Hello, and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of The Verge on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and your podcast app, because that's also where we are. But here we are, everywhere that you are. Anyway, I'm Neil Patel. I'm here.
Paul Miller is here. Hello. And Dieter Bone is here. Hey, how's it going?
We are all in totally different places this time. It's very strange for me. Yeah, the title of this episode will be Skype Delay, I think is where we're going to be. We are, I think it's amazing that podcasting relies to this day on Skype in a way that very few other media industries rely on a single application.
Like, you know, if you're a video editor, there's a big argument between Final Cut and Premiere. If you, I don't know, if you are an audio engineer, you can use Audition or Logic or what, like, there's all this stuff, Pro Tools. But if you make podcasts, there's just Skype. There's, I've literally nobody ever asked me to be on a podcast using another app than Skype.
I wonder if the people at Skype know this. I wonder if it's just like a business for them. I think it is. I feel like Skype doesn't actually offer anything over any other chat app that you can run on a computer on your phone, really, except that you can kind of trust that everybody has it and knows how to use it.
Yeah, everybody installed Skype in 2009, and now we all have it. And that's the end of it. So you don't have to have the conversation of, like, are we going to use FaceTime, are we going to hang out to the other thing? No, just use Skype.
That's all it is. It's just the default. I did a podcast over FaceTime. But it was just me and a buddy, and it was only ever us, and we never had any guests, and we didn't need that flexibility that Skype provides.
Skype doesn't have recording features. They don't even have, like, high-end audio support, really, or a pro version of Skype. I don't think Skype even likes me. Every time I open Skype, I'm just like, who has hacked this account today?
That's basically what I think. Like, how is my girlfriend going to get stolen out of this app today? And there was a drama about their redesigned iOS app, which is, like, they decided to go crazy town. Everyone's like, uh, you're a utility guy.
Guys, don't try and make us do stories in Skype. Stop it right now. My old Skype account that I've had since I first learned about Skype, and then I recorded all the InGadget podcasts on, basically, got hacked, and they won't give it back to me. I, like, emailed them.
I'm like, no. I couldn't prove, I couldn't remember some weird detail about my past. And so, like, they're like, nope. We're just not giving you the best.
That's all right. Anyway, here's the story of the week. There's much to talk about, but lots of little things. Not a huge week in news.
So, I, you know, in our rundown, I've got a bunch of little news, all this other stuff. We're going to talk to Lauren Good about the next episode of Next Level, which is awesome. Actually, you should watch it and talk to Lauren Good about that. And then I actually tweeted out and had people just suggest things for us to talk about.
So, I might randomly spice those in. But we should start, actually, and we rarely ever do this. We should start with some Verge news, because we launched a big new thing this week. It's a big project along with Dan Stiefert and a bunch of other people, Guidebook, which is our expanded reviews program.
Do you want to get into it? Yeah, so we are very excited about it. We are going with this idea of Guidebook because it's sort of like a city guide for tech. And what that means to us is we're going to continue to do the, like, high-end Verge reviews that we've always done.
We're going to have really great video, really, like, good, well-written reviews that explain what's good and, like, how it works and, you know, why it matters to you in your real life. Or it's going to give them a score, the whole nine. But in addition to doing that, we wanted to do a bunch of other stuff. So, we know that, for example, this is my next should be updated on a regular basis.
So, we're going to do that. We're bringing back What's in Your Bag. So, you know, that seems to be what everybody's most excited about, which I think is hilarious. I hope that's coming back.
I'm dreading being asked to do What's in Your Bag. Why? There's nothing in my bag. It's like old phones.
It's like an iPad that I've charged in 10 years. You don't have, like, a Go kit, like, I'm going to a tech event, I need to be ready, set up? I've got a pocket for a tablet sometimes in there. I've got a particular kind of battery that I like.
I've got so many dongles. Oh, yeah. That's interesting. Dude, can I end up all this very important update about Guidebook to tell you about Dongle Life?
I thought I lost my Bluetooth headphones for, like, two weeks. Guess where they were? In my bag. In your bag.
That's not an update on anything, Paul. I'll just let you know. I mean, part of Dongle Life is losing Bluetooth headphones. Paul, Paul, have you found your hat?
Yeah. Yeah, I was in my room. It's on your head. Oh, my God.
The big thing with Guidebook is that we are integrating a really rigorous how-to program into it. I have broken Paul. I love Guidebook, though. Guidebook is just being a gentle parent, like a gently disagreeing parent for all of you in your lives.
How-to's. Anyway. Lots of how-to's. We've got a big how-to series.
We're going to have a regular series where we actually explain how to use all this tech. We're open to very many suggestions. You know, shoot us an email. We are going to be launching how-to stories alongside reviews so that when we have a big review, we'll have a big review.
We'll also have a bunch of stuff explaining how to use the thing. And we've also got a bunch of, like, how-to video series ideas we're really excited about. If you saw the one that Jake did along with James Vincent's YouTube's password manager article, there's a lot more in that vein, but, like, cooler, bigger ideas coming very soon. And basically, the version reviews have always sort of been backed by the sense that we're experts, right?
We know this stuff. We live this stuff day in, day out. We're paying attention to all of the trends and everything that's coming. And so we can put it in that tech context.
But the version is also about culture and how to fix culture. And so we can take that tech context and humanize it and then present that to you in a review format that is just as much about the gadget as a cultural object, like a movie, as it is about a tech object that has, you know, a processor and RAM and whatever. But taking that sense of the thing that we're very good at and marrying it to, we actually can tell you how to use it, feels like it's genuinely interesting to me. And that's why I started by saying it's sort of like a city guide.
It's from somebody you trust. They tell you what you need to know, but they're not going to, like, overload you with, like, insanely granular details that you don't care about. And I would say, tell me if I'm speaking upturned. I would say most of the how-tos, in a sense, like, I would say most Verge-class listeners are already kind of citizens of that city.
And, like, I think a lot of the how-tos that we've done are things that, like, I kind of already knew how to do or I knew for sure I could figure out how to do it. But if a friend or family member asked me how to do it, I wouldn't know definitively the best way. And also, I'd be kind of annoyed trying to, like, help them out. Right, yeah, sort of thing where, like, if someone asks you how to do it, you're just like, just give me your phone, I'll do it for you, because it's easier than trying to, like, walk them through it.
So we'll actually try to walk you through it. So just so you know, like, when you see on the Verge, a how-to is like, well, I already know how to do it. Yeah, but maybe somebody in your life didn't know how, and we're trying to help them too. Plus, I think these phones in particular, with everything, there's so much stuff I want to do with it, and I often just need to be reminded that I can, right?
And that's, like, that's part of it too. Like, oh, I can just, like, spend a little time and get more out of the things I have. I told somebody to buy a laptop off the Wirecutter today. But I think that service is for people who don't love technology, right?
They just, they need a service and utility. I think our site is for people who love this stuff, and they want to engage with it more and better, and I think there's a huge opportunity there in this space to build something that is obviously competitive with Wirecutter, where competitors, we love them, but so it goes, but also is different, right? And, like, meaningfully different and provides a different kind of service. And that space, to me, doesn't feel completely, like, owned or saturated, and I think there's just a big opportunity for us there, so I'm super excited about it.
Yeah, and I mean, in a very similar vein, like, we also love, you know, Ars Technica, right? We love how, like, in-depth they get with benchmarks, but that also, like, and yes, they're also competitive with us, but we love them, but that's also not precisely the thing that we're trying to do. We're trying to do something that's particularly for a Verge audience, and we have a pretty expansive view of what that means, but it definitely sort of assumes a basic interest in tech and what it means in your life, not necessarily, like, knowing exactly what a Xeon processor is. I should like the better, more recent nerdy processor example.
Xeon is around. They're around. I mean, like, look, if you are building a server farm or workstation, rest assured that we will soon have a how-to article for you. Paul builds a server farm.
Absolutely. Paul, you're taking a trip soon to a location in North Carolina. We've bought a lot of land. We're not just building out, like, one rack.
We're doing the whole building. So we've got to work on, like, cooling, solar power. Yeah, hopefully we do some of our own energy gathering as well, for sure. Yeah, how to optimize your server farm to run its own air conditioning system, I think, is one of those Verge stories we have to do.
We start with nothing but sticks and wood and branches and build our way up through all of the history of technology up to phones. Absolutely. Because every how-to will be like, how to make a fire, how to, you know, smelt metal. How to smelt.
I'm ready for it. It's like a skill tree. I would 100% read slash watch how to smelt. Anyway, so that's Guy Book.
It's the big virtual news of the week. I want to put it out there right in front. I know, particularly for a virtual audience, it's something I hope you're interested in. It's something we're taking feedback on.
You know, we just launched the thing. We made a bunch of decisions based on what I think are good bets and, like, solid data about what's been popular in the past, but we're always looking for the next thing. So give us feedback. We love it.
You can tweet right at your exact back one. Just let him know everything you love and hate about Guy Book. Also, if you've got ideas for how to articles, Chris Welch is the other person to tweet. I think he's just at Chris Welch.
There's other stuff that I haven't even mentioned. Like, we decided to create a new category called Editor's Choice where we talk about our very favorite things. There's a bunch of stuff. And we could do a long discussion about all the different discussions about scores and reviews because I know that we're going to discuss some of that.
We'll set that aside for now. But they're staying just simplifying the system a little bit. Give me a TLDR. How are you simplifying it?
Instead of, like, 0 to 10 and you can have, like, a 7.7 and 7.8, we're just going from, like, we're having even numbers and also 0.5s. Because I don't know if you've heard Neil of this reveal before, but there's, like, this thing exists in World of No 7s. 7 is, like, good but not great. It's, like, the default score for a lot of stuff.
And we found that we were, like, it's, well, it's fun to argue about, like, a 0.3 versus a 0.4 thing. To us, that's actually an editorial thing. It's not, like, a strict, like, you know, perfectly evenly scaled benchmark of, like, its pure quality because our scores are contextual to the category of the thing, the time it was released, you know, the context in which it arrived. And so, to us, it really is more like a score on movie review, right?
Like, it is this good in this context in this world. And that, having those tiny little pip updates gives the impression that it is some sort of scientific measurement when really what it is is an editorial, like, I don't know, judgment. And so, since that's what it is, I feel like 0.0 and 0.5 scores do a better job of conveying that to more readers. I will point out that I spent a very long time playing devil's advocate to keep the score system as complicated and have as many points as possible.
Dan Seifert and Lauren Good and Vlad Samov argued for the simpler system. We also had some crazy ideas. We considered a system where the default score was 0 and a bad device would have a negative score and a good device would have a positive score, which is, like, really fascinating. But I also know that, like, the amount of drama that would come from me saying that, like, a random Android phone that was pretty good got a score of 0 would not be worth switching to that system.
Oh, it's totally worth it. You couldn't take it. Yeah, basically, I'm checking. A stock mid-range Android phone is 0, right?
Like, you buy whatever the best Qualcomm chipset is at that minute. You put a reasonably high-resolution display on it. You have a case that doesn't, like, hurt you. That's, I don't know.
Like, sanded the edges. Yeah, yeah. It's, like, not spiky or hot in some way. In, like, some mediocre cameras.
That's a 0. Think about it. Oh, man. I know we just launched iBook, but what if we unlaunch it and relaunch it with this bonker score system?
This is Jake Hasbrack's score system. And when he presented it to the team, we literally were just, like, agape about what a genius it was. We just sat there, like, we could do this. And I'll tell you about that.
Some value to score is that people understand what they mean. Like, a score of negative 3.5 is not translatable out in the world. But I will tell you this. This is my promise to the reader.
Every time we score something, if you type in the right passphrase on the version.com, it won't reveal what it is. It will translate it into a bonkers negative score. And if you ever figure out what that passphrase is, you're the winner. What?
This is the longest. I'm just saying it's true. It's absolutely true. I'm not going to make it out.
Anyway. No, I've got to go figure out the passphrase? Yeah. Just keep typing in the website.
Just boost those on-page times. It works better if you open it up in multiple tabs and then type a different word into each tab. No, I'm going to look at the source code. Apple actually suggested this to me.
It's kind of big news. I guess we're starting on a down. But a bunch of old products are going away. So Apple today confirmed the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle are gone, which is end of an era.
The iPod Touch remains. It starts at 329. I don't think the Touch has been updated in a million years. Are people out there still buying iPod?
Well, they just updated it with new storage for this. Yeah, they're not trying very hard. It's interesting because that Spotify Shuffle clone just came out, right? The Mighty?
Yeah. It's like 85 bucks. So Jake wrote a great timeline of the history of the Nano. And I was working with him on it today.
And I realized that the iPhone didn't just kill the Blackberry keyboard. It killed the iPod click wheel. And I realized all the Nanos after the click wheel, I have no nostalgia for. It's like, well, I never had that physical experience with this device.
And yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's sad. I mean, the last Nano ran that weird iOS clone with Circle Icon.
I mean, it literally looked like they hired a Chinese contract manufacturer to make an iPhone clone that ran iTunes. Yeah, it looked like a knockoff. I mean, I am super not sorry to see the Nano go. I am still bummed about the iPod Classic.
I will say that I am pretty bummed about the Shuffle. I feel like in Apple's mind it's been replaced with the Apple Watch and Bluetooth headphones. But there's something really great, even though you have to connect it to iTunes. There's something really great about it.
This is just a $100 thing that I can clip around that I just know has music on it. I can plug a pair of headphones into it and go out with it. I mean, it's very gadgety now for us to think of it that way. But there's value.
I mean, that's why the Mighty had garnered so much interest because there was like a gap in the market. I'm sure that like nostalgia is not the same thing as like making sales. And so Apple can't just keep it around for nostalgia's sake. And they probably have got numbers that tell them there's no way they're going to turn this thing around.
But it's still a bummer. It's still sad because there is a thing about having just like a simple, tiny, no frills, no nonsense, single use gadget. Yeah, if Apple made a Mighty, like an iPod shuffle that connects wirelessly to your phone, you make your playlists on Apple Music and they're just synced there automatically and then just the light turns green and you know you're ready to go running. Now you've got a little bit of Apple Watch.
That's the Apple Watch. Yeah, but the Apple Watch is a lot of money. Right. Well, you can get an old Apple Watch.
It's funny if like the Mighty, if the Mighty's biggest competitors like use Apple Watches, that's pretty sad. I think there's also an argument here about scale. And there's been a lot of conversation about Apple's scale lately. And there's been a lot of conversation about Apple Watches, that's pretty sad.
because there's all these rumors about iPhone pricing and how they might do a crazy expensive $1,500 iPhone 8 just because they can't make all of the high-end parts they want to put into it. So the price is higher, so less people want to buy it, obviously. You know, this mighty company is a Kickstarter. If they sell 100,000 of these, I bet it's a huge success for that company.
And that's great, and that's the scale at which they live, and that's their business, and hopefully they grow that business and everyone's successful and on and on and on. But Apple selling 100,000 iPod shuffles is not worth it to them at all. And I think that is... Even if they could make a profit on it, it's not worth it to them because people keep asking, how many have you sold?
They get tracked by Wall Street, and they would lose billions of dollars in market cap value for people being, what's going on with the shuffle? Why does this exist? How much does this do it? They would lose more money in the perception of the company and how it affects their stock, and they would make off of the shuffle if it had poor sales.
And they have to support it, and they have to build it into iTunes, and they should blow up iTunes. If killing the shuffle is the thing that allows them to kill iTunes, do it, right? That's worthwhile. I put it in a boat, light the boat on fire, send it into sea, and then turn around and kill iTunes.
That's great. I think you shoot a flaming arrow with the boat. If anybody has a bunch of old shuffles and they want to film a video of them launching it to sea and then lighting it on fire with an arrow, I am open to funding that project. Just let me know, because I'm there for it.
I should burn an effigy, otherwise it's bad for the environment to throw the shuffle and shuffles into the sea. Yeah, I would think, like, take screenshots of iTunes and then print them out, and then print those. Also more flammable. True.
I mean, we did have to do the shuffle. The shuffle did a good job. I'm saying I'm willing to sacrifice the shuffle if it serves the death of iTunes. Also, iTunes is getting better.
You heard it here first. No, that's not true. It's true. It launches faster.
It's more responsive. It's not good. You just got a new computer. No, I didn't.
Are you sure? Yeah. Because that is the only plausible explanation for iTunes getting better. No, no, no, no.
You just threw more processor at it. No, it's improving. So something else, by speaking of things that overloaded your processor and set things on fire, Adobe has announced that Flash is going away, wait for it, in 2020. Three more years.
Paul, can you explain to me why it's going to take that long? Do you know? Because that's when the next presidential election is. If Flash will go to bed for president.
I mean, it seems like a time of change and rebirth in America will arrive in 2020, but... I have no idea. I'm guessing they have to... I really don't know.
I mean, Flash is, in a sense, kind of like an operating system. Like, it really... Like, it takes code, it interprets it, and then it, like, displays the results of that code running, you know? So it makes sense that for all the companies out there that, you know, like, think of, like, you know, you get HR training and it's like a weird Flash app or something like that.
You know, like, obviously that's, like, very old now, but I'm sure companies are still relying on it, so Adobe has to provide some sort of, like, we will continue to support this thing that we sold you products to build in, you know, for a time, nice things that we are genuinely maybe going to miss a little bit. I know it's easy to hate on it. I know it's bad. I know it sucks on your processor.
Home Store is actually not a bad example. Here's the thing that Flash did that we do not have a very good one-to-one replacement for. It made it possible to go on the Internet without installing any software because you probably already had it installed and play a game or watch, you know, a little fun animation without having to, like, hope the HTML5 would work, without having to install anything, without having to set up a Steam account. You just go and do a thing.
And somebody DM to me is like, oh, it's another nail in the coffin of the open web. It's usually often a game without actually having to go through the rigmarole of installing software, setting up an account, or doing whatever. And I know that the conventional wizard now is cross-platform stuff like Flash and not even Java is inherently bad because it doesn't feel native to the thing you're using it on. But there is a benefit to knowing that you can make a thing and not having to overthink the platforms that it's going to show up on.
It's a little bit agnostic to the client. At least it's better than some of the other stuff that's out there. And so Flash, yes, it deserves to die. It was not built for mobile.
They could never make it work for mobile. Junker made this point that it died as soon as they said they were killing the Android version. All that is totally fair and true. But as we light this boat on fire, it is worth shedding a small tear for the thing that we're losing a little bit.
And I don't see a good replacement for it on the horizon. What's a great in-your-browser or out-of-the-in-the-net game replacement for Flash? It's kind of not there. You can go by the App Store on your phone.
WebGL exists and they're working on a GL, or not GL, like an equivalent to Vulkan, like a project for the web. There's WebAssembly for basically you can write native programs. So there's basically OpenSIM. And then the actual things that Flash did can be done by Canvas or SVG.
We've heard these promises that stuff built into the HTML web platform is going to be able to replace Flash for many years. I feel like it's always like two years away. You know those games where you're like a circle and then you roam around and try to eat other circles. They're like massively multiplayer.
They're like HTML5 games. There's a pretty popular HTML5 game. And then the equivalent of Homestar Runner all happens just on YouTube now. If it's just animation and entertainment.
I do see what you're saying. There's no real Newgrounds equivalent right now. But you can make a game in Unity and compile it to WebGL. It just runs in browsers.
Well, I think what I think both of you are getting at is let's use Homestar Runner as an example. That was a website that I went to consistently every day and I had a bunch of other experiences on that website. They could sell me merch and do books and all this other stuff and they built a business around Flash animations in their home, right, on their platform. Whereas now if you wanted to build a business around that, you would do it on YouTube and you wouldn't be able to do any of the ancillary stuff the way that they were able to do at that time.
Newgrounds was a whole business. It was a massive business built on the web because of Flash and now you can't build that same kind of business in the app store. Not really at all. We live in the Lincoln Bio era.
The Lincoln Bio. I was talking about the biography of Abraham Lincoln. I was so confused. I was like, what obscure emphasis is this?
I'll reach out that. Yeah, that's a good line. Yeah, Lincoln Bio is great. Everyone is trying to get you to leave the weird proprietary platform and go to some other proprietary platform.
No one is really trying to build a single place on the web where they live. I was actually talking about this with Caitlin Tiffany, one of our culture reporters, today that it's hard to imagine the kind of blogs that we had and we started from that led to massive careers happening again right now. What you do right now is you build it off like a newsletter. You wouldn't build it off.
I started a blog about some niche interest. I think it's just like Flash enabled that moment. One of my favorite websites actually in the early office was called flashenabled.com. Do you remember this?
It was a totally weird niche website. It was right when Flash was the hottest thing and Flash enabled hardware was coming out. You could code hardware with Flash and it was basically just a gadget blog for cool Flash things. It was just neat.
It's gone. It's not relevant anymore but it was just a moment in time that I thought was really cool. I think that's actually how I got into gadget blogs way back when. Speaking of other old tech that is having weird moments, Microsoft announced it was going to kill paint and then unkilled it in a weird way.
They announced that paint was over and they were going to deprecate it. They were going to put some of the features into paint. Deprecate it is the name of the boat that you lay on fire by the way. They announced they were deprecating it and then there was an outcry.
An actual outcry. People were sad about paint going away and then they reversed tack and said we're putting it into the Windows store for free but what we really want you to use is Paint 3D. Microsoft has bad ideas about what its customers have deep affinity and love for. People just love that's the live tiles.
They love Windows so much. They don't love it. People love Paint. They have nostalgic fond memories of it and the idea that Microsoft could miss that and space on that they don't have that many products that people have a deep abiding love for.
It was a mistake. It's good that they turned it around. The Paint 3D is the real signal to me that they're missing it. Do you remember the time in the Renaissance when they discovered sculpture and everybody stopped painting it?
What are you thinking? That was a great year. I'm not that old. A few more randoms and I've got to read an ad.
I'll talk to Lauren. I think this is strange. Google had results this week. We'll talk about that later but they also released basically a final version of Android O.
Inside of it is kind of an Easter egg of an octopus and our headline was does Google think octopus is a dessert which is such an open question. It really demands a semantic discussion of what dessert is. I've not. You can literally candy anything though.
It's true. You just can't. It could become dessert. I've been using this final release cabinet and it's pretty good.
I've had a couple of resets on my pixel but there's a bunch of little surprising features that I really love. I showed a thing on Twitter where you can drag shortcuts out of the pop-up menu on long press. That's fine. You can dismiss notifications when you see the little dot.
That's cool. The thing I discovered or forgot about but I love that's around today is if you highlight some text they're better at selecting the thing you're trying to highlight. It uses a little bit of machine learning to do that. Then the options that pop up are actually smarter.
I highlighted a Google Doc link that hadn't been turned into a URL for some reason because the app was dumb. Slack. But the Android's copy and paste pop-up saw that it was at docs.google.com and just gave me a button to open it so I wouldn't have to copy and paste the link and figure it out which is really smart. Anyway, I am pretty excited for Android O.
It has those two features and that's it but I'm still like it's nice. Well, didn't Google promise 11 new Daydream VR phones this year? It's soon to be August. That's not a lot of time to announce 11 phones and ship them.
Well, they're probably coming to S8 and S8 Plus with two different phones, right? They're getting down to nine. It's nine phones. Pixel XL 7 we've already got like I don't know the Zenfone or some random thing 6 I don't know maybe they'll come different store adoptions.
That's where they're going to be. I mean, here's Google's real problem with Daydream. It's not VR. I mean, it's VR.
Like, no one cares about Daydream and what scale they do. Disclosure my wife works for Oculus. The real problem though is AR. They went down this long road for Tango of like, we're going to put 50 sensors on your phone and it will understand the space around you.
But if you didn't watch that Aha! video that somebody made with the ARKit it is crazy and the idea that anybody wants to buy a whole new phone with like 10 extra sensors that make the thing cost an extra 50 or 100 bucks to get something like that it's not going to happen for them. And they got laughed or pantsed by Apple pretty hard on the ARKit I think. Yeah, the ARKit demos that are coming out that Aha!
video is like fun. They're just doing that effect. Like, it's cool and I just don't know where that goes. Like, the only compelling thing that ARKit has shown me is like furniture companies will sell you furniture more effectively.
It's so hot for furniture. Yeah, so the Aha! video is great and cool but it's a lot of those demos and they need to turn into something else. I think there's still room to compete if you can figure out a compelling vision for what you want to do with it.
You can pull a Roomba and just sell people maps of the insides of their homes. That is maybe the worst handled announcement in history. So if you don't know what's going on iRobot, which makes Roomba and also I believe Guided Weapon Systems they announce their newest Roomba is what they do location mapping inside your house is the driver's house to build a map of your house and Roomba just quietly announced oh, we're going to start selling that data. We're going to start selling maps of the inside of your house which makes no sense because I don't even know why that information is useful to anyone but also just handled extraordinarily poorly in terms of announcement but if Roomba can do a register with me where they sell the map of my house and I get some money maybe I take it I have to say by the way I'm in the middle of this like what phone should I use because my iPhone died and hilariously one of the phones I want to use is my Nexus 6P that has the latest version of Android O on it and the fact that that version of Android is meaningfully different than the version that's on the Pixel is like driving me crazy like stock Android and Pixel Android are not the same I just don't understand it but I guess that's the way it goes with Android but I kind of like stock better is what I'm saying also that phone is huge so it's not the one I should use but I don't know there's nothing about it but it's just it's so big and so unapologetic about being massive that I'm kind of into it I don't know what fun I'm going to use I'm just going to keep my SIM card in this broken iPhone here let's see if it does this hold on what is broken about your iPhone you should just get a tablet and then like a MiFi and just walk around like that for a while the thing that is now can you guys see that that buzzing sound that clicky sound that is the optical stabilizer on my iPhone camera desperately trying to stabilize it oh my gosh I saw this video on Twitter it was terrifying so for a while I could fix it by hitting the phone and like knocking it back into my head so every time I took a picture I'd open the camera app and then like smack the phone against the wall and I think over time I just made it worse so now you can't have a phone without a camera that works so I got to put it in something I'm literally sitting here with four phones in front of me debating it's just going to be the iPhone 7 but I kind of want to anyway let's move on if you have thoughts I'm eager to hear them but we can move on should it be the pixel ah it's the worst if like the new ones are coming out but then the hot ones are going to be delayed do you know this is the worst time for your phone to break the worst moment you're in the wrong window there's so many feelings about this look this episode of the Vergecast is brought to us by Parachute brought to you by Parachute brought to everyone by Parachute Parachute makes the softest comfiest sheets you'll ever own they're made from the best fabrics and materials in Europe's world-renowned factories they've got modern design with clean minimalist styles and neutral colors they're responsibly made they're all natural there's no harmful chemicals or synthetic softeners they will last and last and actually only get soft with time and they give back so they're partnered with the United Nations Foundation to donate malaria prevention bed nets they've actually donated over 16,000 so far and all the returns are donated to Habitat for Humanity so visit parachutehome.com we've got Next Level going right now it's Lauren's new series while that's going we're going to talk to her so listen to this we'll be back with more of the Vergecast Lauren, how are you doing?
You're back Milai, hello how's the Vergecast going? The Vergecast so far I have to tell you is like a wild ride I've been describing it as like a live Twitch stream basically but it's like a slow week in news but that gives us more time to talk about your show which is you should do third episode which is wild stuff but you talk about prescription video games which sounds wild to me tell me about that So Next Level for those of you who perhaps have not seen the show yet although I'd like to think if our loyal Vergecast audience is aware of it is a show, a video show that is exploring next level concepts prototypes, innovations things going on behind the scenes at tech companies not the commercially available gadgets that you'd normally buy but just really interesting stuff that you haven't seen yet and we've been publishing these videos to Facebook, YouTube and everywhere else you can usually get our videos so for this week's episode we went behind the scenes into the labs of UCSF mission day a lab called neuroscape where a group of neuroscientists have been incubating and testing video games that they think could be used to improve cognitive function and that whole area of brain training games are a little controversial so we're i'm sure we're gonna get to that but the interesting thing is that one of the scientists here in his lab at ucsf has also founded a company co-founded a company called achille and achille is basically taking all this research and they're actually trying to push it through as a commercialized fda approved video game that would be prescribed to people as medicine that's incredible right and we should talk about brain training stuff but just start with achille what kind of medicine are they trying to do so it's really interesting because achille is it kind of has these two faces based on what i know about the company it is a boston-based company uh and that's where their headquarters are and i haven't been there physically but from the way it was described to me that is sort of it's the corporate headquarters it's a little bit more buttoned up it's where people are working on things like the fda approval process and then in marin which is north of san francisco they have another office and this is a little bit of a smaller office but it's where the creatives are so you get the sense when you're in the office in marin which we visited um you know this is where people are drawing things and there are cartoon drawings on the wall and it's got that very sort of loose northern california vibe to it and the chief creative officer who's based in that office actually came from uh lucas arts excuse me i want to be clear i actually i'm gonna double check these from lucas arts or lucas films but he was a director there and so he has this really interesting background in you know the graphic arts world um so you when you're thinking about these games you might be thinking of things like you know first person shooter games and how is that going to be medicine and stuff like that what they're actually building at akili is an ipad game it's a very kind of friendly looking ipad game and what it does is it's challenging your cognitive abilities at the same time it's challenging your motor skills so you're kind of using ipad and like turning it in ways to navigate through this world in this game which is called project evo right now but at the same time you're making cognitive decisions as you're as you're playing it um but that's only one type of game that we saw i mean that is the project evo game that akili is currently trying to make a prescription game it's interesting because when we went into the neuroscape lab which again is sort of like the foundation of all of these games the games are actually like pretty physical in a way yeah you're like running around this is the second episode which you've been in a headset i think yeah but you're like you're like running around there's like motion tracking all kinds of things happening you're in that v6 thing that makes like run in place describe describe the games so the neuroscape games which again are not the ones that are necessarily going to be fda approved but are just at a very sort of fundamental research level right now um these are ones that are physical and they've been designed that way like one of them is called body brain trainer uh or bbt for short which i just kind of made you laugh because it makes me think of all those like workout fads they're like p90x or p90g or whatever like bbt like you just picture like your friends getting really into like bbt bbt is my latest workout fad um but it's called bbt and there's a microsoft connect that is you know kind of capturing your motion capture and you connect a bluetooth heart rate strap your chest so the game can read your heart rate and you're looking at a bunch of items on this giant screen and you have to run around the room to kind of like physically select corresponding items so if this if the game flashes like a green pepper at you and then on the four corners of the screen there are four different kinds of vegetables and one of them happens to be green pepper you have to run physically run in the direction of that green pepper so as you're doing your heart rate is actually it's elevated it's getting it's getting higher because you're getting physically taxed and what they're studying there is and i realize you know as i'm saying this i'm not talking about the cognitive disorders they're trying to address i'm sorry about that i didn't get to that but like as you're doing all this they're trying to see if because you're so physically engaged and you're so immersed in a game that that makes your brain function differently and the kind of thing that they're all trying to address are or conditions such as um attention deficit disorders potentially depression uh potentially alzheimer's disease really anything uh that could impact your cognitive function your cognitive abilities in some way so it's like really interesting stuff another game i played that involved one of those crazy omni virtuix platforms um in a vr headset and i found it to be um i mean i could go on about that game forever because it was really let me just say this that night after i played that game i had a very vivid dream about being lost in a city and that's what that game is about that game puts you in a vr headset and puts you in one of those weird little treadmill machines where you are wandering around the city and your brain is supposed to be you know sort of mapping in your brain okay there's the chase bank okay there's the starbucks and then as each level progresses they purposely mix up the city in a sense so you you are sort of feeling disoriented you're supposed to sort of be training yourselves and engaging yourselves in a way that helps you remember things remember patterns um and i was like wow i mean i found the game very challenging and that night i really did have like a learning dream like i'm lost in a city um which is just like crazy to think about but those are the examples of the kinds of games they're incubating they're incubating in or escape so and those are supposed to obviously treat adhd depression and alzheimer's what's the path from we've invented this game we're doing these tests to see how well they work to actually prescribing video games very very rigorous clinical trials and gathering more evidence and getting the fda's approval so it is a long road i mean neuroscape has been in existence for 12 years and achilles has been working on this now for at least a few years so um it's a long path and it's an expensive path but um yeah i mean this is one of the things that achilles hopes will set it apart from other brain training games because the whole topic of brain training is incredibly controversial it's something that a lot of scientists have come out and spoken against openly that you know saying that there's very little evidence that any of these brain training games such as lumosity or brain hq or cognifit or focus education i think even our education secretary betsy devos' family has a brain training company um you know like people have come out and said there's very little evidence that this type of cognitive training can help with other cognitive issues it comes down to something that's known as the transfer effect scientists say that they're not really sure that training your brain very you know in a focused way in one area will help it with other tasks it's almost like hmm you know if i go to the gym and i like lift arms is that really going to help me run faster right and so or or legs like it's you're kind of you're focusing on one task when you're training these brain games when using these brain games and so there's like the jury's still out on whether that actually helps you in other areas of your cognitive abilities but then there are other scientists who really believe that this can help your cognitive abilities and especially as you get people sort of in a more immersive environment and that's the kind of thing that neuroscape is trying to prove in its labs and it's the kind of thing that achilles hopes to prove through um clinical trials and currently in phase three clinical trials so achilles has actual products right the games are going through trials and not just concepts or do you get to play those games yeah and that was the project evo game that's the one that they are using right now they only let us uh interestingly they only let us play it for short periods of time and they only let us show it on camera for very brief periods of time you know five seconds or less because it's in trials right now and so that means that there are people out there participants who are using a placebo and participants who are using the actual game they're trying to test and they're very concerned that with extended media you know being out there that shows the games that the participants could possibly see our coverage and then say oh wow i'm in the placebo group or you know what i mean or figure out that they're in the actual um the test group so they are uh so they're very uh cagey about showing this game but i did have the opportunity to play the game on the ipad like i said earlier it just kind of feels like a fun sort of navigation mario kart like game where you're on this road and you're kind of you're swerving around um but it's engaging your brain at the same time that you're kind of moving the ipad around your hands yeah it's funny because there's um i think there's a racing game for xbox called evo every time in the early part of this project when you're talking about it i was like they mean a racing game like i was so confused yeah everything comes back to mario kart yeah basically have you ever used any brain training games by the way like have you ever tried lumosity or anything like that you play on your computer or mobile app yeah i've tried a couple you know i um i have like a really bad memory it's just a thing and i've always thought if i could just get better at faces and names i would be like a superhero like i would be unstoppable if i could just remember people's names right like i would be the best journalist in the world right um and so i tried a couple like they're out there to help you get better at it and they've never really done anything for me but i think that's just i might just be broken like maybe it's not effective um but i mean i play with them they just seem like games and i think that's kind of getting out this like transfer effect issue is i can get really good at a game but that doesn't right like i'm pretty good at grand theft auto 5 but that doesn't mean i can actually rob a bank or fly a helicopter right right or you know like to bring it sort of even more into the analog world um you could be great at crossword puzzles and you could practice crossword puzzles and think well this is great because i'm enhancing my vocabulary and my attention span all that stuff but that doesn't mean you're gonna be able to go i don't know like write a dissertation or solve a complicated mouth problem like training your brain in one area doesn't always necessarily translate to another area yeah so what's um as you came i don't want to give away the whole episode but as you you came to the end of the episode what's your takeaway i think that the idea of digital medicine or software as medicine is a really interesting concept because you know in recent years there's been a new category of fda approved medical apps which i think are literally just called like approved medical you know mobile medical apps um that fall within a certain category and um you know are being used in a variety of different ways but other than that there isn't really software that's been prescribed in this way at least according to neuroscape and achilles scientists so so um you know i think that if they're able to push this through it's interesting not just because of the games themselves but because it would possibly establish or create an entirely new category of digital medicine um and obviously healthcare and medicine is a really big topic right now in our country and so i think the implications um are possibly very big and possibly very interesting but i do think that there are a lot of skeptics uh around this you know this topic um they do still have a lot of evidence to gather and a lot to prove and you know we don't actually know at this point if their games will become prescription based but it's a really it's for lack of a better word and i'd probably overuse it but it's a pretty interesting it's a pretty interesting idea and at the very least these games are also the kind of thing that can be used as biomarkers in other trials even if the games are not prescribed as medicine themselves um they you know could sort of create things that could be used in trials for other things um so yeah uh it's a space we're certainly keeping an eye on of course liz lapato our science editor has also written about this before as has rachel becker so once akili does have results from their phase three clinical trials to share i'm sure we'll be all over it all over the story and um and yeah yeah yeah i think the other part of it to me that's interesting is there's so much bad fake sham medicine out there like if this works then you know it's really easy to clone software you know you need like a patent license to manufacture prescription drugs often you need approval you need regulatory approval you need permission are we gonna get to a place where you need permission from the government to manufacture software develop software that works like prescription software is like a fascinating problem and then it's like is there gonna be like the shitty goop version of this which is just built on lights recentering your energy by playing a video game like there's there's so much good and bad that comes from this if it works and like the way it's gonna stretch out i think it's just absolutely fascinating and the upside there could be medicine with no you know side effects software is medicine very little side effects on the downside there will be the goops of the world so there's that yeah uh okay so you've got one episode left in this season of next level uh uh tell us about it give us give us a little hint oh okay i kind of want to keep the company a secret for now that's okay so you're all just gonna have to wait until next tuesday yeah but we are diving into light field display technology and we're talking to a company that believes the future of our interaction with you know digital media um could potentially be smartphone free which is a very big conversation that's happening right now among top technologists uh i think mark zuckerberg just over this week on facebook's earnings call was talking about ar but said he believes that you know he doesn't seem super bullish on glasses and he says he believes people are gonna be looking at their mobile phones for um a long time to come at least i'm paraphrasing a little bit but you know he's he's like pro smartphone right now and there are other technologists who we speak to who say yeah what's what's the post mobile world maybe we won't be looking at these glass rectangles in a few years maybe we'll all be looking at things through headsets and glasses and so this next episode is focused on a company that has been working on some really interesting uh optical technology light field display technology and they're working this stuff into headsets in a way that they think is is going to change the way we interact with you know the way we compute essentially yeah well we've tried a lot of headsets here at the verge yeah i was gonna say all of us between you and me and dear and adi robertson and like every next step every day on our staff i feel like we've probably tried every headset out there yeah but i think like i said i the listeners don't know i know because i got to read this script um it's a super exciting episode and super exciting concept i think the big question for me is these headsets gotta get smaller right and like that's the game but you gotta check it out the show comes out on tuesdays tuesday so this is gonna be august 1st tuesday august 1st very early in the morning august 1st final episode of this season next level uh and then we'll have you next week to talk about your your secret headset episode um but the season's going great so far i've loved every episode i've loved having you on the broadcast thank you so much for joining us again thank you for having me on okay so here's another story we're back by the way thank you lauren here's another story that we talked about from twitter i don't know if you guys saw this there's a company in wisconsin that is offering to implant nfc chips into their employees' hands instead of key cards and obviously it was announced no they haven't done yet they're gonna have a chipping party where they serve chips and salsa and put chips in the employees like lots of employees have signed up for it uh but obviously got announced and there was like a huge uproar over it because it is terrifying but like really it's just like key cards this is bobby like i might it's not mandatory right it's not mandatory that the employees are voluntarily signing up for it because losing your key card kind of sucks so you can have a key card or you can have a chip what could possibly be i don't know it sounds great it's it's a digital it's like a digital equivalent of branding you as uh like owned by the company is the thing that's creepy about it see but that's the thing i feel like that in my soul every time i show up to work like oh these guys got me so now i will say that's because i say that to paul yeah yeah nila says that to me a lot i owe you myself i say this guy he's got you so good morning how you doing nila just says sucker so it's like like post irony to get yourself branded you know what i mean it's not like it makes you an instagram influencer it just gets you in the office and like makes the vending machine go faster uh i mean i was like addy wrote the poster she actually has uh an nc chip in her hand she and she has a magnet in her finger then popper has a magnet in this finger i think there's some other people too then remove the magnet because you gotta get an mri oh yeah so addy wrote a story about how her magnet is failing she's gonna be getting removed and the whole biohacking movement uh and you know five years ago when we launched the virtual biohacking was like a rage like we had a bunch of stories about it extraordinarily well um that movement seems to have subsided because you know the magnets are dying like literally she doesn't feel anything with the magnet finger anymore and she in a post about this key card she said i have an nc chip in my hand i've tried for years to get it to be my office key card and i can't get it to work i think that's actually the problem right the stuff goes obsolete it stops working the like you know you move office buildings you get a new like door system and your key card isn't compatible with it there was ever an argument for open standards i think it's putting a chip in your hand yeah but i would do this there's nothing about this that to me suggests i shouldn't or wouldn't do it well i saw some research like i feel maybe it was almost a year ago or maybe six months ago um i'll try to dig it up but somebody like made a chip that is um basically uses wireless power to allow you to like rewrite it so it's one on the fly yeah oh wow so so the idea is that you would have it implant it wasn't just for stuff that was implant stuff that like had to be like built into buildings or something like that um but it could be updated so like like i would love it if i could like you know put my credit card in my hand but you know like i get hacked i need a new card and now my hand doesn't work but if you know like and as different systems come online like you know some subway systems work with like those contacts you know the tapper things and our office building works like that like if i could like buy a snack swipe into work swipe out of work and like swipe into the subway without without ever pulling out my wallet that'd be pretty cool yeah i can all you know just be attached to one single government id and then they can track everything to do it right and there's like a prefix 666. Actually, you know what convinced me to do this is when someone takes a reprogrammable on-the-fly and a C-chip embedded in your hand and makes it work with Amiibo so I can just spam and hack Amiibo just with it all the time. That would be incredible.
You just wave your hand over your switch. Someone just tweeted a thing that we should talk about is that the new pixels that leaked don't have a headphone jack. Is that a true... Yeah, I've heard they just didn't show that angle.
They didn't show that angle. They said the headphone jack wasn't confirmed. I'm looking at some renders here. There's renders.
It's possible there's one on the top. This is the Android Police article, right? Yeah. Yeah, they said...
Yeah, it's rendered. As to the headphone jack, we're really not sure what the status of that is. Yeah. So now I've got to put it in the Pixel so I have one last minute with the phone with it.
I guess yes, yes. This is a real Twitch stream of a podcast. The Pixel has a real big... Not really.
It's got a camera bump that I'm not super fond of. Yeah. Like I said, this is a real Twitch stream of a podcast. It's just me reacting real time to Twitter.
It's a great video game I'm playing called People Tweet at Me. So there's a bunch of Apple stuff to talk about. And we definitely have to talk about Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. We're getting into it this week.
Weird Trump moment. But then Foxconn announced they're going to build a $10 billion LCD factory in Wisconsin, which everyone assumes is somehow related to this Apple thing. But it's making TVs so sharp. And if the rumors are true, the iPhones are going to have OLED screens.
So there's a huge disconnect there. So that's... A small aside, it looks like they're getting $3 billion in tax breaks if everything works out as they're saying it will. But nobody knows that Foxconn's really going to do it to the level that would give them all those tax breaks.
But if they do get all those tax breaks, it works out to possibly the equivalent of a million dollars in tax breaks per job created because they're saying $3,000. But maybe $13,000. Who knows? It's all very, very fuzzy.
Yeah. It's like a very confusing confluence of Trump tweeting and that has just become a phenomenon that is unlike anything else in the world. Then Apple just ghosting, basically, in the story. And then Foxconn's saying something that feels like it's related but might not be related.
And then the incentives to lure Foxconn to Wisconsin are out of control. So it's great that I'm manufacturing in Wisconsin. I'm from Wisconsin. That's great.
Build more factories and employment people there. But it definitely seems like the way our government and the state government is luring jobs back from China is just straight up paying upfront money or allowing these tax breaks to happen. So I think Bloomberg calculated that you could give everybody in Wisconsin an iPhone. You could just buy an iPhone for the cost it will take for these tax breaks to go into effect.
Well, so I've been thinking, I just read this sea-steading book. You guys up on sea-steading? I mean, as a man who always knows what it is. Say what?
Oh, I'm saying my goal in life is 100% to live upon the sea in a nation of my making. Great. Well, so you're already on board. So the base...
So to speak. Aww. So the sea-steading, like one of the big things that a lot of sea-steading advocates talk about is the success of these special economic zones like Shenzhen where Foxconn has obviously been super successful. And what I wish somebody in the U.S.
government will talk about is like, well, what if we just made, tried to like imitate China and make a Hong Kong or Shenzhen? Like no rules, just right kind of neighborhood where people can come and, you know, build... Because we got a lot of land. We got a lot of places where not a lot's going on.
Like you wouldn't want to do it to like an existing, vibrant, successful city. But, you know, the companies that are involved in the special economic zone take on like extra responsibility for the infrastructure and the building out of the city in exchange. They get way better like tax treatment. Because that's the thing, like a lot of these tax breaks are just, they won't pay as much, but, you know, they're also going to show up at all.
Like they're not going to show up at all unless they get these tax breaks. But, you know, you don't want to get it to like so buddy-buddy crony backroom deals. It'd be nice if, like if you're going to make a huge factory that's going to make big stuff, you get this deal. Like make it something that's open to all of them.
So anyway, read this book about Shenzhen. It's really exciting. How are you getting from, let's build a Hong Kong... By the way, one of the main pieces of Hong Kong is that it is remarkably more free than mainland China, right?
That's the whole point. How are you getting from... Well, the lack of taxation is a freedom. Like a reduction in the amount of your profits.
You have to like look at when you're building a factory, will this be profitable? Like, well, if they take this much of our profits, it won't be profitable. But if they take this much, then we can pull it off. No, I'm with you.
I just think the difference between Hong Kong and mainland China and places in the United States with lower taxes and other places is vastly different. And I'm also confused at how you're getting from that to we should build nation states on derelict oil tankers in the ocean. Well, the idea is that a country like the U.S. won't do special economic zones, so we just got to go to the sea where we can be free.
All right. Isn't that officially a stateless zone? Yeah, so here's the thing. I've always wanted to go to space because I feel like it's the only frontier remaining to me.
But I realized with the seaside stuff that there's a whole ocean that we could settle and that I should get in part of that movement first and put my money where my mouth is as far as I do want to be a pioneer. Yeah, and you want to run an open nation state upon the ocean. But I think it would not hurt the U.S. to have a special economic zone where companies could come in and build up some infrastructure, build their factories and not get taxed to death, so that's impossible.
But that's what states are doing, right? I mean, that's been around Tupal lives in a nation state on the ocean. That is not clear to me. Second, and you can bridge that from me on all years.
Second, I just think the negative impacts of those special economic zones are real, but some of the things that they're allowed to do there are things that we already take for granted in this country. Also, it's just not clear that this is an apple plant in Wisconsin. My takeaway is the person whose job it is to confirm or deny things that Tim Cook has said must be the worst because Donald Trump is like, we're not going to say anything about that, which is kind of, I know we've been living with weird tweets from Donald Trump for a while, but just pause. Just take a moment.
The president of the United States, the most powerful man in the free world, just said Apple's going to build a bunch of factories and Apple didn't confirm, didn't deny, just had no comment, which is just insane. And the last factory they had in the United States was the Mac Pro, which is still around. I promise the update but it hasn't updated yet. Apple won't say if the new Mac Pro is going to get built in the States, but that factory isn't owned by Apple either.
So Apple is in this contract manufacturing zone, so it's not necessarily even for them to say they should do it or not, right? It's a weird, a deeply, deeply weird story and we'll just see what happens. I think it'd be cool. If you've been listening to this show for a long time, we have talked a lot about Apple's responsibility to manufacture things and where they're manufactured in the working conditions and the factories and the lack of transparency in those working conditions.
It would be cool, but it's just, we are definitely in a zone where the president tweeted the ad conversation with Tim Cook that Tim Cook refuses to confirm or deny. Wait, wait, just to clarify though, if three Apple partners or Foxconn announces two more big plans or something like that, does that count as like an only kind of misstatement by Trump? Because Apple's not doing it. Paul, don't they have to make things for Apple?
It would make me feel better if those three things were making things for Apple as far as Trump's statement, but nobody's going to say Trump was a liar unless Apple actually is making their own manufacturing plans, right? No, no, no. If the final assembly for the iPhone happens in Idaho, right, and there's three factories that's great, and if those factories are like Foxconn or whatever, that's fine. If Foxconn is making sharp TVs in Wisconsin...
I agree, that is not what Trump said. Right, so there's just this incredible disconnect in the story that Apple is not talking about because they're just not talking. And that's like Apple's way. Can I ask you a question that's going to make you possibly sputter?
Yeah, love to sputter. How much of Apple's decision about what these factories do you think has actually secretly been about patent deals in Qualcomm? Very little. Zero?
Okay. Yeah, I just, you know, I'm still trying to write this big thing about the Qualcomm case because it's so crazy. People actually tweeted and we should talk about it too. And it's just, it's starting to amp up, right?
Like, Intel has sued Qualcomm now. There's like a weird tangential relationship here between the state of Wisconsin and Intel and Qualcomm and Apple, right? Like, Apple just had to pay a huge fine to the University of Wisconsin system because A-serious processors is why with a patent that was developed at the University of Wisconsin. I went to that school that had an arm of the university system called WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
Their job is to patent inventions that happen in engineering facilities and then go license those patents out. And two people, when I was in law school there, they were in a huge lawsuit with Intel and that spurred a lot of conversation about whether or not universities could be patent trolls. So there's a lot there, right? Whether any of it's actually connected or just a bunch of hazy stuff is completely unclear to me, right?
Like, yes, there is a lot of processor patents that come out of the University of Wisconsin. Like, you cannot, there's no evidence at all for the idea that Apple picked Wisconsin because they want to do something here. You know, like, and they even do it. It's Foxconn.
I'm making Sharp TVs. So there's just a lot, there's just dots. Like, those dots are probably not connected, but there they are. And it's, the Qualcomm case, I am sorry now.
The Qualcomm case to me is just, it's so deep, right? It's, there's something in that relationship that is so important, the relationship between Apple, Qualcomm, standards, who gets to invent the standards, who gets to monetize the standards. There's something so deeply important in there that these two companies don't figure it out and they actually break that relationship between how standards get made and people make money from investing and making the standards that something terrible can happen, right? And like, that's what I'm like researching and trying to figure out right now is what are the, what are the contours of the terrible thing that could happen?
Because I, the case is so complicated that I'm struggling, I'm personally just struggling to understand it. And I think my suspicion is that the way Qualcomm has built its business around inventing these standards is opaque to most people. That's not the business you think about Qualcomm being in. In seconds, Qualcomm has an ad on the show for its chips and like gigabit LTE chips and that's in Snapdragon and that's like the business you think Qualcomm is in, right?
They sell chips in the phones, you buy the phones, the phone makers presumably buy the chips, everyone's happy. But so much of their business is inventing standards and racing ahead so that they can patent the standards ahead of time. And then there's a whole other part of that business that's like who pays them for the patented technology? And none of it, it works the way that you would think a business works.
Just literally none of it. And none of how Apple pays to make iPhones works the way that you think a business works. It just doesn't. Like I've said this on the show before but Apple literally buys the phones from Foxconn.
That's just not how I have ever thought about Apple's work, right? I assumed Apple paid Foxconn to make the phones, right? So they buy a bunch of parts, they pay Foxconn to work to assemble the parts, they help them buy tooling and stuff and then the phones are theirs right at the end of the day. Like the same way that I don't know, you hire a contractor, like come to your house, like go to the fence.
You don't buy the fence, you buy the work, right? But they buy the phones. And so that just like completely changes the nature of that entire relationship and it's wild. And so like what I'm saying is I kind of understand I've been working on figuring it out.
I've spent a lot of time this week and probably spent a lot of time next week. We just hired Sarah John who's an absolutely brilliant tech policy reporter. I hope she can help me figure it out because she's a lot smarter than I am. But if they get it wrong, if they push it, I think it could break something really important.
And I think it's actually worth us talking about that in some meaningfully important way. And I think Qualcomm's in a position where their business can get crushed in a way that affects how standards operate across the industry. I don't know. I could just make it all.
We could get to the end of this process and we've done our research and write the piece and I'm like, this is fine Apple should win. This is fine Qualcomm should win. That could be one of the outcomes too, but the more I dig into it, the more I suspect that everyone's playing with fire. This is why I'm nicely said we'll have no patent law.
I'm considering copyright law. I think we keep copyright, but no patents. What about 100%? No laws, man.
No, no, no. What do you say, Paul? No rules, just the right neighborhood? That sounds like the ad for a condo building.
No rules, just right is Chili's slogan, I believe. Or Outback. Outback Steakhouse. Yeah.
Sad that I know that. Paul's going to live in an Outback Steakhouse on the ocean. All right, all right. You've got to make people want to cover that.
Paul, copyright law and a bloomin' onion. It's made out of LD. Okay, I am going to read a disclosure. Do I have to disclose the ad that I want to read?
I don't approve these ads. They just gave me the copy. So we just talked about Qualcomm but I'm going to read this ad because the copy was given to me. That's your disclosure for the day.
This episode of the broadcast brought to you by Qualcomm Snapdragon Gigabit LTE. With download speeds up seven times faster than typical home Wi-Fi, Snapdragon Gigabit LTE can turbocharge all your connected apps so you can stream 360 videos to support your resolution with minimal buffering. You can access files on the cloud nearly as fast as you would if you're stored on your phone. You can download hours of movies or music in a matter of seconds.
To learn more, visit Snapdragon.com slash Gigabit today. Okay, Paul. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every week, you do a sub-fail.
Tell me about it. Meizu? Me too. All right.
How do you guys say it? Meizu or Meizu? Meizu? Meizu.
Meizu. Yeah, yeah. So Meizu's got new phones out. Pro 7 and Pro 7 Plus.
Front of the phone looks so old. Side of the phone looks very old and thick and just not the most modern. Meizu's pretty good at staying pretty cutting edge. I've just always loved this company and always been sad that they'd never bring anything to the U.S.
But they put a screen on the back and instead of just being an eating thing, we've seen phones that display some small amount of information. But this is a whole AMOLED display that's a couple inches and it can show you the weather, it shows you the time, it shows you alarms and stuff like that. It shows weird abstract graphics. But the thing I love about it is you can use it for rear camera selfies.
It just seems really smart. And so I just think to any phone manufacturer, if you've got the space, you've got the time, you've got the battery life, just put a screen on it. Do you remember when point-and-shoot cameras just hopped on adding screens to like the front or like civil screens? Oh, yeah.
What was that camera with a little screen on the front? I feel like it was Kodak. What was it? There were so many.
I thought it was no one. Didn't Sharp make a dual screen like clamshell? Oh, my God. Sharp dual screen clamshell point-and-shoot camera.
Sign me up. Someone get on eBay right now. There was a time when we used to cover every point-and-shoot camera that came out as though it was breaking news. The time has passed.
I like this idea. Do you think we're both screen on the back just with a camera? Yeah. I just think it's, I mean, it makes the phone obviously thicker, probably shorter battery.
It's like a nice option. I'm just glad it exists for people only in time. I got a DJI Osmo that I would play around with it and I realized I really would prefer to use the rear camera but there's no way to actually see what I'm shooting after the front camera which isn't as good. So I would love to have a little screen on the back.
This is a module for the essential phone that I want. Additional screen for selfies. Oh, that's smart. That's really good as a module.
I found a Samsung camera from 2009 and I remember this because of the, like the, Like, they've got a front-facing LCD. Like, what are we going to put on there? Like, not everybody looks the same. We can't just put a photo of a human because they're like, well, I'm not that person.
Maybe it's just a sticker. So they put the picture of a clown in the press shot. What if you don't want to pay for a screen? And you don't necessarily want that, you know, thing.
You don't want to see what the back camera's seeing all the time. So you make a part of the phone slide up, and it reveals a mirror. Whoa. And on the front, when it slides up, there's a physical keyboard.
I bet any company that did that would be very successful and continue to produce products. That phone 100% runs Android 2.3. That hardware can only be married to an early, early version of Android. No, the Palm Pre had a mirror when you slid it up.
That's what he was talking about, man. Right? Yeah, it was the pre. Let's remember that investor made terrible misogynistic statements.
What was his name? With the crazy... Oh, with the crazy hair. He looked like a scientist from Independence Day.
Yeah. He was like an LCD sound system or some band. Yeah, he went to Good Morning America and just hissed, release me. That was not true, by the way.
I did not say it. Roger McNamee. Yeah. Good old Roger McNamee.
Yeah, he was like... It wouldn't be your first guess if I didn't make a vague weird Palm reference, so it's done and we can now end the show. I would also buy a Palm Pre that ran Android 2.3. Dude, it existed.