 Hey and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of May 7th, 2012. I'm Josh Dupolsky. I'm Nila Patel. Oh, sorry. I thought it went... Ross Miller is joining us. I am the most special guest apparently. And this lumberjack looking fellow on the screen behind us is Joe Flatley, author of Scam World, available now on the Kindle Store. By the way, Scam World, some people were like, was this just an elaborate scam to get people to buy his Kindle book? I was like, well, we gave you the article for free to read online. Does it feel like a scam? Anyhow, Joe Flatley is here, author, lover, and general all around bon vivant. And that's French for dope fellow, dope guy. Joe, how are you? Can you hear us? Thanks for having me here. Thanks for being here. Are we on? Is this a real thing? Yeah, we're on right now. You're beaming live to a number of people who are angry at you. Beaming live to Frank Kern and his syndicate of professional scammers. I just say, hold on. I just say first off, this is the Vergecast where we discuss the week in technology culture and tech, tech products. And this was an interesting, has been a very interesting week. I'm still reading it right now. Long, weird, scary week. But we ran, the reason Joe's here, in case you're wondering, you're like, I just tuned in for this. I don't come here for any other reason. I don't read your site. Joe published a piece today called Scam World. Get rich quick schemes mutate into an online monster. And it is a long investigative piece that he's been working on for months. Basically looking at this world, which up until I read the draft of this, I had no idea the scope of what was going on. And there's this cartel of just completely sleazy, also completely insane scammers that are just stealing money from people. And this actually, the idea for this came from a conversation that Joe and I had about this guy Anthony Morrison, who we'd both seen on TV late at night, who's like a youngish guy. He looks like a regular dude, like somebody you might be friends with. And I saw a thing on TV, and I think Joe had seen it as well. And it was him just, he's like, start right now. You can make money online. You're going to make money online. He kept saying, make money online. And I was like, what do you mean, what do you mean make money online? It's extremely vague. Are you selling things? Is it advertising? Is it services? I don't know. So anyhow, that's kind of how this started. And he's been looking into it for months and months and doing this piece. And traveling. No, this has been going on. Traveling. He went to this conference. What was the conference called? The Underground? The Underground Online Seminar. Experiential. Plenty of underline, internet, underground. Can you tell me more about this conference? Because that whole part of it seems amazing. The video is insane. If you haven't watched the video, watch the video for that. The video is like a serious documentary about this. Jordan, one of our video guys, did a lot of the shooting and the cutting. He's very worried about his life now, from what I understand. Frank Kern, he's here in New York, if you're looking for him. But anyhow, Jordan and Joe went to this thing. Can you explain the conference, this conference? Well, it was basically set up as a place for entrepreneurs, people to go and mingle, not only mingle, but learn the latest internet marketing techniques. I'm not the most up on top of the modern business practices, but I would sit in these – it was interminable. It was like four days of these speakers. They would never say anything that a normal human being would process into meaningful language. It's just like Frank Kern has these videos that, when we were putting the final touches on this, we were working with Jordan on some of the edits on the video, and we were looking for this one video. Frank Kern has these videos, they're called list control modules. They're numbered modules, like list control module one. Is this like the Kobe system? What's the Kobe system? Never mind, go on. What is that? Am I missing some internet joke right now? The Kobe system is an ad campaign. Yeah. That's all. All right, I don't know. It's just an IT ad. He has these names that are like – they're words for things that aren't things. They're like – they don't mean anything. List control is not a thing. List control module four is not a thing. You can't control your lists, man. It's just like made up lingo to talk around people. Yeah, the challenging part of the story, understanding enough to write it and then trying to actually convey something meaningful about it is that these people have a very, very basic, simple way of doing business. Essentially, everybody does it a little different. Basically, it's make really dumb products really cheap, sell them to people that don't know any better, get their email address and then sell it to like a high pressure boiler room sales floor. That's it. So this is the way it works. In order to like keep this whole like industry going, they have to like create all this fake terminology and like they drag in concepts from business and pop psychology and they just like spin a web of these like nonsense words and it's just – it's genuinely confusing. That's probably how they sell so much stuff because people think, well, it must mean something. They're saying it. And they focus – and the reason it was – I built my career on that. And the reason I think it's increasingly interesting and was interesting to us is that they've taken what was – this used to be the guy – so what this used to be is the guy who would come on TV and he'd say, I'm going to teach you how to flip homes. You're going to buy – actually, these guys aren't even that specific. Those guys were selling a thing. These guys are more like – so the basic way it works, right, is they sell you a book on how to make money online. It's a loss meter for them. It's like 15 bucks or 50 bucks or whatever and you're like, well, it's not very expensive. I'm going to give you all the secrets to make money online. And you get the book and it's got like a bunch of crap in it like random, not useful information. Maybe it probably tells you how to set up a website of some sort. Joe, I'm assuming these all kind of link back in – the stuff in the book links back into more of their programs. Is that correct or not? Yeah. So then – so the point is though they get – the whole point of that is they just want to get your information. They'll take a hit on this book or whatever or maybe make a little bit of money. I mean, it's just crazy to me. And the business is selling it to these boiler rooms and the boiler rooms like scam people. They get them into like we can – you're really going to jumpstart your business now. We just need $1,000 from you. And then the calls are like super manipulative. Yeah. And they're all like – it's all like old people or people who just clearly don't understand. And actually, we had a lot of – this is – we had a lot of commenters being like, why are you so stupid? And it's like there's a lot of people out there who don't know how anything works. They don't know how the internet works. They don't know how the internet works. They don't know how scams work. They're not like – I mean, yeah. I would say our readers are generally very critical, very suspicious. Our readers are very savvy. Well, but they're also very savvy. Right. They're savvy. They're like street smart. But there's a lot of people who aren't. That's right. There's a lot of people who don't. I mean, one of these things in the piece, Joe, writes about they end the call with the guy trying to help the woman set up her printer. You know, like she doesn't even know how the printer gets plugged in. And she's going to run an online business. And the reason that he's setting up the printer, right, Joe? It says that she can print a form. So she can print out like forms to, you know, to okay that they take money off the – Take a thousand dollars a month or whatever. But it's like one thing I've noticed about the internet, doing different stories as well as this, just kind of like covering like subcultures and different weird beats in the internet space, is that it's very easy to wall yourself off from things you're not specifically interested in or where you're not specifically doing business. I think a lot of our readers think that scam world is just a very small little place because when a pop-up comes up, they don't investigate it. They close it. And that's why the scam world – that's why internet marketing material is so ridiculous. So people like you and me don't read it. So only people that are like primed to buy ridiculous stuff do read it. Right. That was part of the reasons I wanted to do the story was so that people who wouldn't be inclined to discover this subculture could find how large it is and how weird it is. It's incredible. I mean the crazy thing is that it goes up to – so first off, Tony Robbins – I thought – and I think this is true of many people – I thought Tony Robbins was like – had some legitimate business. He's like a motivational speaker. Motivational speaker. But he is in cahoots with like these guys who are most definitely – I mean Frank Kern sued by the FTC, paid money as a result, like found guilty of whatever it is they found him guilty of. The other people – they're like wrapped up with Tony Robbins. Well, you know what's funny is – remember that book The Game came out? Because Tony Robbins was like self-help guru. The Secret? No, The Game. What's The Game? The Game is a book about the pickup artist. Oh, yeah. The Neil Strauss book. The Neil Strauss book. Oh, oh, oh, oh. And then there's like – who was the pickup artist who made it into the syndicate? Not Ross. It's David D'Angelo, right? Yeah, that's his other name. Oh, yeah, it's a different name. He's got two names. What's the other name? Is that his name? Eben Sandler. Eben Pagan, I'm sorry. Eben Sandler is a buddy of mine. Anyway, so I went to a Neil Strauss – when The Game came out, I went to a Neil Strauss reading in Madison. Like it was there. Like let's all go. This will be great. We'll watch the pickup artist. And I gave them my email address. And this is before like I was graduated from school. They have followed me through the years. They've been following me through the years. And I've been following them through the years. And I've been following them through the years. They have followed me ever since. Really? Like I've been getting emails about how I can pick up any woman in the world if I just give them $5,000. On the eve of your wedding. It seems like the odd of the time to execute. But like it's amazing how persistent it – and I have no interest in it. I have my own pickup artist set that I will sell you for $5,000. Well, that sounds reasonable. But to teach me how to sell the pickup artist to other people. But it's amazing how persistent and it's just there. It's just an underculture of that. It's a very common thing now because when people are making money legitimately or doing whatever it's very common for people to go, okay, now I've heard about this internet. How can I leverage what I have to make more money on the internet? And they follow in with these people. A lot of very legitimate or seemingly legitimate operations have like sidelines either in boiler room sales or something along those lines. And I didn't go into that a lot because it's a dicey territory. And I think – I can tell you something. You also didn't go into any of the rap videos. There were some like late – some late discovery of some like bad rap videos. I don't know if we ran this Nokia. Do we have any of those? Today we ran a Nokia. Oh my God. Lumia rap or Nokia rap? Lumia rap we talked about a lot today. But these videos these guys make are like incredible. I was actually saying to Joe last night – we were by the way working on this till like two in the morning with James our new designer. And I was just out of it. And I was saying like I kind of – the bravado with which these guys come up with just their stories are so ridiculous. They're such insufferable, incredible jerks. You're almost like impressed by it. You're like how could anybody be this much of an ass? Yeah. And if you watch some of these videos it's just like a staggering – it's like staggeringly like just bravado. Well you know it's funny because the consequences are so small. So Joe we looked into Ray – we have a video by the way. We have a video by the way. We have a video by the way. We have a video by the way. We should watch the video. What video are we going to watch? Is it – this guy? Is it Lethal Commission? We should watch Lethal Commission. Could we watch a little bit of Lethal Commission? Lethal Commission is a – who's the name of the guy that did Lethal Commission? It's a Onyx Singhal. He's an internet marketer but he decided the best way to spread his message was to make a Bollywood movie. I mean like he made like this really bad like D movie. Yeah. Here's – this is the trailer. We're going to watch this. I mean this is like one of the best things about your PS2. We're going to have audio on this? I got no audio. Yeah I'm hearing. Nope. I don't hear anything. It was just a high pitched noise. You hoped – I mean – I'm just dreaming. Do we need to have audio? I know what's going on. This is just – here we go. No? Nope. Well look I know what she's saying. There's a high stake poker game. That's Marcelo Andrews. You got to get him. Are you serious? Yeah I know it. And then he's got unlimited income. He's got the software that can make you any affiliates in just a minute. I want you to understand – And then the Indian guy is going to go after this shot. They're basically just ripping off – by the way just ripping off James Bond movies really badly. Oh it's a magic. It just does it. Yeah it's great. Wow. I've watched this trailer like a thousand times. This is like just one of the ways – here we go. And then he pushes it and they're like – What was that? Click bank? Meet Natasha. Yeah. That was click bank. Yeah. Wait who is that guy? That's Natasha. I mean – And then she says you just look at people and kill them. Seriously Joe by the way I've watched this a thousand times. Why is she wearing these huge glasses? She's so smart. Is she a hipster? She's a nerd. Wait she'll take them off. A sexy nerd. No this is the plot of Casino Royale right? Yeah and then that guy says you don't find him he finds you and then explosions, bikinis, explosions and then they're going to play it all in reverse and then they play the credits and then the guy tries to sell you internet marketing. So this is just this video is for – here's what the video is. You're a young guy who's let's just say naive. That's a nice way of putting it. Let's use the word naive. You see this, you think this dude is awesome and he has a ton of money and then you sell him your information and he sells your information to a boiler. They're literally playing the whole trailer backwards. Profit. The bullet comes out and explodes and then cut and then the guy's like check it out that was my video for Lethal Commission. There it is. Oh yeah right. Cool guys don't look at explosions also. And now he wants to say he's live from Las Vegas. Oh my god. I told you. Look at my ascot. Ready to get some money from you. It's like I own all of Las Vegas. You can too. All right let's – that's enough of this. Like the bravado, the sheer – I like that it was only enough of it after we'd watched the whole trailer. The audacity, the sheer audacity of these guys. I'm almost like I get it. I get why people do it. And the consequences are nothing. Right. What's crazy right because – Joey you and I spent like what an hour or two hours looking into the guys who sued John Regoza. We read all the case files. We're like what happened? After all of that he got a judgment of like nine hundred thousand dollars against him. Which was – he didn't have. He didn't have. He's gone. He's hidden the money. Yeah. And nobody got it. And it was like it took them two years. He disappeared for a while. The judge is like where are you? And also like these cases are like you know the thing – the argument is this guy stole money from me but they can prove every step of the way that you willingly gave money to a business and they're like we have all the way – you know we have a program. They didn't follow. They didn't set up their website. It's especially great for them because like for an old woman that they sell the plan to who doesn't know what a website is. They're like she never set up her website. She would have been making money. Yeah. Money back guarantee. Money back guarantee. She never followed the steps. And it's like yeah of course because you're trying to find old women who don't know how to set up a website. Like that's the goal. So I want to – Joe I want to get into this. Have you seen – there was a lot of feedback to the piece. A lot of people really liked it. Uh oh. Controversy. But there's one actually very interesting criticism that Ross pointed out to me before he started. Danny Sullivan who runs Search Engine Land which is a great site that I read. He runs a sister site called – He's in comments? He's in marketing land. No he tweeted. He tweeted. He runs a site called Marketing Land which is kind of adjunct to Search Engine Land. And he says at Verge you've defined all of internet marketing to be a scam. Are you proud of yourself? And then he says he tweeted at Laura our site is all about capital I capital M internet marketing. Thanks for calling us scammers. Danny Sullivan? Danny Sullivan. Wow. I missed this. Danny Sullivan, debating just how big a can of whoop ass I should open. And this to me is like you're defining a term to be too big. Right? It's – there's internet marketing. There's doing marketing on the internet for your legitimate product and service. This was a huge – You should talk about. And then there's this thing, this phenomenon. They call it – Internet marketing. They call it internet marketing. Yeah. Yeah. We can't call it – This was a huge problem when writing this because internet marketing are real words. Right. So wait – Marketing on the internet is – This is just a criticism. I'm reading. I had no idea that – I'm not calling out Danny for this. I just want Joe to respond to it. Has he written anything on it beyond that? No. That's – I mean 17 – I have no idea. I know he's cranking that post in 18 minutes. Go ahead, Joe. Yeah. That was an interesting thing. That was kind of a difficult point when writing this story because there is internet marketing, capital I M, and then there's people that market on the internet. And then there's this world that calls itself internet marketing which like kind of defines its own language and uses its own terms. And after trying to figure out how to explain it for four months or six months, I just decided let's just say what they call themselves. This is like a small fraction of the subculture of internet marketing. I believe that the actual business practices are very common throughout all of scam land. Yeah. But internet marketing is like one subculture. I just tried to portray how that exists for real. I guess I'm just a little curious as to what Danny – I mean it's clear – Get him on the line. It's clear to me that we're not talking about Danny Sullivan in this piece. Right. Right. We're talking about specific people. Yeah. I mean I read Danny's sites. I think he's a good guy. He's a good, smart guy. It's interesting that I'd like to see what he has to say. But I don't know how you can look at this piece and see these guys' videos. I mean if he read the piece and watched these videos and knows who these people are – Which will take a while. Which by the way, I have to assume he knows who these people are because they're all over the internet. Right. They're all over – they're marketing their shit all over the internet. So I'm curious to know like how he feels about Frank Kern. I mean he has to know that when you watch a Frank Kern video, it's basically useless. But it's also all about internet marketing. Right. And then to say – Well, internet – whatever they're calling internet marketing. I mean you can say maybe I should have used a different word, but when you read this article, you have to like – No, I don't know how you could have. This is how they refer to their video. It's weird. And then I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from people in the world of internet marketing saying thanks for – we don't like these guys. Thanks for – You mean legit marketers. Yeah. Well, there's also another thing in IM where every scammer thinks that they're the only legit one. Well, and I guess like – So I don't know where – No, I don't know where Danny falls in like where his interests are in particular. I'd like to know. I'm curious to hear what he has to say about this. I guess he's pissed about it. But I will say this. I mean – I will say this. The one thing that we discovered and that you discovered and that we haven't I don't think fully explored, but there does seem to be a fine line between where these guys are and where people – and I'm not going to like name names, but people that you know, that we know in like the tech community who are very good at marketing themselves, who are involved in some of this stuff as well. Like where it borders on the edge of like self-help, self-promotion and like just kind of – Apparently there's a dude out there named Neil Patel. Neil Patel. Who – Is this a joke or – It's not a joke. Is he your alter ego? He's an SEO expert. How do you spell his name? And ever since we've been making the joke about me calling myself Neil when I get reservations at restaurants, I've had people being like, are you this guy? I'm like, no. Are you Neil Patel? That is the worst insult that anybody has ever delivered to me. I just think we use this Neil I Patel when he gets – I think there's some interesting – and if you just do like a little bit of research, I'm not going to go like down the rabbit hole. Maybe there's another story on it at some point, but there are people in the world of tech that I think are dangerously on like a fine line of being – goes beyond like promotion to like something else. And I think that's an interesting place to explore. And you know, maybe we will at some point. I'm going to leave that vague statement out there. I asked – I tweeted at Danny to see if he'd call in. So Joe. Yeah. Let's take some calls while we have Joe on the line. Why don't we take some calls? Maybe people have some questions for you. If you want to talk about or have been a victim of – Oh, he wrote the piece. Oh, he did. Yeah, he wrote the piece. What does he say? Hold on a second. Hey, the Verge. Can I just call you Verge? We've got a little problem. Apparently, you've grown past your gadget roots and your quest to be the new – wow, this is really insulting. The new all things TechCrunch. In doing so, you've stumbled into labeling a wide swath of the general market. By the way, I just want to say – I just want to say – I just want to say day week one of our launch, day one, I think, we did a piece on survival condos. We've done wide ranging pieces on all sorts of things. We've done pieces on artists, on music. I mean, this is not a new thing for us. We've been – I mean, yeah, but that's – we've been doing – he's incorrect. I'm just going to say – I'm not going to nitpick the whole piece. He's incorrect that somehow today we decided we were going to write – this piece has been in the works since before we launched. We actually had the idea for this before we launched. All right. Well, here's the core of it. Whatever. I mean, that's – Go ahead. Whatever. Just go. You're pretty clearly talking about a scummy segment that pushes internet marketing, capital letters, as a make money scam, but you've done nothing in that giant, huge article to clarify that there's a broader, longer-standing discipline of internet marketing that has nothing to do with that. Now, that's like – that's what I'm saying. It's – you can – this is what they call themselves, and then there's marketing. No. I mean, you can't refer to what they do because their whole thing is like when they talk about themselves, they're like, we're internet marketers. This is internet marketing. Do you want to be a part of internet marketing? It's not – go ahead. Let's see. I want to hear what else Danny's – it is how they refer to themselves. You can't just change it. Well, his last line is, if Nokia comes along and declares that all Windows phones are now iPhones, you'll just start calling them iPhones. Well, what I want to know is why – Misses the point of the piece completely. I have seen like so little from the SEO world and I guess in the internet marketing world, like the so-called legit internet marketing world, to stand up against these guys. I've gotten so many emails from people saying, this was great. I wish I could say something about this, or this is great. I used to stand up to these guys, but it never worked. It's like, why aren't they trying to clean up their industry? That is a great question. Why aren't they striving to get these guys to stop identifying themselves as internet marketers? And to be clear, nowhere in this piece does Danny say like, these scammers are good. He even says – I think it's clear that – No, we all agree on that. Everyone does the same thing. I don't want to put words in Danny's mouth, but I think what he was looking for was a paragraph somewhere that said, now, there are legit internet marketing firms or people who are not involved in this scammy stuff. These guys refer to themselves as internet marketers, and in fact, there is a segment of real internet marketers that are on the up and up. I get that, but we were covering specific people and specific stories in this piece. I have to say, and that's great, but to Joey's – Joey, how you doing, buddy? To Joey. No, to Joey's point, the SEO world is equally scummy. You've got to grow past that. I mean, I'm looking just at this SEO page right now, and it's a beginner's guide to mobile app marketing, free course, W traffic in 30 days plus secret bonus value of 300. I mean, SEO stuff is terrible. And this is the guy – I'm talking about Neil Patel, who is like legit. He consults for TechCrunch. Let's take some calls. Well, let's take some calls. I'm just saying. I mean, but consulting and – He consults for a cheeseburger. I mean, like, he's a legit guy. His tactics are exactly the same. If you want to talk about internet marketing, call 888-418-4074. By the way, Danny Sullivan, if you'd like to call – I think he might be on an airplane. Call from the airplane. I think the rules have changed now. You're able to use your cell phone. 888-418-4074. If you have a question for Joe, if you want to talk about internet marketing, and if you have any experience – if you're Frank Kern or – who are the other guys? I'm trying to think of other – Andy Jenkins. Andy Jenkins. Rick Oza. Perry Belcher. Perry Belcher. Salty Droid, for that matter, if you're out there. Salty Droid. Salty Droid, if you're out there, who – by the way, the guy that – when this story really got interesting is that Joe found this guy, Salty Droid, who's basically been waging this, like, one-man war on these guys through his blog and Twitter. And when he started talking to him, like, the stuff that he knew and the depths of this was like, whoa. Right. It was – this is a lot bigger than Anthony Morrison's late-night commercials. Right. Danny just tweeted me and said I'm literally about to board a plane. It's too bad. So hopefully you can get him on. Thank you, Danny. We'd love to talk to you about it. And of course, we would love to hear what you have to say on this. And I think, you know, I'm – I get his point. I just think that it's – they've muddied the waters. Yeah. Not us. I'm going to take call here. Caller, you're on the air. What is your name? What do you have to say? And what can you sell me? And what – how much does the book cost? Hello? Hello? Hello? My name is Chang. Oh, God. It's you again. Chang. Chang. No. Oh, okay. Long Chang. What's up? What's up? How are you guys? Good. How are you? Good. Well? Good. I always wanted to come on the World Vets Cast. Well, here you are. Yep. Do you have any thoughts? Pleasure talking to you, Josh. Well, the feeling is mutual. Do you have any thoughts on the internet market, any questions about these internet marketers? Did you read the scam world piece? I think it's out of date now. It's been out for four hours. It's been on the site since – All right. Take it off the site, guys. Show your fire. Old news. It's been on the site for – since 10.30 East Coast time. Chang, do you actually – is this a prank call? Are you pranking us? Chang, how high are you? Chang, thanks for calling. All right. Next call, you're on the air. Please be better than Chang. What's your name and what do you want to talk about? Hey. My name is Alex Serena and I wanted to talk about the SEO thing that you guys wrote about the article. The scam world. Sure. Yeah, the scam world one. Yes. I guess I just want to call in and say I definitely understand where Danny Sullivan is coming from in that there's a difference between the legit people and the ones who are obviously out there trying to scam you but I think that there's also a slimy in between. In between those two camps, there's the people who offer you the money back guarantee and while there might be a real money back guarantee, there's – they're going to make you jump through crazy hoops to get it. So I feel like there's no legit internet marketing per se and like – So you think – I mean there is a completely non-legit camp but at the same time, there are people who fall in between. Okay. That's interesting. I mean have you had experience working with these guys or is this just like an observation? Well I mean no. I've obviously – number one, I've talked to people who say they do internet marketing and obviously as someone who considers himself a little bit more well-informed, you just kind of laugh and say, oh no, you're just kind of a scam artist. Right. And sometimes like I said, they do things that seem legitimate but I think the whole entire business of the way marketing is done on the internet can get really slimy at times. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Even something like Danny Sullivan who's completely legitimate, their tactics can be just really – Well you know what's funny is – You know for us to run a site, we have to engage like SEO. It's important for us to know that – We have to understand or to learn it. We have to learn. We have to kind of understand it. I think that our ability to engage in our like desire to engage it deeply is somewhat limited by the fact that every time I get a little too close to it, I'm like, ew. Yes. And then I back away and then all we do – It is – it can be a little icky. I do feel like there's this thing where you feel that a goal is to game something. Yeah. The goal – It's like here's what we want you to learn, how to trick something into doing what you want it to do. Yeah. We do try to do best practices when it comes to SEO but for us, I remember the first time I did a column on the post, they ran a headline. It was like – I can't remember what I wrote about the first time. Maybe the second one they had this very clever Blackberry headline. It was like new Blackberries aren't so bold or something. Hey. What's up? Danny wants us to send him a phone number but we need one that he can call. Oh, 888? Well, he's not going to get through. What? Well, he won't get through. There's like a thousand of them. All right. Sorry. Hang on. Let me just finish my point. Yeah. Finish your point. We – so anyhow, the point is that I was like – I admire their flexibility of being able to write whatever they want because we have to kind of adhere to SEO. You've got to think about it if you're on the internet. But it does feel like when you get into the training stuff, it can feel a little – it can feel a little slimy. I agree with you. I'm not saying Danny is. I think there are elements there though. I mean, he's really covering it. I don't know what Danny's relationship – I don't know everything that Danny does. Danny's relationship with it is to cover it, which is a very different thing. So anyhow, thanks for your call. Our lines are filling up here, but I appreciate the thoughts. Okay. We have – so – Really? Really? Line four is open for Danny if he wants to call in. We have Paul Miller. Paul Miller is on line two. Paul Miller had a dual root canal today. I'm not kidding. Seriously? Two. Two. Yeah. Paul, you're on the line. Yep. Did you have a root canal today? I had two. How are you feeling, buddy? How do you feel? I feel a lot of pain. I just want to say hi to you guys. Are you on any painkillers? No, but I think I might seek them out. Do you want some painkillers? They gave you like a prescription, right? You have to go find them on the street. Well, no, I'm going to try to find them on the street just for the – So I don't know if you know this, but maybe you do because I know you saw Thomas, but we published the scammer's internet marketing scammer's piece. And this has been going on for so long that Paul was there at like the inception of the piece. Paul was there at the beginning of the scam world piece before scam world was even the name. Before there were even scammers on the internet. We published it and Danny Sullivan is mad at us for lumping in all internet marketing with these bad guys, bad internet marketers. Oh, awesome. Yeah. So – Congratulations, Joe, on publishing. Joe's here. Joe's on. Yeah. Thanks, Paul. It's good to talk to you. I miss you. Yeah, he doesn't see you on the internet anymore. Print out a copy and mail it to me. I'm really excited to read it. Mail it to you. I like that. Well, we can print out a copy here. I'll hand deliver it. We can print out a copy here in New York for you if you want to be a little bit easier for – but you know. So are we – sorry. Yeah, we've got Danny on the line. So Danny Sullivan is mad at us about the piece and he's now on the line? What? On the line? On line four? On line four. All right, Paul, can I bring – can I have them both on? No, I'll take off. I just wanted to say hi to you guys and say I'm alive. Well, that's very good. Take care of yourself. Get some pain killers if you need them. Bye, Paul. Feel better. And we'll talk to you next week. I mean, we'll see you in the office. Later. You'll be on next week. All right, bye. Cool. All right, so Danny Sullivan's on four? Danny, it's Josh. Hi. Hi, how are you? Hey. Hey, it's you. Hi. And we have Ross. And Joe, who wrote the article. And we just – sorry, we just discovered – I just – I was in meetings all day and we heard that you were upset about the piece that we wrote and wanted to get your thoughts on it. What are you thinking? The main thing is I understand that there's this segment of scammers who call this whole thing internet marketing. And I love the piece that you're exposing it. I think that stuff is terrible and it's just heartbreaking what people get involved with and how people get taken into that sort of stuff. But there is a much bigger, much more long-standing segment called internet marketing that is made up of people who do everything from social media marketing to SEO to paid for, to display advertising. They're all internet marketers. They all just under this umbrella term just like you have television marketers or print marketers or correct marketers. So I saw that in my entire heart. I mean I have an entire cycle of marketing on this about internet marketing. Right, but like who do you – who's an internet marketer that – I mean give me an example of somebody that – I don't know – on the up and up who's an internet marketer, somebody you describe as an internet marketer who is like completely on the up and up. I'm just trying to understand who you're specifically talking about. You've got people who do social media for you, right? Social media marketing? No. No. We have a guy at Twitch sometimes. We have like our editors man the Twitter account stuff. Okay, but that's marketing. You're running social media accounts as social media marketing and that's part of internet marketing. I mean we're trying to get our – I mean I wouldn't call that marketing exactly. I mean I see social media as an avenue to reach readers, right? Like when I think of it I'm like if people are on Twitter and see that we have written a story they'll come and read the story and I want that because I want people to read the stuff. I mean it is – we're marketing our content I guess but we're not like – we don't pay someone to get the word out. You might not do that right now but as you grow there's an excellent chance you're going to be doing that sort of thing. We didn't do it in Engadget. I don't think we did. Yeah, we didn't do it in Engadget. I mean we had a sales team that sold ads but – Well that's advertising when you're selling it on your site. Marketing is – I'm trying to help people discover our content and sometimes marketing is done through paid which is often referred to as paid marketing or so on. That is done through – in the marketing world would be called earned marketing. It sounds weird but it's the idea that you have somehow earned the idea that people would just freely mention you. So for example a PR firm that helped get an article in the newspaper by doing a really good pitch and you guys know this right? You get pitch. Those PR firms are doing marketing. Right. They can't guarantee that anything can happen. They can't force you to do anything but you know the difference between a good PR person who helps you get the information paid versus some scumbag who comes along and says hey, go to find an ad and it will go up on the site. It doesn't work that way. Right. Sorry, go ahead. So you have this discipline of marketing and where it's probably sounding strange to you is because you guys aren't coming at it as thinking about it as marketing but the people who perform these types of things, they are marketers. People over in Zag, right? You know they make the skins that go on your phone, that sort of thing? They have people who do both social media marketing and do certain digitization. That is their job. They're hired to do that sort of stuff and they think about themselves as marketers. The ad tech conference that happens is filled with big companies and small companies of people who are doing internet marketing. So here's my question to you. So these guys refer to themselves as internet marketers. I don't see what they call what they do. They call it internet marketing. In video after video, these guys are like become an internet marketer. This is how we do internet marketing. This is the world of internet marketing. Over and over again, they use the phrase. So I guess I think what you might have and I said this before, I feel like what we could have done and maybe we'll add an addendum to this somewhere. I'm not putting words in Joe's mouth because it's his piece. Joe Flatley who wrote it is on the line as well. But I think you were looking for a paragraph somewhere that said now look, there are on the up and up people who call themselves internet marketers who do real internet marketing that are SEO people or marketers that have real products and get paid real money by real clients to do specific things that are totally on the up and up. And these guys call themselves internet marketers, but what they're really doing is it's a pyramid scheme essentially. Yeah, I mean, they're not, you know, they're just trying to get rich fast. Now, or get rich off of people. I guess the best equivalent I could say is this is just somebody is doing spam, email spam, right? That they're going around saying that they're an email marketer. These are people who are actually doing actual email marketing, maintaining email lists for their companies and sending out offers to people that they're interacting with and so on that would think, oh my God, I'm not a spammer. That's a completely different person. Right. Well, but Joe, you know, but there is a fine line. Joe made a good point here and I think that you'll have to agree that there are people who probably see themselves as legit. I mean, a lot of these guys seem to see themselves as legit and think that they're selling a service and don't actually seem to recognize that they are spamming. You know, they are spammers, right? Absolutely. All I can say is there's a much bigger group of people who are actually, I think, doing legitimate internet marketing that has nothing to do with the scam that has taken that name and wants to use it as well. So here's my question for you. I think this is something that I'd really like to know and I would like to, what is the legit internet marketing community doing, if anything, or what can they do about these guys co-opting this name, the term and the idea of it? And the success, right? Because legit internet marketing can be successful. I think you do a search for internet marketing, you're not going to find, the first guys you see aren't going to be the up and up guys. The guys you're going to see are going to be Frank Kern and Anthony Morrison and Get Rich Quick Scheme. So what is the internet marketing community, the legit marketing community doing or what do you think they should do to combat this? You know, this is the first time I actually encountered them calling themselves by this kind of a name. I mean, it really surprised me because the last time I was looking at, say, search for internet marketing was probably about six months ago and I don't remember running into any of this stuff at all. So, you know, I don't know if it just suddenly shifted to this more recently or if it's been out there and it's just suddenly grown. But this is my first guy going, what? They're calling themselves internet marketing? Where did that come from? Yeah. I mean, that's... I'm seeing other people treating me like that. I've never heard of this as well. So, you know, I suppose in part, internet marketers out there may not have been doing anything because these paths are just not really crossed. Right. Right. Joe, do you have a sense of how long they've been actually... I mean, because obviously these businesses come from... Sorry. Are you on a plane right now, Danny? Yeah. We're going to get them like totally bald wind. It's very... Yeah, you're going to get kicked off the plane because of us. I'm already at the moment. Joe, do you know how long they've been using internet marketing specifically or kind of trending towards this? Well, I mean, obviously I only ever discovered this... We turned Danny down....four, six months ago. Sorry. Sorry, no, it's okay. You're good, Danny. We'll do it on the other end. Go ahead, Joe. Four, six months ago, but a lot of this material, because they keep reusing the same material. You see YouTube videos from two, three, four years ago. It's internet marketing. Right. And also, internet marketing is like an umbrella term. The stuff is not new. It's plenty of other... Danny, this is Ross. Can I ask you a question? You've read the piece. Yeah. Yeah. Is there anyone that any person or group that we called out that you thought was unfair? Like in particular people, not the term itself, but like people, organizations we called out? No. I just was... What threw me off was coming in and hearing that internet marketing was snake oil because I just had not seen that term being used with these kinds of scams. And I've only seen that term used for legitimate stuff that I know. What kind of term have you heard for these guys? Yeah. What would you call these guys? Because what's interesting is that they've definitely been around and doing this for years, calling themselves internet... Make money, work at home. I would have to go back. I mean, Joe, it sounds like he knows the history of how that word developed much better than I. These kinds of scams don't seem to be new. Maybe the names have changed. And to the degree that the article raises awareness that there are people who may be actually confusing that internet marketing with broader discipline of internet marketing, that's great. I applaud that. It's just that there's no acknowledgement that there's this other kind of internet marketing. When I first got onto the internet in 1995, I was part of the iNet marketing mailing list. That was how we all talked to each other and we were all people who were trying to help everybody else understand how we were going to be getting onto the internet and how we were going to be marketing websites and how we were going to... Part of marketing was building websites for people. That's how far back I know of internet marketing going as a name, as a pipe to the internet. That's interesting. I mean, I think that... I get what you're saying and I think that there's probably some room for... It feels like the thing is, the problem is that these guys call themselves internet marketers. I think that the idea that it's a blanket, that all internet marketers are like these guys is obviously a problem. That wasn't the point. I don't think that was the point of Joe's piece at all. We were kind of focusing on particular people and stories. I can see how... Yeah, we used like what, four, six people to kind of as extreme cartoonish illustrations, but not every single person in the story, not every scammer, not every con artist operates in the exact same way. Not every person that uses their tactics is strictly using their tactics. A lot of them are legit. A lot of legit companies buy into that. Part of the problem is we had to define terms because everybody describes themselves differently and really tries to obfuscate what they're doing. Internet marketer was the most universal, so that's what we picked. I completely agree. I talked to quite a few people in the SEO world and in the legit world and they didn't identify themselves as internet marketers. They all seem to shy away from that. Yeah. I do feel like it does seem like there's a difference between you talking about PR and advertising and SEO. The term internet marketing is not a term I've ever associated with... Even with your site, internet marketing as a phrase is not something that I think of at all. I guess there's this weird disconnect between on your side, there's this disconnect between what these guys are and being internet marketing on the side of the more mainstream, I think there's a disconnect about the idea of internet marketing as a thing at all. That it's something you're associated with. When you talk about somebody... What I'll say is, if you head over to Techme, you'll see Matt Katz over at Google expressing the same kind of surprise that I'm having. He has lived in the dirtiest, darkest trenches of the internet. There is nothing terrible he has not seen about marketing, having to run spam policing for Google. Even he seemed to be surprised to go, what? I totally think it's fine that you use that term to apply it to the way that it's being used within that kind of genre, what those people are saying. I just think it would be really helpful if you explain that there's this whole other discipline of internet marketing. Sometimes it's called digital marketing, sometimes it's called internet marketing. But there are people who do this range of activities. Even the Wikipedia page explains this sort of stuff that are completely distinct from the... I know it's Wikipedia, but actually they work that far off. I mean, for all we know, these guys... Frank Kerr might have been hand editing the Wikipedia page. Yeah, they've been busy at it. You know what, Danny? I hear what you're saying. I know you're on a plane and you probably have to go soon, but I hear what you're saying and we'll discuss it. Maybe there's some way... Danny, if you just give me $1,000, I can make sure that I'll consult with you in the team chat. If you're on the $1,000 level, we got a $500 package. Danny, do you work better with Visa or MasterCard? Because we want to get you in on the right level here. American Express, though, we just have to. No, no, no. In all seriousness, all joking aside, I hear what you're saying. I think that that's totally legit. What you're saying is there's a segment of people who have a real job and it's not ripping people off and they do... Some of them clearly refer to themselves as internet marketers or else you wouldn't be upset about this. Maybe there's some way that we can clarify that in the piece. You know what I mean? It may be as simple as saying, now look, there's a legitimate business called internet marketing. These guys are not it. Maybe we can point to your post and say Danny Sullivan wrote something about the legit internet marketing, but this is something else. Yeah. Go ahead. If you want, and I tone the post down a little bit because I was upset. You referred to us as all things TechCrunch, which I take a little... Which I have to say is the most bitter insult that's ever been delivered to me. I will say, Danny, just really on that one point, I will say if you look at us from launch day, we've been doing big pieces, thought pieces like this that aren't just about gadgets. One of our earliest pieces was Joe did this thing on survival condos. We've done those long form pieces on rim, which is much more about the business side. We've done stuff on art and on music and on culture that are not... This is not a new thing for us. This is just an evolution of what we're doing. I think the features are all great. One of the things that I find interesting is that I think your announcement went out of the new name and everything in November. We launched our marketing land site in the same kind of way that we've long run search engine land, which is about search marketing, and we've got people who do things beyond search engines with internet marketing, so we've launched an internet marketing site. It really has nothing to do with this other kind of internet marketing. We're going to... No, dude, I totally hear you on this. I think that we're going to talk about and figure out if there's a way to get... Just clarify that point, because I think that the fact is these guys are calling themselves internet marketers, and I think it almost helps to point out that what they think is internet marketing or what they're trying to sell people as internet marketing is clearly not the real business of internet marketing. I think that's... You know what? I think that's a good point, and we'll talk about it, and we'll figure something out. Well, I appreciate the time, and sorry things got heated a bit there. No, it's fine. I think I got that one last tweet, and I was like, what? No. We're not getting it. We don't get riled up. I'm actually glad to hear... I'm just glad we got a chance to talk to you. I think it's really interesting to hear the other side of this, which is not evident. That's the thing that's so crazy. That other side is like the voice has been drowned out by these guys. When you do a search for internet marketing, you don't get Danny Sullivan. That's not the first thing. Maybe it is... I don't know where your site ranks, but it really is these guys are drowning out what the industry you're talking about is. Maybe it's time to mount up against these dudes, get lawyer up. After that, or maybe that if it grows to that degree, you're going to have an internet market say, hey, you know what? We're digital workers, but we're something else. They may very well do it. This may have woken up a lot of people who had no idea that they were even calling themselves that. It would be good to have the clarification. It would be great if you guys decide that you want to do it. I think that would help. Anyway, it's good. The piece, I can't say enough, the piece was great in exposing this kind of stuff. I think that you would find a ton of the legitimate internet marketers out there, if you will, want to endorse that same sort of thing to say, this is crap. It's just telling us to be able to say it and then feel like, oh, but you're the same kind of crap. I think that was definitely not our goal. We can draw a finer line, I think, pretty easily. Danny, thanks so much. Have a safe flight wherever you're going. I hope that we talk again soon. Sounds good. Take care. Thanks very much. Bye. That was cool. That was really nice to have him. You adding that piece right now, Joe? Joe's just drinking. We'll figure it out after the Verge. We want to take another call. I feel like we should move on from internet marketing. We're calling Pebble. We're going to talk to the Pebble guys? Really? Wow. Joe, we're going to move on. You know the news cycle, constantly churning. A lot of churning in the news cycle. I've been out of the news cycle for about four months. Yeah, you've been back. I've been deep in the scam world. Actually, Joe, is your next piece, I'm not going to say what it is, but is it what I think it is? It's a shorter form feature that he's writing. Let me set up Pebble before they come on. Joe, are you going to hang out? I don't really want to. I don't like you either, man. Is that weird? Does Ziggler know? No, no, no. That's great. It's better for everybody. Joe, thank you for joining us. It's better for everybody. Thanks, guys. Wow, man. Later, buddy. Great work on this piece. I know. Have a beer. Relax. Enjoy your life. Yeah. If you hear a knock at the door and you don't know who it is on the other side, you're going to be fine. I took my name off the mailbox. I told you where it goes or where you live. Don't worry about it. That's good. All right, Joe. We'll talk to you soon. We'll see you soon. All right. Thanks, guys. Later, man. Let me set this up. Pebble, we talked about them on the show. Pebble, the watch, the smart watch. The Kickstarter watch. They obviously blew past their funding goals. Jammed past it. Actually, to be clear, they wanted to sell a thousand of these watches. They sold 85,000. They've hit over $10 million on Kickstarter. So they're sold out. They're all done. They still have eight days to go. They still have eight days to go, but they're done. They can't make any more money. 85,000 units sold before anything is actually... Who are we talking to? They're online, too. Okay. Eric is online, too. Eric. Eric from Pebble. Eric Pebble. Eric Pebble. Eric Pebble. Eric P. Pebble. Let's just get him on the line. This is cool. Kind of an exclusive conversation. Eric, you're on the line. Can you hear us? Hi. What's up? How are you? Now, how many bottles of champagne have you had today? I want to get a gauge of how much you've been drinking since discovering that you... My level today, I've been eating right next to my desk is an empty bag of dried mangoes. That's what I've been shutting down. Those are good. Those are delicious. Does those get you high? Yeah. No, no. Just the right amount. Okay. Hey, so let me ask you, why did you cut this off? It seems like you could have just kept going forever. You already passed 85,000 by a sizable number. One of the big concerns for us was being able to source enough components in the short term to complete the build on schedule. In the interest of delivering the absolute best product to our Kickstarter backers, we decided to cut off the rewards at the moment. I'm assuming, since you can still donate a dollar or two here now, you just don't get to watch, are you still getting donations today, like decent amount? Yeah, I think, yeah, there were a couple hundred people that have sort of put down a dollar to keep on track. But I mean, we are committed to selling more Pebbles in the future. So for example, as soon as Kickstarter closes, we're going to put up a little page that lets people sort of get in line to buy one of the first Pebbles when they are available after Kickstarter. So what's the... Okay, so you've got $10 million. Now you don't actually have the money yet. This thing has to close. Nope, nope. The project closes on the 18th. Okay. And that's when people's credit cards will be processed against that. And so explain to me... And I think we received the transaction. So explain to me how this works. So you have literally, I'm not trying to be rude, I just want to understand what happens. You now have $10 million in credit card transactions that will be, what will happen on this date, Kickstarter will charge... It will go from zero to 10 million. And a bank account somewhere will suddenly have $10 million in it? It's actually an Amazon payments account since Kickstarter has partnered with Amazon to process all their credit card transactions. But you will have access to $10 million when this thing closes? Yes, our company will. Hi. You personally. You're not going to like... I mean, how much of this is just your party budget? You're going to finally close out all your Prime items that you've been trying... You're like, your wish list? I actually, I think I should check to see if it's now going to be like, I can just spend a lot of money on Amazon or whether I actually get... You get the money. Yeah. So I have some questions for you about the watch. I'm really curious. I'm a smart watch fan boy. I have been. And this is... I think the reason this has caught on is because it has a lot of the pieces that people have wanted in a device. So the first one is just, can you talk to us about how it actually works with iOS? Because that seems to be the thing that has made this one really interesting, right? Yeah. So I think there's some things I can't really talk about too much until we've gone through the final stages of the process. But in briefly, we're following the MFI guidelines, made for iPhone guidelines. I think one of the things that we've done differently is we've used a couple of different Bluetooth profiles. So in order to get phone call notification on the watch, we're actually using the HFP profile of Bluetooth. That's the headset profile. We've done extensive testing to show that you can connect to an iPhone with Pebble as well as another headset. So you can get caller ID information using Pebble. Oh, that's interesting. Wait, let me just paint this picture. So you have an iPhone, you've got a Bluetooth headset in your ear, and you've got a smart watch. And they're both connected. You get a call, then you answer it with your watch, and then begin talking. Is that correct, Eric? Is that right? So you get a call, you're notified on the watch, you can answer it on the watch, and it bounces it to the headset. But you can't answer it like there's no speaker or microphone on the watch. No, no, no, no, I know that. But you take action on the call, and then it bounces the call to the headset, essentially. Right now, we have the caller ID showing up on the watch. Oh, so you can't take action on it. It's possible that we may have that in. We can't guarantee it right now. Okay. Have you worked with Apple on this at all? Has there been any, you probably can't talk about it even if you did, but I just wonder if there's been any conversation with anybody there in terms of how you might... So for example, that, what I just described, is a plain Bluetooth spec thing. We're also using, another thing that we've done that other people haven't done is used AVRCP, the audio-visual remote control profile, to be able to control music on either iPhone or Android. Oh, wow. So these are, the profiles you're using, they're not some sort of custom spec. These are... These are like standard, anybody could tap into this. It's just that nobody seems to have done it or done it... Done it correctly. Done it well. And then there's a provision where your app gets to run in the background because it's connected to the watch, right? Correct. So that's really interesting. How did you kind of negotiate that? Is that going to kill battery life? That's not a negotiation. That's another, that's something that came around with iOS 5. Okay. So up until iOS 5, you know, with iOS 4, there were some provisions for doing backgrounding if you ran streaming music like Spotify or if you did location-aware apps like Foursquare or something like that. But there was no exception or background exemption for hardware up until iOS 5. But they run these discrete processes, right? I mean, they're kind of... You're not actually backgrounding the entire app. You're backgrounding this... No, not actually backgrounding the app. There's some crazy stuff that's going on in the iOS. Right. Yeah. So you'll be tapping into that to keep a constant connection. Yeah. And is there a battery life concern? Is there, I mean, what kind of... What does that put on the phone side? No, not in particular. I mean, we haven't released, you know, precise numbers, but we haven't seen that. Is it the equivalent to, say, when I'm in my car and, you know, my phone is connected, obviously via Bluetooth. I mean, similar connection, like in terms of battery life concerns? Probably a little bit less because with a car kit, especially when you're making calls, that's a constant Bluetooth connection. Right. Ours is very intermittent. And you're not actually utilizing the watch for the call. Right. And then, so then the other big piece of news you just had was you upgraded the phone... Or the phone. By the way, I keep calling it a phone. It's part of my... It's not a phone. It's Ross's fault. It's a watch. It's a watch. It's a watch. Just collapse them all. No, so you just upgraded to Bluetooth 4.0, which was actually the very first... When I first saw the watch, I was like, but why isn't it Bluetooth 4.0? And then, so you kind of made my day there. What do you expect to kind of... Yeah, well, I think it was a matter of like, you know, so when we started off the Kickstarter project, we were estimating that we were going to be able to manufacture, you know, a thousand watches if we raised $100,000. And so, I mean, we obviously had a plan in the past for larger amounts of manufacturing. That's what we're pursuing right now. But at the end of the day, you know, we were just, you know, really hardcore focused on making watches. So we sort of... We wanted to bite off what we could chew. And that's why we targeted 2.1 plus EDR to start with. Right, because that was available. And so I have a question. Is it... Was the response bigger than you expected? I mean, it seems like it was way bigger than you expected. I'd like to know, was it? And why... Yeah, how are you kind of dealing with it? Like, what do you think the cause of it was? Like, what is it that you did? Or what is it about your product that you think is... I mean, what have you heard from people? They were like, I've got to buy into this. Like, can you communicate that? Can you tell me that? Yeah, I mean, we're still in the process of figuring it out, because that's going to be a pretty valuable insight to figure out. From what I've heard, I mean, just talking about, you know, parents and my relatives, like, this is the first product that I've created that really sort of lit up my hands on ice or something like that. That's really cool. That means that we're sort of reaching beyond our comfort zone, which is the tech and the geek and the gadget guys, and, you know, crossing over into our mainstream iPhone users, Android users. And so what I've heard from, you know, basically my relatives or some of the people that I've been talking to the most, you know, they like the idea of customizing their watch, being able to download a different watch face and run it on your watch. I think that's pretty cool. I mean, how complex can you get with this? I mean, this is an E Ink display, right? It's E Paper. Is it E Ink specifically? E Paper, sorry. Is it E Ink? Is it E Ink or is it E Paper? Because E Ink is a brand, right? E Ink is a brand. E Ink is a brand name, yeah. So it's E Paper. And what are you doing in terms of levels of gray? I mean, how detailed can you get? What's the, you know, I guess there's no... It's just black and white at the moment. Oh, it is? Okay. And so third party faces? Is that a thing that you might do? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So you might get like Bell and Ross or somebody to do a custom... I'm serious. Yeah, or I mean like custom design. We're starting with just anyone who wants to make one can start writing a watch face. I was thinking you could do like Swatch could be a partner. They could be funky. Yeah. Actually, have you talked to any watch companies? Yeah, I have. You were also like, damn it, we've been trying to do this for 20 years. You would think that, yeah, we have legit, you know, like already established watch companies reached out and said, I don't know why I'm saying legit a lot on this show. Yeah, no, it's cool. It's like, it's super 94. MC Hammer, MC Hammer. Have watch companies reached out to you guys? Have you gotten people sniffing around now going, hey, we want this technology? Not yet, but I'm sure once they do, you know, we'd be happy to chat. Yeah. Would you consider licensing this technology for other devices, other watches? We haven't really nailed down, you know, that kind of future stuff. We're really at the moment just focused on getting these out there for our Kickstarter and stuff. What exactly is next for you? Yeah. Is the design finished? Are you just waiting to buy the parts? I just said, do you buy the parts? Why do you buy the parts? Wait, go ahead. Sorry, sorry, go ahead. We're placing large component orders, getting everything lined up for starting production later this summer. So actually I have kind of two questions. One's like kind of minor and one's bigger. And I think the big one's really interesting. So you start out saying we want to make a thousand watches. We want to prove the model. We want to show people that we can do this. So there's a way to make a better watch. And then you ended up with $10 million and 85,000 orders. What changed over the course? I mean, how did you react to the first explosion and then how did you react to kind of, okay, now we have to do this for real. Yeah. I mean, when you're talking about a thousand devices, that's a boutique order essentially. That's a proof of concept. That's a, right. I mean, that's a very small run. When you get up to what you're at now, you must have had to scale up, I mean, the infrastructure to produce 85,000 versus a thousand has got to be somewhat different. So we actually, when we started working on Pebble, Pebble is our second watch. We worked on Impulse, the Blackberry smartwatch for a while. We actually, so we had designed right after iOS 5 hit last summer, we started designing Pebble working with this new display that we had sourced. We'd lined up a manufacturer. We'd lined up a whole team for making sort of a large scale product, but we just didn't have the capital to be able to support that. We had attempted to raise venture capital from the VCs and just we weren't able to get any sort of traction in the venture capital market. So we had this great plan and we had this great product. We just had no cash to be able to pull it off. So we scaled back our dreams. We said, okay, maybe we had this great sort of watch that we wanted to design. What's a subset of that? What could we launch on a finite amount of money? And that's what we came up with, with our, with Pebble. So you scaled back, this started as a different watch is what you're saying? It didn't, no, sorry. The watch is the same watch, but we scaled our manufacturing plans back. Oh, okay, okay. So you weren't like, we want to do this crazy watch, but we can do half the features. So do you feel kind of vindicated that all these VCs turned you down and now you've like gone to the people? To be honest, I'm just really happy that I get to make Pebble. Right. I would have hated, I mean, I wouldn't have given up. We would have figured out how to get it out there somehow, but it probably would have ended up with just me making more watches in our garage. So the 18th is when you close, right? When the Kickstarter project closes. What is the very first thing that happens after that? I'm just curious to know, like literally, what's the process? Literally you get the, you have the money, right? You've obviously got the plans for the watch, I assume, you know, you've got your suppliers in place. So what is the very first thing you do? You have the money, like how do you start the, what's the first domino? So the very first thing actually happened about four weeks ago. So the day after we opened Kickstarter and you know, the first Engadget article hit, it sort of exploded and we made the switch. We flipped the switch. Real rag. We flipped the switch that day. Engadget you say. Oh, it's fine. I'm sure you've heard of them. I've heard of them. They sound familiar. And so then the next thing is you get the money and are you like writing a check to a supplier? Is that the next thing? Do you have to fly? Do you have to go? We're writing a lot of different checks, but no. So for example, we phoned up our contract manufacturer, you know, the day after Kickstarter started and we were like, well, we're going to order a lot more watches than we thought. That's been in the works for four weeks. The thing for sure that's going to happen at the end of May is I'm going to sign several very large checks for long lead time components. Interesting. Hello, Eric. Hi. Sorry. And these are all sold. That's the nice thing. It's not like you're like, hey, we're going to make 85,000 watches and we don't know what we're going to do with them. I mean, these are so, so explain to me how that works. Is this the watches are manufactured overseas, right? Yes. OK. And then are they just being shipped directly to the customers? We're not 100 percent sure how the logistics will work out, but we'll probably figure out what's the best way to get them out to all over the world. And following the 85,000 that you've that you've now sold, right? They're all spoken for, correct? Correct. So beyond that, do you have are you planning on ramping to getting? Are you going to go to stores? Are you going to distribute these? Are you going to talk to distributors? Are you going to try to put them in Apple stores or Best Buy or what's the plan beyond the Kickstarter people? We're building it for production. So like the production set up that we'll have to make the Kickstarter batch will be the same factory, the same set up that we could use to make more watches. What's the ramp between filling out the Kickstarter orders and then selling it to the public? Yeah, I think a lot of people are curious. So the major thing is the holidays. And we were only I mean, like we're shipping in September and we're just, you know, the Kickstarter backers are the premier people. So we get the watch before anyone else. And if we're able to make more watches before Christmas, that's cool. But I'm not as worried about that as much as just making sure that our Kickstarter backers are as happy as possible. And it's too late now. I can't get one. You're done. Can we get one for you? You didn't back it? Well, I did. I was going to back it today. So now you're going to hate my guts. You're going to hate me, Eric. But I'm a big fan of analog watches. I actually don't really like digital watches at all. There's an analog face. No, I know that. What I want is a watch. This is my dream watch. Maybe you'll make it for me. I want a watch. Do you remember the Motorola Aura phone that had the circular display? On the front, yeah. So what I want is a watch that looks like a regular, like a classic watch, but the display is a circular digital display. And it looks like a regular watch until you swipe to the side and then you get all kinds of other features or whatever. That's my kind of dream. That's the watch that I think I'm going to be really fall in love with. But perhaps when I see the Pebble watch in person and you got one, right? You got one? What color are you getting? Black. You got black? Jet black. Did you get one? No. I found this story out by going to the Kickstarter page and realizing I can't donate. By the way, it's rare that you get to talk to the creator of the back. Yeah, this is exciting. Eric, we were going to have Eric on the show. It's rare that you get to talk to him and tell him that you didn't buy the product and hear firsthand the disappointment and I think a little anger actually. More like an opportunity. If you didn't get it, there's probably a few other people out there that didn't get it as well. That's right. Maybe there will be some people for the next batch. Oh, I think there will be people for the next batch. I think there will be people for the next batch. Sorry, I have two questions. One from the listeners, which I think is hilarious. I'll ask that second. My next question, which is a little question, is are you at all worried about Apple kind of rejiggering the iPod Nano? Now that they've seen your success kind of rejiggering the Nano because they're already doing the watch stuff with it to make it connect with the iPhone, does that concern you at all or are you making your own product? That's a possibility. I'm not super frightened. I think I would buy one. He still has 85,000 orders. Yeah, you've got $10 million. You're good, right? Yeah. I might be able to afford one with that. Okay, and the second question, and this is from the listeners, are you kind of mad that Samsung just released a product called the S-Pebble because they did? Oh, that's true. It's one of the colors, like one of the colors. No, it's a little MP3 player called the S-Pebble. It's a square. It's a tiny little MP3 player that is an accessory for the phone. No, I did not see that. They cannot tell time. Is that like yesterday? Yeah, no, it was when they announced the Galaxy S3. It syncs to the phone. I thought that was just a color. No, it's an accessory. They said that one of the S3 colors was purple. No, it's an accessory for it and it's like a little square that you use to play. It controls the music on the phone? No, it's an MP3 player that syncs to the phone. I don't understand the point of it. Yeah, nobody understands that. Nobody understands it, but it is in your space now. You better watch out. I will Google this right now. You may have heard of the small company Samsung. They're challenging you on the name Pebble. Well their name is Spebble. Yeah, it's Spebble. No, don't say it looks cool. You don't want to give them any credit. Samsung's lawyers listen to the Vergecast. No, they do. They're listening right now. I bet they do. But, Eric, listen, I'm sure you have champagne to drink over there and watches to manufacture. So we're going to let you go. Watches to make. But we would love to have you come on the show. We do this on the Verge and we almost had you guys come on the last one and it didn't work out. You don't have to tell me now, but hopefully we can make that happen because we'd love to talk to you and maybe see a prototype. Yeah, and it would be cool to show you the UI as it progresses over the summer. That would be great. That would be awesome. You know, the developer kit and everything. That would be great. Hey, if you want to come on, we have a show next week. Tay 17. Just start bimping it out. I mean, you know, you're welcome. You just want to fly in? I want to check it out. Anyhow, but Eric, thank you so much. And we will definitely be talking to you soon. I think we're all really excited about this. I think what's cool about this is, you know, we cover products all the time and it's like they're all from big, big companies. And we just had Tony Fadell on the last show and we were talking about how hard it is to create a hardware startup. And you guys have not only done, you're not only a hardware startup, but you're doing it in a way that is totally unorthodox and completely new. And I think really exciting because it's like your idea has been validated by a public, by the buying public before you've ever put rubber to road. So by the way, don't screw it up. Because otherwise, no pressure, but just 85,000 people and $10 billion riding on it. So anyhow, with that, Eric, good luck. We're really excited about it and we can't wait to watch what you guys are doing. And anytime you want to talk, we're happy to do it. Looking forward to it. All right. Thank you. Bye. Bye. So how many startup hardware companies are there out there that are still successful? I mean, there's Roku, I'd say. Roku needs to make money. No, they're making, they're not profitable. Why am I talking like this? Roku is not profitable. But you know, Roku is popular, but not profitable. Okay. All right. Is there any other news this week we want to talk about? Because we're at like an hour and a half on this show. Oh, wow. Well, there's two things that I think are really interesting. One, I guess the HP stuff isn't interesting. Yeah. It's HP, right? Well, they put out a bunch of laptops and now they're calling them sleekbooks, which I think is what it is. Oh, no. Is that HP's term or AMD's term? It's HP's term. Okay. Sleekbooks. So what they've done is they put out, and some of them look good, but Ultrabook is this set of specs controlled by Intel. So HP is like, well, we'll use AMD processors and slower components and we'll call those sleekbooks. Yeah, but they can't call them Ultrabooks. So that's like a thing that's happening now. It's bad. I feel like I could do better than that. I'm not saying that book... I mean, I'm not saying I'm a genius marketer, but I just feel like sleekbook, I feel like you could do better if you just spent a little bit of time on doing an Ultrabook. And they don't look bad. The new Spectre XT looks pretty good. That's one of their Ultrabooks. There's an air of familiarity. There's definitely an air of familiarity. So the thing with HP has been they keep on doing... They keep on making these laptops, the other NVs and now these. And they kind of look like the MacBooks. And so Richard Lai, who we know from our time in Engadget, was at an event in China and HP's director of design told him, we don't try to copy Apple. If you go down this road, you just end up in the same place. And I think to me, that's like... That's insane. You know, there's this other story. I know there's some things like... There's another story last week. I think it was an Android site wrote the Galaxy S3 is the first phone designed by lawyers. And it's like, no, it's the first phone designed by lazy designers. Well, no, it's not. That phone looks like the pre-3 to me, from the front. I think this idea that either you end up in the same place because you're following the same principles or you're in a lawsuit with Apple, so you do something. I'm sorry. You make a crappy phone. They could have done the... Again, I feel like... The One X doesn't look like an iPhone. Even the Lumia 900. Not a Motorola phone. I think I go back to this on every podcast now, but I'm sorry. Nobody would look at the Lumia and go like, you ripped off Apple. Different materials, different shape. The only thing that's really similar is that they both have a touch screen and they're phones. So done. It's an iPhone. But I'm saying it is lazy designers. And I said this last week. I think I kind of like ranted about it last week. I just feel like there is just a freaking laziness going on in the world of design and in product design. It's like, you know what? I mean, you look at this picture. No, I mean, yes. Here's something. This is the HP and V-Spectre XT. I'll go one better for you guys. Why don't you not call it a sleep book? Why don't you just make it really awesome looking? Why don't you make it really unique? Do something that nobody else is doing, you know? And you don't have to give it some cheesy name to compete with Ultrabooks because people will see it and go like, what is that? I want it. The same thing is if it looks good, call it whatever you want. If it's good, it's good. Yeah. Call it the book. They think it looks good enough to call it the sleep book. That's what's happening here. So that's this interesting trend. I think the name is as unimaginative as the design. And I have to say, you know, there are lots of Android manufacturers out there. I mean, I think Motorola is probably the emblematic example. They're doing, I don't know if their design is great. But what they're doing with the Razr, what they did with the other Droids they've made. They at least seem to be trying a bit. Yeah. You know, the original Droid we talked about this, I thought, had a very striking design. I think the Droid Razr and the Droid Razr Max even more so. And keep in mind... Because of its quality. By the way, had they just released the Droid Razr Max, I feel like the impact would have been so much more impactful. So much more impressive, you know, because it's like... Look at all this battery life. But that design is... It works. What they're doing with the Razr now is exactly what they did with the first Razr. They're putting it out in new colors every day. They announced a blue one today. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. It's in red, white and blue now. Like science or like dark blue? It's like a dark blue. Navy. Yeah. Still has a crappy pentile screen. Man, I tell you, I tweeted about this yesterday, but I got this... And I'm not promoting them, but InCase makes this case for the iPhone now called the Box. They have a square case, too. It seriously looks like the Lumia, like from the side and back. But it's cool, man. I gotta say, my only gripe about it is that it's a little bit like raised on the front. So when you're swiping side to side, it kind of... Your thumbs hit it. Doesn't it have like the InCase kind of logo like built into it? Yeah, it has a really big InCase logo on the back. But I do feel like it's so weird and different. If somebody made a phone like that, like a sleek, shiny black... You know, I know Paul always talked about this, like the monolith phone. It's cool. Just do it. I'd be into that. But if you make a phone with like a leather back or a wood back or just anything, just... Go nuts. Try. Well, just try. Didn't the bolds have leather backs or faux leather backs? Bolds had leather backs. Faux. I think DoCoMo in Japan... DoCoMo do anything. They don't count. They have wooden phones. That's like... No, and they're like... They're like... There's that startup AdZero, which is doing the bamboo phone, which I am like really into. No, yeah. By the way, this excuse that Samsung said today, they use pen-towel displays because it helps the phone display last longer, is crap. What does that mean? They're like the blue pixels die out faster than the other pixels, so we'll just use fewer blue pixels and more green pixels. I'll take a screen that works in sunlight versus... Very disappointing. As the summer months are rolling around, my Galaxy Nexus display is definitely like... Punish. Punish. I forgot. I forgot how these screens are in bright sunlight because, you know, it's been kind of gloomy. Because you're a vampire. And because I can't go on the side or I'll explode. So one more story, and I think this is actually a really big story. Lay it on us. Windows 8, coming out soon. Mozilla and Google are now saying, because they cannot develop browsers for the desktop side of Windows 8 on ARM... Well, they can. They just have to do them for ARM. No, they can't. No, no. So the deal is... Oh, right, because they're not letting people do... They're not letting people do that. Desktop apps. So they're saying... So, yeah, so there's a big piece out last night... Why can't they just do a Metro one? Yeah, so the problem is you can build a Metro one, but IE in Metro still has hooks into desktop. So the Metro IE will perform better than whatever Firefox or Chrome can do. So they're saying this is... Microsoft obviously has a history of blocking browsers. There was the antitrust litigation. There was the settlement agreement with the government, which expired last year, but Microsoft promised... No, no, no, no. Will uphold it. Legally binding promise or just... Yeah, it was kind of a, well, we'll just keep it up. Everybody loves us. Don't sue us. As Microsoft was like putting... Like they're collecting their stuff from jail and putting their old leather jacket on. They're like, we'll never come back. The warden's like, we don't want to see you back here. They're like, yeah, sure, warden. So I think this to me is... It's interesting on a number of levels. I think the first one is if they didn't have that desktop environment there, they wouldn't have this problem. Right, because you could build the Metro stuff. But they still might be calling things or utilizing things that they don't give access to developers for the Metro interface. Yeah, but if you call it... I think the problem for them is that they call it Windows. Apple does it. Apple is the dominant share of the tablet market, but nobody complains that you can only really run Safari or build a browser that only uses WebKit. Nozilla complains about it, but they're not... But their share is not dominant. But it is in the tablet market. Oh, in tablets. Tablets, like it's in the market, it's in the news. Right, so you let it develop, but it shows no sign of it changing. Right. Well, at some point, though, something's got to give. I don't know. Star and Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt. Oh, God. Is that who's in it? I think it is. No, no, wait. And a dog. Isn't that the dog? And the dog. Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt was as good as it gets. Oh, that is his now. Something's got to give is Diane Keaton. Oh, something's got to give is Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Yes. Damn, so close. And Keanu Reeves, too. And Parker Posey. Yeah. Something's got to give. When you think you're too old. Well, no, so look, here's what I wonder. It's like they made this choice to keep the desktop there. But if they had just done the thing that we constantly asked them to do. Something's got to give. Just make a Metro device. I mean, this is going to be a huge. They're not listening to UniLive. They don't care. This is going to be such a huge problem for them. Look, listen. Is it going to be a huge problem for people? I'm getting a Windows RT. Not for people. No, not for consumers. Yeah. But I think Microsoft is in a tenuous phase. I mean, yes, we're consumers, but they want to keep it. Yes, we're consumers, but they want to know. Yeah. I mean, no one complained that you couldn't get Opera browser on your iPhone. Now that you can't. I don't know anyone that uses it. Hey. No, it's hugely popular in the iPhone. Well, if the iPhone allowed you... If iOS was truly a free and open operating system that allowed you to choose your own browser, it would probably be in higher use. Because the way it is now is... Or you're on MailCry. It doesn't matter. to look at things, but anything that dumps you anywhere, it's always shooting you back as far as... Don't get me wrong. I think the iPhone and iOS should let you pick your own mail client and let you pick your own browser. Can you imagine? How amazing would it be if you could set Sparrow as your default mail client? And so I don't think that that's a good model. I think I understand Apple does it because they want it to be locked down, they want it clean, but I think you should be able to flip a switch and make it as messy as you want. And I think that's where Microsoft has to go with Metro. It's interesting to imagine them thinking, but we really screwed up when we made computers. We really got it wrong, guys. We gave people all these options. It's just too much freedom. They can pick their own mail client. Let's lock this down. We got people that with Thunderbird, Outlook, Thunderbird, they're putting Netscape. You know what? People want less choice. They want simplicity. People get confused. They say, yeah, always open it with this app and then that. But just think about this. If you're Mozilla, this is the end of the line for you as a company. Mozilla's in trouble. You're not on the iPhone. I'll tell you what, though. You've made no headway on Android. I'm going to tell you something about Mozilla. If you get kicked off of Metro, there's nowhere else for you to go. I'm going to tell you something about Mozilla and about Firefox. If they made a new Firefox that was faster and more stable than Chrome, I would waste no time using that as my main browser. That's all they have to do. How much faster and how would you perceive it? Just faster. Voluntarily. Just faster and more stable. That's it. They could argue that now, though. No. I don't think they can. They definitely can't argue more stable. It's definitely not faster. I've used it. I've used their newest version compared to the newest version of Chrome, and there are notable differences in speed. Firefox used to burn me so bad. When we were editing Gadget, our CMS only worked in Firefox. We all lived in... We had two browsers. I always had two browsers open, and Firefox crashed on me in the middle of posts, time after time after time. Oh, my God. We had so many fail-saves to prevent it. Never edit. Don't edit in the browser. Anyhow, but seriously, I think in our industry, brand loyalty is really not... It's in short supply. This is actually... Well, segue. Yeah. Let me just make this point. Finish the point. I think, yes, you love Apple. You love Microsoft. They're big things, big entrenched companies, but when it comes to new things, especially new things, brand loyalty... I honestly think Facebook could go out and be done for in a couple of years if something came along that did all the things that Facebook did, but in some way that people just liked better. Everyone will leave. I mean, it's like MySpace to Facebook. I mean, yes, there are reasons, but a lot of the reasons were people liked Facebook better for some... Obviously, they have features, but the point is it was better, and I think that if a better browser came along, people would be like, yeah, I'm going to use that. I mean, years ago, our browser structure at Engadget, years and years ago, was like IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, when Chrome was first out. And you're talking about the... Now it's like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE. So the thing is that people are just happy to adopt something new if it's really good. I'm happy. So Zilli, you don't have to go out of business. Just make something better than the best thing. Right, but what if the majority of the world's computers end up running Metro? I love it. They can't... But they can't be there. IE12. Right, but I think that's why they're freaking out so bad, right? What happens if the majority... Yes, it's clearly a monopolistic practice. Well, okay. So... Why, you disagree? No, I think Microsoft is opening a can of worms here with the desktop. Your disagreement is like you're doing dumb things. Microsoft, you're doing dumb things in general. You're causing problems. And this is like a little symptom of that. This is a problem they don't need to have. That isn't really like a thing. You just accidentally made it happen. We built the product. We put out Metro. We only got halfway... Don't you think that's the point, though? I don't know. Isn't the point that they want... Well, either way they want it to be a... I have been told by sources that Microsoft believes very strongly... Sources familiar with the matter? Very familiar with the matter. That Microsoft believes very strongly that Metro is the future and that the desktop on ARM is a legacy environment so that it can run Office and provide compatibility with the older version of IE. Okay, cool. But... But I think that doing it that way creates more of a problem for them... Oh, I agree....than if they just said, this is Metro and we didn't finish the APIs. We provided these things so you can run these old apps if you need them. What's so crazy to me is... And we'll continue to build out the APIs. What's so crazy is... Mozilla, you're a first-class citizen. What's so crazy is it's like you're not letting anybody do anything in that environment anyhow, so why don't you just get rid of it? Just you don't... Because they want to put Office on the tablet. At the end of the day, that's their hook. Put Office for a tablet on it. Well, they've got to make it. I don't think they've made it yet. Well, that's their problem, isn't it? Soon to be the world's problem. What was the segue thing you wanted to say? So the segue, I think this is actually interesting because this is the other piece of Microsoft. We've got to wrap up. Give me two seconds. No, it's fine. We're on time. They rolled out a new Bing today. Bing. Bing. You Binged. You Binged all day long. I worked with Alice in the Post for a while today. Yeah, I played with the new Bing, by the way. And the thing about it that's really interesting is they're kind of saying, okay, well, we're as good at Google as algorithmic search. Yes. So you type in a thing, we spot it on the web, we figure out what we want. I found this to not be true. That's their claim. I tested the new Bing. And now... I tested the new Bing, and I looked at it side by side with Google, and I felt my results were less of what I wanted. Right. Personally. Sure. I'm a person. That's one opinion. I think it's better than people would switch from Google. I think there's too much sort of entrenched, this is what you do. I think what... On that piece, not the deliver the results piece, I think just on the we spot it on the web, I think it's the risk reward, the cost reward of trying to be better at Google at what Google does is too high. So what they've done is they've added in all these other pieces. So they're pulling in Twitter, they're pulling in Facebook, they're pulling in Yelp, they're pulling in OpenTable. Yeah, recommendations. They're adding in all these other services to say, well, here's what Google search is, but we're gonna make it way bigger. And we're gonna turn it search into something more than we spider the web and computer figures it out. We're gonna go to all these other sites that almost all of them... And your friends. Have contentious relationships with Google. Right. And your friends. And your friends. But your friends are on the... They're on Facebook. They're on Facebook. Yeah. Right. So Facebook and Google have a contentious relationship. Yes. And they're on Facebook and Google. So all of these other social sites that don't want Google anywhere near them are saying, well, Microsoft, okay, you've got a search engine that's table-safes with algorithms and we'll do this big social play. My name is my friend. Yeah. It's like classic international relations. And by the way... There's like the big guy and we'll all team up against the big guy. In 10 years when... Not that this is a national habit. In 10 years when Bing is the superior... Yeah. I'll run back to you. They're going to be like, what have we done? We made a deal with the devil. It'll be some crazy thing like this Mozilla thing where Microsoft is doing some crazy... I mean, all of these companies are the same. When they get... No, they all want... This is what they all want. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and everybody else for some strange reason, HP and Samsung, they want you to buy into all of their things all together forever. Yeah. Like they just want you to use... If you're on Windows, just use Outlook and just use our web SkyDrive and just only be here, only use Zoom, only play an Xbox. And Apple's like only iOS, only use an iPad. It's like screw off. Let me use the things... Why don't you do this? It create a world where you are interoperable. Yeah. Like where you actually play together. Well, just think about if email didn't work this way. Because what's good for the consumer is not your best ecosystem. Right. What's good for the consumer is consumers having choices and being able to use things together. No, but just think about if email worked this way or the web itself. It's like if you bought a car and you could only go to BP gas stations. Yeah. Like you bought your... Okay, you bought your Ford and now you've got to go to BP. And it's like, well, there's not a BP on this road for another 100 miles and I've only got 50 miles of gas... Car left. 50 miles of car left. Really? The car is on the road. I've only got 50 miles to the forest. Cinderella is just going to go away. It's been a long week. What I wanted to say was I've only got 50 miles worth of gas left in the tank. All right. Have your laugh, Patel and Miller. F bomb Topolsky. You didn't laugh. That's good. I did kind of drop a half F bomb. It was like, fuu. It was like that kiss song. Okay. All right, Cran, are we done? Yeah. Cran's been sitting here. He's been doing this for like an hour. Wrap it up. Let's go. Got it. All right. Let's go. I don't know what that is. I'm just... You don't do that. What was the thing you were like last time? You were like... What is this? I wish you could see what Cran's doing right now. He's doing... He refuses to let us put a camera on him. You know why? He's horribly disfigured. You've never seen Two-Face? Worse. It's like Two-Face and the Elephant Man. Together. It's like if the regular part of Two-Face were the Elephant Man. Great. I will say the third scar below your chin is looking better. It's not bad. Seems to be healing. It's not pulsating. All right. That's the Vergecast for this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email us at vergecast at theverge.com. You can leave a comment on the post, of course. I know you're going to do it anyhow, complaining about our video player. Which, by the way, is about to be swapped out for a much better video player coming soon. Or you can find us on Twitter. The Verge is at Verge. I'm Joshua Topolsky. Hold on a second. Let me finish. Neely is reckless. Ross is oh no, Ross, go no E on the end. And Crayshon is sensible madman. That's not a thing. I don't know what that is. Week from today. Oh, God, I didn't even say anything about this. Thursday, next Thursday, May 17, new on The Verge. We have Damon Lindelof, who we flew out to LA to talk to. I talked to him for a really long time. I'm really excited to see the video. So we're not going to run the whole interview because it's so long, but we're going to have exclusive stuff you'll only be able to see if you come to the show with Damon Lindelof talking about Lost, talking about Prometheus, a bunch of stuff about both, talking about Independence Day in 2012. We had a really good conversation. It was completely off the rails. Talking about bar mitzvahs. It was good, really good. And we have Masioka, who was hero on Heroes and is now on Hawaii Five-O. Him and Paul went to the new museum and looked at art and talked. They just talked. Museum of the Moving Image. Oh, Museum of the Moving Image. I'm sorry. A little different. A little different. A little different. You can't deny that. It has to be the name. And then we're in the process of another guest, and I don't want to say because we're not sure yet, but it's going to be a jam-packed show. We have segments, news, giveaways. What's happening with this? This thing is just moving around. Really upsetting. It's alive. That was weird. Look, if you can't tell, it's been hit by Creighton's deformed tail. It's just shaking it. Yeah, what's happening here? Anyhow, long and short of it. It's really ending on a high note here. By the way, the number of people saying GIF in the comments is really impressive. It's the least I can do for you. All right. Well, I wish you and yours all the best. Wow, man, I sound a lot better without this pop filter on. It's time for me to go. Yeah. Enjoy your weekend. Rock and roll. Paul. You know what? All right. Thanks, Paul. Uncle Peter. you
 Hey and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of May 7th, 2012.
 I'm Josh Dupolsky.
 I'm Nila Patel.
 Oh, sorry.
 I thought it went...
 Ross Miller is joining us.
 I am the most special guest apparently.
 And this lumberjack looking fellow on the screen behind us is Joe Flatley, author of
 Scam World, available now on the Kindle Store.
 By the way, Scam World, some people were like, was this just an elaborate scam to get people
 to buy his Kindle book?
 I was like, well, we gave you the article for free to read online.
 Does it feel like a scam?
 Anyhow, Joe Flatley is here, author, lover, and general all around bon vivant.
 And that's French for dope fellow, dope guy.
 Joe, how are you?
 Can you hear us?
 Thanks for having me here.
 Thanks for being here.
 Are we on?
 Is this a real thing?
 Yeah, we're on right now.
 You're beaming live to a number of people who are angry at you.
 Beaming live to Frank Kern and his syndicate of professional scammers.
 I just say, hold on.
 I just say first off, this is the Vergecast where we discuss the week in technology culture
 and tech, tech products.
 And this was an interesting, has been a very interesting week.
 I'm still reading it right now.
 Long, weird, scary week.
 But we ran, the reason Joe's here, in case you're wondering, you're like, I just tuned
 in for this.
 I don't come here for any other reason.
 I don't read your site.
 Joe published a piece today called Scam World.
 Get rich quick schemes mutate into an online monster.
 And it is a long investigative piece that he's been working on for months.
 Basically looking at this world, which up until I read the draft of this, I had no idea
 the scope of what was going on.
 And there's this cartel of just completely sleazy, also completely insane scammers that
 are just stealing money from people.
 And this actually, the idea for this came from a conversation that Joe and I had about
 this guy Anthony Morrison, who we'd both seen on TV late at night, who's like a youngish
 guy.
 He looks like a regular dude, like somebody you might be friends with.
 And I saw a thing on TV, and I think Joe had seen it as well.
 And it was him just, he's like, start right now.
 You can make money online.
 You're going to make money online.
 He kept saying, make money online.
 And I was like, what do you mean, what do you mean make money online?
 It's extremely vague.
 Are you selling things?
 Is it advertising?
 Is it services?
 I don't know.
 So anyhow, that's kind of how this started.
 And he's been looking into it for months and months and doing this piece.
 And traveling.
 No, this has been going on.
 Traveling.
 He went to this conference.
 What was the conference called?
 The Underground?
 The Underground Online Seminar.
 Experiential.
 Plenty of underline, internet, underground.
 Can you tell me more about this conference?
 Because that whole part of it seems amazing.
 The video is insane.
 If you haven't watched the video, watch the video for that.
 The video is like a serious documentary about this.
 Jordan, one of our video guys, did a lot of the shooting and the cutting.
 He's very worried about his life now, from what I understand.
 Frank Kern, he's here in New York, if you're looking for him.
 But anyhow, Jordan and Joe went to this thing.
 Can you explain the conference, this conference?
 Well, it was basically set up as a place for entrepreneurs,
 people to go and mingle, not only mingle,
 but learn the latest internet marketing techniques.
 I'm not the most up on top of the modern business practices,
 but I would sit in these – it was interminable.
 It was like four days of these speakers.
 They would never say anything that a normal human being
 would process into meaningful language.
 It's just like Frank Kern has these videos that,
 when we were putting the final touches on this,
 we were working with Jordan on some of the edits on the video,
 and we were looking for this one video.
 Frank Kern has these videos, they're called list control modules.
 They're numbered modules, like list control module one.
 Is this like the Kobe system?
 What's the Kobe system?
 Never mind, go on.
 What is that? Am I missing some internet joke right now?
 The Kobe system is an ad campaign.
 Yeah.
 That's all.
 All right, I don't know.
 It's just an IT ad.
 He has these names that are like – they're words for things that aren't things.
 They're like – they don't mean anything.
 List control is not a thing.
 List control module four is not a thing.
 You can't control your lists, man.
 It's just like made up lingo to talk around people.
 Yeah, the challenging part of the story,
 understanding enough to write it and then trying to actually convey
 something meaningful about it is that these people have a very, very basic,
 simple way of doing business.
 Essentially, everybody does it a little different.
 Basically, it's make really dumb products really cheap,
 sell them to people that don't know any better,
 get their email address and then sell it to like a high pressure boiler room sales floor.
 That's it.
 So this is the way it works.
 In order to like keep this whole like industry going,
 they have to like create all this fake terminology and like they drag in concepts
 from business and pop psychology and they just like spin a web of these like nonsense words
 and it's just – it's genuinely confusing.
 That's probably how they sell so much stuff because people think,
 well, it must mean something.
 They're saying it.
 And they focus – and the reason it was –
 I built my career on that.
 And the reason I think it's increasingly interesting and was interesting to us
 is that they've taken what was – this used to be the guy –
 so what this used to be is the guy who would come on TV and he'd say,
 I'm going to teach you how to flip homes.
 You're going to buy – actually, these guys aren't even that specific.
 Those guys were selling a thing.
 These guys are more like – so the basic way it works, right,
 is they sell you a book on how to make money online.
 It's a loss meter for them.
 It's like 15 bucks or 50 bucks or whatever and you're like,
 well, it's not very expensive.
 I'm going to give you all the secrets to make money online.
 And you get the book and it's got like a bunch of crap in it like random,
 not useful information.
 Maybe it probably tells you how to set up a website of some sort.
 Joe, I'm assuming these all kind of link back in –
 the stuff in the book links back into more of their programs.
 Is that correct or not?
 Yeah.
 So then – so the point is though they get –
 the whole point of that is they just want to get your information.
 They'll take a hit on this book or whatever
 or maybe make a little bit of money.
 I mean, it's just crazy to me.
 And the business is selling it to these boiler rooms
 and the boiler rooms like scam people.
 They get them into like we can – you're really going to jumpstart your business now.
 We just need $1,000 from you.
 And then the calls are like super manipulative.
 Yeah.
 And they're all like – it's all like old people
 or people who just clearly don't understand.
 And actually, we had a lot of – this is –
 we had a lot of commenters being like, why are you so stupid?
 And it's like there's a lot of people out there who don't know how anything works.
 They don't know how the internet works.
 They don't know how the internet works.
 They don't know how scams work.
 They're not like –
 I mean, yeah.
 I would say our readers are generally very critical, very suspicious.
 Our readers are very savvy.
 Well, but they're also very savvy.
 Right.
 They're savvy.
 They're like street smart.
 But there's a lot of people who aren't.
 That's right.
 There's a lot of people who don't.
 I mean, one of these things in the piece, Joe, writes about they end the call
 with the guy trying to help the woman set up her printer.
 You know, like she doesn't even know how the printer gets plugged in.
 And she's going to run an online business.
 And the reason that he's setting up the printer, right, Joe?
 It says that she can print a form.
 So she can print out like forms to, you know, to okay that they take money off the –
 Take a thousand dollars a month or whatever.
 But it's like one thing I've noticed about the internet,
 doing different stories as well as this, just kind of like covering like subcultures
 and different weird beats in the internet space,
 is that it's very easy to wall yourself off from things you're not specifically interested in
 or where you're not specifically doing business.
 I think a lot of our readers think that scam world is just a very small little place
 because when a pop-up comes up, they don't investigate it.
 They close it.
 And that's why the scam world – that's why internet marketing material is so ridiculous.
 So people like you and me don't read it.
 So only people that are like primed to buy ridiculous stuff do read it.
 Right.
 That was part of the reasons I wanted to do the story was so that people who wouldn't be inclined
 to discover this subculture could find how large it is and how weird it is.
 It's incredible.
 I mean the crazy thing is that it goes up to – so first off, Tony Robbins –
 I thought – and I think this is true of many people –
 I thought Tony Robbins was like – had some legitimate business.
 He's like a motivational speaker.
 Motivational speaker.
 But he is in cahoots with like these guys who are most definitely –
 I mean Frank Kern sued by the FTC, paid money as a result,
 like found guilty of whatever it is they found him guilty of.
 The other people – they're like wrapped up with Tony Robbins.
 Well, you know what's funny is – remember that book The Game came out?
 Because Tony Robbins was like self-help guru.
 The Secret?
 No, The Game.
 What's The Game?
 The Game is a book about the pickup artist.
 Oh, yeah.
 The Neil Strauss book.
 The Neil Strauss book.
 Oh, oh, oh, oh.
 And then there's like – who was the pickup artist who made it into the syndicate?
 Not Ross.
 It's David D'Angelo, right?
 Yeah, that's his other name.
 Oh, yeah, it's a different name.
 He's got two names.
 What's the other name?
 Is that his name?
 Eben Sandler.
 Eben Pagan, I'm sorry.
 Eben Sandler is a buddy of mine.
 Anyway, so I went to a Neil Strauss – when The Game came out,
 I went to a Neil Strauss reading in Madison.
 Like it was there.
 Like let's all go.
 This will be great.
 We'll watch the pickup artist.
 And I gave them my email address.
 And this is before like I was graduated from school.
 They have followed me through the years.
 They've been following me through the years.
 And I've been following them through the years.
 And I've been following them through the years.
 They have followed me ever since.
 Really?
 Like I've been getting emails about how I can pick up any woman in the world if I just
 give them $5,000.
 On the eve of your wedding.
 It seems like the odd of the time to execute.
 But like it's amazing how persistent it – and I have no interest in it.
 I have my own pickup artist set that I will sell you for $5,000.
 Well, that sounds reasonable.
 But to teach me how to sell the pickup artist to other people.
 But it's amazing how persistent and it's just there.
 It's just an underculture of that.
 It's a very common thing now because when people are making money legitimately or doing
 whatever it's very common for people to go, okay, now I've heard about this internet.
 How can I leverage what I have to make more money on the internet?
 And they follow in with these people.
 A lot of very legitimate or seemingly legitimate operations have like sidelines either in boiler
 room sales or something along those lines.
 And I didn't go into that a lot because it's a dicey territory.
 And I think –
 I can tell you something.
 You also didn't go into any of the rap videos.
 There were some like late – some late discovery of some like bad rap videos.
 I don't know if we ran this Nokia.
 Do we have any of those?
 Today we ran a Nokia.
 Oh my God.
 Lumia rap or Nokia rap?
 Lumia rap we talked about a lot today.
 But these videos these guys make are like incredible.
 I was actually saying to Joe last night – we were by the way working on this till like two
 in the morning with James our new designer.
 And I was just out of it.
 And I was saying like I kind of – the bravado with which these guys come up with just their
 stories are so ridiculous.
 They're such insufferable, incredible jerks.
 You're almost like impressed by it.
 You're like how could anybody be this much of an ass?
 Yeah.
 And if you watch some of these videos it's just like a staggering – it's like staggeringly
 like just bravado.
 Well you know it's funny because the consequences are so small.
 So Joe we looked into Ray – we have a video by the way.
 We have a video by the way.
 We have a video by the way.
 We have a video by the way.
 We should watch the video.
 What video are we going to watch?
 Is it – this guy?
 Is it Lethal Commission?
 We should watch Lethal Commission.
 Could we watch a little bit of Lethal Commission?
 Lethal Commission is a – who's the name of the guy that did Lethal Commission?
 It's a Onyx Singhal.
 He's an internet marketer but he decided the best way to spread his message was to
 make a Bollywood movie.
 I mean like he made like this really bad like D movie.
 Yeah.
 Here's – this is the trailer.
 We're going to watch this.
 I mean this is like one of the best things about your PS2.
 We're going to have audio on this?
 I got no audio.
 Yeah I'm hearing.
 Nope.
 I don't hear anything.
 It was just a high pitched noise.
 You hoped – I mean – I'm just dreaming.
 Do we need to have audio?
 I know what's going on.
 This is just – here we go.
 No?
 Nope.
 Well look I know what she's saying.
 There's a high stake poker game.
 That's Marcelo Andrews.
 You got to get him.
 Are you serious?
 Yeah I know it.
 And then he's got unlimited income.
 He's got the software that can make you any affiliates in just a minute.
 I want you to understand –
 And then the Indian guy is going to go after this shot.
 They're basically just ripping off – by the way just ripping off James Bond movies
 really badly.
 Oh it's a magic.
 It just does it.
 Yeah it's great.
 Wow.
 I've watched this trailer like a thousand times.
 This is like just one of the ways – here we go.
 And then he pushes it and they're like –
 What was that?
 Click bank?
 Meet Natasha.
 Yeah.
 That was click bank.
 Yeah.
 Wait who is that guy?
 That's Natasha.
 I mean –
 And then she says you just look at people and kill them.
 Seriously Joe by the way I've watched this a thousand times.
 Why is she wearing these huge glasses?
 She's so smart.
 Is she a hipster?
 She's a nerd.
 Wait she'll take them off.
 A sexy nerd.
 No this is the plot of Casino Royale right?
 Yeah and then that guy says you don't find him he finds you and then explosions, bikinis,
 explosions and then they're going to play it all in reverse and then they play the credits
 and then the guy tries to sell you internet marketing.
 So this is just this video is for – here's what the video is.
 You're a young guy who's let's just say naive.
 That's a nice way of putting it.
 Let's use the word naive.
 You see this, you think this dude is awesome and he has a ton of money and then you sell
 him your information and he sells your information to a boiler.
 They're literally playing the whole trailer backwards.
 Profit.
 The bullet comes out and explodes and then cut and then the guy's like check it out
 that was my video for Lethal Commission.
 There it is.
 Oh yeah right.
 Cool guys don't look at explosions also.
 And now he wants to say he's live from Las Vegas.
 Oh my god.
 I told you.
 Look at my ascot.
 Ready to get some money from you.
 It's like I own all of Las Vegas.
 You can too.
 All right let's – that's enough of this.
 Like the bravado, the sheer – I like that it was only enough of it after we'd watched
 the whole trailer.
 The audacity, the sheer audacity of these guys.
 I'm almost like I get it.
 I get why people do it.
 And the consequences are nothing.
 Right.
 What's crazy right because – Joey you and I spent like what an hour or two hours
 looking into the guys who sued John Regoza.
 We read all the case files.
 We're like what happened?
 After all of that he got a judgment of like nine hundred thousand dollars against him.
 Which was – he didn't have.
 He didn't have.
 He's gone.
 He's hidden the money.
 Yeah.
 And nobody got it.
 And it was like it took them two years.
 He disappeared for a while.
 The judge is like where are you?
 And also like these cases are like you know the thing – the argument is this guy stole
 money from me but they can prove every step of the way that you willingly gave money to
 a business and they're like we have all the way – you know we have a program.
 They didn't follow.
 They didn't set up their website.
 It's especially great for them because like for an old woman that they sell the plan to
 who doesn't know what a website is.
 They're like she never set up her website.
 She would have been making money.
 Yeah.
 Money back guarantee.
 Money back guarantee.
 She never followed the steps.
 And it's like yeah of course because you're trying to find old women who don't know how
 to set up a website.
 Like that's the goal.
 So I want to – Joe I want to get into this.
 Have you seen – there was a lot of feedback to the piece.
 A lot of people really liked it.
 Uh oh.
 Controversy.
 But there's one actually very interesting criticism that Ross pointed out to me before
 he started.
 Danny Sullivan who runs Search Engine Land which is a great site that I read.
 He runs a sister site called –
 He's in comments?
 He's in marketing land.
 No he tweeted.
 He tweeted.
 He runs a site called Marketing Land which is kind of adjunct to Search Engine Land.
 And he says at Verge you've defined all of internet marketing to be a scam.
 Are you proud of yourself?
 And then he says he tweeted at Laura our site is all about capital I capital M internet
 marketing.
 Thanks for calling us scammers.
 Danny Sullivan?
 Danny Sullivan.
 Wow.
 I missed this.
 Danny Sullivan, debating just how big a can of whoop ass I should open.
 And this to me is like you're defining a term to be too big.
 Right?
 It's – there's internet marketing.
 There's doing marketing on the internet for your legitimate product and service.
 This was a huge –
 You should talk about.
 And then there's this thing, this phenomenon.
 They call it –
 Internet marketing.
 They call it internet marketing.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 We can't call it –
 This was a huge problem when writing this because internet marketing are real words.
 Right.
 So wait –
 Marketing on the internet is –
 This is just a criticism.
 I'm reading.
 I had no idea that –
 I'm not calling out Danny for this.
 I just want Joe to respond to it.
 Has he written anything on it beyond that?
 No.
 That's – I mean 17 –
 I have no idea.
 I know he's cranking that post in 18 minutes.
 Go ahead, Joe.
 Yeah.
 That was an interesting thing.
 That was kind of a difficult point when writing this story because there is internet marketing,
 capital I M, and then there's people that market on the internet.
 And then there's this world that calls itself internet marketing which like kind of defines
 its own language and uses its own terms.
 And after trying to figure out how to explain it for four months or six months, I just decided
 let's just say what they call themselves.
 This is like a small fraction of the subculture of internet marketing.
 I believe that the actual business practices are very common throughout all of scam land.
 Yeah.
 But internet marketing is like one subculture.
 I just tried to portray how that exists for real.
 I guess I'm just a little curious as to what Danny – I mean it's clear –
 Get him on the line.
 It's clear to me that we're not talking about Danny Sullivan in this piece.
 Right.
 Right.
 We're talking about specific people.
 Yeah.
 I mean I read Danny's sites.
 I think he's a good guy.
 He's a good, smart guy.
 It's interesting that I'd like to see what he has to say.
 But I don't know how you can look at this piece and see these guys' videos.
 I mean if he read the piece and watched these videos and knows who these people are –
 Which will take a while.
 Which by the way, I have to assume he knows who these people are because they're all
 over the internet.
 Right.
 They're all over – they're marketing their shit all over the internet.
 So I'm curious to know like how he feels about Frank Kern.
 I mean he has to know that when you watch a Frank Kern video, it's basically useless.
 But it's also all about internet marketing.
 Right.
 And then to say –
 Well, internet – whatever they're calling internet marketing.
 I mean you can say maybe I should have used a different word, but when you read this article,
 you have to like –
 No, I don't know how you could have.
 This is how they refer to their video.
 It's weird.
 And then I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from people in the world of internet marketing
 saying thanks for – we don't like these guys.
 Thanks for –
 You mean legit marketers.
 Yeah.
 Well, there's also another thing in IM where every scammer thinks that they're the only
 legit one.
 Well, and I guess like –
 So I don't know where –
 No, I don't know where Danny falls in like where his interests are in particular.
 I'd like to know.
 I'm curious to hear what he has to say about this.
 I guess he's pissed about it.
 But I will say this.
 I mean –
 I will say this.
 The one thing that we discovered and that you discovered and that we haven't I don't
 think fully explored, but there does seem to be a fine line between where these guys
 are and where people – and I'm not going to like name names, but people that you know,
 that we know in like the tech community who are very good at marketing themselves, who
 are involved in some of this stuff as well.
 Like where it borders on the edge of like self-help, self-promotion and like just kind
 of –
 Apparently there's a dude out there named Neil Patel.
 Neil Patel.
 Who –
 Is this a joke or –
 It's not a joke.
 Is he your alter ego?
 He's an SEO expert.
 How do you spell his name?
 And ever since we've been making the joke about me calling myself Neil when I get reservations
 at restaurants, I've had people being like, are you this guy?
 I'm like, no.
 Are you Neil Patel?
 That is the worst insult that anybody has ever delivered to me.
 I just think we use this Neil I Patel when he gets –
 I think there's some interesting – and if you just do like a little bit of research,
 I'm not going to go like down the rabbit hole.
 Maybe there's another story on it at some point, but there are people in the world of
 tech that I think are dangerously on like a fine line of being – goes beyond like
 promotion to like something else.
 And I think that's an interesting place to explore.
 And you know, maybe we will at some point.
 I'm going to leave that vague statement out there.
 I asked – I tweeted at Danny to see if he'd call in.
 So Joe.
 Yeah.
 Let's take some calls while we have Joe on the line.
 Why don't we take some calls?
 Maybe people have some questions for you.
 If you want to talk about or have been a victim of –
 Oh, he wrote the piece.
 Oh, he did.
 Yeah, he wrote the piece.
 What does he say?
 Hold on a second.
 Hey, the Verge.
 Can I just call you Verge?
 We've got a little problem.
 Apparently, you've grown past your gadget roots and your quest to be the new – wow,
 this is really insulting.
 The new all things TechCrunch.
 In doing so, you've stumbled into labeling a wide swath of the general market.
 By the way, I just want to say – I just want to say – I just want to say day week
 one of our launch, day one, I think, we did a piece on survival condos.
 We've done wide ranging pieces on all sorts of things.
 We've done pieces on artists, on music.
 I mean, this is not a new thing for us.
 We've been – I mean, yeah, but that's – we've been doing – he's incorrect.
 I'm just going to say – I'm not going to nitpick the whole piece.
 He's incorrect that somehow today we decided we were going to write – this piece has
 been in the works since before we launched.
 We actually had the idea for this before we launched.
 All right.
 Well, here's the core of it.
 Whatever.
 I mean, that's –
 Go ahead.
 Whatever.
 Just go.
 You're pretty clearly talking about a scummy segment that pushes internet marketing, capital
 letters, as a make money scam, but you've done nothing in that giant, huge article
 to clarify that there's a broader, longer-standing discipline of internet marketing that has
 nothing to do with that.
 Now, that's like – that's what I'm saying.
 It's – you can – this is what they call themselves, and then there's marketing.
 No.
 I mean, you can't refer to what they do because their whole thing is like when they
 talk about themselves, they're like, we're internet marketers.
 This is internet marketing.
 Do you want to be a part of internet marketing?
 It's not – go ahead.
 Let's see.
 I want to hear what else Danny's – it is how they refer to themselves.
 You can't just change it.
 Well, his last line is, if Nokia comes along and declares that all Windows phones are now
 iPhones, you'll just start calling them iPhones.
 Well, what I want to know is why –
 Misses the point of the piece completely.
 I have seen like so little from the SEO world and I guess in the internet marketing world,
 like the so-called legit internet marketing world, to stand up against these guys.
 I've gotten so many emails from people saying, this was great.
 I wish I could say something about this, or this is great.
 I used to stand up to these guys, but it never worked.
 It's like, why aren't they trying to clean up their industry?
 That is a great question.
 Why aren't they striving to get these guys to stop identifying themselves as internet
 marketers?
 And to be clear, nowhere in this piece does Danny say like, these scammers are good.
 He even says –
 I think it's clear that –
 No, we all agree on that.
 Everyone does the same thing.
 I don't want to put words in Danny's mouth, but I think what he was looking for was a
 paragraph somewhere that said, now, there are legit internet marketing firms or people
 who are not involved in this scammy stuff.
 These guys refer to themselves as internet marketers, and in fact, there is a segment
 of real internet marketers that are on the up and up.
 I get that, but we were covering specific people and specific stories in this piece.
 I have to say, and that's great, but to Joey's – Joey, how you doing, buddy?
 To Joey.
 No, to Joey's point, the SEO world is equally scummy.
 You've got to grow past that.
 I mean, I'm looking just at this SEO page right now, and it's a beginner's guide
 to mobile app marketing, free course, W traffic in 30 days plus secret bonus value of 300.
 I mean, SEO stuff is terrible.
 And this is the guy – I'm talking about Neil Patel, who is like legit.
 He consults for TechCrunch.
 Let's take some calls.
 Well, let's take some calls.
 I'm just saying.
 I mean, but consulting and –
 He consults for a cheeseburger.
 I mean, like, he's a legit guy.
 His tactics are exactly the same.
 If you want to talk about internet marketing, call 888-418-4074.
 By the way, Danny Sullivan, if you'd like to call –
 I think he might be on an airplane.
 Call from the airplane.
 I think the rules have changed now.
 You're able to use your cell phone.
 888-418-4074.
 If you have a question for Joe, if you want to talk about internet marketing, and if you
 have any experience – if you're Frank Kern or – who are the other guys?
 I'm trying to think of other –
 Andy Jenkins.
 Andy Jenkins.
 Rick Oza.
 Perry Belcher.
 Perry Belcher.
 Salty Droid, for that matter, if you're out there.
 Salty Droid.
 Salty Droid, if you're out there, who – by the way, the guy that – when this story
 really got interesting is that Joe found this guy, Salty Droid, who's basically been
 waging this, like, one-man war on these guys through his blog and Twitter.
 And when he started talking to him, like, the stuff that he knew and the depths of this
 was like, whoa.
 Right.
 It was – this is a lot bigger than Anthony Morrison's late-night commercials.
 Right.
 Danny just tweeted me and said I'm literally about to board a plane.
 It's too bad.
 So hopefully you can get him on.
 Thank you, Danny.
 We'd love to talk to you about it.
 And of course, we would love to hear what you have to say on this.
 And I think, you know, I'm – I get his point.
 I just think that it's – they've muddied the waters.
 Yeah.
 Not us.
 I'm going to take call here.
 Caller, you're on the air.
 What is your name?
 What do you have to say?
 And what can you sell me?
 And what – how much does the book cost?
 Hello?
 Hello?
 Hello?
 My name is Chang.
 Oh, God.
 It's you again.
 Chang.
 Chang.
 No.
 Oh, okay.
 Long Chang.
 What's up?
 What's up?
 How are you guys?
 Good.
 How are you?
 Good.
 Well?
 Good.
 I always wanted to come on the World Vets Cast.
 Well, here you are.
 Yep.
 Do you have any thoughts?
 Pleasure talking to you, Josh.
 Well, the feeling is mutual.
 Do you have any thoughts on the internet market, any questions about these internet marketers?
 Did you read the scam world piece?
 I think it's out of date now.
 It's been out for four hours.
 It's been on the site since –
 All right.
 Take it off the site, guys.
 Show your fire.
 Old news.
 It's been on the site for – since 10.30 East Coast time.
 Chang, do you actually – is this a prank call?
 Are you pranking us?
 Chang, how high are you?
 Chang, thanks for calling.
 All right.
 Next call, you're on the air.
 Please be better than Chang.
 What's your name and what do you want to talk about?
 Hey.
 My name is Alex Serena and I wanted to talk about the SEO thing that you guys wrote about
 the article.
 The scam world.
 Sure.
 Yeah, the scam world one.
 Yes.
 I guess I just want to call in and say I definitely understand where Danny Sullivan is coming
 from in that there's a difference between the legit people and the ones who are obviously
 out there trying to scam you but I think that there's also a slimy in between.
 In between those two camps, there's the people who offer you the money back guarantee and
 while there might be a real money back guarantee, there's – they're going to make you jump
 through crazy hoops to get it.
 So I feel like there's no legit internet marketing per se and like –
 So you think –
 I mean there is a completely non-legit camp but at the same time, there are people who
 fall in between.
 Okay.
 That's interesting.
 I mean have you had experience working with these guys or is this just like an observation?
 Well I mean no.
 I've obviously – number one, I've talked to people who say they do internet marketing
 and obviously as someone who considers himself a little bit more well-informed, you just
 kind of laugh and say, oh no, you're just kind of a scam artist.
 Right.
 And sometimes like I said, they do things that seem legitimate but I think the whole
 entire business of the way marketing is done on the internet can get really slimy at times.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 I agree.
 Even something like Danny Sullivan who's completely legitimate, their tactics can be
 just really –
 Well you know what's funny is –
 You know for us to run a site, we have to engage like SEO.
 It's important for us to know that –
 We have to understand or to learn it.
 We have to learn.
 We have to kind of understand it.
 I think that our ability to engage in our like desire to engage it deeply is somewhat
 limited by the fact that every time I get a little too close to it, I'm like, ew.
 Yes.
 And then I back away and then all we do –
 It is – it can be a little icky.
 I do feel like there's this thing where you feel that a goal is to game something.
 Yeah.
 The goal –
 It's like here's what we want you to learn, how to trick something into doing what you
 want it to do.
 Yeah.
 We do try to do best practices when it comes to SEO but for us, I remember the first time
 I did a column on the post, they ran a headline.
 It was like – I can't remember what I wrote about the first time.
 Maybe the second one they had this very clever Blackberry headline.
 It was like new Blackberries aren't so bold or something.
 Hey.
 What's up?
 Danny wants us to send him a phone number but we need one that he can call.
 Oh, 888?
 Well, he's not going to get through.
 What?
 Well, he won't get through.
 There's like a thousand of them.
 All right.
 Sorry.
 Hang on.
 Let me just finish my point.
 Yeah.
 Finish your point.
 We – so anyhow, the point is that I was like – I admire their flexibility of being
 able to write whatever they want because we have to kind of adhere to SEO.
 You've got to think about it if you're on the internet.
 But it does feel like when you get into the training stuff, it can feel a little – it
 can feel a little slimy.
 I agree with you.
 I'm not saying Danny is.
 I think there are elements there though.
 I mean, he's really covering it.
 I don't know what Danny's relationship – I don't know everything that Danny does.
 Danny's relationship with it is to cover it, which is a very different thing.
 So anyhow, thanks for your call.
 Our lines are filling up here, but I appreciate the thoughts.
 Okay.
 We have – so –
 Really?
 Really?
 Line four is open for Danny if he wants to call in.
 We have Paul Miller.
 Paul Miller is on line two.
 Paul Miller had a dual root canal today.
 I'm not kidding.
 Seriously?
 Two.
 Two.
 Yeah.
 Paul, you're on the line.
 Yep.
 Did you have a root canal today?
 I had two.
 How are you feeling, buddy?
 How do you feel?
 I feel a lot of pain.
 I just want to say hi to you guys.
 Are you on any painkillers?
 No, but I think I might seek them out.
 Do you want some painkillers?
 They gave you like a prescription, right?
 You have to go find them on the street.
 Well, no, I'm going to try to find them on the street just for the –
 So I don't know if you know this, but maybe you do because I know you saw Thomas, but
 we published the scammer's internet marketing scammer's piece.
 And this has been going on for so long that Paul was there at like the inception of the
 piece.
 Paul was there at the beginning of the scam world piece before scam world was even the
 name.
 Before there were even scammers on the internet.
 We published it and Danny Sullivan is mad at us for lumping in all internet marketing
 with these bad guys, bad internet marketers.
 Oh, awesome.
 Yeah.
 So –
 Congratulations, Joe, on publishing.
 Joe's here.
 Joe's on.
 Yeah.
 Thanks, Paul.
 It's good to talk to you.
 I miss you.
 Yeah, he doesn't see you on the internet anymore.
 Print out a copy and mail it to me.
 I'm really excited to read it.
 Mail it to you.
 I like that.
 Well, we can print out a copy here.
 I'll hand deliver it.
 We can print out a copy here in New York for you if you want to be a little bit easier
 for – but you know.
 So are we – sorry.
 Yeah, we've got Danny on the line.
 So Danny Sullivan is mad at us about the piece and he's now on the line?
 What?
 On the line?
 On line four?
 On line four.
 All right, Paul, can I bring – can I have them both on?
 No, I'll take off.
 I just wanted to say hi to you guys and say I'm alive.
 Well, that's very good.
 Take care of yourself.
 Get some pain killers if you need them.
 Bye, Paul.
 Feel better.
 And we'll talk to you next week.
 I mean, we'll see you in the office.
 Later.
 You'll be on next week.
 All right, bye.
 Cool.
 All right, so Danny Sullivan's on four?
 Danny, it's Josh.
 Hi.
 Hi, how are you?
 Hey.
 Hey, it's you.
 Hi.
 And we have Ross.
 And Joe, who wrote the article.
 And we just – sorry, we just discovered – I just – I was in meetings all day and
 we heard that you were upset about the piece that we wrote and wanted to get your thoughts
 on it.
 What are you thinking?
 The main thing is I understand that there's this segment of scammers who call this whole
 thing internet marketing.
 And I love the piece that you're exposing it.
 I think that stuff is terrible and it's just heartbreaking what people get involved with
 and how people get taken into that sort of stuff.
 But there is a much bigger, much more long-standing segment called internet marketing that is
 made up of people who do everything from social media marketing to SEO to paid for, to display
 advertising.
 They're all internet marketers.
 They all just under this umbrella term just like you have television marketers or print
 marketers or correct marketers.
 So I saw that in my entire heart.
 I mean I have an entire cycle of marketing on this about internet marketing.
 Right, but like who do you – who's an internet marketer that – I mean give me an example
 of somebody that – I don't know – on the up and up who's an internet marketer,
 somebody you describe as an internet marketer who is like completely on the up and up.
 I'm just trying to understand who you're specifically talking about.
 You've got people who do social media for you, right?
 Social media marketing?
 No.
 No.
 We have a guy at Twitch sometimes.
 We have like our editors man the Twitter account stuff.
 Okay, but that's marketing.
 You're running social media accounts as social media marketing and that's part of internet
 marketing.
 I mean we're trying to get our – I mean I wouldn't call that marketing exactly.
 I mean I see social media as an avenue to reach readers, right?
 Like when I think of it I'm like if people are on Twitter and see that we have written
 a story they'll come and read the story and I want that because I want people to read
 the stuff.
 I mean it is – we're marketing our content I guess but we're not like – we don't
 pay someone to get the word out.
 You might not do that right now but as you grow there's an excellent chance you're
 going to be doing that sort of thing.
 We didn't do it in Engadget.
 I don't think we did.
 Yeah, we didn't do it in Engadget.
 I mean we had a sales team that sold ads but –
 Well that's advertising when you're selling it on your site.
 Marketing is – I'm trying to help people discover our content and sometimes marketing
 is done through paid which is often referred to as paid marketing or so on.
 That is done through – in the marketing world would be called earned marketing.
 It sounds weird but it's the idea that you have somehow earned the idea that people would
 just freely mention you.
 So for example a PR firm that helped get an article in the newspaper by doing a really
 good pitch and you guys know this right?
 You get pitch.
 Those PR firms are doing marketing.
 Right.
 They can't guarantee that anything can happen.
 They can't force you to do anything but you know the difference between a good PR
 person who helps you get the information paid versus some scumbag who comes along and says
 hey, go to find an ad and it will go up on the site.
 It doesn't work that way.
 Right.
 Sorry, go ahead.
 So you have this discipline of marketing and where it's probably sounding strange to you
 is because you guys aren't coming at it as thinking about it as marketing but the people
 who perform these types of things, they are marketers.
 People over in Zag, right?
 You know they make the skins that go on your phone, that sort of thing?
 They have people who do both social media marketing and do certain digitization.
 That is their job.
 They're hired to do that sort of stuff and they think about themselves as marketers.
 The ad tech conference that happens is filled with big companies and small companies of
 people who are doing internet marketing.
 So here's my question to you.
 So these guys refer to themselves as internet marketers.
 I don't see what they call what they do.
 They call it internet marketing.
 In video after video, these guys are like become an internet marketer.
 This is how we do internet marketing.
 This is the world of internet marketing.
 Over and over again, they use the phrase.
 So I guess I think what you might have and I said this before, I feel like what we could
 have done and maybe we'll add an addendum to this somewhere.
 I'm not putting words in Joe's mouth because it's his piece.
 Joe Flatley who wrote it is on the line as well.
 But I think you were looking for a paragraph somewhere that said now look, there are on
 the up and up people who call themselves internet marketers who do real internet marketing
 that are SEO people or marketers that have real products and get paid real money by real
 clients to do specific things that are totally on the up and up.
 And these guys call themselves internet marketers, but what they're really doing is it's a pyramid
 scheme essentially.
 Yeah, I mean, they're not, you know, they're just trying to get rich fast.
 Now, or get rich off of people.
 I guess the best equivalent I could say is this is just somebody is doing spam, email
 spam, right?
 That they're going around saying that they're an email marketer.
 These are people who are actually doing actual email marketing, maintaining email lists for
 their companies and sending out offers to people that they're interacting with and so
 on that would think, oh my God, I'm not a spammer.
 That's a completely different person.
 Right.
 Well, but Joe, you know, but there is a fine line.
 Joe made a good point here and I think that you'll have to agree that there are people
 who probably see themselves as legit.
 I mean, a lot of these guys seem to see themselves as legit and think that they're selling a
 service and don't actually seem to recognize that they are spamming.
 You know, they are spammers, right?
 Absolutely.
 All I can say is there's a much bigger group of people who are actually, I think, doing
 legitimate internet marketing that has nothing to do with the scam that has taken that name
 and wants to use it as well.
 So here's my question for you.
 I think this is something that I'd really like to know and I would like to, what is
 the legit internet marketing community doing, if anything, or what can they do about these
 guys co-opting this name, the term and the idea of it?
 And the success, right?
 Because legit internet marketing can be successful.
 I think you do a search for internet marketing, you're not going to find, the first guys you
 see aren't going to be the up and up guys.
 The guys you're going to see are going to be Frank Kern and Anthony Morrison and Get
 Rich Quick Scheme.
 So what is the internet marketing community, the legit marketing community doing or what
 do you think they should do to combat this?
 You know, this is the first time I actually encountered them calling themselves by this
 kind of a name.
 I mean, it really surprised me because the last time I was looking at, say, search for
 internet marketing was probably about six months ago and I don't remember running into
 any of this stuff at all.
 So, you know, I don't know if it just suddenly shifted to this more recently or if it's been
 out there and it's just suddenly grown.
 But this is my first guy going, what?
 They're calling themselves internet marketing?
 Where did that come from?
 Yeah.
 I mean, that's...
 I'm seeing other people treating me like that.
 I've never heard of this as well.
 So, you know, I suppose in part, internet marketers out there may not have been doing
 anything because these paths are just not really crossed.
 Right.
 Right.
 Joe, do you have a sense of how long they've been actually...
 I mean, because obviously these businesses come from...
 Sorry.
 Are you on a plane right now, Danny?
 Yeah.
 We're going to get them like totally bald wind.
 It's very...
 Yeah, you're going to get kicked off the plane because of us.
 I'm already at the moment.
 Joe, do you know how long they've been using internet marketing specifically or kind of
 trending towards this?
 Well, I mean, obviously I only ever discovered this...
 We turned Danny down.
...four, six months ago.
 Sorry.
 Sorry, no, it's okay.
 You're good, Danny.
 We'll do it on the other end.
 Go ahead, Joe.
 Four, six months ago, but a lot of this material, because they keep reusing the same material.
 You see YouTube videos from two, three, four years ago.
 It's internet marketing.
 Right.
 And also, internet marketing is like an umbrella term.
 The stuff is not new.
 It's plenty of other...
 Danny, this is Ross.
 Can I ask you a question?
 You've read the piece.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Is there anyone that any person or group that we called out that you thought was unfair?
 Like in particular people, not the term itself, but like people, organizations we called out?
 No.
 I just was...
 What threw me off was coming in and hearing that internet marketing was snake oil because
 I just had not seen that term being used with these kinds of scams.
 And I've only seen that term used for legitimate stuff that I know.
 What kind of term have you heard for these guys?
 Yeah.
 What would you call these guys?
 Because what's interesting is that they've definitely been around and doing this for
 years, calling themselves internet...
 Make money, work at home.
 I would have to go back.
 I mean, Joe, it sounds like he knows the history of how that word developed much better than
 I. These kinds of scams don't seem to be new.
 Maybe the names have changed.
 And to the degree that the article raises awareness that there are people who may be
 actually confusing that internet marketing with broader discipline of internet marketing,
 that's great.
 I applaud that.
 It's just that there's no acknowledgement that there's this other kind of internet marketing.
 When I first got onto the internet in 1995, I was part of the iNet marketing mailing list.
 That was how we all talked to each other and we were all people who were trying to help
 everybody else understand how we were going to be getting onto the internet and how we
 were going to be marketing websites and how we were going to...
 Part of marketing was building websites for people.
 That's how far back I know of internet marketing going as a name, as a pipe to the internet.
 That's interesting.
 I mean, I think that...
 I get what you're saying and I think that there's probably some room for...
 It feels like the thing is, the problem is that these guys call themselves internet marketers.
 I think that the idea that it's a blanket, that all internet marketers are like these
 guys is obviously a problem.
 That wasn't the point.
 I don't think that was the point of Joe's piece at all.
 We were kind of focusing on particular people and stories.
 I can see how...
 Yeah, we used like what, four, six people to kind of as extreme cartoonish illustrations,
 but not every single person in the story, not every scammer, not every con artist operates
 in the exact same way.
 Not every person that uses their tactics is strictly using their tactics.
 A lot of them are legit.
 A lot of legit companies buy into that.
 Part of the problem is we had to define terms because everybody describes themselves differently
 and really tries to obfuscate what they're doing.
 Internet marketer was the most universal, so that's what we picked.
 I completely agree.
 I talked to quite a few people in the SEO world and in the legit world and they didn't
 identify themselves as internet marketers.
 They all seem to shy away from that.
 Yeah.
 I do feel like it does seem like there's a difference between you talking about PR and
 advertising and SEO.
 The term internet marketing is not a term I've ever associated with...
 Even with your site, internet marketing as a phrase is not something that I think of
 at all.
 I guess there's this weird disconnect between on your side, there's this disconnect between
 what these guys are and being internet marketing on the side of the more mainstream, I think
 there's a disconnect about the idea of internet marketing as a thing at all.
 That it's something you're associated with.
 When you talk about somebody...
 What I'll say is, if you head over to Techme, you'll see Matt Katz over at Google expressing
 the same kind of surprise that I'm having.
 He has lived in the dirtiest, darkest trenches of the internet.
 There is nothing terrible he has not seen about marketing, having to run spam policing
 for Google.
 Even he seemed to be surprised to go, what?
 I totally think it's fine that you use that term to apply it to the way that it's being
 used within that kind of genre, what those people are saying.
 I just think it would be really helpful if you explain that there's this whole other
 discipline of internet marketing.
 Sometimes it's called digital marketing, sometimes it's called internet marketing.
 But there are people who do this range of activities.
 Even the Wikipedia page explains this sort of stuff that are completely distinct from
 the...
 I know it's Wikipedia, but actually they work that far off.
 I mean, for all we know, these guys...
 Frank Kerr might have been hand editing the Wikipedia page.
 Yeah, they've been busy at it.
 You know what, Danny?
 I hear what you're saying.
 I know you're on a plane and you probably have to go soon, but I hear what you're saying
 and we'll discuss it.
 Maybe there's some way...
 Danny, if you just give me $1,000, I can make sure that I'll consult with you in the team
 chat.
 If you're on the $1,000 level, we got a $500 package.
 Danny, do you work better with Visa or MasterCard?
 Because we want to get you in on the right level here.
 American Express, though, we just have to.
 No, no, no.
 In all seriousness, all joking aside, I hear what you're saying.
 I think that that's totally legit.
 What you're saying is there's a segment of people who have a real job and it's not ripping
 people off and they do...
 Some of them clearly refer to themselves as internet marketers or else you wouldn't be
 upset about this.
 Maybe there's some way that we can clarify that in the piece.
 You know what I mean?
 It may be as simple as saying, now look, there's a legitimate business called internet marketing.
 These guys are not it.
 Maybe we can point to your post and say Danny Sullivan wrote something about the legit internet
 marketing, but this is something else.
 Yeah.
 Go ahead.
 If you want, and I tone the post down a little bit because I was upset.
 You referred to us as all things TechCrunch, which I take a little...
 Which I have to say is the most bitter insult that's ever been delivered to me.
 I will say, Danny, just really on that one point, I will say if you look at us from launch
 day, we've been doing big pieces, thought pieces like this that aren't just about gadgets.
 One of our earliest pieces was Joe did this thing on survival condos.
 We've done those long form pieces on rim, which is much more about the business side.
 We've done stuff on art and on music and on culture that are not...
 This is not a new thing for us.
 This is just an evolution of what we're doing.
 I think the features are all great.
 One of the things that I find interesting is that I think your announcement went out
 of the new name and everything in November.
 We launched our marketing land site in the same kind of way that we've long run search
 engine land, which is about search marketing, and we've got people who do things beyond
 search engines with internet marketing, so we've launched an internet marketing site.
 It really has nothing to do with this other kind of internet marketing.
 We're going to...
 No, dude, I totally hear you on this.
 I think that we're going to talk about and figure out if there's a way to get...
 Just clarify that point, because I think that the fact is these guys are calling themselves
 internet marketers, and I think it almost helps to point out that what they think is
 internet marketing or what they're trying to sell people as internet marketing is clearly
 not the real business of internet marketing.
 I think that's...
 You know what?
 I think that's a good point, and we'll talk about it, and we'll figure something out.
 Well, I appreciate the time, and sorry things got heated a bit there.
 No, it's fine.
 I think I got that one last tweet, and I was like, what?
 No.
 We're not getting it.
 We don't get riled up.
 I'm actually glad to hear...
 I'm just glad we got a chance to talk to you.
 I think it's really interesting to hear the other side of this, which is not evident.
 That's the thing that's so crazy.
 That other side is like the voice has been drowned out by these guys.
 When you do a search for internet marketing, you don't get Danny Sullivan.
 That's not the first thing.
 Maybe it is...
 I don't know where your site ranks, but it really is these guys are drowning out what
 the industry you're talking about is.
 Maybe it's time to mount up against these dudes, get lawyer up.
 After that, or maybe that if it grows to that degree, you're going to have an internet market
 say, hey, you know what?
 We're digital workers, but we're something else.
 They may very well do it.
 This may have woken up a lot of people who had no idea that they were even calling themselves
 that.
 It would be good to have the clarification.
 It would be great if you guys decide that you want to do it.
 I think that would help.
 Anyway, it's good.
 The piece, I can't say enough, the piece was great in exposing this kind of stuff.
 I think that you would find a ton of the legitimate internet marketers out there, if you will,
 want to endorse that same sort of thing to say, this is crap.
 It's just telling us to be able to say it and then feel like, oh, but you're the same
 kind of crap.
 I think that was definitely not our goal.
 We can draw a finer line, I think, pretty easily.
 Danny, thanks so much.
 Have a safe flight wherever you're going.
 I hope that we talk again soon.
 Sounds good.
 Take care.
 Thanks very much.
 Bye.
 That was cool.
 That was really nice to have him.
 You adding that piece right now, Joe?
 Joe's just drinking.
 We'll figure it out after the Verge.
 We want to take another call.
 I feel like we should move on from internet marketing.
 We're calling Pebble.
 We're going to talk to the Pebble guys?
 Really?
 Wow.
 Joe, we're going to move on.
 You know the news cycle, constantly churning.
 A lot of churning in the news cycle.
 I've been out of the news cycle for about four months.
 Yeah, you've been back.
 I've been deep in the scam world.
 Actually, Joe, is your next piece, I'm not going to say what it is, but is it what I
 think it is?
 It's a shorter form feature that he's writing.
 Let me set up Pebble before they come on.
 Joe, are you going to hang out?
 I don't really want to.
 I don't like you either, man.
 Is that weird?
 Does Ziggler know?
 No, no, no.
 That's great.
 It's better for everybody.
 Joe, thank you for joining us.
 It's better for everybody.
 Thanks, guys.
 Wow, man.
 Later, buddy.
 Great work on this piece.
 I know.
 Have a beer.
 Relax.
 Enjoy your life.
 Yeah.
 If you hear a knock at the door and you don't know who it is on the other side, you're
 going to be fine.
 I took my name off the mailbox.
 I told you where it goes or where you live.
 Don't worry about it.
 That's good.
 All right, Joe.
 We'll talk to you soon.
 We'll see you soon.
 All right.
 Thanks, guys.
 Later, man.
 Let me set this up.
 Pebble, we talked about them on the show.
 Pebble, the watch, the smart watch.
 The Kickstarter watch.
 They obviously blew past their funding goals.
 Jammed past it.
 Actually, to be clear, they wanted to sell a thousand of these watches.
 They sold 85,000.
 They've hit over $10 million on Kickstarter.
 So they're sold out.
 They're all done.
 They still have eight days to go.
 They still have eight days to go, but they're done.
 They can't make any more money.
 85,000 units sold before anything is actually...
 Who are we talking to?
 They're online, too.
 Okay.
 Eric is online, too.
 Eric.
 Eric from Pebble.
 Eric Pebble.
 Eric Pebble.
 Eric Pebble.
 Eric P. Pebble.
 Let's just get him on the line.
 This is cool.
 Kind of an exclusive conversation.
 Eric, you're on the line.
 Can you hear us?
 Hi.
 What's up?
 How are you?
 Now, how many bottles of champagne have you had today?
 I want to get a gauge of how much you've been drinking since discovering that you...
 My level today, I've been eating right next to my desk is an empty bag of dried mangoes.
 That's what I've been shutting down.
 Those are good.
 Those are delicious.
 Does those get you high?
 Yeah.
 No, no.
 Just the right amount.
 Okay.
 Hey, so let me ask you, why did you cut this off?
 It seems like you could have just kept going forever.
 You already passed 85,000 by a sizable number.
 One of the big concerns for us was being able to source enough components in the short term
 to complete the build on schedule.
 In the interest of delivering the absolute best product to our Kickstarter backers, we
 decided to cut off the rewards at the moment.
 I'm assuming, since you can still donate a dollar or two here now, you just don't get
 to watch, are you still getting donations today, like decent amount?
 Yeah, I think, yeah, there were a couple hundred people that have sort of put down a dollar
 to keep on track.
 But I mean, we are committed to selling more Pebbles in the future.
 So for example, as soon as Kickstarter closes, we're going to put up a little page that lets
 people sort of get in line to buy one of the first Pebbles when they are available after
 Kickstarter.
 So what's the...
 Okay, so you've got $10 million.
 Now you don't actually have the money yet.
 This thing has to close.
 Nope, nope.
 The project closes on the 18th.
 Okay.
 And that's when people's credit cards will be processed against that.
 And so explain to me...
 And I think we received the transaction.
 So explain to me how this works.
 So you have literally, I'm not trying to be rude, I just want to understand what happens.
 You now have $10 million in credit card transactions that will be, what will happen on this date,
 Kickstarter will charge...
 It will go from zero to 10 million.
 And a bank account somewhere will suddenly have $10 million in it?
 It's actually an Amazon payments account since Kickstarter has partnered with Amazon to process
 all their credit card transactions.
 But you will have access to $10 million when this thing closes?
 Yes, our company will.
 Hi.
 You personally.
 You're not going to like...
 I mean, how much of this is just your party budget?
 You're going to finally close out all your Prime items that you've been trying...
 You're like, your wish list?
 I actually, I think I should check to see if it's now going to be like, I can just spend
 a lot of money on Amazon or whether I actually get...
 You get the money.
 Yeah.
 So I have some questions for you about the watch.
 I'm really curious.
 I'm a smart watch fan boy.
 I have been.
 And this is...
 I think the reason this has caught on is because it has a lot of the pieces that people
 have wanted in a device.
 So the first one is just, can you talk to us about how it actually works with iOS?
 Because that seems to be the thing that has made this one really interesting, right?
 Yeah.
 So I think there's some things I can't really talk about too much until we've gone through
 the final stages of the process.
 But in briefly, we're following the MFI guidelines, made for iPhone guidelines.
 I think one of the things that we've done differently is we've used a couple of different
 Bluetooth profiles.
 So in order to get phone call notification on the watch, we're actually using the HFP
 profile of Bluetooth.
 That's the headset profile.
 We've done extensive testing to show that you can connect to an iPhone with Pebble as
 well as another headset.
 So you can get caller ID information using Pebble.
 Oh, that's interesting.
 Wait, let me just paint this picture.
 So you have an iPhone, you've got a Bluetooth headset in your ear, and you've got a smart
 watch.
 And they're both connected.
 You get a call, then you answer it with your watch, and then begin talking.
 Is that correct, Eric?
 Is that right?
 So you get a call, you're notified on the watch, you can answer it on the watch, and
 it bounces it to the headset.
 But you can't answer it like there's no speaker or microphone on the watch.
 No, no, no, no, I know that.
 But you take action on the call, and then it bounces the call to the headset, essentially.
 Right now, we have the caller ID showing up on the watch.
 Oh, so you can't take action on it.
 It's possible that we may have that in.
 We can't guarantee it right now.
 Okay.
 Have you worked with Apple on this at all?
 Has there been any, you probably can't talk about it even if you did, but I just wonder
 if there's been any conversation with anybody there in terms of how you might...
 So for example, that, what I just described, is a plain Bluetooth spec thing.
 We're also using, another thing that we've done that other people haven't done is used
 AVRCP, the audio-visual remote control profile, to be able to control music on either iPhone
 or Android.
 Oh, wow.
 So these are, the profiles you're using, they're not some sort of custom spec.
 These are...
 These are like standard, anybody could tap into this.
 It's just that nobody seems to have done it or done it...
 Done it correctly.
 Done it well.
 And then there's a provision where your app gets to run in the background because it's
 connected to the watch, right?
 Correct.
 So that's really interesting.
 How did you kind of negotiate that?
 Is that going to kill battery life?
 That's not a negotiation.
 That's another, that's something that came around with iOS 5.
 Okay.
 So up until iOS 5, you know, with iOS 4, there were some provisions for doing backgrounding
 if you ran streaming music like Spotify or if you did location-aware apps like Foursquare
 or something like that.
 But there was no exception or background exemption for hardware up until iOS 5.
 But they run these discrete processes, right?
 I mean, they're kind of...
 You're not actually backgrounding the entire app.
 You're backgrounding this...
 No, not actually backgrounding the app.
 There's some crazy stuff that's going on in the iOS.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 So you'll be tapping into that to keep a constant connection.
 Yeah.
 And is there a battery life concern?
 Is there, I mean, what kind of...
 What does that put on the phone side?
 No, not in particular.
 I mean, we haven't released, you know, precise numbers, but we haven't seen that.
 Is it the equivalent to, say, when I'm in my car and, you know, my phone is connected,
 obviously via Bluetooth.
 I mean, similar connection, like in terms of battery life concerns?
 Probably a little bit less because with a car kit, especially when you're making calls,
 that's a constant Bluetooth connection.
 Right.
 Ours is very intermittent.
 And you're not actually utilizing the watch for the call.
 Right.
 And then, so then the other big piece of news you just had was you upgraded the phone...
 Or the phone.
 By the way, I keep calling it a phone.
 It's part of my...
 It's not a phone.
 It's Ross's fault.
 It's a watch.
 It's a watch.
 It's a watch.
 Just collapse them all.
 No, so you just upgraded to Bluetooth 4.0, which was actually the very first...
 When I first saw the watch, I was like, but why isn't it Bluetooth 4.0?
 And then, so you kind of made my day there.
 What do you expect to kind of...
 Yeah, well, I think it was a matter of like, you know, so when we started off the Kickstarter
 project, we were estimating that we were going to be able to manufacture, you know, a thousand
 watches if we raised $100,000.
 And so, I mean, we obviously had a plan in the past for larger amounts of manufacturing.
 That's what we're pursuing right now.
 But at the end of the day, you know, we were just, you know, really hardcore focused on
 making watches.
 So we sort of...
 We wanted to bite off what we could chew.
 And that's why we targeted 2.1 plus EDR to start with.
 Right, because that was available.
 And so I have a question.
 Is it...
 Was the response bigger than you expected?
 I mean, it seems like it was way bigger than you expected.
 I'd like to know, was it?
 And why...
 Yeah, how are you kind of dealing with it?
 Like, what do you think the cause of it was?
 Like, what is it that you did?
 Or what is it about your product that you think is...
 I mean, what have you heard from people?
 They were like, I've got to buy into this.
 Like, can you communicate that?
 Can you tell me that?
 Yeah, I mean, we're still in the process of figuring it out, because that's going to be
 a pretty valuable insight to figure out.
 From what I've heard, I mean, just talking about, you know, parents and my relatives,
 like, this is the first product that I've created that really sort of lit up my hands
 on ice or something like that.
 That's really cool.
 That means that we're sort of reaching beyond our comfort zone, which is the tech and the
 geek and the gadget guys, and, you know, crossing over into our mainstream iPhone users, Android
 users.
 And so what I've heard from, you know, basically my relatives or some of the people that I've
 been talking to the most, you know, they like the idea of customizing their watch, being
 able to download a different watch face and run it on your watch.
 I think that's pretty cool.
 I mean, how complex can you get with this?
 I mean, this is an E Ink display, right?
 It's E Paper.
 Is it E Ink specifically?
 E Paper, sorry.
 Is it E Ink?
 Is it E Ink or is it E Paper?
 Because E Ink is a brand, right?
 E Ink is a brand.
 E Ink is a brand name, yeah.
 So it's E Paper.
 And what are you doing in terms of levels of gray?
 I mean, how detailed can you get?
 What's the, you know, I guess there's no...
 It's just black and white at the moment.
 Oh, it is?
 Okay.
 And so third party faces?
 Is that a thing that you might do?
 Yeah, definitely.
 Yeah.
 So you might get like Bell and Ross or somebody to do a custom...
 I'm serious.
 Yeah, or I mean like custom design.
 We're starting with just anyone who wants to make one can start writing a watch face.
 I was thinking you could do like Swatch could be a partner.
 They could be funky.
 Yeah.
 Actually, have you talked to any watch companies?
 Yeah, I have.
 You were also like, damn it, we've been trying to do this for 20 years.
 You would think that, yeah, we have legit, you know, like already established watch companies
 reached out and said, I don't know why I'm saying legit a lot on this show.
 Yeah, no, it's cool.
 It's like, it's super 94.
 MC Hammer, MC Hammer.
 Have watch companies reached out to you guys?
 Have you gotten people sniffing around now going, hey, we want this technology?
 Not yet, but I'm sure once they do, you know, we'd be happy to chat.
 Yeah.
 Would you consider licensing this technology for other devices, other watches?
 We haven't really nailed down, you know, that kind of future stuff.
 We're really at the moment just focused on getting these out there for our Kickstarter
 and stuff.
 What exactly is next for you?
 Yeah.
 Is the design finished?
 Are you just waiting to buy the parts?
 I just said, do you buy the parts?
 Why do you buy the parts?
 Wait, go ahead.
 Sorry, sorry, go ahead.
 We're placing large component orders, getting everything lined up for starting production
 later this summer.
 So actually I have kind of two questions.
 One's like kind of minor and one's bigger.
 And I think the big one's really interesting.
 So you start out saying we want to make a thousand watches.
 We want to prove the model.
 We want to show people that we can do this.
 So there's a way to make a better watch.
 And then you ended up with $10 million and 85,000 orders.
 What changed over the course?
 I mean, how did you react to the first explosion and then how did you react to kind of, okay,
 now we have to do this for real.
 Yeah.
 I mean, when you're talking about a thousand devices, that's a boutique order essentially.
 That's a proof of concept.
 That's a, right.
 I mean, that's a very small run.
 When you get up to what you're at now, you must have had to scale up, I mean, the infrastructure
 to produce 85,000 versus a thousand has got to be somewhat different.
 So we actually, when we started working on Pebble, Pebble is our second watch.
 We worked on Impulse, the Blackberry smartwatch for a while.
 We actually, so we had designed right after iOS 5 hit last summer, we started designing
 Pebble working with this new display that we had sourced.
 We'd lined up a manufacturer.
 We'd lined up a whole team for making sort of a large scale product, but we just didn't
 have the capital to be able to support that.
 We had attempted to raise venture capital from the VCs and just we weren't able to get
 any sort of traction in the venture capital market.
 So we had this great plan and we had this great product.
 We just had no cash to be able to pull it off.
 So we scaled back our dreams.
 We said, okay, maybe we had this great sort of watch that we wanted to design.
 What's a subset of that?
 What could we launch on a finite amount of money?
 And that's what we came up with, with our, with Pebble.
 So you scaled back, this started as a different watch is what you're saying?
 It didn't, no, sorry.
 The watch is the same watch, but we scaled our manufacturing plans back.
 Oh, okay, okay.
 So you weren't like, we want to do this crazy watch, but we can do half the features.
 So do you feel kind of vindicated that all these VCs turned you down and now you've like
 gone to the people?
 To be honest, I'm just really happy that I get to make Pebble.
 Right.
 I would have hated, I mean, I wouldn't have given up.
 We would have figured out how to get it out there somehow, but it probably would have
 ended up with just me making more watches in our garage.
 So the 18th is when you close, right?
 When the Kickstarter project closes.
 What is the very first thing that happens after that?
 I'm just curious to know, like literally, what's the process?
 Literally you get the, you have the money, right?
 You've obviously got the plans for the watch, I assume, you know, you've got your suppliers
 in place.
 So what is the very first thing you do?
 You have the money, like how do you start the, what's the first domino?
 So the very first thing actually happened about four weeks ago.
 So the day after we opened Kickstarter and you know, the first Engadget article hit,
 it sort of exploded and we made the switch.
 We flipped the switch.
 Real rag.
 We flipped the switch that day.
 Engadget you say.
 Oh, it's fine.
 I'm sure you've heard of them.
 I've heard of them.
 They sound familiar.
 And so then the next thing is you get the money and are you like writing a check to
 a supplier?
 Is that the next thing?
 Do you have to fly?
 Do you have to go?
 We're writing a lot of different checks, but no.
 So for example, we phoned up our contract manufacturer, you know, the day after Kickstarter
 started and we were like, well, we're going to order a lot more watches than we thought.
 That's been in the works for four weeks.
 The thing for sure that's going to happen at the end of May is I'm going to sign several
 very large checks for long lead time components.
 Interesting.
 Hello, Eric.
 Hi.
 Sorry.
 And these are all sold.
 That's the nice thing.
 It's not like you're like, hey, we're going to make 85,000 watches and we don't know what
 we're going to do with them.
 I mean, these are so, so explain to me how that works.
 Is this the watches are manufactured overseas, right?
 Yes.
 OK.
 And then are they just being shipped directly to the customers?
 We're not 100 percent sure how the logistics will work out, but we'll probably figure out
 what's the best way to get them out to all over the world.
 And following the 85,000 that you've that you've now sold, right?
 They're all spoken for, correct?
 Correct.
 So beyond that, do you have are you planning on ramping to getting?
 Are you going to go to stores?
 Are you going to distribute these?
 Are you going to talk to distributors?
 Are you going to try to put them in Apple stores or Best Buy or what's the plan beyond
 the Kickstarter people?
 We're building it for production.
 So like the production set up that we'll have to make the Kickstarter batch will be the
 same factory, the same set up that we could use to make more watches.
 What's the ramp between filling out the Kickstarter orders and then selling it to the public?
 Yeah, I think a lot of people are curious.
 So the major thing is the holidays.
 And we were only I mean, like we're shipping in September and we're just, you know, the
 Kickstarter backers are the premier people.
 So we get the watch before anyone else.
 And if we're able to make more watches before Christmas, that's cool.
 But I'm not as worried about that as much as just making sure that our Kickstarter backers
 are as happy as possible.
 And it's too late now.
 I can't get one.
 You're done.
 Can we get one for you?
 You didn't back it?
 Well, I did.
 I was going to back it today.
 So now you're going to hate my guts.
 You're going to hate me, Eric.
 But I'm a big fan of analog watches.
 I actually don't really like digital watches at all.
 There's an analog face.
 No, I know that.
 What I want is a watch.
 This is my dream watch.
 Maybe you'll make it for me.
 I want a watch.
 Do you remember the Motorola Aura phone that had the circular display?
 On the front, yeah.
 So what I want is a watch that looks like a regular, like a classic watch, but the display
 is a circular digital display.
 And it looks like a regular watch until you swipe to the side and then you get all kinds
 of other features or whatever.
 That's my kind of dream.
 That's the watch that I think I'm going to be really fall in love with.
 But perhaps when I see the Pebble watch in person and you got one, right?
 You got one?
 What color are you getting?
 Black.
 You got black?
 Jet black.
 Did you get one?
 No.
 I found this story out by going to the Kickstarter page and realizing I can't donate.
 By the way, it's rare that you get to talk to the creator of the back.
 Yeah, this is exciting.
 Eric, we were going to have Eric on the show.
 It's rare that you get to talk to him and tell him that you didn't buy the product and
 hear firsthand the disappointment and I think a little anger actually.
 More like an opportunity.
 If you didn't get it, there's probably a few other people out there that didn't get it
 as well.
 That's right.
 Maybe there will be some people for the next batch.
 Oh, I think there will be people for the next batch.
 I think there will be people for the next batch.
 Sorry, I have two questions.
 One from the listeners, which I think is hilarious.
 I'll ask that second.
 My next question, which is a little question, is are you at all worried about Apple kind
 of rejiggering the iPod Nano?
 Now that they've seen your success kind of rejiggering the Nano because they're already
 doing the watch stuff with it to make it connect with the iPhone, does that concern you at
 all or are you making your own product?
 That's a possibility.
 I'm not super frightened.
 I think I would buy one.
 He still has 85,000 orders.
 Yeah, you've got $10 million.
 You're good, right?
 Yeah.
 I might be able to afford one with that.
 Okay, and the second question, and this is from the listeners, are you kind of mad that
 Samsung just released a product called the S-Pebble because they did?
 Oh, that's true.
 It's one of the colors, like one of the colors.
 No, it's a little MP3 player called the S-Pebble.
 It's a square.
 It's a tiny little MP3 player that is an accessory for the phone.
 No, I did not see that.
 They cannot tell time.
 Is that like yesterday?
 Yeah, no, it was when they announced the Galaxy S3.
 It syncs to the phone.
 I thought that was just a color.
 No, it's an accessory.
 They said that one of the S3 colors was purple.
 No, it's an accessory for it and it's like a little square that you use to play.
 It controls the music on the phone?
 No, it's an MP3 player that syncs to the phone.
 I don't understand the point of it.
 Yeah, nobody understands that.
 Nobody understands it, but it is in your space now.
 You better watch out.
 I will Google this right now.
 You may have heard of the small company Samsung.
 They're challenging you on the name Pebble.
 Well their name is Spebble.
 Yeah, it's Spebble.
 No, don't say it looks cool.
 You don't want to give them any credit.
 Samsung's lawyers listen to the Vergecast.
 No, they do.
 They're listening right now.
 I bet they do.
 But, Eric, listen, I'm sure you have champagne to drink over there and watches to manufacture.
 So we're going to let you go.
 Watches to make.
 But we would love to have you come on the show.
 We do this on the Verge and we almost had you guys come on the last one and it didn't
 work out.
 You don't have to tell me now, but hopefully we can make that happen because we'd love
 to talk to you and maybe see a prototype.
 Yeah, and it would be cool to show you the UI as it progresses over the summer.
 That would be great.
 That would be awesome.
 You know, the developer kit and everything.
 That would be great.
 Hey, if you want to come on, we have a show next week.
 Tay 17.
 Just start bimping it out.
 I mean, you know, you're welcome.
 You just want to fly in?
 I want to check it out.
 Anyhow, but Eric, thank you so much.
 And we will definitely be talking to you soon.
 I think we're all really excited about this.
 I think what's cool about this is, you know, we cover products all the time and it's like
 they're all from big, big companies.
 And we just had Tony Fadell on the last show and we were talking about how hard it is to
 create a hardware startup.
 And you guys have not only done, you're not only a hardware startup, but you're doing
 it in a way that is totally unorthodox and completely new.
 And I think really exciting because it's like your idea has been validated by a public,
 by the buying public before you've ever put rubber to road.
 So by the way, don't screw it up.
 Because otherwise, no pressure, but just 85,000 people and $10 billion riding on it.
 So anyhow, with that, Eric, good luck.
 We're really excited about it and we can't wait to watch what you guys are doing.
 And anytime you want to talk, we're happy to do it.
 Looking forward to it.
 All right.
 Thank you.
 Bye.
 Bye.
 So how many startup hardware companies are there out there that are still successful?
 I mean, there's Roku, I'd say.
 Roku needs to make money.
 No, they're making, they're not profitable.
 Why am I talking like this?
 Roku is not profitable.
 But you know, Roku is popular, but not profitable.
 Okay.
 All right.
 Is there any other news this week we want to talk about?
 Because we're at like an hour and a half on this show.
 Oh, wow.
 Well, there's two things that I think are really interesting.
 One, I guess the HP stuff isn't interesting.
 Yeah.
 It's HP, right?
 Well, they put out a bunch of laptops and now they're calling them sleekbooks, which
 I think is what it is.
 Oh, no.
 Is that HP's term or AMD's term?
 It's HP's term.
 Okay.
 Sleekbooks.
 So what they've done is they put out, and some of them look good, but Ultrabook is this
 set of specs controlled by Intel.
 So HP is like, well, we'll use AMD processors and slower components and we'll call those
 sleekbooks.
 Yeah, but they can't call them Ultrabooks.
 So that's like a thing that's happening now.
 It's bad.
 I feel like I could do better than that.
 I'm not saying that book...
 I mean, I'm not saying I'm a genius marketer, but I just feel like sleekbook, I feel like
 you could do better if you just spent a little bit of time on doing an Ultrabook.
 And they don't look bad.
 The new Spectre XT looks pretty good.
 That's one of their Ultrabooks.
 There's an air of familiarity.
 There's definitely an air of familiarity.
 So the thing with HP has been they keep on doing...
 They keep on making these laptops, the other NVs and now these.
 And they kind of look like the MacBooks.
 And so Richard Lai, who we know from our time in Engadget, was at an event in China and
 HP's director of design told him, we don't try to copy Apple.
 If you go down this road, you just end up in the same place.
 And I think to me, that's like...
 That's insane.
 You know, there's this other story.
 I know there's some things like...
 There's another story last week.
 I think it was an Android site wrote the Galaxy S3 is the first phone designed by lawyers.
 And it's like, no, it's the first phone designed by lazy designers.
 Well, no, it's not.
 That phone looks like the pre-3 to me, from the front.
 I think this idea that either you end up in the same place because you're following the
 same principles or you're in a lawsuit with Apple, so you do something.
 I'm sorry.
 You make a crappy phone.
 They could have done the...
 Again, I feel like...
 The One X doesn't look like an iPhone.
 Even the Lumia 900.
 Not a Motorola phone.
 I think I go back to this on every podcast now, but I'm sorry.
 Nobody would look at the Lumia and go like, you ripped off Apple.
 Different materials, different shape.
 The only thing that's really similar is that they both have a touch screen and they're
 phones.
 So done.
 It's an iPhone.
 But I'm saying it is lazy designers.
 And I said this last week.
 I think I kind of like ranted about it last week.
 I just feel like there is just a freaking laziness going on in the world of design and
 in product design.
 It's like, you know what?
 I mean, you look at this picture.
 No, I mean, yes.
 Here's something.
 This is the HP and V-Spectre XT.
 I'll go one better for you guys.
 Why don't you not call it a sleep book?
 Why don't you just make it really awesome looking?
 Why don't you make it really unique?
 Do something that nobody else is doing, you know?
 And you don't have to give it some cheesy name to compete with Ultrabooks because people
 will see it and go like, what is that?
 I want it.
 The same thing is if it looks good, call it whatever you want.
 If it's good, it's good.
 Yeah.
 Call it the book.
 They think it looks good enough to call it the sleep book.
 That's what's happening here.
 So that's this interesting trend.
 I think the name is as unimaginative as the design.
 And I have to say, you know, there are lots of Android manufacturers out there.
 I mean, I think Motorola is probably the emblematic example.
 They're doing, I don't know if their design is great.
 But what they're doing with the Razr, what they did with the other Droids they've made.
 They at least seem to be trying a bit.
 Yeah.
 You know, the original Droid we talked about this, I thought, had a very striking design.
 I think the Droid Razr and the Droid Razr Max even more so.
 And keep in mind...
 Because of its quality.
 By the way, had they just released the Droid Razr Max, I feel like the impact would have
 been so much more impactful.
 So much more impressive, you know, because it's like...
 Look at all this battery life.
 But that design is...
 It works.
 What they're doing with the Razr now is exactly what they did with the first Razr.
 They're putting it out in new colors every day.
 They announced a blue one today.
 Yeah.
 Whoa.
 Yeah.
 It's in red, white and blue now.
 Like science or like dark blue?
 It's like a dark blue.
 Navy.
 Yeah.
 Still has a crappy pentile screen.
 Man, I tell you, I tweeted about this yesterday, but I got this...
 And I'm not promoting them, but InCase makes this case for the iPhone now called the Box.
 They have a square case, too.
 It seriously looks like the Lumia, like from the side and back.
 But it's cool, man.
 I gotta say, my only gripe about it is that it's a little bit like raised on the front.
 So when you're swiping side to side, it kind of...
 Your thumbs hit it.
 Doesn't it have like the InCase kind of logo like built into it?
 Yeah, it has a really big InCase logo on the back.
 But I do feel like it's so weird and different.
 If somebody made a phone like that, like a sleek, shiny black...
 You know, I know Paul always talked about this, like the monolith phone.
 It's cool.
 Just do it.
 I'd be into that.
 But if you make a phone with like a leather back or a wood back or just anything, just...
 Go nuts.
 Try.
 Well, just try.
 Didn't the bolds have leather backs or faux leather backs?
 Bolds had leather backs.
 Faux.
 I think DoCoMo in Japan...
 DoCoMo do anything.
 They don't count.
 They have wooden phones.
 That's like...
 No, and they're like...
 They're like...
 There's that startup AdZero, which is doing the bamboo phone, which I am like really into.
 No, yeah.
 By the way, this excuse that Samsung said today, they use pen-towel displays because
 it helps the phone display last longer, is crap.
 What does that mean?
 They're like the blue pixels die out faster than the other pixels, so we'll just use fewer
 blue pixels and more green pixels.
 I'll take a screen that works in sunlight versus...
 Very disappointing.
 As the summer months are rolling around, my Galaxy Nexus display is definitely like...
 Punish.
 Punish.
 I forgot.
 I forgot how these screens are in bright sunlight because, you know, it's been kind of gloomy.
 Because you're a vampire.
 And because I can't go on the side or I'll explode.
 So one more story, and I think this is actually a really big story.
 Lay it on us.
 Windows 8, coming out soon.
 Mozilla and Google are now saying, because they cannot develop browsers for the desktop
 side of Windows 8 on ARM...
 Well, they can.
 They just have to do them for ARM.
 No, they can't.
 No, no.
 So the deal is...
 Oh, right, because they're not letting people do...
 They're not letting people do that.
 Desktop apps.
 So they're saying...
 So, yeah, so there's a big piece out last night...
 Why can't they just do a Metro one?
 Yeah, so the problem is you can build a Metro one, but IE in Metro still has hooks into
 desktop.
 So the Metro IE will perform better than whatever Firefox or Chrome can do.
 So they're saying this is...
 Microsoft obviously has a history of blocking browsers.
 There was the antitrust litigation.
 There was the settlement agreement with the government, which expired last year, but Microsoft
 promised...
 No, no, no, no.
 Will uphold it.
 Legally binding promise or just...
 Yeah, it was kind of a, well, we'll just keep it up.
 Everybody loves us.
 Don't sue us.
 As Microsoft was like putting...
 Like they're collecting their stuff from jail and putting their old leather jacket on.
 They're like, we'll never come back.
 The warden's like, we don't want to see you back here.
 They're like, yeah, sure, warden.
 So I think this to me is...
 It's interesting on a number of levels.
 I think the first one is if they didn't have that desktop environment there, they wouldn't
 have this problem.
 Right, because you could build the Metro stuff.
 But they still might be calling things or utilizing things that they don't give access
 to developers for the Metro interface.
 Yeah, but if you call it...
 I think the problem for them is that they call it Windows.
 Apple does it.
 Apple is the dominant share of the tablet market, but nobody complains that you can
 only really run Safari or build a browser that only uses WebKit.
 Nozilla complains about it, but they're not...
 But their share is not dominant.
 But it is in the tablet market.
 Oh, in tablets.
 Tablets, like it's in the market, it's in the news.
 Right, so you let it develop, but it shows no sign of it changing.
 Right.
 Well, at some point, though, something's got to give.
 I don't know.
 Star and Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt.
 Oh, God.
 Is that who's in it?
 I think it is.
 No, no, wait.
 And a dog.
 Isn't that the dog?
 And the dog.
 Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt was as good as it gets.
 Oh, that is his now.
 Something's got to give is Diane Keaton.
 Oh, something's got to give is Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson.
 Yes.
 Damn, so close.
 And Keanu Reeves, too.
 And Parker Posey.
 Yeah.
 Something's got to give.
 When you think you're too old.
 Well, no, so look, here's what I wonder.
 It's like they made this choice to keep the desktop there.
 But if they had just done the thing that we constantly asked them to do.
 Something's got to give.
 Just make a Metro device.
 I mean, this is going to be a huge.
 They're not listening to UniLive.
 They don't care.
 This is going to be such a huge problem for them.
 Look, listen.
 Is it going to be a huge problem for people?
 I'm getting a Windows RT.
 Not for people.
 No, not for consumers.
 Yeah.
 But I think Microsoft is in a tenuous phase.
 I mean, yes, we're consumers, but they want to keep it.
 Yes, we're consumers, but they want to know.
 Yeah.
 I mean, no one complained that you couldn't get Opera browser on your iPhone.
 Now that you can't.
 I don't know anyone that uses it.
 Hey.
 No, it's hugely popular in the iPhone.
 Well, if the iPhone allowed you...
 If iOS was truly a free and open operating system that allowed you to choose your own
 browser, it would probably be in higher use.
 Because the way it is now is...
 Or you're on MailCry.
 It doesn't matter.
 to look at things, but anything that dumps you anywhere, it's always shooting you back
 as far as...
 Don't get me wrong. I think the iPhone and iOS should let you pick your own mail client
 and let you pick your own browser.
 Can you imagine? How amazing would it be if you could set Sparrow as your default mail
 client?
 And so I don't think that that's a good model. I think I understand Apple does it because
 they want it to be locked down, they want it clean, but I think you should be able to
 flip a switch and make it as messy as you want. And I think that's where Microsoft has
 to go with Metro.
 It's interesting to imagine them thinking, but we really screwed up when we made computers.
 We really got it wrong, guys. We gave people all these options.
 It's just too much freedom.
 They can pick their own mail client.
 Let's lock this down.
 We got people that with Thunderbird, Outlook, Thunderbird, they're putting Netscape.
 You know what? People want less choice. They want simplicity.
 People get confused. They say, yeah, always open it with this app and then that.
 But just think about this. If you're Mozilla, this is the end of the line for you as a company.
 Mozilla's in trouble.
 You're not on the iPhone.
 I'll tell you what, though.
 You've made no headway on Android.
 I'm going to tell you something about Mozilla.
 If you get kicked off of Metro, there's nowhere else for you to go.
 I'm going to tell you something about Mozilla and about Firefox.
 If they made a new Firefox that was faster and more stable than Chrome, I would waste
 no time using that as my main browser.
 That's all they have to do.
 How much faster and how would you perceive it?
 Just faster.
 Voluntarily.
 Just faster and more stable.
 That's it.
 They could argue that now, though.
 No. I don't think they can.
 They definitely can't argue more stable.
 It's definitely not faster.
 I've used it.
 I've used their newest version compared to the newest version of Chrome, and there are
 notable differences in speed.
 Firefox used to burn me so bad.
 When we were editing Gadget, our CMS only worked in Firefox.
 We all lived in...
 We had two browsers.
 I always had two browsers open, and Firefox crashed on me in the middle of posts, time
 after time after time.
 Oh, my God.
 We had so many fail-saves to prevent it.
 Never edit.
 Don't edit in the browser.
 Anyhow, but seriously, I think in our industry, brand loyalty is really not...
 It's in short supply.
 This is actually...
 Well, segue.
 Yeah.
 Let me just make this point.
 Finish the point.
 I think, yes, you love Apple.
 You love Microsoft.
 They're big things, big entrenched companies, but when it comes to new things, especially
 new things, brand loyalty...
 I honestly think Facebook could go out and be done for in a couple of years if something
 came along that did all the things that Facebook did, but in some way that people just liked
 better.
 Everyone will leave.
 I mean, it's like MySpace to Facebook.
 I mean, yes, there are reasons, but a lot of the reasons were people liked Facebook better
 for some...
 Obviously, they have features, but the point is it was better, and I think that if a better
 browser came along, people would be like, yeah, I'm going to use that.
 I mean, years ago, our browser structure at Engadget, years and years ago, was like IE,
 Firefox, Safari, Chrome, when Chrome was first out.
 And you're talking about the...
 Now it's like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE.
 So the thing is that people are just happy to adopt something new if it's really good.
 I'm happy.
 So Zilli, you don't have to go out of business.
 Just make something better than the best thing.
 Right, but what if the majority of the world's computers end up running Metro?
 I love it.
 They can't...
 But they can't be there.
 IE12.
 Right, but I think that's why they're freaking out so bad, right?
 What happens if the majority...
 Yes, it's clearly a monopolistic practice.
 Well, okay.
 So...
 Why, you disagree?
 No, I think Microsoft is opening a can of worms here with the desktop.
 Your disagreement is like you're doing dumb things.
 Microsoft, you're doing dumb things in general.
 You're causing problems.
 And this is like a little symptom of that.
 This is a problem they don't need to have.
 That isn't really like a thing.
 You just accidentally made it happen.
 We built the product.
 We put out Metro.
 We only got halfway...
 Don't you think that's the point, though?
 I don't know.
 Isn't the point that they want...
 Well, either way they want it to be a...
 I have been told by sources that Microsoft believes very strongly...
 Sources familiar with the matter?
 Very familiar with the matter.
 That Microsoft believes very strongly that Metro is the future and that the desktop on
 ARM is a legacy environment so that it can run Office and provide compatibility with
 the older version of IE.
 Okay, cool.
 But...
 But I think that doing it that way creates more of a problem for them...
 Oh, I agree.
...than if they just said, this is Metro and we didn't finish the APIs.
 We provided these things so you can run these old apps if you need them.
 What's so crazy to me is...
 And we'll continue to build out the APIs.
 What's so crazy is...
 Mozilla, you're a first-class citizen.
 What's so crazy is it's like you're not letting anybody do anything in that environment anyhow,
 so why don't you just get rid of it?
 Just you don't...
 Because they want to put Office on the tablet.
 At the end of the day, that's their hook.
 Put Office for a tablet on it.
 Well, they've got to make it.
 I don't think they've made it yet.
 Well, that's their problem, isn't it?
 Soon to be the world's problem.
 What was the segue thing you wanted to say?
 So the segue, I think this is actually interesting because this is the other piece of Microsoft.
 We've got to wrap up.
 Give me two seconds.
 No, it's fine.
 We're on time.
 They rolled out a new Bing today.
 Bing.
 Bing.
 You Binged.
 You Binged all day long.
 I worked with Alice in the Post for a while today.
 Yeah, I played with the new Bing, by the way.
 And the thing about it that's really interesting is they're kind of saying, okay, well, we're
 as good at Google as algorithmic search.
 Yes.
 So you type in a thing, we spot it on the web, we figure out what we want.
 I found this to not be true.
 That's their claim.
 I tested the new Bing.
 And now...
 I tested the new Bing, and I looked at it side by side with Google, and I felt my results
 were less of what I wanted.
 Right.
 Personally.
 Sure.
 I'm a person.
 That's one opinion.
 I think it's better than people would switch from Google.
 I think there's too much sort of entrenched, this is what you do.
 I think what...
 On that piece, not the deliver the results piece, I think just on the we spot it on the
 web, I think it's the risk reward, the cost reward of trying to be better at Google at
 what Google does is too high.
 So what they've done is they've added in all these other pieces.
 So they're pulling in Twitter, they're pulling in Facebook, they're pulling in Yelp, they're
 pulling in OpenTable.
 Yeah, recommendations.
 They're adding in all these other services to say, well, here's what Google search is,
 but we're gonna make it way bigger.
 And we're gonna turn it search into something more than we spider the web and computer figures
 it out.
 We're gonna go to all these other sites that almost all of them...
 And your friends.
 Have contentious relationships with Google.
 Right.
 And your friends.
 And your friends.
 But your friends are on the...
 They're on Facebook.
 They're on Facebook.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 So Facebook and Google have a contentious relationship.
 Yes.
 And they're on Facebook and Google.
 So all of these other social sites that don't want Google anywhere near them are saying,
 well, Microsoft, okay, you've got a search engine that's table-safes with algorithms
 and we'll do this big social play.
 My name is my friend.
 Yeah.
 It's like classic international relations.
 And by the way...
 There's like the big guy and we'll all team up against the big guy.
 In 10 years when...
 Not that this is a national habit.
 In 10 years when Bing is the superior...
 Yeah.
 I'll run back to you.
 They're going to be like, what have we done?
 We made a deal with the devil.
 It'll be some crazy thing like this Mozilla thing where Microsoft is doing some crazy...
 I mean, all of these companies are the same.
 When they get...
 No, they all want...
 This is what they all want.
 Google, Microsoft, Apple, and everybody else for some strange reason, HP and Samsung, they
 want you to buy into all of their things all together forever.
 Yeah.
 Like they just want you to use...
 If you're on Windows, just use Outlook and just use our web SkyDrive and just only be
 here, only use Zoom, only play an Xbox.
 And Apple's like only iOS, only use an iPad.
 It's like screw off.
 Let me use the things...
 Why don't you do this?
 It create a world where you are interoperable.
 Yeah.
 Like where you actually play together.
 Well, just think about if email didn't work this way.
 Because what's good for the consumer is not your best ecosystem.
 Right.
 What's good for the consumer is consumers having choices and being able to use things
 together.
 No, but just think about if email worked this way or the web itself.
 It's like if you bought a car and you could only go to BP gas stations.
 Yeah.
 Like you bought your...
 Okay, you bought your Ford and now you've got to go to BP.
 And it's like, well, there's not a BP on this road for another 100 miles and I've only got
 50 miles of gas...
 Car left.
 50 miles of car left.
 Really?
 The car is on the road.
 I've only got 50 miles to the forest.
 Cinderella is just going to go away.
 It's been a long week.
 What I wanted to say was I've only got 50 miles worth of gas left in the tank.
 All right.
 Have your laugh, Patel and Miller.
 F bomb Topolsky.
 You didn't laugh.
 That's good.
 I did kind of drop a half F bomb.
 It was like, fuu.
 It was like that kiss song.
 Okay.
 All right, Cran, are we done?
 Yeah.
 Cran's been sitting here.
 He's been doing this for like an hour.
 Wrap it up.
 Let's go.
 Got it.
 All right.
 Let's go.
 I don't know what that is.
 I'm just...
 You don't do that.
 What was the thing you were like last time?
 You were like...
 What is this?
 I wish you could see what Cran's doing right now.
 He's doing...
 He refuses to let us put a camera on him.
 You know why?
 He's horribly disfigured.
 You've never seen Two-Face?
 Worse.
 It's like Two-Face and the Elephant Man.
 Together.
 It's like if the regular part of Two-Face were the Elephant Man.
 Great.
 I will say the third scar below your chin is looking better.
 It's not bad.
 Seems to be healing.
 It's not pulsating.
 All right.
 That's the Vergecast for this week.
 If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email us at vergecast at theverge.com.
 You can leave a comment on the post, of course.
 I know you're going to do it anyhow, complaining about our video player.
 Which, by the way, is about to be swapped out for a much better video player coming
 soon.
 Or you can find us on Twitter.
 The Verge is at Verge.
 I'm Joshua Topolsky.
 Hold on a second.
 Let me finish.
 Neely is reckless.
 Ross is oh no, Ross, go no E on the end.
 And Crayshon is sensible madman.
 That's not a thing.
 I don't know what that is.
 Week from today.
 Oh, God, I didn't even say anything about this.
 Thursday, next Thursday, May 17, new on The Verge.
 We have Damon Lindelof, who we flew out to LA to talk to.
 I talked to him for a really long time.
 I'm really excited to see the video.
 So we're not going to run the whole interview because it's so long, but we're going to have
 exclusive stuff you'll only be able to see if you come to the show with Damon Lindelof
 talking about Lost, talking about Prometheus, a bunch of stuff about both, talking about
 Independence Day in 2012.
 We had a really good conversation.
 It was completely off the rails.
 Talking about bar mitzvahs.
 It was good, really good.
 And we have Masioka, who was hero on Heroes and is now on Hawaii Five-O.
 Him and Paul went to the new museum and looked at art and talked.
 They just talked.
 Museum of the Moving Image.
 Oh, Museum of the Moving Image.
 I'm sorry.
 A little different.
 A little different.
 A little different.
 You can't deny that.
 It has to be the name.
 And then we're in the process of another guest, and I don't want to say because we're not
 sure yet, but it's going to be a jam-packed show.
 We have segments, news, giveaways.
 What's happening with this?
 This thing is just moving around.
 Really upsetting.
 It's alive.
 That was weird.
 Look, if you can't tell, it's been hit by Creighton's deformed tail.
 It's just shaking it.
 Yeah, what's happening here?
 Anyhow, long and short of it.
 It's really ending on a high note here.
 By the way, the number of people saying GIF in the comments is really impressive.
 It's the least I can do for you.
 All right.
 Well, I wish you and yours all the best.
 Wow, man, I sound a lot better without this pop filter on.
 It's time for me to go.
 Yeah.
 Enjoy your weekend.
 Rock and roll.
 Paul.
 You know what?
 All right.
 Thanks, Paul.
 Uncle Peter.
 you