 Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of March 4, 2013. I'm Josh Topolsky. I'm Paul Miller. I'm Nilay Patel. Floating the disembodied voice of. So we are, let me just explain what's going on. So we are in my office at my unfurnished, unadorned, my prison office at our new office in Midtown Manhattan. And we're still setting up our studio, which we don't have all of our live streaming stuff set up there yet. So we're doing a hangout from my office in the corner. And Nilay is sitting across from me, as if I was interviewing him for a job. And Paul is sitting off to the side over here. Paul's taking notes like an assistant. Just roll through. Give the interview to people that you exactly know. Let the internet see you, and then you can roll away again. Hey. Hey. There he is. Nilay. Beautiful John Carter. You do have the Taylor Lautner thing going on in there. Taylor Lautner is not the actor. Is he not the guy? No, no. He's the wolf. No, you're right. So the Taylor Kitsch. Taylor Kitsch. Oh, yeah, you're right. Taylor Lautner's the wolf. Way too much. Yeah, the product of, by the way, a product of the 90s. Yeah. Taylor. A name that needs to be struck out of existence. Tim, the Tool Man Taylor. Every day they'd enter Tim, the Tool Man Taylor. JTT. No, Taylor's a fine name. It's a fine, regular name. Jonathan Taylor Thomas is what you're referencing. Is one of the handsome brothers a Taylor? Because that would make a lot of sense. I'm just going to assume. So anyway, so we're back here on the Vergecast. And we have a lot of stuff to talk about. And we're excited to be bringing it to you. But not next week. Not the next Vergecast, but the one following that will be all set up in our new studio. Yeah. Ross is, oh yeah, Ross is also in the room. In the corner. Where he belongs. You've been a bad Miller. You've been a horrible person. You're going to pay. No, next week we'll have our new studio. I mean, I was just down there. It looks beautiful. You watched Top Shelf today. Yeah. You saw a little bit of what it's doing. There's some comments in the forum about Top Shelf they think are too dark. Go ahead and shut it. Like too emotionally dark? Yeah, it's too heavy. I did kill David at the end. I actually just watched some of the episode. And it's been a terrible sun. Wow. Sun. Really? Getting too much echo from where? Because we have two mics. What if I hold it like this? Is this better? Is this any better? Do you want me to go to the, this is cool? I feel like Jerry Lee Lewis. Goodness gracious. Great balls of fire. Now marry a 15-year-old. What? I would love to. Jerry Lee Lewis. You can marry him. He's a 15-year-old cousin. No way. Jerry Lee Lewis. He's a nasty. Great balls of fire, man. This is better or not better? Not better. Everything. He's the original nutty professor, right? Stop doing this. He's going to switch us, right? Yeah. So we're good. OK, so we're just going to make a quick mic change here because I'm having some sort of mic problem. Should I just mute this mic for now? Yes. Hold on, guys. I'll be right back with you. So can Neil and I just talk? Yeah. How's it going? It's pretty good. How's life without the internet? It's all right. Here's a question for the anywhere. I just got the Witcher 2. Oh, god. You know, it was pretty complicated, but I figured out. I can craft potions. I can. It's like building a boat from the actual old PC version. That's what I've always wanted to do. Nobody can hear you talk, Josh. Josh is making fun of the save. Yo, what up, internet? You live and direct. How about these new MTA fairs? Can you believe this is happening? I woke up one morning, and it turned out I'm poor now. Dude, I've been listening. I'll do your comedy act. I've been listening to Ty Love's New York on 92.3 now. I thought that was a Ty store. No, it's Ty. The guy's name is Ty, and he does a morning show on my pop radio station. He comes on at 5 AM. And he is so excited to be alive. And he talks about his fiancee or his wife or somebody. Beyonce. We should start over. We should start over. Let's start over. You want to start over? Hey, and welcome to The Vergecast for the week of March 4, 2013. I'm Josh Dabolsky. I'm Paul Miller. And we're Vergecasting. I already explained this the first time we did this, but I'm going to explain it to you again, because that's how much I like you and care about what you know. We're Vergecasting from my office, my unadorned, empty office in the corner of our new building, which we just moved to in midtown Manhattan. And our studio's not ready yet. Still being prepped. Next week. Still being massaged and prepped. Not next week. Week after next. Anyhow, so we're Vergecasting from my office, and we're doing it via Google Hangout. And we're also doing an open mic Vergecast. It's very cool. I wrote a song about children. This is how much. This is how much. About children? Yeah. For the future. You wrote a song about children? We're also beautiful. Paul, get over here. Yeah, Paul's on camera. Let's do this. Paul's avoiding the internet. Here he is. Taylor Kitch. Taylor Kitch or John Carter or Robert Rodgers. Now, Paul is the only person who liked the John Carter movie, right? You liked it. No, it was pretty bad. I read the book. It was terrible. I was so rooting for it, though. Did you just assume Paul liked it because he has the same American name as John Carter or Robert Rodgers? Here's Paul's. I don't think he's called that top of a critic when it comes to fanciness. Here's the problem. Mars has 2 3rds the gravity of Earth. If you jump on Mars, you don't go like 50 feet. It's harder to jump. No, it's easier to jump. Oh, easier to jump. It's easier to jump. But let's say it only has a third less gravity. Wait, are you saying your biggest problem with John Carter is Mars? It's just number one problem. It's a technical problem. It's just one of the problems. Everything about John Carter and Mars, utter perfection. But the one piece I will not allow was that you're supposed to, it's only a third less gravity. It really made it seem like it was half as much gravity. The fact that he was just walking around, there's alien races battling for nothing. You know what? I didn't see it. Can you please stop ruining the plot of John Carter and Mars? Oh, you didn't see it? I'll say this. Oh, you have to watch it. There's a great, it's friggin' read the story about how that movie failed and how it started with their first trailer, which has a need to be a real cover of. I want to correct this. I want to correct this myth. So John Carter was horribly promoted, right? Unmitigated disaster. But here's the thing. I read that article, and it's all about how nobody knows no one's ever read this book. Nobody knows about this. Don't hear the movie. The trailers are bad, and they don't know the intellectual property. It's like a triple whammy. It's never going to succeed. But meanwhile, we know I've read the book. I love the director. I've seen all of the trailers multiple times. Went to see the movie, and it was horrible, and it deserved to fail. Sure. I mean, it was terrible. Let's just say it was a bad movie, no matter whether you watched, whether you watched. I hate this set up, by the way. I'm really uncomfortable right now. I want everybody to know. Why don't you look at us? Yeah, I don't know where to look. That's part of the problem. Look at us. OK. Look at us. Look at me. Josh, I know exactly who you should look at. I just think that it was a bad movie. And I don't know why we're talking about this, because your hair looks like Taylor Kitchin. That's it. Let's talk about one of the things we need to talk about. So Facebook had a big event today. Facebook, blowing it out. By the way, I have the new news. They gave it to you already. Yeah, I have it. I'm on the list. You want to know about it? What do you want to know? Tell me about it. As a person who doesn't read Facebook very often, this doesn't seem like a big change to me. How many photos of Neelay's relatives could you find? Go. And with graph search, you just do that right away. Could you graph search? Photos of Neelay Patel. Photos by Neelay Patel. Photos of me and Neelay Patel. Yeah, that's what you want. Nude photos of Neelay Patel taken in Brooklyn. Riding a horse. Photos of Neelay Patel. Here they are. I'll look at that. Excuse me. They had a big event. They said, we're going to make it more like our mobile apps. I wish I could screen share this. And they said something really weird, which I thought was interesting for Facebook, which was, we don't make content, we're a container of other people's content, and we want to show that as beautifully as possible. Like Tupperware. And then Zuckerberg's line was, we want to be the best newspaper in your life, or something crazy like that. Everybody wants to be the best newspaper in your life. Yeah, because what a great business to aspire to be. We want to be the new crumbling local newspaper. It used to be a business. It used to be a business. It's my New York Times subscription. It was called a portal. Yeah. AOL was well known for this. You'd go there. That was your home page. Yahoo. Get all your news. Get your weather. Yeah, the IHU. Get maybe, see how many. Look up movie time. See how many emails you had from your friends. Maybe open up an IM. Support scores. I just think, if Facebook wants to be in the portal business, the social portal. That's what they are. And that's what they are. I'm seeing, by the way, I can see beyond you a new chair for my office that is being built. Yes. And no other chairs. I just think everybody wants to be, they want to make their spot inescapable. This is just Facebook's next move to try to get you to keep looking at Facebook as much as possible. Yeah. Sticky. But what's really interesting to me, and we were talking about it as the event was going on, was this is the second big product launch Facebook's had. It hasn't been about phones or tablets. It's about Facebook on the desktop. It's about Facebook's core business. Where their numbers are going down. They know that people are using Facebook on phones and tablets more. But they're like, all this relentless focus on the desktop. I think it's really tough. I think it's really tough. And Ellis just wrote this huge thing about how teenagers aren't using Facebook. And I have to say, I think it's really tough to be a social network on a platform that isn't beholden to, it's all about being in apps. You don't want to go into an app, a Facebook app, to use other apps. You want to Instagram, you're going to go Instagram. You want to tweet something, you're tweeting. I don't know how many people are really posting to Facebook that often. There are now ways to do it from within iOS, from within Android that doesn't require that you go to Facebook to do it, so you're not coming to see their ads. You're not seeing their content they want you to see. And I think it's kind of a big problem for that. What this is all about is that they're making Facebook nicer to look at. So when you go to it, you see more of the photos. You see all this content people are doing. Can you tell me the basic, what did they change? They changed the news feed. They made their news feed, they made it more visual. They changed the way it's displayed. They moved where your chat window is. They moved your chat and a bunch of other stuff to a left panel. It's actually a little bit more like the Android app and the iOS app, where it has a sliding panel. They showed all the screens and they said they're all the same. I think they want to move to a parity of these things. Well, that's logical because if they can teach you how to use it on the desktop, then you'll know how to use their mobile app. Right, and then it's a level of comfort. And it is a better design. It looks better. I have to say, I am. They're using a Sarah font for headlines, which I think is really weird. Most of my, or a good number of my friends don't use Facebook, or they use it very, very sparingly. My sister's probably like 2-3, much like the Gravity of Mars. She's like 2-3 never on, like quit Facebook. She's like, oh, I got Facebook back for now. And then she quits it again. Right. But I see my friends scroll through Instagram all the time. That's what they do. They don't pull up Instagram and check it and then put it away. They just sit there and scroll and scroll and scroll. And I have to say, like that, it solves a lot of things. When you want to know about what your friends are doing. You don't have to slide a bar over or go through a graph. You get like blasts of text all over the place. You're getting text messages. You're getting email. You're on Twitter. It's nice to just have a place where it's like, thing is happening, there's a photo of it, I have my discrete group of friends. And it's really basic. And I do think, as Facebook tries to become, and all of these things, like Twitter is a little bit pushing into this all-encompassing social network, I think we are starting to people are going like, well, I don't really want the all-encompassing. It's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. And it's just like, it's not. So I don't think Twitter has a problem at all. They've moved further into. They've moved further and they're doing crazy stuff. They've got the snippet thing now. What are snippets? They'll show part of an article. But I think people are very comfortable with Twitter. Because unless you're in a small class of Twitter users that has tens of thousands of followers, you pretty much know everybody who's following. You can look at the list. There they are. All these people are going to see you. But if you follow too many, this has happened to me, if you just are naive and follow too many people, and I've done this. You just get too many friend requests. No, no, no. On Twitter, if you follow too many people, it gets really overwhelming. And it stops making. If that's content coming in. I think Facebook's problem is not an overwhelming amount. It's coming in. I think people just don't want to share. I think people are afraid of Facebook. I think when the data goes on to Facebook, they go. There's a little bit of that. I think there's certain types of sharing that Facebook seems to be perfect for. Some of the things that I've seen are events. Like family events, weddings, babies. There's these things where it's like, you want to have a bunch of photos. You want people to be able to go, oh my god, that's so cute. Or I can't believe you wore that hat or whatever. And events, it's really good for it. I think for individual outings, we've started to acclimate to more of a micro blogging sort of thing, where it's like, you want little spurts of, you want to know a little bit. Like, here's a picture from last night. Or I'm wearing this jacket, or whatever. Where it's not like, here's a gallery of things. Or here's a bunch of text about it. Or let's have a conversation about it. I just want to share this one thing with you, then get on with my life. And I feel like in a way, that's like Vine and Snapchat are both kind of reinforcing this idea that people want to get in, get out, and get on with their lives. No, but they do. But there is this thing where you want, and what you don't want to do. It's the exact antithesis of Facebook, where you don't want to live there. And it's the opposite also of that frictionless sharing thing that Facebook does so well. Which by the way, the other day I was listening to, literally for work, I was listening to a selection of really, really bad pop music. And people were like, Kali Shwitzer and other people started tweeting, because they could see my scrabble. My scrabble was exposed. And it was like four or five tweets like, oh yeah, listening to Britney Spears or whatever. I'm like, yeah, I am. But I don't see how that's actually a very useful interaction. Like, what I realized is like, this isn't, it's not doing anything for me, except like people are like, whoa, Britney Spears. You mean the information that's shared passively by. Passive sharing. And all encompassing are two things that I think we are discovering are somewhat less desirable than Facebook assumed they would be. Some of the passive stuff is stuff that I want to look back on, like I know people are talking about how the Instagram stuff is geotagged. So it can be helpful. For instance, my sister went to England a year or so ago and took a bunch of photos. And I think that's all geotagged. So if I wanted to find places she'd been to, I'd probably do that. And I'm really interested in stuff like Foursquare, getting to know, like if my friends like restaurants and things like that, finding recommendations. But I don't need to know that. But you think of like Yelp and Foursquare as discrete things for those, right? Yeah, a little bit. Don't you think of like Yelp as like a discrete way to go find good restaurants? That's another thing where you're choosing very specifically, I want to share the specific type and amount of data. In this place. I also think there's part of Instagram where it hasn't blown up. I mean, it's huge. It's huge, but it's not a billion people. No, it is. It's a billion people. OK. It's huge, but it's not. Is that right? Is that a new stat? Is Instagram a billion people? No. I'm kidding. I was going to say, I've never heard that. A billion dollars. It's not like nearly. It's some enormous number. No, it's a high number. But you can share. You don't remember when everybody's pissed their parents came on to Facebook? Yeah. Not everybody's parents are on Instagram yet. Not yet. So you can share with kind of a small crowd. Yeah, like Snapchat's trending. Or Vine or whatever your parents isn't on. Whatever they use it on. It depends on if you think of your parents as a singular or a plural. It's actually a really good point. How many parents are there? If you have more than one. I have one parent. I can't tell anything to my parents without my parents knowing. Oh, they're like a unit where you can't share secrets. If I call them on the phone, they get together in a room and talk to me. I'll speak to them. Yeah, my parents love to get on the phone. Close to 90 million. Well, this was several months ago, so I got it probably close to your home. 90 million monthly active. So probably more registered. But Instagram is growing. I think the point about like. Almost a billion. I think the point about recommendations, like food recommendations, is like, I think in the same way that I don't know. I don't want to have like an Apple car and an Apple phone and like an Apple house and like an Apple camera. Like I like to have. I think they're. Well, I mean, I don't necessarily want to have all of the same thing. I don't think that everybody's all. Like that Apple would be good at making every product. I don't believe that. Like I don't think most companies would be good at making every product. You know what product Apple really sucked at? What? Making a social network? Yeah. Well, OK. And a great example. Bad at making a social network. Bad at making web stuff. I think bad at email and calendaring stuff. Maps. Really not bad at maps. And by the way, and we've talked about this a lot, but it is that ecosystem. Address book applications? Yeah. It is that lock-in. Really good at making faux leather apps. Facebook wants to do. Good desktop photos. Facebook would like to be there for everything. But I think what human beings really want is like the things that are best for those things. And that's what they're going to use. And like people, I think, gravitate and like the simplicity of a single use application. Because you know what it's doing. You know what it's doing, and you know that like the data is all meant for that purpose. You know, like Instagram, there's not more to the story. You shared a picture. You maybe said something about it. Maybe it says where you are. That's the entire interaction. It's a single use. Makes total sense. Super easy to process. Like when you're presented with these myriad options and ways you can share and ways you can connect things, I think it becomes overwhelming. I think the moment that's a little problem for Facebook. I think the moment. They're becoming a portable. A portable? A portable. They're becoming a portal. And I think a portal is a dangerous place to them. And also, they're very portable. But that's basically what they said. We want to be in the newspaper for you. Yeah. But people have newspapers. They don't. And they don't want to read. People don't want to read the version on Facebook. They want to see a link from the version. Yeah. They're not pulling out content. Please join us. I think what they're saying is, I think all these single use apps are great. But I think their point is, we can pull in all that data. We can pull in Instagram. It's what they have to do. It's so big and so predominant that all these other networks will have to connect to us. You don't want to open up your Facebook browser into your Facebook feed and then get off the internet. That's not what people do. And that's not what they're going to do. And if apps are any indication and phones are any indication, they're also not going to do it on their mobile devices. It just isn't how we want to interact with things. You don't want to sit down at your world terminal, experience world stuff, and then turn it off. Wait, wait. That sounds amazing. I love the world terminal. What? You can purchase a world terminal? You wake up in the morning. You turn on your Facebook terminal, Facebook PC or whatever, your Facebook screen. It watches you for the rest of the day. You turn it on. Facebook, it's pulling in all of the stuff. It's like you would be mistaken if you felt that that's what Google was doing because it isn't. Google searches the memes to an end. It's not the place to go. Google's building pluses is way under. It's like Google's not working. Well, that's true. Well, that's the goal. We're talking from our perspective, and a lot of people we know perspective, of wanting variety and always choosing, like I'm not going to do my photos on Facebook, but I'm doing it on Instagram. But it totally still makes sense for Facebook to cast as wide of a net as possible. It makes sense for them to do this. I'm assuming this report will go up very soon. You're angry because you're angry. It's because we're not wearing headphones. We can't hear ourselves. I can hear you guys perfectly. You sound great. No, Adrian's writing a report, and the metaphor that was in it that I was reading just before set down was Facebook wants to be bigger than a container. They want to be the container ship. Facebook wants to be the social network of record. Yeah, it just went up. So in there, she says, Facebook wants to be not just the biggest container, but the container ship. I'm more interested in all these single use apps, and Facebook is where you go, and you can see all the things people are sharing. You can see all the photos from Instagram that they're using, but they will be so big that companies like Twitter will have to integrate things. If I'm wearing Instagram photos, go on Facebook. Yeah, they do. They're their own Facebook. I know they own it. But they put it. Yeah, you can connect to that. I think you can disconnect it, yeah. Well, I mean, because I actually have some behavior like I'll see people there like they like this Instagram photo. And the Instagram photo appears in their feed if you like something. But I think you have to specifically tell it to do that. I'm not really sure. By the way, this is why Facebook is a problem. I don't know if Instagram stuff will appear automatically, or if I can turn it on and off, or if it's just on certain actions like lights. That's the worst. Facebook has turned into some weird combination. It's Windows. It's an operating system. It's XP, where it's like, how do I make this thing stop appearing? How do I change this? I always turn off Mac. Where do I adjust the time? Like, I don't understand. It's very easy. It's a weird combination of a country and an operating system. I know. I know it's easy. You just double click the clock. No, but you put an old person in front of XP for the first time to ask them to do anything that involves changing anything. And you put an old person in front of Facebook for the first time, immediate dong picks. Dude, you just can't help it. Here's what I want to know. And then I want to change topics. But here's what I want to know. Since Facebook has changed its search, I have done more Bing searches. Because you've just been let in. Because I'm trying to do a search that it can't do. And I'm just like, OK, fine. Bing's traffic has got to be skyrocketing right now. Yeah, it has to be. It's got to be. I want to find numbers. So if you do a search on Facebook, it automatically also searches Bing? If you do a search on Facebook, let's say like, hold on, I can't type here and talk. Let's just say Paul Miller. Press the Siri button on that line. Offline, OK? Is there a Siri button? Well, hold on. In OS X? It's just a rotation button. Paul Miller offline news. If I search for this, it doesn't find anything. And so it brings up a web search. And so I'm like, OK. Oh, so it's another click. It's a second click. And it kicks you over to Bing, a Bing search. And you agreed to do that on a regular basis? Well, sometimes I just do it out of habit. I want to see what results it pulls up. Because I'm looking for it. And it's happened a number of times. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I just Binged that. But their traffic, it has to be the best thing in the world for Bing. I'm sure. I mean, I feel like Microsoft got an incredible slam dunk on this thing. Or Bing is just really confused. Because Bing is always having to search for random people that it doesn't know anything about. I don't know if the people are using GraphQL or something. Uncle Steve. I don't know if people are even using GraphQL. They're probably not using it. But I have to imagine there's some kick up there. I just hate Bing. Bing it. OK, so what else do we have topic-wise? Well, you went to TED last week. Oh, yeah, I went to TED. I wrote a feature on it. Trent wrote a thing last week. You went to TED. Would you say you're an influencer, Josh? I would say that no. I would say that, well, my cloud score, I think, does say I'm an influencer. Are you TED active? I've been active at TED. So I went to TED all last week. And I'd never been. I'd only seen the TED talks online, which everybody has seen and everybody loves. If you like to hear smart people talking, you like TED talk. It's like bite-sized intelligence. It's like I'm not going to college. I'm not going to learn this thing all the way through. But this person's going to make me feel that I have, that I can now speak with authority on the mating rituals of African frogs. Based on a 20-minute talk, I have so much authority. I know everything I know about dinosaurs. I know everything I know about malaria. So here's what they don't give you, you don't see talks on, is the TED experience. What it's like to be at TED, and what I realize is that at TED, it's like you're in this, and I use this metaphor, the snow globe metaphor. But it's like you're in this world with all these people. Really smart, really talented, really rich, really famous. The most famous, most rich, most talented, weirdest group of people that may ever assemble, which to their credit is, I've got to say, it's kind of amazing that you can get Ben Affleck and Bono and Bill Gates and me. I'm just a random journalist guy there. And all these weird, I met a ton of journalists there and a ton of artists. Amanda Palmer, or she's known more rawly, Amanda fucking Palmer, and that's her name. I have no idea. See, you're so in the world. By the way, not listed as Amanda fucking Palmer on any of the TED stuff. That's just raw. All these weird people together, and performers and musicians. Jugglers. Jugglers. No, they have a dance crew. I met movie directors, directors of movies that you know, that you have seen, that are like you love. No, you specifically. Really? Me specifically? And so it's just weird. Understand of John Carter. No, not John Carter. Like what? Harry Potter? I can't tell you, man. Like Harry Potter? I'll just say, I'm going to say it's a music movie. Leave it at that. Recent music movie. Anyhow. But the thing is, it's perfect. No. Also, really? Really? But my point is that you're in this bubble. That you love? That's magic, Mike. The thing that's weird about Ted that you don't know, I'm just going to say this really quickly, and then we can go on with our lives. It's like you're in this bubble with all these people, and you don't really leave. You're in this convention center. You're in this arena for a party. You go to the aquarium for a party at night. They have parties and weird things at all of the hotels. It's like four hotels, and it's in a mile radius. And you're not supposed to go, really. You're supposed to be there the whole time. And it just becomes this weird get up at 830 in the morning, and off to some sessions. Then you're mingling and eating all day, and then party at night, and then cage match. And it's like 2 in the morning. You're like, I'm still with all these same people at Ted. What's going on? We're still all hanging out. And everybody's talking about the ideas. And it's just this weird utopian, this little micro world that's created for a week, and then it's gone. Lame is? No. You damn dropped all those other assholes. Those are people who are known. So you're not supposed to talk about who's there. That's one of the rules. Oh, I didn't know that. Sorry. OK, I'll keep on guessing. Director of Never Say Never. He's an awesome dude. Really nice guy. I shouldn't have said that. I'm going to be banned from Ted for life now. That's the other thing. They're like, scary. They'll ban you again. I bet they will. They'll ban you and mess you up bad. It just sounds like some weird combination of a floating island nation state plus a really hippy dippy rebel on a call. I describe it as a temporary autonomous zone, which is the anarchist and writer Hakeem Bey coined in 1991, which is basically this nation state that rises up, that's like secret, it's an idea, a place, a mindset, some kind of traveling band. It's like Burning Man. Burning Man for the realities. But really organized Burning Man. Burning Man meets like Amram. It's fascist Burning Man. Kind of, yeah. It's like super elite Burning Man, but with a point. There's a point. Burning Man is like, I got to masculine, let's go out to the desert. This is like, I got some ideas, let's go to Long Beach. It's moving to Vancouver next year, which by the way, I think is even more isolated. Vancouver, Canada. Which I think is even more isolated. There is no LA you can drive to. The closest city is like Victoria or something. Is Vancouver. It's like, Victoria, Vancouver, and then Victoria is not too far away. But it's like, whatever. I just went to Whistler, which is out in Vancouver. That was a pain in the ass. Whistler is where they're going to have Ted active. No, that's so hard to get. It's hard enough to fly into Vancouver, and then you have to drive to Whistler, and you just want to kill yourself. It's beautiful. Until you see Whistler, and you're like, thank God, I didn't suicide. I just ski. Lucky thing. It's like a ski town, right? So anyhow, but it was really interesting. And I have to say, if you have an opportunity to go to Ted, I recommend it. But the way I ended up on it is that it is, like a lot of people that week, especially people who were new, were like, this is kind of like a cult. Because everybody who works there is preaching the gospel of Ted. I interviewed June Cohen, who's Chris Anderson's right hand man. And she speaks very emphatically and very excitedly about the ideas that are going to be spread at Ted. And you feel very caught up in the excitement of the kind of a religious feeling. You're going to change the world. We're going to change the world. And it is like an atheist cult, is how I just started thinking of it. And like a cult of questions. And I say this in the piece. If religion is like, we got it. We got the answers. You want to know what's going on in the universe, like here's the deal. Then this is like, you want to know what's going on in the universe, like we don't know. But here's some possible ideas. Here's some thoughts on it. And maybe one guy says one thing that's polar opposite of the other guy. It to me sounds like a weird island nation state crossed with the hippiest liberal arts college in the Northeast. You could possibly drink that. It's exactly what it's like. And you never leave. And everyone's there to get to town. It's like a three hour drive. I said it's like a college quad, but with much older people. Yeah. Like when you have. You play any Frisbee? Yeah, but there was shit like that going on. There were people like, no, I saw some hacky sack. Oh, jeez. I saw hacky sacking. I bet Bono and Prince William were playing Ultimate. No, I'm not kidding. I think there was definitely somebody hacky sacking. And it was like people eating and eating and just losing. There's coffee everywhere, coffee everywhere. There's so many coffees. They pour over coffee. They're like whatever you want. Like 15 different types of freshly brewed teas, like crazy teas from the mountains of China. And they're like the people there are all really not. Also, I'm like really thirsty. Yeah, right? I want some tea. Excuse me. Oh, look at you. You guys really move on? I'd like to move on. The Re-Night piece is called Insight Tech, the smartest bubble in the world. I don't know if that's actually a set. It's not an empirical. That's not a factoid. That is a factoid. It's not a fact. There's like dumb bubbles. Dumb bubble. That would be, uh, give me salt. I could have salt so many. You know what? No offense, but the Teletubbies home is kind of a dumb bubble. No offense? For like four-year-olds, man. You weren't like burning a Teletubby? I think he's going to show up. What else do we have? Topic wise. We ran a bunch of pieces about women's technology this week. We did. We had an Elizabeth Spires piece, which I'm now told is how her name is pronounced. I've heard many, many variations. But she ran a piece on this kind of weird backlash. So actually, I want to talk about the piece. I won't even tell you about what it is. That's fine. There's something here that I think is very interesting. Something in the room? He's got something interesting to say, Josh. Say what the backlash is. But I want to know. So she ran a piece on this backlash about Remersa Maya, the CEO of Yahoo, saying everybody has to come to the office. And it's actually very interesting that we ran it, us, this site ran it. Because we have now moved into this office. And I'm watching our team change. And you're very egotistical point you're making. Complete remote team. And you just had a baby. I just had a baby. And I think what Neelai is saying in a roundabout way is that it was interesting that last week we moved into our new office, where we were like, hey, everybody come to the office. Because we have a new big office that we want people to be at. And Yahoo copied us by saying everybody come to the office. No, I know. I haven't been on the internet. But I'm just guessing the backlash is that she decided to do this because she's a woman? There's all sorts of different levels of backlash. But a lot of it is the tone is a lot about her being a woman and not a very specific kind of woman. And then there was this interview where somebody asked her if she was a feminist. And she said that she wasn't. And that's caused all this hubbub. There's just the tone of a lot of the conversation about her and Sheryl Sandberg. It's like there's never been a woman CEO before. But in the tone of the conversation is all very like. It's very confusing. So Sheryl Sandberg is the CEO of Facebook, put out a book called Lean In, which is all about how women should be. How women lead. How women lead, right? And her recommendations, as Elizabeth points out in her piece, are super non-controversial. Women should be more aggressive. Should ask for what they want. They should know that there's pay inequality in America. They should demand to get paid more. Do all of these things. It's stuff that if a man had written the book and said the same things, people would just be, either they would ignore it, or they would say, great points. But when it's a woman writing it, all of a sudden, people are like, how could she? How dare you? So Elizabeth's piece addressed how both of these women are being judged on different criteria than men. But the Marissa Meyer thing to me is like, yeah, who's a broken company? It doesn't work. It's full of people who aren't doing anything good. It's not making money. They're not innovative. For her to say, you all have to come into the office, and we're going to sit in this room and work together to figure out how to make our company better, is the least controversial thing. And I'll say this. And I'll say this. The second that I heard the announcement, it seemed obvious to me. Having worked at a company before, which is very large. Where you still wander around dreaming of hiring people. Yeah, where there were a lot of people who worked there, and a lot of them seemed really incompetent, and they weren't doing their job. And people would literally phone it in, and also figuratively phone it in. When you get to a certain size, I think it can be very hard to see who's great and who isn't. Despite your evaluations, which can obviously be like, you know, these written evaluations that these big companies do. I do feel that there is a motivating factor here. And I feel like we wrote, Ben might have written something about it. I can't remember when she first made this announcement. Oh, so get rid of the people. It's really about weeding the people who aren't great performers. She's trying to figure out how to get you to. And everybody's like, how could you do this? And the truth is, the bedside manners suck. That's the problem. Like the truth is, it could have probably been done in a more tactful way. So here's what's interesting about that. A, wait. Three things. So first, she had two. Don't just shut up. Shut up for three things. Three things. Well, the first one really fast. So she had two metrics that she used. One was that she has all these remote workers, and she noticed that many of them were not even logging into the VPN. So these people are off doing whatever at home. They're not on Yahoo's time. Second is, there were a lot of people getting paid by Yahoo while they founded startups, which is a huge problem. And they are a great problem. A lot of people doing Bing searches. And a lot of people doing Bing searches. Banging, banging. And then the third one, which is what Ben was saying, was this is a really great way to essentially do layoffs without having to lay anyone off. Right. Because you'll find people who are like, I'm not doing this. I'm out of here. Or the people won't actually live up to the requirements. Right. So I want to talk about your second point. Because I think when you have a big company, you have a lot of dead weight. But also, most of your good ideas are in the brains of those people who want to do startups. And I worked at a company called AOL. And it turns out we left. If I had an idea for a startup, what I could not have done is had that idea implemented at my company. If I had an idea for a startup, I would have to quit my job and go make that company. And what you want is you want smart people to do a startup inside of your business. I mean, that's what happens at Google. And there have been a lot of ideas that I've really liked at Yahoo that haven't ever. Yahoo essentially should be Instagram right now if they'd done Flickr well. But this is like a corporate culture thing. I could have. But it's hard to break off a single-use thing. Flickr's all-encompassing. I mean, just not getting the weeds on that. But I think it's a little bit hard to say like. They have a lot of great products. And they've had a lot of great ideas. And they always die because they don't quite go all the way through with them. I haven't seen any good ideas for a while. But I remember three or four or five years ago, a lot of cool stuff would come out of Yahoo. And then they'd just die. I think there is something on the internet that, I'm sorry. I just want to take a break on that point for just one quick second. I do think that people who are native to the internet and use the internet have a tendency and a desire to move away from old products that have been improved upon. And I don't think they have any allegiance to those products beyond their utility in their lives. An anti-allegiance because you can't understand that the old thing could do it. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, people who are in love with technology and the internet and who use it, or maybe not even in love with it, but use it and need it, their goals are, they're beholden to, I think for the most part, finding the best tools to do the things they want them to do. And there's so much competition and so many new things on the internet all the time that if there's one thing that you don't like about the old thing, you're just going to go like, I'm going to use the new thing. Like, who cares? Especially if it's free. Yahoo's free to use. Like, if something free comes along and it's better, you're like, I'm just going to do that. That's how Google's won in search. That's why I'm using Chrome right now. I'm not saying it's just Google products, all sorts of things. That's the iPhone. Nobody was like, I'm never giving up this Palm Pilot. They're like, oh, that's better? Thanks. I'm going to go use that. There is an aspect of, I mean, if you look at how Silicon Valley works, there are people with ideas. And those people, if they have a good enough idea and it looks like they can implement it, they get millions of dollars from somebody. Wait, finish that point. They get millions of dollars from somebody and they create that product. And I think there should theoretically be a way to be inside of a big company, have a great idea, looks like you can execute it. You get millions of dollars from your big company called Yahoo. You launch it, unbranded or branded, and it's a good idea. And then people will use it. You would incentivize people. That sounds like a theory. I think it's a really cool idea. I don't know if from a business perspective that can actually work. We're using Google Hangout right now, which was developed in a similar way. Incentivizing your employees and giving them ownership of the things they make and thinking you can add value to the company that you work for and also line your pocket books and become an entrepreneur in some ways, a really awesome idea. I just don't know if logically that makes any sense for a business like that. That's why people leave Google and Apple. That's why people are like, I'm out of here to start my own company. Also, people create great things inside of Google. Google's an awesome example. And they do. And I think Google is a much newer company. And they're much better at incubating startup ideas from within while letting those bubble up to the surface. What happens to these companies? We should get back to the point. No. There's actually a, we ran a second piece about Silicon Valley, which was very interesting. But what actually happens to these companies is that these founders leave, they build their businesses, and then they acquire back, because that's how the cycle actually works. You leave Apple, you build a company, and then you sell to Google. Maybe there's a lot. Maybe if Yahoo wants to have any chance of becoming a good It's all about mitigating risk for the company. So you say, go. Go start a company. Send a Google buy it. Yeah, but maybe there's a smarter way to do it. Yes, that's how it works. But Yahoo's sucking. And maybe there's a smarter way to do it. So maybe. For me, I'm kind of like a loyalist type of person. To be honest, if I had felt like AOL, if I'd had an idea and someone would allow me to build it into a product, I would have been interested in that. I like the idea of working for a company and being a part of a company and building a company. I think that's cool. Nice little hat you got there. I was popping a little bit. Yeah. Was I spiking? So let's talk about. It'd be cool if they figured. I want to talk about your first point. Is this better? This fantasy world of big companies investing in people that way is not real. Because what the market has chosen is to mitigate risk by letting you go start a startup and then buying a company if it's good. And that's how big companies are. And that's why you spend a billion dollars on Instagram. And that's why you buy Instagram. If Instagram hadn't worked, Facebook would have spent a billion dollars. But the point is, if Instagram hadn't worked, it would have cost Facebook $5 million in experimentation. Yeah, but they couldn't. Oh, right. So there are really two paths, right? There's the path to. So I want to just stop. I want to get back to our actual point. How big companies like Dwyer? Are we the whole end of talking? Do you want a diet coke or something? Because I'm really thirsty. Do you want anything? Are you going to leave? I'm too thirsty. Why don't you just send Ross a tooth brush. Can you grab a diet coke for Paul? I know it's not your job. I tried to drop a hint earlier, but I'm so thirsty. He did try to drop a hint. And you were completely telling him off here. Thanks, Ross. OK. Let me get back to the point. Please do. Please. Because I think there's something reflected in both of these pieces. I'm thirsty for debate. It's good. I'm hungry for Cheetos. Is that weird? That's just the thing. OK, go ahead. Both these pieces, the reactions to them from our readers and from the world reflected something that I think you just brought up, which is, if you have a good idea, the tech community will just give you millions of dollars. No, that's not true. I said, if you have an idea and you have the ability to execute it. Fine. But those are all objective criteria. But we ran another piece this week, which is all about how female founders of companies have to fight harder to get venture capital than male founders of employees. Gee, I wonder why. There's a structural problem there. Because it's a bunch of old white men running the money. And they have the money. They have control of the money. They invest in the people that they feel comfortable with. I mean, this is not some, you know, not that. And then I think that's even further amplified by the internet, which allows a bunch. We know the demographic of our site. The demographic of our site is like wealthier 18 to 35 year old men. That's like the core. Handsome. Very handsome. And we actually have a decent female audience. And it's growing. And it is growing. But that's the big chunk in the middle. And those demographics are real. And that means one type of site, whatever, Reddit, attracts one kind of person. For them to say, if you come onto Reddit and your ideas are good, we'll support you, is like completely ignorant of the structural reality of Reddit. Of the thousands of years of subjugation of minorities and women by essentially white men. Or men in power. I don't see color or gender in this space. But that space is a reflection of reality. No, no, no. Reddit sees color and gender. But if you do. No, no, no. They insist that they don't. No, no, no, no. It's not about Reddit. It's just about the nature of humanity, which is. They see. I think it's about actually the nature of discussion on the internet, which is dominated by. There is this we're color blind. Yeah. You know, and I know. I'm not racist. How can I be racist? I can't even see what color you're. Right, exactly. And it's like, yeah, but you're still operating on the playbook of a structure that was built thousands of years before you came into existence. But typically with at least nicknames on Reddit, you can typically tell if it's a girl or a guy. That's racist. A lot of times. That's completely insane. No, I'm just saying. I can't tell that. I didn't know that Violent Acres was a guy. Just kidding. All I'm saying is I actually do think an idea from anybody on Reddit can do pretty well. That's fine, but like. Reddit's a bad example. Reddit is like a forum. It's a forum. Right. A startup is a very different thing. You're talking about starting an actual business and having to go in front of investors. You make it face to face. I think it's all. Yeah, but in a book. You don't solve the big problem without the people. But Reddit's the least of the problem. It's a spectrum. It's a gradient of behaviors. You can say the reaction to our piece about the big problems from people on the internet was why do these problems exist, I don't even see them. Your action to why were there no women at the Sony event was 1,000 comments on our site that were well, maybe there are no women qualified enough to do the job. I'm in computer science class and there are no women in here, maybe men just like it better. And that's crazy. Let's comment on the women at the Sony event piece. What happened with the Sony event? Well, Sony did PS4, the PS4 event. And they probably had 18 people on stage. From a variety of companies. From a dozen companies, not just Sony people. Sony just happened to not have any females in those positions they wanted to put on stage. I get it. But one company had one woman that could speak about their product on stage at the event. It just seems really weird. And by the way, people are like, you don't have any women on the Vergecast. The Vergecast is like a show. It's like, there's no women in Poison. Poison's a band. They started the band. It's like four guys and they're Poison. The Vergecast is us for the most part. And we do have agreement on the Vergecast. We try to keep it this group of three. We try to keep women down. We try to keep women down. But the point is, we're like a band. We are. But I don't think we're perfect. Am I happy with the amount of women we have in roles here, in senior roles or whatever? No. Am I happy with the amount of minorities that we have? I mean, we have Neelai and that's pretty much it. That's it. I try to carry the torch for everyone. We're not perfect. And we're also working against this thousands of years of the structure of society. But I think no one's perfect. But I think the first step is saying, yeah, we can be better. But the people on the internet are saying, what's the problem? It's a meritocracy everywhere. Look around. You have an idea on the internet. It's great. The only thing worse than what you're describing of the Sony event, which I didn't see. It's forcing women on stage. Because I have seen this happen at a lot of gaming announcements that Microsoft and Sony have done. Where like, here's our token woman who enjoys fitness apps. And pandering is just as bad as the other thing. I think it's definitely worse. And I would rather have a reflection. My favorite thing at the gaming announcement things, whatever you call them, keynotes, gaming keynotes, and I've been to a lot, is when the guy who is the number one guy at that company or building that game, that guy or woman, but it's typically a guy who is heading that project, walks out on stage and plays his game, that means a lot to me. And so I wouldn't want a woman thrust into that role. And so if the only games that matter is motion. The question's not about how you put out on stage. The bigger question and the fundamental question is, are we building industries, new industries, that are as open and welcoming to women and minorities as they should be? And if people on the internet keep going, of course, you're on the internet. Doesn't matter. It's all equal. Everybody's the same. And the actual thing that's happening in the board rooms and the offices of the world that are actually where these companies are happening is the old school stuff that's been going on for 500 years or longer or whatever. Then we have a bad disconnect. Because you go on one hand, you're like, nothing's wrong. It's like there's a war going on. And you're like, I can't see the war. So there's no war. I will say this idea of the enforced meritocracy of the internet is flawed from conception. Because if you say you come on the internet, you have a good idea, you'll win. Who is the judge? Who's saying this idea is good? This idea is bad? And it requires more than just a good idea. It requires a lot of really hard work. The internet is a slightly different version of life. Which is, yeah, I think you do have more opportunities if you have an idea to get that idea heard and to make something out of it. But it doesn't mean that if you have a good idea that you are going to make something out of it and that people are going to care. It just means that you have an opportunity. I will agree. Sorry, I'm stuck. And I'm sorry because I haven't been part of this larger discussion that happened on the internet. And wait, in the page of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It's like a big deal. But anyhow, to your point. I literally do not. I will totally agree that there are way less women in the video game industry than there should be, maybe, and that I would like to see and even could be. But I really do not see any systemic effort or reason why they can't be. Well, I think that on its face, yeah, it's probably true, but we're getting into territory, which is the structure of business. And let's just say, let's take America for a moment. But this is all over the world. The structure of businesses in the world and in America and the ways that we have learned to interact. I mean, there are deep reasons why women are paid less than men in the same position and why it's harder for women to get into those. And also, in terms of our education, the types of ways that we push people into, what types of industries we push them into, is dramatically effected. And what is an open and accepting industry for women to feel that they can go into versus one that men feel comfortable going into? Just the way most men don't want to go into the industry of fashion, I'm sure most men you know don't think that that's an open, welcoming industry that they can be part of and be a man. I know a bunch of guys in fashion, but yes. I see what you're saying. You live in New York, and you're a weird guy, so you know people in fashion. But typically, out in the Midwest, people aren't like, I really want to go into fashion. For men, that's not a job that seems like a job for them. Just like many jobs are, historically, we were pushing people towards these things because of the structure of society, which is fundamentally unfair to groups of people. I do think there's something. So I can't speak to all the edges. Oh man, we're in dangerous territory. I don't think we're in dangerous territory. I think we're saying really obvious things. I can't speak to the education side of what people push towards, and I can't speak to the larger corporate structures because I don't understand them very well. But I will say, especially knowing a gamer community, and the gaming industry is relatively young. So you may have people kind of creating companies that are kind of, well just let me say it. You have people creating just relatively new companies that they can kind of form in their own way. Companies like Valve, this is a very new generation. How many women there at an executive level? How many women are there? There are women there, but I'd like to know the breakdown. But I'm just saying that if you're a woman and you show up for that, I don't think you have an uphill climb. You're right. I know you are absolutely 100% wrong, and it's because you don't know what's been going on. Right? And that's it. And now I'm frustrated with it because there's an entire set of tweets and articles as hashtag one reason why, which is just women in the games industry complaining and noting the problems, the deep structural problems they face to advance, to make games, to be put in positions of leadership. I think what he's saying, the only thing that, well, Paul saying the opportunity to have a new company that thinks differently is there because we're creating these new industries. But the reality is that there are layers of societal issues that are causing companies to be formed using the same bad, broken tactics that we've been using forever in business, which does subjugate women and minorities basically, whether we like it or not. Right. And what I'm saying is it's great. I don't think that people go into interviews at EA or wherever and there's like a, oh, you're a woman, get out of here. I think that there's a real tendency to say, I think this is why, for example. You know, NVIDIA at CES. Perfect example. Their keynote with the girl, with the, you don't remember? I was PTSD. Jen Sun had this girl come out and he's like, take a picture of me and I'm going to take my jacket off. And she was like, you're a gamer, right? And it was like this totally awful, and it's like, just that that is even existing. There's that overt gross sexism that's still like, here. But that speaks to a. So I guess I should walk this back a little bit. I see that. But that overt sexism speaks to a much more subtle underlying sexism that just kind of infects. Why are you shaking your head at me? I'm not shaking your head at you. Right. OK. They're just kind of. I'm irritated by this entire topic. They're just kind of. Why? Because it's not that we're discussing it. I'm thoroughly enjoying our discussion. Yeah, you seem very upset about it. I'm very upset because it's. You're upset at Paul. Yeah, it's OK. I'm a little upset. I love you too. You're mad at Paul because he's e, you feel he's missing. I guess a part of this debate. I've missed the discussion. I'm very naive on this. Most of the gamer culture that I see and I participate in seems very welcoming and very overtly. I think that the mindset of the gamers and many of the. Well, let me put it to you this way. Sometimes in gaming, to be honest, I see a more inclusive community that is more rapidly welcoming of somebody who might not always be. I think you're looking at the best of the best. And I think those people are out there. Online gaming is a Vergecraft world that built a shrine to you. No, no, no, no, no. I've participated in all sorts of games. I think if you asked my wife, what is it like playing Xbox? She would say an eight-year-old races Screams at you. No, no, no. That's the market. That's the mainstream market. I think Paul, and I'm not trying to defend him, not that we're attacking him, but to his point, I think Paul is, and I think that it gives you a bad perspective on this, you are not an aggressive hardcore gamer. There's types of games that you like that are a little bit more indie, a little bit more weird. And I think you're exposed to a part of the industry that is more progressive, at least in terms of its demo. You know what I mean? There are a lot of female players of World of Warcraft. We know that. And I think that that is a more inclusive demographic. But it does not reflect in the industry that is making World of Warcraft. I think that's the problem. There are female players and female developers, and there are women who do these things. It's just not truly reflective of the industry. Not even close. And that's the problem. And games are big business with a lot of money. And technology is a big business with a lot of money. And that amount of money just attracts assholes. So you might see there's weird. You're still building off of a model that's an old model. It's just we're building businesses off of a model. For example, we're sending a lot of people to South by Southwest this week. And I went last year, and I couldn't stand it. Because it was such a, at its core, South by is supposed to be a, it's supposed to be Ted. It's full of ideas. Everybody's here. They're happy. Let's go to a bunch of stuff. Slow down, my man. No, but it is supposed to be a celebration of the tech community, of the startup community. And I walked around basically meeting a bunch of people who I thought had hokey ideas. It's drunk dudes on the startup bus. And they all thought they were going to get rich. And look, I have to say, read when Kara Swisher writes about the pig pile of Silicon Valley. She's talking about an old boys club. She's talking about almost literally is the room with the guys smoking cigars and no women allowed. That's a real thing. And it sucks. How do I get to this room? Yeah, how do I get out of here? What are they drinking? Can I have some? Brandy. But anyhow, look, even that kind of joke is sexist. We're horrible sexists. And I feel terrible. But the truth is we are not as advanced as we'd like to be. Let's put it that way. The tech industry thinks it's a lot more advanced than it is. And that's the problem. I think the problem is everybody in this industry. We're busy congratulating ourselves. We're right. Going, I'm colorblind. I'm blind to gender. I don't care about this stuff. But actually, your actions and the statistics don't even come close to reflecting that. And so that's a problem. I think being aware of it is how you start to fix it. You say, is there a problem? Are we not being as inclusive as we can be? Can we find ways to involve more people, different kinds of people in this? Because they can bring something new and exciting to it, and we're ignoring that because we're working off of an old playbook. I think that's the start. And then I don't think there's affirmative action in the tech industry that you need to force people into jobs. I just think you need to recognize that we're not as socially sophisticated as the tech industry wants to be. You want to be this colorblind. Everybody wants to say, we're colorblind. We're genderblind. Let's just do this thing all together. Let's hold hands and jump into this exciting new abyss of technology. But the truth is, we're working off playbooks that are like the oil tycoons. We're working off the same playbook. I'll just say I'm optimistic because the gamer community I see, the people creating the indie games right now, and the people who are going to be leading the industry in the future, seem to be a lot of pretty great, interesting people. And I think we do have an opportunity. This industry does have an opportunity to fix a lot of what has been broken for a long time in this equality conversation. But although I will say, our biggest, beyond the who's on stage criticism of the PS4 event, but our biggest context or constant criticism was, all these games look like shooters. They are. They're driving games. And honestly, it's like, you know what? If you only wear the same guys to make your games, or the same types of guys to make your games, you're only going to end up shooting. I like a game where you're shooting someone who's the same squad. But they are. They're like, the government's surveilling you, but what if you had superpowers? Wait. That's where the money is, but at the same time, Sony promotes, has in-house, some of the best, most artistic, interesting developers as well. If only they were allowed to do things other than make Killzone 30. No, no, no, no. I mean, Journey and Flower. Yeah, but there's a big batch. There's a huge gulf between, I just want to say, getting more specifically to games. Little Big Planet? Those are all from Extrate from Sony. There's a huge gulf between these whimsical cartoon games and games about real things. Sure, there's War Room. But look at movies. There are movies that are serious adult movies. They're about human drama. Sometimes they're violent. Sometimes they're romantic. Sometimes they're about a mystery. There's all these wild places that movies go. Sometimes they're very meta. They're commentary, social commentary. So all of these things in games really. And then there's also cartoon movies. There's Wreck-It Ralph. And there's all these different types of cartoon movies. Sony also has exclusively that Ellen Page game. The Ellen Page game at the end of the day, it's like, you're a girl. You're superpowers. You've got to kill these cops. Sure, but it's like you've got to go. I'm just saying, if you're going to compare Sony and Microsoft, Sony's way further advanced in terms of this. Not way further. A little bit further. Just take the games industry as a whole. What does Microsoft have? This is why. Let me just say. Viva Pinata? Can I stop this for one second? I'm just saying that there's a whole gulf of places that games don't go. Sony, Microsoft, whoever. I agree. And we're safe, and what we really need, I think what we really want is more people, more diversity, more ideas. I don't care where they even come from. Just let's be accepting of them. This is a totally different topic. God, we're so off topic. And I have to go, because I actually have a meeting in two minutes. Is it the meeting? No. Never mind. Whoa. That'll blow everything. Josh is getting his facial implant. I'm finally getting the ability. I'm going to get the ability to laugh. Josh has Google Glass 2.0, which is going to go inside his brain. So we didn't. This was the last topic. Do we need to talk about it? We didn't talk about it last week on the first cast, because you did a big feature, and then you went around. Google Glass. I want you to talk about it. Oh, yeah. And I want to talk about it. Josh, I literally know nothing. I want to talk about it. Please tell me. A never-ending series of watch rumors from every company that I'm so familiar with. Yeah, and I have like two minutes, and then I have to go for real. What's it like? It's like not that jarring. I think people have made this assumption that when you're wearing it, it somehow creates some overlay on your vision, your field of vision. It's just like you're using it, and there's a little thing up here. And if you look up, you see it. And if you don't look up, it goes away. So there's a little glass cube. Do you perceive that cube? Not really. It's a glass cube, exactly. No, not really. Once it's on, you're not thinking about it. So you never see the edge of it with your other eye? In my memory of the experience of using it, I wasn't like, ugh, this thing's hanging over my eye. It didn't feel like that. You know it's there, but it doesn't feel. It's like wearing glasses. I see the rim of my glasses right now. And maybe I'm less sensitive too, because I wear glasses all the time. But I see my glasses all the time. Like when I look over here, there's my glasses. There they are. They're right there. So it's a lot like that, except it also shows stuff in your field of vision. And it's just this thing, this little information cube. And here's the thing. I probably wouldn't wear Google Glass in its current form unless I was in very specific situations. Dire straits. If I was jamming with dire straits. And you needed a tab. The tabular for it. And I needed to make sure I could see the notes of money for nothing. No, in certain situations, like I'm doing something crazy, or taking a roller coaster, or I don't know, if I had kids and you were hanging out with your video for the roller coaster. Because you could do video and pictures and stuff. There are times, like I'm looking at my dog and I'm like, man, I wish I could take a picture of this right now. That would be awesome. Is that the primary application? The camera? I think it's no. I think that the camera's a big piece. But I think also this kind of non-intrusive message notifications. Non-intrusive, like you get a text message and you're like that, instead of going like that. I think that's a big deal for them. Would you rather go like that or like that? For people who listen to audio. Would you rather look at a watch? Or? It's all a strata of distraction. I think taking your phone out, unlocking it, and looking at the thing is a huge distraction. Also, physically disruptive to what you're doing. I think this is less distracting, but also somewhat physically disruptive. Looking at a watch. I mean, looking at a watch is not that hard. I do it all the time. But is it as easy as doing this? It's not. So here's the thing. At the end of the day, the big questions are, they look goofy. People are like, they look goofy. But if they don't look goofy, then let's just say they're going to be. Do you have to refocus on the thing? Yeah, it kind of is like it's off in the distance. This feels like it's getting off. It feels like you're focusing on it. How do you wear glasses? How does it work for you? My prescription's not super strong. OK. Did you wear it in lieu of glasses? Well, they're working on a version that can take. So they have a thing that I put on these sunglasses that kind of like twist and they snap into the frame. And so what they're doing is that they're working on making versions of that for prescription lenses. So you can get a prescription lens for it and stick it in. The holy grail is to integrate it right into the lens. The holy grail is like I go to buy these glasses. Like, do you want that with Google Glass or without? And that'll be an extra $1,000 or whatever the price, $500. If these had Google Glass, I'd be like, that's awesome. Let's do that. Because you don't worry about it. Because I don't have to worry about it. If I want to use it, I can use it. Would you not want some extra help? Like if you're walking around. I don't think I've ever looked at your eyes and glasses as much in a conversation. One of the coolest things. It's very romantic. One of the coolest things. Josh, I never knew you. I could never tell the color of people's eyes. Like bluish-gray? Brown? Really? I have no idea. Bluish-green. I don't even know the color. What do you think? Bluish-gray and then brown. What color would you say my eyes are? What colors would your blue eyes? No, they're like a. I grew up and I had blue eyes. They look blue to me. Did they change color? They're a little smokier. They're like a smoky blue. Very jealous of all of you. Anyhow. Josh, what color eyes do you have? They're like greenish. One of them looks different colors. Is this Ross's good television? You look like a snake. Paul just said, and I quote, you look like a snake. I'm terrified of you. By the way, Chinese astrological sign, snake, year of, the snake. You look like the Witcher. It's time to close this thing. Anyhow, that's the Vergecaster this week. Oh, I'm sorry. Can you get turn-by-turn directions and cool stuff? Yeah, so that's what I was going to say. The coolest thing is you get out of the train. You're walking around. You're like, how do I get to there? Turn-by-turn, right here. The only thing I'm worried about is whether you have to refocus your eyes. It's not like a crazy refocusing. It's like I'm looking at you, and then I'm looking at the wall and back. It's not even that much, probably. You know what? Just a little feature request. I would kind of like if you had Google Glass and it was in your actual glasses, if it would, I think Google Glass needs some outward-focused aspects to let people know Google Glass is doing things. I think it needs a record light. You can see the light on, but it's very subtle. A red light would be probably. Yeah, a red light, because I think it's really rude. Right, well, I was going to say the other big thing is are they cool? But then the other question is privacy. That's really terrible. The other thing is if you have. And I went in and I went into Starbucks and filmed, and nobody said anything to me. If you have, what should we call it? It looks like the Terminator. I was like, if you say something to me, I will blow your head off. But also, if you have glasses, it would be cool. If you have turn-by-turn, I'd almost want the arrows to show up your vision. No, no, just because I want to see if you're looking at something else other than me. The ultimate. OK, that's, yeah. You know. OK. Maybe you can have a little LED thing that says, using turn-by-turn. Like a little scrawl aid thing. OK, that's our Vergecast for the 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 when it goes up. We'd love that. You could post something in forums, if you want, on the site. You can also find us on Twitter. The Verge is at Verge. I'm Joshua Topolsky. Neal I is reckless. And Paul is future Paul. Soon to return to the internet when? May 1. May 1. I mean, we're just creeping right up on it. Yeah. Just creeping up behind it. That's right. And we're wearing Google Glass. And we're wearing Google Glass. And we're recording. And we'll be back next week with more Vergecasty goodness. And until then, I think don't worry about what's in the back seat of your car. It's probably nothing.
 Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of March
 4, 2013.
 I'm Josh Topolsky.
 I'm Paul Miller.
 I'm Nilay Patel.
 Floating the disembodied voice of.
 So we are, let me just explain what's going on.
 So we are in my office at my unfurnished, unadorned, my
 prison office at our new office in Midtown Manhattan.
 And we're still setting up our studio, which we don't have
 all of our live streaming stuff set up there yet.
 So we're doing a hangout from my office in the corner.
 And Nilay is sitting across from me, as if I was
 interviewing him for a job.
 And Paul is sitting off to the side over here.
 Paul's taking notes like an assistant.
 Just roll through.
 Give the interview to people that you exactly know.
 Let the internet see you, and then you can roll away again.
 Hey.
 Hey.
 There he is.
 Nilay.
 Beautiful John Carter.
 You do have the Taylor Lautner thing going on in there.
 Taylor Lautner is not the actor.
 Is he not the guy?
 No, no.
 He's the wolf.
 No, you're right.
 So the Taylor Kitsch.
 Taylor Kitsch.
 Oh, yeah, you're right.
 Taylor Lautner's the wolf.
 Way too much.
 Yeah, the product of, by the way, a product of the 90s.
 Yeah.
 Taylor.
 A name that needs to be struck out of existence.
 Tim, the Tool Man Taylor.
 Every day they'd enter Tim, the Tool Man Taylor.
 JTT.
 No, Taylor's a fine name.
 It's a fine, regular name.
 Jonathan Taylor Thomas is what you're referencing.
 Is one of the handsome brothers a Taylor?
 Because that would make a lot of sense.
 I'm just going to assume.
 So anyway, so we're back here on the Vergecast.
 And we have a lot of stuff to talk about.
 And we're excited to be bringing it to you.
 But not next week.
 Not the next Vergecast, but the one following that will be
 all set up in our new studio.
 Yeah.
 Ross is, oh yeah, Ross is also in the room.
 In the corner.
 Where he belongs.
 You've been a bad Miller.
 You've been a horrible person.
 You're going to pay.
 No, next week we'll have our new studio.
 I mean, I was just down there.
 It looks beautiful.
 You watched Top Shelf today.
 Yeah.
 You saw a little bit of what it's doing.
 There's some comments in the forum about Top Shelf they
 think are too dark.
 Go ahead and shut it.
 Like too emotionally dark?
 Yeah, it's too heavy.
 I did kill David at the end.
 I actually just watched some of the episode.
 And it's been a terrible sun.
 Wow.
 Sun.
 Really?
 Getting too much echo from where?
 Because we have two mics.
 What if I hold it like this?
 Is this better?
 Is this any better?
 Do you want me to go to the, this is cool?
 I feel like Jerry Lee Lewis.
 Goodness gracious.
 Great balls of fire.
 Now marry a 15-year-old.
 What?
 I would love to.
 Jerry Lee Lewis.
 You can marry him.
 He's a 15-year-old cousin.
 No way.
 Jerry Lee Lewis.
 He's a nasty.
 Great balls of fire, man.
 This is better or not better?
 Not better.
 Everything.
 He's the original nutty professor, right?
 Stop doing this.
 He's going to switch us, right?
 Yeah.
 So we're good.
 OK, so we're just going to make a quick mic change here
 because I'm having some sort of mic problem.
 Should I just mute this mic for now?
 Yes.
 Hold on, guys.
 I'll be right back with you.
 So can Neil and I just talk?
 Yeah.
 How's it going?
 It's pretty good.
 How's life without the internet?
 It's all right.
 Here's a question for the anywhere.
 I just got the Witcher 2.
 Oh, god.
 You know, it was pretty complicated, but I figured out.
 I can craft potions.
 I can.
 It's like building a boat from the actual old PC version.
 That's what I've always wanted to do.
 Nobody can hear you talk, Josh.
 Josh is making fun of the save.
 Yo, what up, internet?
 You live and direct.
 How about these new MTA fairs?
 Can you believe this is happening?
 I woke up one morning, and it turned out I'm poor now.
 Dude, I've been listening.
 I'll do your comedy act.
 I've been listening to Ty Love's New York on 92.3 now.
 I thought that was a Ty store.
 No, it's Ty.
 The guy's name is Ty, and he does a morning show on my pop
 radio station.
 He comes on at 5 AM.
 And he is so excited to be alive.
 And he talks about his fiancee or his wife or somebody.
 Beyonce.
 We should start over.
 We should start over.
 Let's start over.
 You want to start over?
 Hey, and welcome to The Vergecast for the week of
 March 4, 2013.
 I'm Josh Dabolsky.
 I'm Paul Miller.
 And we're Vergecasting.
 I already explained this the first time we did this, but
 I'm going to explain it to you again, because that's how much
 I like you and care about what you know.
 We're Vergecasting from my office, my unadorned, empty
 office in the corner of our new building, which we just
 moved to in midtown Manhattan.
 And our studio's not ready yet.
 Still being prepped.
 Next week.
 Still being massaged and prepped.
 Not next week.
 Week after next.
 Anyhow, so we're Vergecasting from my office, and we're
 doing it via Google Hangout.
 And we're also doing an open mic Vergecast.
 It's very cool.
 I wrote a song about children.
 This is how much.
 This is how much.
 About children?
 Yeah.
 For the future.
 You wrote a song about children?
 We're also beautiful.
 Paul, get over here.
 Yeah, Paul's on camera.
 Let's do this.
 Paul's avoiding the internet.
 Here he is.
 Taylor Kitch.
 Taylor Kitch or John Carter or Robert Rodgers.
 Now, Paul is the only person who liked the John Carter
 movie, right?
 You liked it.
 No, it was pretty bad.
 I read the book.
 It was terrible.
 I was so rooting for it, though.
 Did you just assume Paul liked it because he has the same
 American name as John Carter or Robert Rodgers?
 Here's Paul's.
 I don't think he's called that top of a critic when it comes
 to fanciness.
 Here's the problem.
 Mars has 2 3rds the gravity of Earth.
 If you jump on Mars, you don't go like 50 feet.
 It's harder to jump.
 No, it's easier to jump.
 Oh, easier to jump.
 It's easier to jump.
 But let's say it only has a third less gravity.
 Wait, are you saying your biggest problem with John
 Carter is Mars?
 It's just number one problem.
 It's a technical problem.
 It's just one of the problems.
 Everything about John Carter and Mars, utter perfection.
 But the one piece I will not allow was that you're
 supposed to, it's only a third less gravity.
 It really made it seem like it was half as much gravity.
 The fact that he was just walking around, there's alien
 races battling for nothing.
 You know what?
 I didn't see it.
 Can you please stop ruining the plot of
 John Carter and Mars?
 Oh, you didn't see it?
 I'll say this.
 Oh, you have to watch it.
 There's a great, it's friggin' read the story about
 how that movie failed and how it started with their first
 trailer, which has a need to be a real cover of.
 I want to correct this.
 I want to correct this myth.
 So John Carter was horribly promoted, right?
 Unmitigated disaster.
 But here's the thing.
 I read that article, and it's all about how nobody knows
 no one's ever read this book.
 Nobody knows about this.
 Don't hear the movie.
 The trailers are bad, and they don't know the intellectual
 property.
 It's like a triple whammy.
 It's never going to succeed.
 But meanwhile, we know I've read the book.
 I love the director.
 I've seen all of the trailers multiple times.
 Went to see the movie, and it was horrible, and it deserved
 to fail.
 Sure.
 I mean, it was terrible.
 Let's just say it was a bad movie, no matter whether you
 watched, whether you watched.
 I hate this set up, by the way.
 I'm really uncomfortable right now.
 I want everybody to know.
 Why don't you look at us?
 Yeah, I don't know where to look.
 That's part of the problem.
 Look at us.
 OK.
 Look at us.
 Look at me.
 Josh, I know exactly who you should look at.
 I just think that it was a bad movie.
 And I don't know why we're talking about this, because
 your hair looks like Taylor Kitchin.
 That's it.
 Let's talk about one of the things we need to talk about.
 So Facebook had a big event today.
 Facebook, blowing it out.
 By the way, I have the new news.
 They gave it to you already.
 Yeah, I have it.
 I'm on the list.
 You want to know about it?
 What do you want to know?
 Tell me about it.
 As a person who doesn't read Facebook very often, this
 doesn't seem like a big change to me.
 How many photos of Neelay's relatives could you find?
 Go.
 And with graph search, you just do that right away.
 Could you graph search?
 Photos of Neelay Patel.
 Photos by Neelay Patel.
 Photos of me and Neelay Patel.
 Yeah, that's what you want.
 Nude photos of Neelay Patel taken in Brooklyn.
 Riding a horse.
 Photos of Neelay Patel.
 Here they are.
 I'll look at that.
 Excuse me.
 They had a big event.
 They said, we're going to make it more like our mobile apps.
 I wish I could screen share this.
 And they said something really weird, which I thought was
 interesting for Facebook, which was, we don't make
 content, we're a container of other people's content, and we
 want to show that as beautifully as possible.
 Like Tupperware.
 And then Zuckerberg's line was, we want to be the best
 newspaper in your life, or something crazy like that.
 Everybody wants to be the best newspaper in your life.
 Yeah, because what a great business to aspire to be.
 We want to be the new crumbling local newspaper.
 It used to be a business.
 It used to be a business.
 It's my New York Times subscription.
 It was called a portal.
 Yeah.
 AOL was well known for this.
 You'd go there.
 That was your home page.
 Yahoo.
 Get all your news.
 Get your weather.
 Yeah, the IHU.
 Get maybe, see how many.
 Look up movie time.
 See how many emails you had from your friends.
 Maybe open up an IM.
 Support scores.
 I just think, if Facebook wants to be in the portal
 business, the social portal.
 That's what they are.
 And that's what they are.
 I'm seeing, by the way, I can see beyond you a new chair for
 my office that is being built.
 Yes.
 And no other chairs.
 I just think everybody wants to be, they want to make their
 spot inescapable.
 This is just Facebook's next move to try to get you to keep
 looking at Facebook as much as possible.
 Yeah.
 Sticky.
 But what's really interesting to me, and we were talking
 about it as the event was going on, was this is the
 second big product launch Facebook's had.
 It hasn't been about phones or tablets.
 It's about Facebook on the desktop.
 It's about Facebook's core business.
 Where their numbers are going down.
 They know that people are using Facebook on phones and
 tablets more.
 But they're like, all this relentless focus on the
 desktop.
 I think it's really tough.
 I think it's really tough.
 And Ellis just wrote this huge thing about how teenagers
 aren't using Facebook.
 And I have to say, I think it's really tough to be a
 social network on a platform that isn't beholden to, it's
 all about being in apps.
 You don't want to go into an app, a Facebook app, to use
 other apps.
 You want to Instagram, you're going to go Instagram.
 You want to tweet something, you're tweeting.
 I don't know how many people are really posting to
 Facebook that often.
 There are now ways to do it from within iOS, from within
 Android that doesn't require that you go to Facebook to do
 it, so you're not coming to see their ads.
 You're not seeing their content they want you to see.
 And I think it's kind of a big problem for that.
 What this is all about is that they're making Facebook
 nicer to look at.
 So when you go to it, you see more of the photos.
 You see all this content people are doing.
 Can you tell me the basic, what did they change?
 They changed the news feed.
 They made their news feed, they made it more visual.
 They changed the way it's displayed.
 They moved where your chat window is.
 They moved your chat and a bunch of other stuff to a
 left panel.
 It's actually a little bit more like the Android app and
 the iOS app, where it has a sliding panel.
 They showed all the screens and they said they're all the
 same.
 I think they want to move to a parity of these things.
 Well, that's logical because if they can teach you how to
 use it on the desktop, then you'll know how to use their
 mobile app.
 Right, and then it's a level of comfort.
 And it is a better design.
 It looks better.
 I have to say, I am.
 They're using a Sarah font for headlines, which I think is
 really weird.
 Most of my, or a good number of my friends don't use
 Facebook, or they use it very, very sparingly.
 My sister's probably like 2-3, much like
 the Gravity of Mars.
 She's like 2-3 never on, like quit Facebook.
 She's like, oh, I got Facebook back for now.
 And then she quits it again.
 Right.
 But I see my friends scroll through Instagram all the
 time.
 That's what they do.
 They don't pull up Instagram and check it and
 then put it away.
 They just sit there and scroll and scroll and scroll.
 And I have to say, like that, it solves a lot of things.
 When you want to know about what your friends are doing.
 You don't have to slide a bar over or go through a graph.
 You get like blasts of text all over the place.
 You're getting text messages.
 You're getting email.
 You're on Twitter.
 It's nice to just have a place where it's like, thing is
 happening, there's a photo of it, I have my discrete group
 of friends.
 And it's really basic.
 And I do think, as Facebook tries to become, and all of
 these things, like Twitter is a little bit pushing into this
 all-encompassing social network, I think we are
 starting to people are going like, well, I don't really
 want the all-encompassing.
 It's overwhelming.
 It's overwhelming.
 And it's just like, it's not.
 So I don't think Twitter has a problem at all.
 They've moved further into.
 They've moved further and they're doing crazy stuff.
 They've got the snippet thing now.
 What are snippets?
 They'll show part of an article.
 But I think people are very comfortable with Twitter.
 Because unless you're in a small class of Twitter users
 that has tens of thousands of followers, you pretty much
 know everybody who's following.
 You can look at the list.
 There they are.
 All these people are going to see you.
 But if you follow too many, this has happened to me, if
 you just are naive and follow too many people, and I've
 done this.
 You just get too many friend requests.
 No, no, no.
 On Twitter, if you follow too many people, it gets really
 overwhelming.
 And it stops making.
 If that's content coming in.
 I think Facebook's problem is not an overwhelming amount.
 It's coming in.
 I think people just don't want to share.
 I think people are afraid of Facebook.
 I think when the data goes on to Facebook, they go.
 There's a little bit of that.
 I think there's certain types of sharing that Facebook seems
 to be perfect for.
 Some of the things that I've seen are events.
 Like family events, weddings, babies.
 There's these things where it's like, you want to have a
 bunch of photos.
 You want people to be able to go, oh my god, that's so cute.
 Or I can't believe you wore that hat or whatever.
 And events, it's really good for it.
 I think for individual outings, we've started to
 acclimate to more of a micro blogging sort of thing, where
 it's like, you want little spurts of, you want to know a
 little bit.
 Like, here's a picture from last night.
 Or I'm wearing this jacket, or whatever.
 Where it's not like, here's a gallery of things.
 Or here's a bunch of text about it.
 Or let's have a conversation about it.
 I just want to share this one thing with you, then get on
 with my life.
 And I feel like in a way, that's like Vine and Snapchat
 are both kind of reinforcing this idea that people want to
 get in, get out, and get on with their lives.
 No, but they do.
 But there is this thing where you want, and what you don't
 want to do.
 It's the exact antithesis of Facebook, where you don't want
 to live there.
 And it's the opposite also of that frictionless sharing
 thing that Facebook does so well.
 Which by the way, the other day I was listening to,
 literally for work, I was listening to a selection of
 really, really bad pop music.
 And people were like, Kali Shwitzer and other people
 started tweeting, because they could see my scrabble.
 My scrabble was exposed.
 And it was like four or five tweets like, oh yeah,
 listening to Britney Spears or whatever.
 I'm like, yeah, I am.
 But I don't see how that's actually a very useful
 interaction.
 Like, what I realized is like, this isn't, it's not doing
 anything for me, except like people are like, whoa,
 Britney Spears.
 You mean the information that's shared passively by.
 Passive sharing.
 And all encompassing are two things that I think we are
 discovering are somewhat less desirable than Facebook
 assumed they would be.
 Some of the passive stuff is stuff that I want to look back
 on, like I know people are talking about how the
 Instagram stuff is geotagged.
 So it can be helpful.
 For instance, my sister went to England a year or so ago
 and took a bunch of photos.
 And I think that's all geotagged.
 So if I wanted to find places she'd been to, I'd
 probably do that.
 And I'm really interested in stuff like Foursquare, getting
 to know, like if my friends like restaurants and things
 like that, finding recommendations.
 But I don't need to know that.
 But you think of like Yelp and Foursquare as discrete things
 for those, right?
 Yeah, a little bit.
 Don't you think of like Yelp as like a discrete way to go
 find good restaurants?
 That's another thing where you're choosing very
 specifically, I want to share the specific type and amount
 of data.
 In this place.
 I also think there's part of Instagram where it hasn't
 blown up.
 I mean, it's huge.
 It's huge, but it's not a billion people.
 No, it is.
 It's a billion people.
 OK.
 It's huge, but it's not.
 Is that right?
 Is that a new stat?
 Is Instagram a billion people?
 No.
 I'm kidding.
 I was going to say, I've never heard that.
 A billion dollars.
 It's not like nearly.
 It's some enormous number.
 No, it's a high number.
 But you can share.
 You don't remember when everybody's pissed their
 parents came on to Facebook?
 Yeah.
 Not everybody's parents are on Instagram yet.
 Not yet.
 So you can share with kind of a small crowd.
 Yeah, like Snapchat's trending.
 Or Vine or whatever your parents isn't on.
 Whatever they use it on.
 It depends on if you think of your parents as a singular or
 a plural.
 It's actually a really good point.
 How many parents are there?
 If you have more than one.
 I have one parent.
 I can't tell anything to my parents
 without my parents knowing.
 Oh, they're like a unit where you can't share secrets.
 If I call them on the phone, they get together in a room
 and talk to me.
 I'll speak to them.
 Yeah, my parents love to get on the phone.
 Close to 90 million.
 Well, this was several months ago, so I got it
 probably close to your home.
 90 million monthly active.
 So probably more registered.
 But Instagram is growing.
 I think the point about like.
 Almost a billion.
 I think the point about recommendations, like food
 recommendations, is like, I think in the same way that I
 don't know.
 I don't want to have like an Apple car and an Apple phone
 and like an Apple house and like an Apple camera.
 Like I like to have.
 I think they're.
 Well, I mean, I don't necessarily want to have all
 of the same thing.
 I don't think that everybody's all.
 Like that Apple would be good at making every product.
 I don't believe that.
 Like I don't think most companies would be good at
 making every product.
 You know what product Apple really sucked at?
 What?
 Making a social network?
 Yeah.
 Well, OK.
 And a great example.
 Bad at making a social network.
 Bad at making web stuff.
 I think bad at email and calendaring stuff.
 Maps.
 Really not bad at maps.
 And by the way, and we've talked about this a lot, but it
 is that ecosystem.
 Address book applications?
 Yeah.
 It is that lock-in.
 Really good at making faux leather apps.
 Facebook wants to do.
 Good desktop photos.
 Facebook would like to be there for everything.
 But I think what human beings really want is like the things
 that are best for those things.
 And that's what they're going to use.
 And like people, I think, gravitate and like the
 simplicity of a single use application.
 Because you know what it's doing.
 You know what it's doing, and you know that like the data is
 all meant for that purpose.
 You know, like Instagram, there's not more to the story.
 You shared a picture.
 You maybe said something about it.
 Maybe it says where you are.
 That's the entire interaction.
 It's a single use.
 Makes total sense.
 Super easy to process.
 Like when you're presented with these myriad options and
 ways you can share and ways you can connect things, I think
 it becomes overwhelming.
 I think the moment that's a little problem for Facebook.
 I think the moment.
 They're becoming a portable.
 A portable?
 A portable.
 They're becoming a portal.
 And I think a portal is a dangerous place to them.
 And also, they're very portable.
 But that's basically what they said.
 We want to be in the newspaper for you.
 Yeah.
 But people have newspapers.
 They don't.
 And they don't want to read.
 People don't want to read the version on Facebook.
 They want to see a link from the version.
 Yeah.
 They're not pulling out content.
 Please join us.
 I think what they're saying is, I think all these single
 use apps are great.
 But I think their point is, we can pull in all that data.
 We can pull in Instagram.
 It's what they have to do.
 It's so big and so predominant that all these other networks
 will have to connect to us.
 You don't want to open up your Facebook browser into your
 Facebook feed and then get off the internet.
 That's not what people do.
 And that's not what they're going to do.
 And if apps are any indication and phones are any indication,
 they're also not going to do it on their mobile devices.
 It just isn't how we want to interact with things.
 You don't want to sit down at your world terminal,
 experience world stuff, and then turn it off.
 Wait, wait.
 That sounds amazing.
 I love the world terminal.
 What?
 You can purchase a world terminal?
 You wake up in the morning.
 You turn on your Facebook terminal, Facebook PC or
 whatever, your Facebook screen.
 It watches you for the rest of the day.
 You turn it on.
 Facebook, it's pulling in all of the stuff.
 It's like you would be mistaken if you felt that that's what
 Google was doing because it isn't.
 Google searches the memes to an end.
 It's not the place to go.
 Google's building pluses is way under.
 It's like Google's not working.
 Well, that's true.
 Well, that's the goal.
 We're talking from our perspective, and a lot of
 people we know perspective, of wanting variety and always
 choosing, like I'm not going to do my photos on Facebook,
 but I'm doing it on Instagram.
 But it totally still makes sense for Facebook to cast as
 wide of a net as possible.
 It makes sense for them to do this.
 I'm assuming this report will go up very soon.
 You're angry because you're angry.
 It's because we're not wearing headphones.
 We can't hear ourselves.
 I can hear you guys perfectly.
 You sound great.
 No, Adrian's writing a report, and the metaphor that was in
 it that I was reading just before set down was Facebook
 wants to be bigger than a container.
 They want to be the container ship.
 Facebook wants to be the social network of record.
 Yeah, it just went up.
 So in there, she says, Facebook wants to be not just
 the biggest container, but the container ship.
 I'm more interested in all these single use apps, and
 Facebook is where you go, and you can see all the things
 people are sharing.
 You can see all the photos from Instagram that they're
 using, but they will be so big that companies like Twitter
 will have to integrate things.
 If I'm wearing Instagram photos, go on Facebook.
 Yeah, they do.
 They're their own Facebook.
 I know they own it.
 But they put it.
 Yeah, you can connect to that.
 I think you can disconnect it, yeah.
 Well, I mean, because I actually have some behavior
 like I'll see people there like they like
 this Instagram photo.
 And the Instagram photo appears in their feed if you
 like something.
 But I think you have to specifically
 tell it to do that.
 I'm not really sure.
 By the way, this is why Facebook is a problem.
 I don't know if Instagram stuff will appear automatically,
 or if I can turn it on and off, or if it's just on certain
 actions like lights.
 That's the worst.
 Facebook has turned into some weird combination.
 It's Windows.
 It's an operating system.
 It's XP, where it's like, how do I make this
 thing stop appearing?
 How do I change this?
 I always turn off Mac.
 Where do I adjust the time?
 Like, I don't understand.
 It's very easy.
 It's a weird combination of a country and an operating
 system.
 I know.
 I know it's easy.
 You just double click the clock.
 No, but you put an old person in front of XP for the first
 time to ask them to do anything that involves
 changing anything.
 And you put an old person in front of Facebook for the
 first time, immediate dong picks.
 Dude, you just can't help it.
 Here's what I want to know.
 And then I want to change topics.
 But here's what I want to know.
 Since Facebook has changed its search, I have done more Bing
 searches.
 Because you've just been let in.
 Because I'm trying to do a search that it can't do.
 And I'm just like, OK, fine.
 Bing's traffic has got to be skyrocketing right now.
 Yeah, it has to be.
 It's got to be.
 I want to find numbers.
 So if you do a search on Facebook, it automatically
 also searches Bing?
 If you do a search on Facebook, let's say like,
 hold on, I can't type here and talk.
 Let's just say Paul Miller.
 Press the Siri button on that line.
 Offline, OK?
 Is there a Siri button?
 Well, hold on.
 In OS X?
 It's just a rotation button.
 Paul Miller offline news.
 If I search for this, it doesn't find anything.
 And so it brings up a web search.
 And so I'm like, OK.
 Oh, so it's another click.
 It's a second click.
 And it kicks you over to Bing, a Bing search.
 And you agreed to do that on a regular basis?
 Well, sometimes I just do it out of habit.
 I want to see what results it pulls up.
 Because I'm looking for it.
 And it's happened a number of times.
 And I'm like, oh, yeah, I just Binged that.
 But their traffic, it has to be the best thing in the world
 for Bing.
 I'm sure.
 I mean, I feel like Microsoft got an incredible slam dunk
 on this thing.
 Or Bing is just really confused.
 Because Bing is always having to search for random people
 that it doesn't know anything about.
 I don't know if the people are using
 GraphQL or something.
 Uncle Steve.
 I don't know if people are even using GraphQL.
 They're probably not using it.
 But I have to imagine there's some kick up there.
 I just hate Bing.
 Bing it.
 OK, so what else do we have topic-wise?
 Well, you went to TED last week.
 Oh, yeah, I went to TED.
 I wrote a feature on it.
 Trent wrote a thing last week.
 You went to TED.
 Would you say you're an influencer, Josh?
 I would say that no.
 I would say that, well, my cloud score, I think, does say
 I'm an influencer.
 Are you TED active?
 I've been active at TED.
 So I went to TED all last week.
 And I'd never been.
 I'd only seen the TED talks online, which everybody has
 seen and everybody loves.
 If you like to hear smart people talking, you like TED
 talk.
 It's like bite-sized intelligence.
 It's like I'm not going to college.
 I'm not going to learn this thing all the way through.
 But this person's going to make me feel that I have, that I
 can now speak with authority on the mating rituals of
 African frogs.
 Based on a 20-minute talk, I have so much authority.
 I know everything I know about dinosaurs.
 I know everything I know about malaria.
 So here's what they don't give you, you don't see talks on,
 is the TED experience.
 What it's like to be at TED, and what I realize is that at
 TED, it's like you're in this, and I use this metaphor, the
 snow globe metaphor.
 But it's like you're in this world with all these people.
 Really smart, really talented, really rich, really famous.
 The most famous, most rich, most talented, weirdest group
 of people that may ever assemble, which to their
 credit is, I've got to say, it's kind of amazing that you
 can get Ben Affleck and Bono and Bill Gates and me.
 I'm just a random journalist guy there.
 And all these weird, I met a ton of journalists there and a
 ton of artists.
 Amanda Palmer, or she's known more rawly, Amanda fucking
 Palmer, and that's her name.
 I have no idea.
 See, you're so in the world.
 By the way, not listed as Amanda fucking Palmer on any
 of the TED stuff.
 That's just raw.
 All these weird people together, and performers and
 musicians.
 Jugglers.
 Jugglers.
 No, they have a dance crew.
 I met movie directors, directors of movies that you
 know, that you have seen, that are like you love.
 No, you specifically.
 Really?
 Me specifically?
 And so it's just weird.
 Understand of John Carter.
 No, not John Carter.
 Like what?
 Harry Potter?
 I can't tell you, man.
 Like Harry Potter?
 I'll just say, I'm going to say it's a music movie.
 Leave it at that.
 Recent music movie.
 Anyhow.
 But the thing is, it's perfect.
 No.
 Also, really?
 Really?
 But my point is that you're in this bubble.
 That you love?
 That's magic, Mike.
 The thing that's weird about Ted that you don't know, I'm
 just going to say this really quickly, and then we can go on
 with our lives.
 It's like you're in this bubble with all these people,
 and you don't really leave.
 You're in this convention center.
 You're in this arena for a party.
 You go to the aquarium for a party at night.
 They have parties and weird things at all of the hotels.
 It's like four hotels, and it's in a mile radius.
 And you're not supposed to go, really.
 You're supposed to be there the whole time.
 And it just becomes this weird get up at 830 in the morning,
 and off to some sessions.
 Then you're mingling and eating all day, and then party at
 night, and then cage match.
 And it's like 2 in the morning.
 You're like, I'm still with all these same people at Ted.
 What's going on?
 We're still all hanging out.
 And everybody's talking about the ideas.
 And it's just this weird utopian, this little micro
 world that's created for a week, and then it's gone.
 Lame is?
 No.
 You damn dropped all those other assholes.
 Those are people who are known.
 So you're not supposed to talk about who's there.
 That's one of the rules.
 Oh, I didn't know that.
 Sorry.
 OK, I'll keep on guessing.
 Director of Never Say Never.
 He's an awesome dude.
 Really nice guy.
 I shouldn't have said that.
 I'm going to be banned from Ted for life now.
 That's the other thing.
 They're like, scary.
 They'll ban you again.
 I bet they will.
 They'll ban you and mess you up bad.
 It just sounds like some weird combination of a floating
 island nation state plus a really hippy dippy rebel
 on a call.
 I describe it as a temporary autonomous zone, which is the
 anarchist and writer Hakeem Bey coined in 1991, which is
 basically this nation state that rises up, that's like
 secret, it's an idea, a place, a mindset, some kind of
 traveling band.
 It's like Burning Man.
 Burning Man for the realities.
 But really organized Burning Man.
 Burning Man meets like Amram.
 It's fascist Burning Man.
 Kind of, yeah.
 It's like super elite Burning Man, but with a point.
 There's a point.
 Burning Man is like, I got to masculine, let's go out to the
 desert.
 This is like, I got some ideas, let's go to Long Beach.
 It's moving to Vancouver next year, which by the way, I
 think is even more isolated.
 Vancouver, Canada.
 Which I think is even more isolated.
 There is no LA you can drive to.
 The closest city is like Victoria or something.
 Is Vancouver.
 It's like, Victoria, Vancouver, and then Victoria
 is not too far away.
 But it's like, whatever.
 I just went to Whistler, which is out in Vancouver.
 That was a pain in the ass.
 Whistler is where they're going to have Ted active.
 No, that's so hard to get.
 It's hard enough to fly into Vancouver, and then you have
 to drive to Whistler, and you just want to kill yourself.
 It's beautiful.
 Until you see Whistler, and you're like, thank God, I
 didn't suicide.
 I just ski.
 Lucky thing.
 It's like a ski town, right?
 So anyhow, but it was really interesting.
 And I have to say, if you have an opportunity to go to Ted, I
 recommend it.
 But the way I ended up on it is that it is, like a lot of
 people that week, especially people who were new, were like,
 this is kind of like a cult.
 Because everybody who works there is preaching the gospel
 of Ted.
 I interviewed June Cohen, who's Chris
 Anderson's right hand man.
 And she speaks very emphatically and very
 excitedly about the ideas that are going to be spread at Ted.
 And you feel very caught up in the excitement of the kind of
 a religious feeling.
 You're going to change the world.
 We're going to change the world.
 And it is like an atheist cult, is how I just started
 thinking of it.
 And like a cult of questions.
 And I say this in the piece.
 If religion is like, we got it.
 We got the answers.
 You want to know what's going on in the universe,
 like here's the deal.
 Then this is like, you want to know what's going on in the
 universe, like we don't know.
 But here's some possible ideas.
 Here's some thoughts on it.
 And maybe one guy says one thing that's polar opposite of
 the other guy.
 It to me sounds like a weird island nation state crossed
 with the hippiest liberal arts college in the Northeast.
 You could possibly drink that.
 It's exactly what it's like.
 And you never leave.
 And everyone's there to get to town.
 It's like a three hour drive.
 I said it's like a college quad, but with much older
 people.
 Yeah.
 Like when you have.
 You play any Frisbee?
 Yeah, but there was shit like that going on.
 There were people like, no, I saw some hacky sack.
 Oh, jeez.
 I saw hacky sacking.
 I bet Bono and Prince William were playing Ultimate.
 No, I'm not kidding.
 I think there was definitely somebody hacky sacking.
 And it was like people eating and eating and
 just losing.
 There's coffee everywhere, coffee everywhere.
 There's so many coffees.
 They pour over coffee.
 They're like whatever you want.
 Like 15 different types of freshly brewed teas, like
 crazy teas from the mountains of China.
 And they're like the people there are all really not.
 Also, I'm like really thirsty.
 Yeah, right?
 I want some tea.
 Excuse me.
 Oh, look at you.
 You guys really move on?
 I'd like to move on.
 The Re-Night piece is called Insight Tech, the smartest
 bubble in the world.
 I don't know if that's actually a set.
 It's not an empirical.
 That's not a factoid.
 That is a factoid.
 It's not a fact.
 There's like dumb bubbles.
 Dumb bubble.
 That would be, uh, give me salt.
 I could have salt so many.
 You know what?
 No offense, but the Teletubbies home is kind of a
 dumb bubble.
 No offense?
 For like four-year-olds, man.
 You weren't like burning a Teletubby?
 I think he's going to show up.
 What else do we have?
 Topic wise.
 We ran a bunch of pieces about women's
 technology this week.
 We did.
 We had an Elizabeth Spires piece, which I'm now told is
 how her name is pronounced.
 I've heard many, many variations.
 But she ran a piece on this kind of weird backlash.
 So actually, I want to talk about the piece.
 I won't even tell you about what it is.
 That's fine.
 There's something here that I think is very interesting.
 Something in the room?
 He's got something interesting to say, Josh.
 Say what the backlash is.
 But I want to know.
 So she ran a piece on this backlash about Remersa Maya,
 the CEO of Yahoo, saying everybody has to
 come to the office.
 And it's actually very interesting that we ran it, us,
 this site ran it.
 Because we have now moved into this office.
 And I'm watching our team change.
 And you're very egotistical point you're making.
 Complete remote team.
 And you just had a baby.
 I just had a baby.
 And I think what Neelai is saying in a roundabout way is
 that it was interesting that last week we moved into our
 new office, where we were like, hey, everybody come to
 the office.
 Because we have a new big office that we want people to
 be at.
 And Yahoo copied us by saying everybody come to the office.
 No, I know.
 I haven't been on the internet.
 But I'm just guessing the backlash is that she decided
 to do this because she's a woman?
 There's all sorts of different levels of backlash.
 But a lot of it is the tone is a lot about her being a woman
 and not a very specific kind of woman.
 And then there was this interview where somebody asked
 her if she was a feminist.
 And she said that she wasn't.
 And that's caused all this hubbub.
 There's just the tone of a lot of the conversation about her
 and Sheryl Sandberg.
 It's like there's never been a woman CEO before.
 But in the tone of the conversation is all very like.
 It's very confusing.
 So Sheryl Sandberg is the CEO of Facebook, put out a book
 called Lean In, which is all about how women should be.
 How women lead.
 How women lead, right?
 And her recommendations, as Elizabeth points out in her
 piece, are super non-controversial.
 Women should be more aggressive.
 Should ask for what they want.
 They should know that there's pay inequality in America.
 They should demand to get paid more.
 Do all of these things.
 It's stuff that if a man had written the book and said the
 same things, people would just be, either they would ignore
 it, or they would say, great points.
 But when it's a woman writing it, all of a sudden, people
 are like, how could she?
 How dare you?
 So Elizabeth's piece addressed how both of these women are
 being judged on different criteria than men.
 But the Marissa Meyer thing to me is like, yeah, who's a
 broken company?
 It doesn't work.
 It's full of people who aren't doing anything good.
 It's not making money.
 They're not innovative.
 For her to say, you all have to come into the office, and
 we're going to sit in this room and work together to
 figure out how to make our company better, is the least
 controversial thing.
 And I'll say this.
 And I'll say this.
 The second that I heard the announcement, it seemed
 obvious to me.
 Having worked at a company before, which is very large.
 Where you still wander around dreaming of hiring people.
 Yeah, where there were a lot of people who worked there,
 and a lot of them seemed really incompetent, and they
 weren't doing their job.
 And people would literally phone it in, and also
 figuratively phone it in.
 When you get to a certain size, I think it can be very
 hard to see who's great and who isn't.
 Despite your evaluations, which can obviously be like,
 you know, these written evaluations that these big
 companies do.
 I do feel that there is a motivating factor here.
 And I feel like we wrote, Ben might have written something
 about it.
 I can't remember when she first made this announcement.
 Oh, so get rid of the people.
 It's really about weeding the people who aren't great
 performers.
 She's trying to figure out how to get you to.
 And everybody's like, how could you do this?
 And the truth is, the bedside manners suck.
 That's the problem.
 Like the truth is, it could have probably been done in a
 more tactful way.
 So here's what's interesting about that.
 A, wait.
 Three things.
 So first, she had two.
 Don't just shut up.
 Shut up for three things.
 Three things.
 Well, the first one really fast.
 So she had two metrics that she used.
 One was that she has all these remote workers, and she
 noticed that many of them were not even
 logging into the VPN.
 So these people are off doing whatever at home.
 They're not on Yahoo's time.
 Second is, there were a lot of people getting paid by Yahoo
 while they founded startups, which is a huge problem.
 And they are a great problem.
 A lot of people doing Bing searches.
 And a lot of people doing Bing searches.
 Banging, banging.
 And then the third one, which is what Ben was saying, was
 this is a really great way to essentially do layoffs without
 having to lay anyone off.
 Right.
 Because you'll find people who are like, I'm not doing this.
 I'm out of here.
 Or the people won't actually live up to the requirements.
 Right.
 So I want to talk about your second point.
 Because I think when you have a big company, you have a lot
 of dead weight.
 But also, most of your good ideas are in the brains of
 those people who want to do startups.
 And I worked at a company called AOL.
 And it turns out we left.
 If I had an idea for a startup, what I could not have done is
 had that idea implemented at my company.
 If I had an idea for a startup, I would have to quit my job
 and go make that company.
 And what you want is you want smart people to do a startup
 inside of your business.
 I mean, that's what happens at Google.
 And there have been a lot of ideas that I've really liked
 at Yahoo that haven't ever.
 Yahoo essentially should be Instagram right now if they'd
 done Flickr well.
 But this is like a corporate culture thing.
 I could have.
 But it's hard to break off a single-use thing.
 Flickr's all-encompassing.
 I mean, just not getting the weeds on that.
 But I think it's a little bit hard to say like.
 They have a lot of great products.
 And they've had a lot of great ideas.
 And they always die because they don't quite go all the
 way through with them.
 I haven't seen any good ideas for a while.
 But I remember three or four or five years ago, a lot of
 cool stuff would come out of Yahoo.
 And then they'd just die.
 I think there is something on the internet that, I'm sorry.
 I just want to take a break on that point for just one quick
 second.
 I do think that people who are native to the internet and use
 the internet have a tendency and a desire to move away from
 old products that have been improved upon.
 And I don't think they have any allegiance to those
 products beyond their utility in their lives.
 An anti-allegiance because you can't understand that the old
 thing could do it.
 Right.
 I mean, at the end of the day, people who are in love with
 technology and the internet and who use it, or maybe not
 even in love with it, but use it and need it, their goals
 are, they're beholden to, I think for the most part,
 finding the best tools to do the things
 they want them to do.
 And there's so much competition and so many new
 things on the internet all the time that if there's one thing
 that you don't like about the old thing, you're just going
 to go like, I'm going to use the new thing.
 Like, who cares?
 Especially if it's free.
 Yahoo's free to use.
 Like, if something free comes along and it's better, you're
 like, I'm just going to do that.
 That's how Google's won in search.
 That's why I'm using Chrome right now.
 I'm not saying it's just Google products, all
 sorts of things.
 That's the iPhone.
 Nobody was like, I'm never giving up this Palm Pilot.
 They're like, oh, that's better?
 Thanks.
 I'm going to go use that.
 There is an aspect of, I mean, if you look at how
 Silicon Valley works, there are people with ideas.
 And those people, if they have a good enough idea and it
 looks like they can implement it, they get millions of
 dollars from somebody.
 Wait, finish that point.
 They get millions of dollars from somebody and they create
 that product.
 And I think there should theoretically be a way to be
 inside of a big company, have a great idea, looks like you
 can execute it.
 You get millions of dollars from your big
 company called Yahoo.
 You launch it, unbranded or branded, and it's a good idea.
 And then people will use it.
 You would incentivize people.
 That sounds like a theory.
 I think it's a really cool idea.
 I don't know if from a business perspective that can
 actually work.
 We're using Google Hangout right now, which was developed
 in a similar way.
 Incentivizing your employees and giving them ownership of
 the things they make and thinking you can add value to
 the company that you work for and also line your pocket
 books and become an entrepreneur in some ways, a
 really awesome idea.
 I just don't know if logically that makes any sense for a
 business like that.
 That's why people leave Google and Apple.
 That's why people are like, I'm out of here to start my
 own company.
 Also, people create great things inside of Google.
 Google's an awesome example.
 And they do.
 And I think Google is a much newer company.
 And they're much better at incubating startup ideas from
 within while letting those bubble up to the surface.
 What happens to these companies?
 We should get back to the point.
 No.
 There's actually a, we ran a second piece about Silicon
 Valley, which was very interesting.
 But what actually happens to these companies is that these
 founders leave, they build their businesses, and then they
 acquire back, because that's how the cycle actually works.
 You leave Apple, you build a company, and then you sell to
 Google.
 Maybe there's a lot.
 Maybe if Yahoo wants to have any chance of becoming a good
 It's all about mitigating risk for the company.
 So you say, go.
 Go start a company.
 Send a Google buy it.
 Yeah, but maybe there's a smarter way to do it.
 Yes, that's how it works.
 But Yahoo's sucking.
 And maybe there's a smarter way to do it.
 So maybe.
 For me, I'm kind of like a loyalist type of person.
 To be honest, if I had felt like AOL, if I'd had an idea
 and someone would allow me to build it into a product, I
 would have been interested in that.
 I like the idea of working for a company and being a part of a
 company and building a company.
 I think that's cool.
 Nice little hat you got there.
 I was popping a little bit.
 Yeah.
 Was I spiking?
 So let's talk about.
 It'd be cool if they figured.
 I want to talk about your first point.
 Is this better?
 This fantasy world of big companies investing in people
 that way is not real.
 Because what the market has chosen is to mitigate risk by
 letting you go start a startup and then buying a
 company if it's good.
 And that's how big companies are.
 And that's why you spend a billion
 dollars on Instagram.
 And that's why you buy Instagram.
 If Instagram hadn't worked, Facebook would have spent a
 billion dollars.
 But the point is, if Instagram hadn't worked, it would have
 cost Facebook $5 million in experimentation.
 Yeah, but they couldn't.
 Oh, right.
 So there are really two paths, right?
 There's the path to.
 So I want to just stop.
 I want to get back to our actual point.
 How big companies like Dwyer?
 Are we the whole end of talking?
 Do you want a diet coke or something?
 Because I'm really thirsty.
 Do you want anything?
 Are you going to leave?
 I'm too thirsty.
 Why don't you just send Ross a tooth brush.
 Can you grab a diet coke for Paul?
 I know it's not your job.
 I tried to drop a hint earlier, but I'm so thirsty.
 He did try to drop a hint.
 And you were completely telling him off here.
 Thanks, Ross.
 OK.
 Let me get back to the point.
 Please do.
 Please.
 Because I think there's something reflected in both of
 these pieces.
 I'm thirsty for debate.
 It's good.
 I'm hungry for Cheetos.
 Is that weird?
 That's just the thing.
 OK, go ahead.
 Both these pieces, the reactions to them from our
 readers and from the world reflected something that I
 think you just brought up, which is, if you have a good
 idea, the tech community will just give you
 millions of dollars.
 No, that's not true.
 I said, if you have an idea and you have the ability to
 execute it.
 Fine.
 But those are all objective criteria.
 But we ran another piece this week, which is all about how
 female founders of companies have to fight harder to get
 venture capital than male founders of employees.
 Gee, I wonder why.
 There's a structural problem there.
 Because it's a bunch of old white men running the money.
 And they have the money.
 They have control of the money.
 They invest in the people that they feel comfortable with.
 I mean, this is not some, you know, not that.
 And then I think that's even further amplified by the
 internet, which allows a bunch.
 We know the demographic of our site.
 The demographic of our site is like wealthier 18 to 35
 year old men.
 That's like the core.
 Handsome.
 Very handsome.
 And we actually have a decent female audience.
 And it's growing.
 And it is growing.
 But that's the big chunk in the middle.
 And those demographics are real.
 And that means one type of site, whatever, Reddit,
 attracts one kind of person.
 For them to say, if you come onto Reddit and your ideas are
 good, we'll support you, is like completely ignorant of
 the structural reality of Reddit.
 Of the thousands of years of subjugation of minorities and
 women by essentially white men.
 Or men in power.
 I don't see color or gender in this space.
 But that space is a reflection of reality.
 No, no, no.
 Reddit sees color and gender.
 But if you do.
 No, no, no.
 They insist that they don't.
 No, no, no, no.
 It's not about Reddit.
 It's just about the nature of humanity, which is.
 They see.
 I think it's about actually the nature of discussion on the
 internet, which is dominated by.
 There is this we're color blind.
 Yeah.
 You know, and I know.
 I'm not racist.
 How can I be racist?
 I can't even see what color you're.
 Right, exactly.
 And it's like, yeah, but you're still operating on the
 playbook of a structure that was built thousands of years
 before you came into existence.
 But typically with at least nicknames on Reddit, you can
 typically tell if it's a girl or a guy.
 That's racist.
 A lot of times.
 That's completely insane.
 No, I'm just saying.
 I can't tell that.
 I didn't know that Violent Acres was a guy.
 Just kidding.
 All I'm saying is I actually do think an idea from anybody on
 Reddit can do pretty well.
 That's fine, but like.
 Reddit's a bad example.
 Reddit is like a forum.
 It's a forum.
 Right.
 A startup is a very different thing.
 You're talking about starting an actual business and having
 to go in front of investors.
 You make it face to face.
 I think it's all.
 Yeah, but in a book.
 You don't solve the big problem without the people.
 But Reddit's the least of the problem.
 It's a spectrum.
 It's a gradient of behaviors.
 You can say the reaction to our piece about the big problems
 from people on the internet was why do these problems
 exist, I don't even see them.
 Your action to why were there no women at the Sony event was
 1,000 comments on our site that were well, maybe there
 are no women qualified enough to do the job.
 I'm in computer science class and there are no women in
 here, maybe men just like it better.
 And that's crazy.
 Let's comment on the women at the Sony event piece.
 What happened with the Sony event?
 Well, Sony did PS4, the PS4 event.
 And they probably had 18 people on stage.
 From a variety of companies.
 From a dozen companies, not just Sony people.
 Sony just happened to not have any females in those
 positions they wanted to put on stage.
 I get it.
 But one company had one woman that could speak about their
 product on stage at the event.
 It just seems really weird.
 And by the way, people are like, you don't have any women
 on the Vergecast.
 The Vergecast is like a show.
 It's like, there's no women in Poison.
 Poison's a band.
 They started the band.
 It's like four guys and they're Poison.
 The Vergecast is us for the most part.
 And we do have agreement on the Vergecast.
 We try to keep it this group of three.
 We try to keep women down.
 We try to keep women down.
 But the point is, we're like a band.
 We are.
 But I don't think we're perfect.
 Am I happy with the amount of women we have in roles here,
 in senior roles or whatever?
 No.
 Am I happy with the amount of minorities that we have?
 I mean, we have Neelai and that's pretty much it.
 That's it.
 I try to carry the torch for everyone.
 We're not perfect.
 And we're also working against this thousands of years of
 the structure of society.
 But I think no one's perfect.
 But I think the first step is saying, yeah, we can be better.
 But the people on the internet are saying, what's the problem?
 It's a meritocracy everywhere.
 Look around.
 You have an idea on the internet.
 It's great.
 The only thing worse than what you're describing of the Sony
 event, which I didn't see.
 It's forcing women on stage.
 Because I have seen this happen at a lot of gaming
 announcements that Microsoft and Sony have done.
 Where like, here's our token woman who enjoys fitness apps.
 And pandering is just as bad as the other thing.
 I think it's definitely worse.
 And I would rather have a reflection.
 My favorite thing at the gaming announcement things,
 whatever you call them, keynotes, gaming keynotes, and
 I've been to a lot, is when the guy who is the number one guy
 at that company or building that game, that guy or woman,
 but it's typically a guy who is heading that project, walks
 out on stage and plays his game, that means a lot to me.
 And so I wouldn't want a woman thrust into that role.
 And so if the only games that matter is motion.
 The question's not about how you put out on stage.
 The bigger question and the fundamental question is, are we
 building industries, new industries, that are as open
 and welcoming to women and minorities as they should be?
 And if people on the internet keep going, of course, you're
 on the internet.
 Doesn't matter.
 It's all equal.
 Everybody's the same.
 And the actual thing that's happening in the board rooms
 and the offices of the world that are actually where these
 companies are happening is the old school stuff that's been
 going on for 500 years or longer or whatever.
 Then we have a bad disconnect.
 Because you go on one hand, you're like, nothing's wrong.
 It's like there's a war going on.
 And you're like, I can't see the war.
 So there's no war.
 I will say this idea of the enforced meritocracy of the
 internet is flawed from conception.
 Because if you say you come on the internet, you have a good
 idea, you'll win.
 Who is the judge?
 Who's saying this idea is good?
 This idea is bad?
 And it requires more than just a good idea.
 It requires a lot of really hard work.
 The internet is a slightly different version of life.
 Which is, yeah, I think you do have more opportunities if you
 have an idea to get that idea heard and to make
 something out of it.
 But it doesn't mean that if you have a good idea that you
 are going to make something out of it and that people are
 going to care.
 It just means that you have an opportunity.
 I will agree.
 Sorry, I'm stuck.
 And I'm sorry because I haven't been part of this
 larger discussion that happened on the internet.
 And wait, in the page of the New York Times and the Wall
 Street Journal.
 It's like a big deal.
 But anyhow, to your point.
 I literally do not.
 I will totally agree that there are way less women in
 the video game industry than there should be, maybe, and
 that I would like to see and even could be.
 But I really do not see any systemic effort or reason why
 they can't be.
 Well, I think that on its face, yeah, it's probably
 true, but we're getting into territory, which is the
 structure of business.
 And let's just say, let's take America for a moment.
 But this is all over the world.
 The structure of businesses in the world and in America and
 the ways that we have learned to interact.
 I mean, there are deep reasons why women are paid less than
 men in the same position and why it's harder for women to
 get into those.
 And also, in terms of our education, the types of ways
 that we push people into, what types of industries we push
 them into, is dramatically effected.
 And what is an open and accepting industry for women
 to feel that they can go into versus one that men feel
 comfortable going into?
 Just the way most men don't want to go into the industry
 of fashion, I'm sure most men you know don't think that
 that's an open, welcoming industry that they can be part
 of and be a man.
 I know a bunch of guys in fashion, but yes.
 I see what you're saying.
 You live in New York, and you're a weird guy, so you
 know people in fashion.
 But typically, out in the Midwest, people aren't like,
 I really want to go into fashion.
 For men, that's not a job that seems like a job for them.
 Just like many jobs are, historically, we were pushing
 people towards these things because of the structure of
 society, which is fundamentally unfair to groups
 of people.
 I do think there's something.
 So I can't speak to all the edges.
 Oh man, we're in dangerous territory.
 I don't think we're in dangerous territory.
 I think we're saying really obvious things.
 I can't speak to the education side of what people push
 towards, and I can't speak to the larger corporate
 structures because I don't understand them very well.
 But I will say, especially knowing a gamer community, and
 the gaming industry is relatively young.
 So you may have people kind of creating companies that are
 kind of, well just let me say it.
 You have people creating just relatively new companies that
 they can kind of form in their own way.
 Companies like Valve, this is a very new generation.
 How many women there at an executive level?
 How many women are there?
 There are women there, but I'd like to know the breakdown.
 But I'm just saying that if you're a woman and you show up
 for that, I don't think you have an uphill climb.
 You're right.
 I know you are absolutely 100% wrong, and it's because you
 don't know what's been going on.
 Right?
 And that's it.
 And now I'm frustrated with it because there's an entire set
 of tweets and articles as hashtag one reason why, which
 is just women in the games industry complaining and
 noting the problems, the deep structural problems they face
 to advance, to make games, to be put in positions of
 leadership.
 I think what he's saying, the only thing that, well, Paul
 saying the opportunity to have a new company that thinks
 differently is there because we're creating
 these new industries.
 But the reality is that there are layers of societal issues
 that are causing companies to be formed using the same bad,
 broken tactics that we've been using forever in business,
 which does subjugate women and minorities basically, whether
 we like it or not.
 Right.
 And what I'm saying is it's great.
 I don't think that people go into interviews at EA or
 wherever and there's like a, oh, you're a woman,
 get out of here.
 I think that there's a real tendency to say, I think this
 is why, for example.
 You know, NVIDIA at CES.
 Perfect example.
 Their keynote with the girl, with the, you don't remember?
 I was PTSD.
 Jen Sun had this girl come out and he's like, take a
 picture of me and I'm going to take my jacket off.
 And she was like, you're a gamer, right?
 And it was like this totally awful, and it's like, just
 that that is even existing.
 There's that overt gross sexism that's still like, here.
 But that speaks to a.
 So I guess I should walk this back a little bit.
 I see that.
 But that overt sexism speaks to a much more subtle underlying
 sexism that just kind of infects.
 Why are you shaking your head at me?
 I'm not shaking your head at you.
 Right.
 OK.
 They're just kind of.
 I'm irritated by this entire topic.
 They're just kind of.
 Why?
 Because it's not that we're discussing it.
 I'm thoroughly enjoying our discussion.
 Yeah, you seem very upset about it.
 I'm very upset because it's.
 You're upset at Paul.
 Yeah, it's OK.
 I'm a little upset.
 I love you too.
 You're mad at Paul because he's e, you feel he's missing.
 I guess a part of this debate.
 I've missed the discussion.
 I'm very naive on this.
 Most of the gamer culture that I see and I participate in
 seems very welcoming and very overtly.
 I think that the mindset of the gamers and many of the.
 Well, let me put it to you this way.
 Sometimes in gaming, to be honest, I see a more inclusive
 community that is more rapidly welcoming of somebody who
 might not always be.
 I think you're looking at the best of the best.
 And I think those people are out there.
 Online gaming is a Vergecraft world that
 built a shrine to you.
 No, no, no, no, no.
 I've participated in all sorts of games.
 I think if you asked my wife, what is it like playing
 Xbox?
 She would say an eight-year-old races Screams at you.
 No, no, no.
 That's the market.
 That's the mainstream market.
 I think Paul, and I'm not trying to defend him, not that
 we're attacking him, but to his point, I think Paul is, and I
 think that it gives you a bad perspective on this, you are
 not an aggressive hardcore gamer.
 There's types of games that you like that are a little bit
 more indie, a little bit more weird.
 And I think you're exposed to a part of the industry that is
 more progressive, at least in terms of its demo.
 You know what I mean?
 There are a lot of female players of World of Warcraft.
 We know that.
 And I think that that is a more inclusive demographic.
 But it does not reflect in the industry that is making World
 of Warcraft.
 I think that's the problem.
 There are female players and female developers, and there
 are women who do these things.
 It's just not truly reflective of the industry.
 Not even close.
 And that's the problem.
 And games are big business with a lot of money.
 And technology is a big business with a lot of money.
 And that amount of money just attracts assholes.
 So you might see there's weird.
 You're still building off of a model that's an old model.
 It's just we're building businesses off of a model.
 For example, we're sending a lot of people to
 South by Southwest this week.
 And I went last year, and I couldn't stand it.
 Because it was such a, at its core, South by is supposed to
 be a, it's supposed to be Ted.
 It's full of ideas.
 Everybody's here.
 They're happy.
 Let's go to a bunch of stuff.
 Slow down, my man.
 No, but it is supposed to be a celebration of the tech
 community, of the startup community.
 And I walked around basically meeting a bunch of people who
 I thought had hokey ideas.
 It's drunk dudes on the startup bus.
 And they all thought they were going to get rich.
 And look, I have to say, read when Kara Swisher writes about
 the pig pile of Silicon Valley.
 She's talking about an old boys club.
 She's talking about almost literally is the room with the
 guys smoking cigars and no women allowed.
 That's a real thing.
 And it sucks.
 How do I get to this room?
 Yeah, how do I get out of here?
 What are they drinking?
 Can I have some?
 Brandy.
 But anyhow, look, even that kind of joke is sexist.
 We're horrible sexists.
 And I feel terrible.
 But the truth is we are not as advanced as we'd like to be.
 Let's put it that way.
 The tech industry thinks it's a lot more advanced than it is.
 And that's the problem.
 I think the problem is everybody in this industry.
 We're busy congratulating ourselves.
 We're right.
 Going, I'm colorblind.
 I'm blind to gender.
 I don't care about this stuff.
 But actually, your actions and the statistics don't even come
 close to reflecting that.
 And so that's a problem.
 I think being aware of it is how you start to fix it.
 You say, is there a problem?
 Are we not being as inclusive as we can be?
 Can we find ways to involve more people, different kinds
 of people in this?
 Because they can bring something new and exciting to
 it, and we're ignoring that because we're working off of
 an old playbook.
 I think that's the start.
 And then I don't think there's affirmative action in the
 tech industry that you need to force people into jobs.
 I just think you need to recognize that we're not as
 socially sophisticated as the tech industry wants to be.
 You want to be this colorblind.
 Everybody wants to say, we're colorblind.
 We're genderblind.
 Let's just do this thing all together.
 Let's hold hands and jump into this exciting
 new abyss of technology.
 But the truth is, we're working off playbooks that are
 like the oil tycoons.
 We're working off the same playbook.
 I'll just say I'm optimistic because the gamer community I
 see, the people creating the indie games right now, and the
 people who are going to be leading the industry in the
 future, seem to be a lot of pretty great, interesting
 people.
 And I think we do have an opportunity.
 This industry does have an opportunity to fix a lot of
 what has been broken for a long time in this equality
 conversation.
 But although I will say, our biggest, beyond the who's on
 stage criticism of the PS4 event, but our biggest
 context or constant criticism was, all these games look like
 shooters.
 They are.
 They're driving games.
 And honestly, it's like, you know what?
 If you only wear the same guys to make your games, or the
 same types of guys to make your games, you're only going
 to end up shooting.
 I like a game where you're shooting
 someone who's the same squad.
 But they are.
 They're like, the government's surveilling you, but what if
 you had superpowers?
 Wait.
 That's where the money is, but at the same time, Sony
 promotes, has in-house, some of the best, most artistic,
 interesting developers as well.
 If only they were allowed to do things other than make
 Killzone 30.
 No, no, no, no.
 I mean, Journey and Flower.
 Yeah, but there's a big batch.
 There's a huge gulf between, I just want to say, getting more
 specifically to games.
 Little Big Planet?
 Those are all from Extrate from Sony.
 There's a huge gulf between these whimsical cartoon games
 and games about real things.
 Sure, there's War Room.
 But look at movies.
 There are movies that are serious adult movies.
 They're about human drama.
 Sometimes they're violent.
 Sometimes they're romantic.
 Sometimes they're about a mystery.
 There's all these wild places that movies go.
 Sometimes they're very meta.
 They're commentary, social commentary.
 So all of these things in games really.
 And then there's also cartoon movies.
 There's Wreck-It Ralph.
 And there's all these different types of cartoon
 movies.
 Sony also has exclusively that Ellen Page game.
 The Ellen Page game at the end of the day, it's like, you're
 a girl.
 You're superpowers.
 You've got to kill these cops.
 Sure, but it's like you've got to go.
 I'm just saying, if you're going to compare Sony and
 Microsoft, Sony's way further advanced in terms of this.
 Not way further.
 A little bit further.
 Just take the games industry as a whole.
 What does Microsoft have?
 This is why.
 Let me just say.
 Viva Pinata?
 Can I stop this for one second?
 I'm just saying that there's a whole gulf of places that
 games don't go.
 Sony, Microsoft, whoever.
 I agree.
 And we're safe, and what we really need, I think what we
 really want is more people, more diversity, more ideas.
 I don't care where they even come from.
 Just let's be accepting of them.
 This is a totally different topic.
 God, we're so off topic.
 And I have to go, because I actually have a
 meeting in two minutes.
 Is it the meeting?
 No.
 Never mind.
 Whoa.
 That'll blow everything.
 Josh is getting his facial implant.
 I'm finally getting the ability.
 I'm going to get the ability to laugh.
 Josh has Google Glass 2.0, which is going to go inside
 his brain.
 So we didn't.
 This was the last topic.
 Do we need to talk about it?
 We didn't talk about it last week on the first cast,
 because you did a big feature, and then you went around.
 Google Glass.
 I want you to talk about it.
 Oh, yeah.
 And I want to talk about it.
 Josh, I literally know nothing.
 I want to talk about it.
 Please tell me.
 A never-ending series of watch rumors from every company
 that I'm so familiar with.
 Yeah, and I have like two minutes, and then I have to
 go for real.
 What's it like?
 It's like not that jarring.
 I think people have made this assumption that when you're
 wearing it, it somehow creates some overlay on your vision,
 your field of vision.
 It's just like you're using it, and there's a little thing
 up here.
 And if you look up, you see it.
 And if you don't look up, it goes away.
 So there's a little glass cube.
 Do you perceive that cube?
 Not really.
 It's a glass cube, exactly.
 No, not really.
 Once it's on, you're not thinking about it.
 So you never see the edge of it with your other eye?
 In my memory of the experience of using it, I wasn't like,
 ugh, this thing's hanging over my eye.
 It didn't feel like that.
 You know it's there, but it doesn't feel.
 It's like wearing glasses.
 I see the rim of my glasses right now.
 And maybe I'm less sensitive too, because I wear glasses
 all the time.
 But I see my glasses all the time.
 Like when I look over here, there's my glasses.
 There they are.
 They're right there.
 So it's a lot like that, except it also shows stuff in
 your field of vision.
 And it's just this thing, this little information cube.
 And here's the thing.
 I probably wouldn't wear Google Glass in its current
 form unless I was in very specific situations.
 Dire straits.
 If I was jamming with dire straits.
 And you needed a tab.
 The tabular for it.
 And I needed to make sure I could see the notes of money
 for nothing.
 No, in certain situations, like I'm doing something crazy,
 or taking a roller coaster, or I don't know, if I had kids
 and you were hanging out with your video for the roller
 coaster.
 Because you could do video and pictures and stuff.
 There are times, like I'm looking at my dog and I'm like,
 man, I wish I could take a picture of this right now.
 That would be awesome.
 Is that the primary application?
 The camera?
 I think it's no.
 I think that the camera's a big piece.
 But I think also this kind of non-intrusive message
 notifications.
 Non-intrusive, like you get a text message and you're like
 that, instead of going like that.
 I think that's a big deal for them.
 Would you rather go like that or like that?
 For people who listen to audio.
 Would you rather look at a watch?
 Or?
 It's all a strata of distraction.
 I think taking your phone out, unlocking it, and looking at
 the thing is a huge distraction.
 Also, physically disruptive to what you're doing.
 I think this is less distracting, but also somewhat
 physically disruptive.
 Looking at a watch.
 I mean, looking at a watch is not that hard.
 I do it all the time.
 But is it as easy as doing this?
 It's not.
 So here's the thing.
 At the end of the day, the big questions are,
 they look goofy.
 People are like, they look goofy.
 But if they don't look goofy, then let's just say they're
 going to be.
 Do you have to refocus on the thing?
 Yeah, it kind of is like it's off in the distance.
 This feels like it's getting off.
 It feels like you're focusing on it.
 How do you wear glasses?
 How does it work for you?
 My prescription's not super strong.
 OK.
 Did you wear it in lieu of glasses?
 Well, they're working on a version that can take.
 So they have a thing that I put on these sunglasses that
 kind of like twist and they snap into the frame.
 And so what they're doing is that they're working on making
 versions of that for prescription lenses.
 So you can get a prescription lens for it and stick it in.
 The holy grail is to integrate it right into the lens.
 The holy grail is like I go to buy these glasses.
 Like, do you want that with Google Glass or without?
 And that'll be an extra $1,000 or whatever the price, $500.
 If these had Google Glass, I'd be like, that's awesome.
 Let's do that.
 Because you don't worry about it.
 Because I don't have to worry about it.
 If I want to use it, I can use it.
 Would you not want some extra help?
 Like if you're walking around.
 I don't think I've ever looked at your eyes and glasses as
 much in a conversation.
 One of the coolest things.
 It's very romantic.
 One of the coolest things.
 Josh, I never knew you.
 I could never tell the color of people's eyes.
 Like bluish-gray?
 Brown?
 Really?
 I have no idea.
 Bluish-green.
 I don't even know the color.
 What do you think?
 Bluish-gray and then brown.
 What color would you say my eyes are?
 What colors would your blue eyes?
 No, they're like a.
 I grew up and I had blue eyes.
 They look blue to me.
 Did they change color?
 They're a little smokier.
 They're like a smoky blue.
 Very jealous of all of you.
 Anyhow.
 Josh, what color eyes do you have?
 They're like greenish.
 One of them looks different colors.
 Is this Ross's good television?
 You look like a snake.
 Paul just said, and I quote, you look like a snake.
 I'm terrified of you.
 By the way, Chinese astrological sign, snake, year
 of, the snake.
 You look like the Witcher.
 It's time to close this thing.
 Anyhow, that's the Vergecaster this week.
 Oh, I'm sorry.
 Can you get turn-by-turn directions and cool stuff?
 Yeah, so that's what I was going to say.
 The coolest thing is you get out of the train.
 You're walking around.
 You're like, how do I get to there?
 Turn-by-turn, right here.
 The only thing I'm worried about is whether you have to
 refocus your eyes.
 It's not like a crazy refocusing.
 It's like I'm looking at you, and then I'm looking at the
 wall and back.
 It's not even that much, probably.
 You know what?
 Just a little feature request.
 I would kind of like if you had Google Glass and it was in
 your actual glasses, if it would, I think Google Glass
 needs some outward-focused aspects to let people know
 Google Glass is doing things.
 I think it needs a record light.
 You can see the light on, but it's very subtle.
 A red light would be probably.
 Yeah, a red light, because I think it's really rude.
 Right, well, I was going to say the other big thing is
 are they cool?
 But then the other question is privacy.
 That's really terrible.
 The other thing is if you have.
 And I went in and I went into Starbucks and filmed, and
 nobody said anything to me.
 If you have, what should we call it?
 It looks like the Terminator.
 I was like, if you say something to me, I will blow
 your head off.
 But also, if you have glasses, it would be cool.
 If you have turn-by-turn, I'd almost want the arrows to show
 up your vision.
 No, no, just because I want to see if you're looking at
 something else other than me.
 The ultimate.
 OK, that's, yeah.
 You know.
 OK.
 Maybe you can have a little LED thing that says, using
 turn-by-turn.
 Like a little scrawl aid thing.
 OK, that's our Vergecast for the 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 when it goes up.
 We'd love that.
 You could post something in forums, if
 you want, on the site.
 You can also find us on Twitter.
 The Verge is at Verge.
 I'm Joshua Topolsky.
 Neal I is reckless.
 And Paul is future Paul.
 Soon to return to the internet when?
 May 1.
 May 1.
 I mean, we're just creeping right up on it.
 Yeah.
 Just creeping up behind it.
 That's right.
 And we're wearing Google Glass.
 And we're wearing Google Glass.
 And we're recording.
 And we'll be back next week with more Vergecasty goodness.
 And until then, I think don't worry about what's in the
 back seat of your car.
 It's probably nothing.