it like as it goes we'll have lots of analysis that's all happening Look at the site, theverge.com, if you don't remember what it is.

1:27:52You're this far into the Verge Cast, you know, it's theverge.com. It's a good website. I don't know what you're doing. Also, we've gotten a number of submissions to our wearables equation. We're going to get into that next week. We're going to lay them all out. We have to do some algebra. So we're going to figure out how to do algebra on this podcast. Just imagine that scene from A Beautiful Mind. That's going to be us next week. It's great. I love those submissions. If you have them, keep it. VergeCast at theverge.com. Email us your wearable equations and missions. It's been fun to read them all.

1:28:20We'll get into it next week. All right, that's it. That's VergeCast. Bye.

1:28:28And that's a wrap for VergeCast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecastattheverge.com. The VergeCast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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