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Robinhood’s in better shape than it looks

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Never mind the House hearing, the company’s full steam ahead

So here we are: about to have a hearing about GameStonk. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is going to have to explain himself tomorrow. What happens next for Robinhood?

Perhaps you recall last month, when GameStop stock shot up by as much as 500 percent, hitting a peak of $483 on January 28th, thanks largely to memes and a shitposting finance subreddit. (I’m sure there will be entire academic books written on r/WallStreetBets. There is a paper already.) Many of the retail traders involved in the GameStop buying frenzy were using Robinhood, and the company became part of the meme — even though it had to limit trades on GameStop. The run-up had a populist theme: the little guys were gonna show the hedge funds; they were gonna make those dang short-sellers pay. The GameStop meme was a ton of free publicity for Robinhood, though the public outcry about limited trades means the House of Representatives is now inquiring.

The House Financial Services Committee is going to have a hearing! This will be fun political theater, but it’s unlikely to have any kind of serious outcome. That’s probably why Robinhood is still planning to go public this year. Robinhood topped Apple’s mobile app store for days, and more than half a million people downloaded it, CNBC reports.

“They actually have an incredible opportunity with new users right now,” said Catherine Lamberton, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, Wharton. The GameStonk saga is actually evidence that Robinhood has changed power dynamics in the market, she said. “They have an opportunity to keep growing with this.”

Sure, Robinhood limited GameStop trading near the peak, enraging some of its customers. But in March 2020, during the pandemic-related market crash, you may recall Robinhood had three major outages in a little more than a week. In some ways, this makes sense: Robinhood is a startup, and it was having a painful growth moment. At the time, Tenev and his co-CEO Baiju Bhatt chalked that failure up to “stress on our infrastructure.” They hadn’t predicted an event of that scale — and hadn’t planned for it.

Of course, the more famous service outage didn’t happen until January 2021, but the basic contours are the same. Robinhood hadn’t planned for an event of that scale, and when the clearinghouses raised their cash requirements, whoopsies! If this had been Twitter, there would have been a fail whale. People get mad enough when social media networks go down — but this is money. Even so, what happened last March, and again around GameStop, fit into a larger pattern of tech startup behavior.

“This is a normal startup thing,” said Lana Swartz, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media. Essentially, the move is to bring a platform to market, get it to scale, and worry about everything else later.

A lack of customer service is expected in social media companies, Swartz said. “But as Silicon Valley companies are trying to take over more and more parts of our life, that modus operandi — ‘Sorry, we don’t work now and you signed the terms of service, so it’s on you! You consented to this!’ — that way of doing things isn’t going to cut it,” Swartz said. That’s why the most interesting questions at the hearing are likely to be about the terms of service agreement, not hedge funds, short-sellers, or payment for order flow.

The question here is what small investors were led to believe and what actually happened, said Anat Admati, a professor of finance and economics at the Stanford School of Business. Robinhood does say in its terms of service that it can decline trades — but how many of its users read the terms of service? “The broader issue is that we agree to all kinds of things online,” Admati said in a telephone interview.

What’s more, with complex financial transactions, “we’ll work out the details later” is difficult to pull off, Lamberton said. “This isn’t an area where one can dabble,” she said. Lamberton wants to know how Robinhood might handle a similar mass retail event in the future: is it its goal to never let the GameStop situation happen again? Or would it instead figure out how to let mass retail events occur without its own internal system capsizing? “That decision will change their platform and also how they fit with Wall Street,” she says.

There are a lot of free things online, and the question is always how they make money, Admati said. In Robinhood’s case, that will be one of the subjects House politicians are likely to dive into — a controversial practice called “payment for order flow.” This allows market makers to bundle trades and make money through arbitrage. It could also theoretically let banks front-run retail investors, a practice which is illegal. Also, as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine notes: “The wholesaler is ordinarily filling your order at a price that is better than what’s available in the public market, so ‘front-running’ — going out and buying on the stock exchange and then turning around and selling to you at a profit — doesn’t work.”

The guest list suggests this is where we will focus. There is, first of all, Citadel Securities, which does payment for order flow for brokerages that include Robinhood. There is Melvin Capital, a hedge fund that was fabulously successful last year and had to be bailed out this year due in part to its GameStop short positions. Citadel, a hedge fund, bought a stake. To make matters more confusing, Citadel and Citadel Securities are not the same thing, though they were founded by the same guy, Ken Griffin.

The thing about payment for order flow is that Robinhood makes money when people make more trades. The company sends push notifications about positions you own, and you can set up custom price targets if you like to receive more. This is only a problem for Robinhood’s users; in general, day traders mostly don’t make money.

This is particularly true for Robinhood, actually! During “herding events” like GameStonk, when Robinhood traders crowd into a stock, “large increases in Robinhood users are often accompanied by large price spikes and are followed by reliably negative returns,” the authors of a study on Robinhood users write. Another paper views Robinhood traders as, essentially, noise.

Focusing on a hedge fund conspiracy is missing the point. Robinhood and Citadel Securities make money when people trade. It is reasonable to ask whether to limit push notifications that might prompt people to impulse-trade.

We will also hear from the Reddit representatives, CEO Steve Huffman and r/WallStreetBets user Keith “DeepFuckingValue” Gill, also known as Roaring Kitty on YouTube. I imagine this will be about day trading, and someone will have to explain r/WallStreetBets, which: good luck! I hope Gill wears his formal headband.

It’s possible Tenev will have a disastrous performance, setting Robinhood up for a world of hurt. But the questions focused on payment for order flow, hedge funds, and whether short-sellers are evil (they aren’t!) will miss the Silicon Valley thing. Part of the problem was the terms of service agreement itself — no one reads them. Robinhood absolutely had the right to restrict trades, and furthermore, Robinhood is not liable for service failures regardless of cause, including those caused by software malfunctions. There is also an arbitration clause.

What I’m getting at here is that Robinhood doesn’t have to change anything. It’s scaling rapidly. Users have agreed it can have whoopsies whenever it likes. Robinhood makes money regardless of whether its users do. Disputes go to arbitration, not court. Investors are piling in. If Tenev can ride out this hearing (and perhaps a similar one from the Senate), he’s in an excellent position for an IPO. All he has to do is let the politicians get their soundbites and not say anything horrible, and he wins.

Robinhood ran a Super Bowl ad celebrating its customers. If that’s not confidence, I’m not sure what is.

How to get more space in your Google storage

For many of us, Google storage is the modern-day hard drive. It’s the place where our most important thoughts, documents, and memories reside. But just like with a traditional hard drive, the space isn’t infinite, and running out of room can be a real problem.

By default, Google gives you 15GB of space to use for everything associated with your account. (If you have a paid G Suite account, your limit’s likely higher.) That includes content connected to Gmail, Google Drive, and all Google Photos saved after June 1st. Needless to say, data adds up fast.

You can check your current storage status by visiting this page, and if push comes to shove, you can purchase more space there, too, for as little as $2 a month for an extra 100GB. But shelling out more money might not be necessary. A quick round of old-fashioned housekeeping could be enough to clear away your virtual cobwebs and give yourself ample room to grow. Here’s how to do it.

Delete Drive debris

Google Drive is a common place for space-sucking files to build up and wear down your quota, but tidying things up doesn’t take long.

Open this link, which will show you a list of all of your Drive files sorted by size with the largest items at the top
Look through the heftiest offenders and delete anything you no longer need
Click the gear-shaped icon in Drive’s upper-right corner, and select “Settings,” followed by “Manage Apps”
For any apps that have a note about hidden data, click the gray “Options” box to the right, and select “Delete hidden app data”

For any apps that have a note about hidden data, click the gray “Options” box to the right, and select “Delete hidden app data.”

Apps associated with your Google Drive storage can sometimes have hidden data, but all it takes is a couple of clicks to remove it.

Open your Drive Trash folder and click on the “Empty trash” link at the top of the page

Free up Photos storage

Unless you currently have a Pixel phone (in which case, you will, for now, keep the unlimited “high quality” option), as of June 1st, 2021, every photo and video backed up to Google Photos is going to count against your Google storage. If you’ve been saving photos at their original sizes, you can free up tons of space by converting them to Google’s “high-quality” option, which compresses images down to 16MP and videos to 1080p (a change that’s unlikely to be noticeable for most people and purposes).

Go to the Photos settings page, and select “High quality (free unlimited storage)”
When you make that selection, you’ll be asked whether you want to switch to the “high quality” format and compress your existing photos. If there are any photos you don’t want to compress, click on the “Learn how to keep original files” link for instructions on saving those photos to your device.

When you switch to “high quality,” you can also compress the rest of your Google Photos content.

Say goodbye to Gmail junk

Emails don’t take up a ton of space, but you know what does? Attachments. Odds are, you’ve got plenty of old attachments sitting in your Gmail account that you don’t really need.

Here’s how to address that:

Go to the Gmail website and type “has:attachment larger:10M” into the search box at the top
Identify any messages with disposable attachments and delete them. (There’s no great way to get rid of an attachment without also deleting the associated email, unfortunately, but you can always forward a message back to yourself and manually remove the attachment before axing the original.)
Open your Spam folder, and click the link to “Delete all spam messages now”
Open your Trash folder, and select “Empty Trash now” to send everything away for good

Feeling lighter is liberating, isn’t it?

Update February 17th, 2021, 10:37AM ET: This article was originally published on March 19th, 2019. The information on Google Photos has been updated.

Ecobee adds baby monitoring features to its SmartCamera

Ecobee has updated its SmartCamera home security camera with a few new features that make it easier to use as a baby monitor. The new Baby Monitor mode, which is enabled during setup of the camera, adjusts the camera’s settings to dim the LED lights on the front, makes it harder to accidentally enable the camera’s Siren alarm, and, perhaps most importantly, adds an audio-only streaming option that lets you continue to listen for disruptions even if you switch to a different app or lock your phone.

Using a home security camera as a baby monitor is hardly a new idea, but this is the first one to my knowledge that actually makes it easier to do so. While traditional video monitors provide an always-on feed to a dedicated screen, home security cameras require the use of your phone and an app, which can be slow to load and cumbersome to use. Ecobee’s audio streaming mode effectively turns the camera and your phone into an always-on audio monitor, from which you can then tap into the app to check the video feed when you hear a disturbance.

The SmartCamera is also compatible with Apple’s HomeKit platform (including HomeKit Secure Video) and Amazon Alexa, which allows you to view the video feed from an Echo smart display or the Home app on an iOS or macOS device. Ecobee’s dedicated app is the only way to access the audio monitoring and other dedicated features such as pan and zoom on the SmartCamera, however.

The baby monitoring features for the SmartCamera include dimmed LED lights and an audio streaming mode.

Image: Ecobee

One thing the new baby monitor features don’t specifically address is the security concerns inherent with aiming an internet-connected camera at your baby’s crib. There have been numerous accounts of security cameras being accessed by an unauthorized user and children’s privacy being violated through the camera, speaker, and microphone. Ecobee does have two-factor authentication for its accounts, which helps prevent these kinds of attacks, but that might not be enough comfort for some parents.

Ecobee notes that you can switch between the baby monitoring (which disables some of the home security features of the camera) and the standard security camera modes at any time, so once you no longer have the need for a baby monitor, you can repurpose the camera elsewhere in your home.

In addition to the new baby monitoring features, Ecobee is also now selling a bundle that includes a SmartCamera and a SmartThermostat for $299.99. The SmartCamera is available separately for $99.99.

Google Maps will now let you pay for public transportation and parking through its app

Google Maps is adding a couple of new useful features: the ability to pay for parking or buy a train ticket right from the app.

Google Maps is integrating two mobile parking payment services into its app, Passport and ParkMobile. Both offer the ability to find, pay for, and replenish parking meters or parking lot fees through a smartphone app. Now, those features will also be available in Google Maps. According to the company:

Simply tap on the “Pay for Parking” button that appears as you near your destination. Then enter your meter number, the amount of time you want to park for, and tap “Pay.” Need to add more time to your meter? Easily extend your parking session with just a few taps.

The ability to pay for parking in Google Maps will be available in 400-plus cities in the US, including Boston, Cincinnati, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC, and more, Google said. Android phone users will get the feature first, with iPhone owners soon to follow.

Paying for public transportation will work much in the same way. If you are searching for transit directions in Google Maps, you’ll see an option to purchase tickets appear alongside your results. Similar to the pay for parking feature, customers will need to have a Google Pay account linked to a valid credit or debit card to make the transaction.

Then, customers can use their phone — either in a tap-to-pay situation or by showing a digital ticket to a conductor — to ride public transportation. And in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, customers will be able to buy a digital Clipper card directly from Google Maps. The feature will be available to use in over 80 transit systems around the world, Google says.

A number of transit agencies around the world have modernized their fare collection methods to include contactless or tap-to-pay mediums like Google Pay and Apple Pay. Some that rely on weekly or monthly passes, like London’s Oyster card or San Francisco’s Clipper card, have also started working with Apple and Google Pay to integrate those payment passes in their apps.

It’s the latest feature in Google Maps’ ongoing effort to make itself more user-friendly for commuters and transit riders. In 2019, it added new transit crowdedness predictions, allowing customers to see how crowded their bus, train, or tube is likely to be before heading out on their commute. It also added a feature that pairs transit directions with biking and ride-sharing options so customers can get directions using a variety of transportation modes.

Google isn’t the only tech giant attempting to appeal to transit riders. Uber and Lyft have both recently started integrating transit directions into their respective apps. Customers who live in Denver can even purchase train tickets using their Uber account. Both companies are building sophisticated algorithms that rely on reams of data from transit agencies pertaining to routes and schedules. Moreover, it’s a race among tech giants to become a one-stop shop for transportation.

How to check how much free Google storage you have left

It seems like the days of free apps are slowly grinding to a halt. Just recently, password manager LastPass announced that it was drastically limiting the usefulness of its free app, and now, Google has sent out emails reaffirming that it is ending its free unlimited photo storage policy:

Starting June 1, 2021, all new photos and videos backed up in High quality and Express quality^* will count toward the free 15 GB of storage that comes with your Google account or any additional storage you may have purchased, the same way other Google services like Google Drive and Gmail already do.

While this isn’t a surprise — Google announced its new policy back in November 2020 — it is still depressing to be reminded of the upcoming storage crunch. Of course, until June 1st, you can still add as many “high quality” photos as you like, so if you’re planning to upload a lot of old photos, this is the time to do it. Meanwhile, though, you may want to figure out just how much space you’re already using, so you can figure out if you need to upgrade. It’s not difficult, and there are several ways of doing it:

Go to this page, and you’ll see a breakdown of how much storage you’re using and how it’s been divided between Google Drive, Gmail, Google Photos, and your device backup. (Note: how the page looks may vary, depending on the type of Google account you have.)

Google will let you know how much storage space you have left and what it’s being used by.

You can also see how much storage you have left by going to your Google Drive page and looking at the Storage statistic showing at the bottom of the left-hand column
Google has also created a page that estimates, based on your current usage, how long it will be before you need to increase your storage. You can find it here.

Once the June 1st deadline has passed, Google says it will send reminders when you’re nearing your limit. It also intends to provide a tool that will identify what it calls “dark, blurry, and otherwise unwanted content.”

Now that you know how much space you have left, you can try to figure out what you want to do next. If you’re getting close to your limit, do you want to pay Google for more storage space? (Prices start at $1.99 per month for 100GB.) Find a different service to store your photos? It’s up to you.

One word of advice: before you do anything else, try to get rid of any old, unwanted, or duplicate files that are hanging around in your Google storage. You’d be amazed at how much space you might save.

Epic Games brings Apple fight to the EU with new antitrust complaint

Fortnite developer Epic Games has made a formal antitrust complaint about Apple to the European Commission, the company announced today. Epic alleges that Apple’s “carefully designed anti-competitive restrictions” have “completely eliminated competition in app distribution and payment processes.” It says this leads to consumers playing higher prices, and gives Apple too much control over developers on its platform.

The complaint is the latest legal action taken by Epic in its ongoing dispute with Apple. The developer has criticized Apple’s control over software distribution with the App Store, as well as its policies around payments, which often result in Apple taking a 30 percent cut of in-app purchases. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has called this 30 percent cut a “tax,” and Epic claims Apple’s policies give its own services an unfair advantage over other iOS developers. In November, Apple said it would reduce its App Store commission rate to 15 percent for any developer that earns less than $1 million in annual revenue, in an apparent response to pressure from developers and regulators.

In its announcement, Epic Games said it’s not seeking damages from Apple in the EU. Instead, it says it wants “timely and effective remedies” to address what it claims are Apple’s anti-competitive practices. “We just want to see prohibition on these platform companies using their control over the hardware to exert control over secondary markets and force them to compete on equal terms with every competitor,” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney told The Financial Times when asked what these remedies should include.

Epic’s dispute with Apple erupted last summer when the developer attempted to circumvent Apple’s 30 percent cut on in-app purchases in Fortnite. Apple responded by removing the popular game from its App Store, only for Epic Games to file a lawsuit in response. Epic has subsequently launched legal proceedings in Australia, and earlier this year complained to the UK’s antitrust tribunal about Apple’s actions. Epic Games and Apple are due to meet in court in May, according to the FT.

As well as challenging Apple, Epic also sued Google after it removed Fortnite from Android’s Google Play Store.

Responding to Epic’s latest filing, Apple told Bloomberg that Epic had intentionally violated its App Store policies, and that these “apply equally to every developer and protect customers.” It said Epic’s actions “made pawns of customers, and we look forward to making this clear to the European Commission.”

Epic’s new complaint follows the EU’s announcement last year that it has opened a formal antitrust investigation against Apple over its App Store and Apple Pay practices. The EU is concerned that Apple’s policies stifle and distort competition in cases where Apple’s own services compete with other developers on its App Store. Messaging app Telegram has also complained to the EU about Apple’s policies, demanding that it allow users to download software outside of the App Store.

Soundboks claims it just released the world’s loudest portable speaker

(Image credit: Soundboks)

Soundboks, a Danish company that started out by crowdfunding, says that it has built the world’s loudest portable wireless loudspeaker, which it claims can deliver 126dBSPL.

When considering this measurement, it’s worth noting that the company doesn’t state the distance from the loudspeaker at which this sound pressure level was measured, nor the frequency at which it was measured, nor a bandwidth over which it might be delivered.

Best portable outdoor loudspeakers

According to Forbes magazine, Hjalte Emilio Wieth, Jesper Theil Thomsen, Christoffer Nyvold and five of their friends built battery-powered speakers in a garage to satisfy orders ahead of the Roskilde music festival in 2015.

Afterwards they raised $870,000 on Kickstarter and $2.5 million from investors including Matthew Bellamy (Muse) and Tue Mantoni (a former CEO of Bang & Olufsen).

(Image credit: Soundboks)

The latest ‘3’ version of the Soundboks uses three Class-D amplifiers, each rated at 72-watts continuous per channel, to drive two 254mm bass/midrange drivers and a 25mm compression tweeter via a 2.5-way crossover.

The amplifiers (built by Merus Audio) are powered by a single 12.8V, 7.8Ah Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) battery that Soundboks claims will enable 40 hours of playback at mid-volume or five hours at full volume.

The company says the battery can be fully recharged in 3.5 hours. Extra plug-in battery packs are available so you don’t have to waste time recharging. Bluetooth is 5.0 with Soundboks claiming “lower latency stereo performance” through the use of SKAA Audio’s Pro SKAA circuitry.

Best outdoor speakers 2021: portable, wireless, waterproof

(Image credit: Soundboks)

“We have finally created the speaker we always wanted,” says Thomsen. “Over the past four years we’ve been integrating community feedback with the vision of the speaker we have always wanted to build; the result is the new Soundboks. We were very focused on creating an unmatched sound experience, wireless connectivity and battery life were critical for that.”

(Image credit: Soundboks)

Up to five individual Soundboks 3’s can be interlinked, so there’s a free app that allows you to specify whether a specific unit will handle the left or the right channel, or operate in mono. The app also allows you to equalise the sound to your own preference, or use one of Soundboks’ own sound modes: Bass+, Power, or Indoor.

In addition to Bluetooth, there are two mic/line inputs (XLR, 6.35mm phone) and a 3.5mm stereo input. There is also a 3.5mm stereo output jack for physical linking to completely eliminate latency when operating multiple units.

Available now, the Soundboks 3 (also known as ‘The New Soundboks’) sells for £815 $999, AU$1599.

Best portable bluetooth loudspeakers

Apple’s adjusting emoji in iOS 14.5 to promote helmet use and sell headphones

As part of iOS 14.5, Apple is updating its emoji with new variations from the Unicode Consortium’s 13.1 release, including new skin tone options for popular emoji, several new smiley faces and hearts, and some deliberate Apple redesigns.

The changes to skin tone and gender presentation are probably the most important to note. Popular emoji like “Couples Kissing” and “Couples with Heart” now have many more skin tone variations for all options.

Skin tone variations for the “Couples with Heart” emoji in iOS 14.5.

Image: Emojipedia

In addition to more skin tones, the bearded emoji has also been adjusted to allow for not just the neutral “Person:Beard” but also “Man:Beard” and “Woman:Beard.”

The various beard options in iOS 14.5.

Image: Emojipedia

On the more unusual side of things, Apple’s update also includes several variations on smiley faces like “Exhaling Face,” “Face with Spiral Eyes,” and the elusive “Face in Clouds.” Hearts, another emoji go-to category, also has two new members joining its ranks, “Heart on Fire” and “Mending Heart.”

Exhaling face, face with spiral eyes, and face in clouds.

Image: Emojipedia
Heart on fire and mending heart.

Image: Emojipedia

Finally, Apple is also making tweaks to some existing emoji: the rock-climbing emoji will now feature a helmet, the syringe emoji is now a more generic one rather than one filled with blood, and the headphones look like the AirPods Max.

The syringe change could be a legitimately helpful one for anyone writing about COVID-19. Not only is the new syringe way less intimidating when emptied of blood, but it’s also more applicable to vaccinations, which will hopefully become a lot more common soon. The headphone change, on the other hand, is just Apple branding, the same way that the preexisting mobile phone emoji was designed to look like an iPhone.

A comparison between the two versions of the syringe emoji.

Image: Emojipedia

Apple says all of these emoji are available in the new release of the iOS 14.5 beta, which also comes with a nice little change to the Apple Music app. According to users on Reddit running the beta, you can now add and remove music from your queue with the same kind of swiping gesture used in Apple’s Mail app to archive, delete, or flag emails.

The full release of iOS 14.5 is also said to include several other helpful additions like support for the new Xbox and PlayStation controllers, the ability to set Siri’s default music streaming service to Spotify, and the ability to unlock your phone with your Apple Watch.

Apple won’t have to allow App Store alternatives on iOS after North Dakota bill fails

A North Dakota bill that would have drastically altered the way app store operators like Apple and Google manage their digital marketplaces has failed to garner enough votes, failing in the state senate by an 11-36 vote on Tuesday, according to North Dakota House of Representatives member Karla Rose Hanson.

The bill, SB 2333, stirred considerable controversy last week when a committee hearing drew the attention of corporate lawyers and lobbyists, experts, and Apple critics arguing both in favor and against the proposed legislation’s potentially far-reaching consequences.

The bill would have barred any company in the business of software distribution making over $10 million in annual revenue from imposing rules on developers dictating they only use one app store, like the App Store or the Google Play Store, and that they have to use the app store owner’s preferred payment system. Using Apple or Google’s payment system, in turn, lets those companies take 30 percent of most sales, per their long-standing revenue sharing policies around app sales and in-app purchases.

Requiring developers to use the App Store and Apple’s own payment system are pillars of the iPhone maker’s mobile business and largely responsible for the App Store’s continued financial success. The App Store is estimated to have generated more than $64 billion in revenue last year. (Google does allow alternative app stores onto Android, but the company requires users to click through security warnings to download and use such software.) Yet, developers have long complained of Apple’s grip on the flow of revenue on iOS, with critics claiming its ever-changing rules are inconsistently applied and that Apple grants exemptions on a case-by-case basis.

Although the bill would only have dictated how companies like Apple operate within the state of North Dakota, the bill’s broad language may have forced Apple to make systemic changes to its business nationwide. The legislation’s success could have also inspired other states to follow suit with similar attempts to regulate app stores’ relationships with developers, although that appears to be already underway despite SB 2333’s failure.

In arguing against SB 2333, Apple’s chief privacy engineer, Erik Neuenschwander, testified that the bill “threatens to destroy iPhone as you know it,” arguing that it would “undermine the privacy, security, safety, and performance that’s built into iPhone by design,” according to the Bismarck Tribune. “Simply put, we work hard to keep bad apps out of the App Store; (the bill) could require us to let them in,” Neuenschwander concluded.

The legislation is just one of a growing number of state bills, which now includes proposed bills in Arizona and Georgia that seek to place limits on the power of Apple and fellow app store owners. a The New York Times report this weekend linked the bills to a multi-state lobbying effort from Apple’s fiercest critics, with Fortnite creator Epic Games leading the charge.

SB 2333 was proposed by Sen. Kyle Davison (R-Fargo) after the state senator was approached by Lacee Bjork Anderson, a lobbyist with the firm Odney Public Affairs based in Bismarck, North Dakota. Anderson, it turns out, was hired by Epic, the Times reported. Epic is also suing Apple and Google after both companies removed Fortnite last August, following Epic’s decision to include its own in-app payment system in the iOS and Android versions of the battle royale hit.

Anderson was also paid by the Coalition of App Fairness, an industry group formed last fall consisting of Epic and fellow app makers like Tinder parent company Match Group and Spotify that have for years railed against the App Store and Apple’s mandate that it take 30 percent of all app sales and in-app purchases.

In a tweet, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney acknowledged Epic and the Coalition for App Fairness’ participation in the ongoing lobbying efforts. “North Dakota’s effort to combat app store monopolies is awesome for consumers and developers,” Sweeney wrote. “The Coalition for App Fairness organized the outreach, lobbying, and developer participation. Can’t take credit for it, but Epic is proud to be a part of it!”

North Dakota’s effort to combat app store monopolies is awesome for consumers and developers. The Coalition for App Fairness organized the outreach, lobbying, and developer participation. Can’t take credit for it, but Epic is proud to be a part of it!https://t.co/Zi0iDMpkaz

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) February 16, 2021

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

New Xbox Wireless Headset supports Dolby Atmos and DTS Headphone:X

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has announced a new wireless gaming headset for the Xbox Series X and Series S. Called the Xbox Wireless Headset, it launches on 16th March and will cost £94.99 ($99.99, AU$129.99).

It connects wirelessly to your console without needing a separate dongle and supports spatial audio technologies such as Dolby Atmos, DTS Headphone:X and Windows Sonic.

The gaming headset has some clever controls, too. You can adjust the volume and the game/chat balance by twisting the rotating ear cup dials, while the microphone tucks out of the way when not needed. Those ear cushions promise to be comfortable enough for all-day sessions, and the 15-hour battery life should be more than enough for the average gaming session.

Speak, and voice isolation focuses the mic on your voice, reducing background noise, so you can be heard loud and clear. Stop talking, and auto-mute kicks in, helping keep the comms channels clear. There’s also a manual mute option to give you some privacy.

A light indicator tells you when the mic is on, so you always know when people can hear what you’re saying.

You can fine-tune the audio output using the Xbox Accessories app on your console, adjusting the equaliser, bass boost, auto-mute sensitivity and mic-monitoring levels. You can even adjust the brightness of the mic indicator light. And the headset can connect to your mobile device over Bluetooth to double as a pair of ordinary wireless headphones when you’re not gaming. You can also pair to your console and phone at the same time, so you can simultaneously be in a Zoom meeting while blasting aliens.

In a blog post announcing the headset, Xbox Wire’s Will Tuttle was keen to big up the spatial sound capabilities.

“You’ll have the advantage by being able to hear all the subtle, yet critical sounds (like enemy footsteps sneaking up on you) that elevate great gamers above the rest,” he wrote.

Erik Garcia, Project Architect and Lead, added:

“We spent a lot of time in the audio testing chambers trying to characterize and understand how the headset reproduces audio in different room environments. It goes in your living room, game room, and dorm room and we want it to sound the best for all types of audio.”

Given that Sony’s rival console, the PS5, launched with its own optional gaming headset (the Pulse 3D) at launch, it’s surprising Xbox has taken so long to follow suit. And we’ll tell you if it’s been worth the wait just as soon as we get our hands on a review sample.

MORE:

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Six free alternatives to the LastPass password manager

Free is always nice, and when a free app is no longer free (or when the free version becomes so limited it is virtually useless), then you have to decide whether to pay up or move on. This happened with the Evernote note manager almost five years ago, and now it is time for users of the popular password manager LastPass to make the same decision. LastPass is changing its free version so that it will only work on one type of device — either your computer or your mobile device. If you, like most of us, use both a phone and a computer, then you will have to either start paying $3 a month or find an alternative.

If you’d rather not pay at all, there are other password managers out there that have free versions that may work better for you. And there are, of course, other alternatives. Most browsers, such as Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox, have their own password managers. In addition, many security apps such as Norton offer their own password managers, so if you already subscribe to one, you may have a password manager on hand.

But if you’d rather use an independent password manager, here are a few that are currently available. We have not yet tried them out; this is just a brief look until we have a chance to make recommendations.

Image: Bitwarden

Bitwarden

Bitwarden is a well-known open-source password manager that offers a solid selection of features, including saving unlimited items, syncing across devices, and generating passwords. For day-to-day password usage, Bitwarden could be a good alternative.

Other pricing: For $10 a year, you can add 1GB of encrypted file storage and two-step login, among other extras.

Image: Zoho

Zoho Vault

Zoho Vault, which is one of Zoho’s wide variety of productivity apps, has a free version that includes unlimited storage of passwords and notes, access from both computers and mobile devices, two-factor authentication, and password generation, among a fairly impressive number of other features.

Other pricing: Zoho’s paid plan, which starts at $1 / month per user, offers business options such as password sharing and expiration alerts.

Image: KeePass

KeePass

KeePass is another free open-source password manager, but judging from its website, it may be a little difficult for less technically adept users to adopt. Nothing is kept in the cloud, so while that can be more secure (you can store your passwords in a master key-locked encrypted database), it is also less convenient. However, if you don’t mind manually transferring your password database from one device to another, this could be worth a try.

Other pricing: None

Image: LogMeOnce

LogMeOnce

LogMeOnce’s free version provides unlimited passwords and use on unlimited devices, along with autofill, sync, password generation, and two-factor authentication. LogMeOnce uses ads to fund its free version, so that could be a setback, depending on your tolerance for advertising.

Other pricing: Additional features start at $2.50 a month and include emergency access, additional password sharing, and priority technical support, among others.

Image: Nordpass

NordPass

NordPass has a free version that includes unlimited passwords and syncing across devices. While there is no limit on the number of devices you can use, only one can be active at a time — so, for example, if you use it on your phone, you will be logged out of your computer’s version.

Other pricing: The premium version of NordPass lets you have up to six active accounts running at a time, and it includes secure item sharing and a data breach scanner, among other features.

Image: RoboForm

RoboForm

RoboForm has been around for a while, although it’s never been as well-known as LastPass or 1Password. Its free version offers unlimited passwords, form filling, and emergency access, among other features. However, it does not sync across devices, which can be a definite inconvenience.

Other pricing: RoboForm Everywhere costs $18 for a one-year subscription, and it lets you sync across devices, perform cloud backup, and use two-factor authentication, among other features.

Trello is redesigning its project management platform for a remote work future

Productivity app Trello, a virtual whiteboard-style platform for organizing and managing projects, is announcing a major redesign today in addition to new features for helping businesses manage third-party integrations. The platform is getting a visual overhaul, both to its logo and the illustrations it deploys across its website and apps. It’s also getting multiple new ways to both customize cards and view your workload beyond the core whiteboard column view.

“During the pandemic, Trello became many people’s new offices in a remote-first world. The overnight shift to distributed work coupled with the frantic adoption of digital tools led to an exponential increase in digital work artifacts scattered across apps, some of which now resemble a graveyard of ‘tried-and-tossed’ tools,” explains Trello co-founder Michael Pryor, who leads up the platform at enterprise software giant Atlassian following its acquisition in 2017, in a blog post published on Tuesday.

Pryor says Trello has accumulated well over 50 million users, and the company wants to expand the way Trello works with third-party services like Google Drive, ticketing platform Jira, and Slack. “Today, we are unveiling the beginning of a whole new Trello, built specifically to support teams as they usher in a new era of work. These features, along with our plans for the future, will give users a central vantage point from which to view, plan and tackle their work.”

The new cards include both mirror cards and link cards, which the company hopes will make it easier to manage other apps and services from within Trello. Link cards, for instance, can now display previews if they contain a link to a third-party service like Dropbox, Google Docs, and YouTube. Another new card type, mirror cards, will let you pair together cards across multiple boards, so changes to one are reflected on all the others. Trello says this should help cut down on confusion and unnecessary interoffice updates, because more basic information about the status of a project will be automatically available instead of having to be manually communicated.

Trello is also introducing five new board views that deviate from the standard column layout the platform helped popularize. These include team table view for turning multiple Trello boards into something more akin to a spreadsheet for easy viewing; timeline view for organizing a complex project by upcoming deadlines; calendar view for tracking projects and even simply individual to-do list items on a monthly basis; map view for organizing projects that incorporate information (like real estate); and dashboard view for visualizations of data and other project information into bar, line, and pie charts.

Images: Trello
Images: Trello
Images: Trello
Images: Trello
Images: Trello

These changes may help Trello, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, stay competitive against alternatives like Asana, as well as the scores of smaller project management apps all vying for a coveted spot among the ever-growing list of software tools used by small startups and large corporations alike. Key to that, Pryor says, is acknowledging that Trello can’t be the one app that does everything you want it to do, but rather that it needs to be flexible enough to let companies and small teams connect to the tools they do need and have it all be accessible.

“‘Hey, we’re just going to get everyone to use our tool, we will be the project management tool to rule them all.’ When you look at how people work, that strategy is a little myopic,” Pryror told The Verge in an interview last week. “There’s a lot of different tools people use to get their job done and they’re not all the same thing to different people.”

The goal for Trello going forward, he added, is figuring out “how can we expand the card metaphor to different tools and to give you a perspective on all the work that’s happening.” New types of cards, and new ways of visualizing Trello’s signature whiteboard, could help expand those metaphors and, Pryor hopes, make people more productive in the process.

Microsoft announces new Xbox Wireless Headset, available March 16th for $99

Microsoft is launching a new $99 Xbox Wireless Headset next month. It’s the first wireless Xbox headset since the Xbox 360 days, and it’s designed to connect with Xbox One and Xbox Series X / S consoles, PCs, and mobile devices via Bluetooth.

The Xbox Wireless Headset design improves nearly every aspect of the basic Xbox One Stereo and Wired Chat headsets that are currently available. Microsoft has leaned on its work with the Surface Headphones to add similar rotating ear cup dials that let you adjust volume and game / audio chat balance.

Microsoft’s new Xbox Wireless Headset.

Image: Microsoft

This new Xbox Wireless Headset is also designed to match the new Xbox Series X / S design, with a lightweight frame that has large leather ear cups and an adjustable cushioned headband. It will also support Windows Sonic, Dolby Atmos, and DTS Headphone:X spatial sound technologies.

Microsoft has also worked to improve microphone quality, with Xbox party chats in mind. This new headset has dual beamforming microphones and voice isolation to help isolate background noise. You can also pair the headset to your phone and Xbox at the same time, allowing you to listen to audio or calls from your phone while you game.

The customizations for the Xbox Wireless Headset.

Image: Microsoft

The Xbox Wireless Headset will last for up to 15 hours on battery, and a 30-minute charge will let you play for around four hours. A full charge will take around three hours. Microsoft is also updating the Xbox Accessories app to include control over the equalizer, bass boost, auto-mute sensitivity, mic monitoring, and brightness of the mic’s mute light.

The new Xbox Wireless Headset will be available worldwide starting March 16th, priced at $99. You can preorder the headset today at the Microsoft Store and other retailers.

What did we learn from the GameStop mess?

On this week’s Decoder, I sat down with CNBC anchor Jon Fortt to talk about GameStop, how the media covered it, what happens next for the market, and what — if anything — we learned from it all. We also talked about his new online course, The Black Experience in America.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jon Fortt, [you’re] one of the anchors of Squawk Alley on CNBC. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me.

And I should say you’re also the proprietor of Fortt Knox, which you just told me is a digital brand. It encompasses many things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a podcast, but it’s no longer a podcast. It’s mostly on LinkedIn. You can also catch it on YouTube, but one-on-one interviews. And then I release clips too. So lots of fun.

And you’ve got Fortt Media, and you just used that to launch a course about the Black experience in America, which I definitely want to talk to you about, but I want to start with the news. It’s been two weeks since GameStop. It feels like both a minute and a lifetime.

It’s been insane.

I feel like I am still trying to figure out what I learned from a story about a subreddit trading at such volumes that a stock went up way higher than it should have and crashed back down. And everybody went along for the ride. What have we learned?

Well, it’s going to be years before we kind of sift through this debris and do the CSI and figure out what really happened here. So in a way, it’s still too early to see what we really learned. But I think part of what we learned is it’s not really that different this time, and this supposed revolution in access to trading and markets, it’s interesting, but we got to keep our eye on the ball here, which is that most people should not day trade, right? Most people, you get rich slowly in the markets, if you do it right, not overnight. And mom and dad at home probably shouldn’t be attempting short squeezes on hedge funds as a routine thing. Maybe every once in a while…

So a lot of people are going to hear that from you and instantly tweet at both of us and probably send me emails because I read my email address at the end of every show. They’re going to say, what we actually learned is the market’s rigged. It’s a casino anyway, the rich people always get richer, and retail investors having this kind of access and moving as a collective to run a short squeeze is actually a necessary and good corrective to how corrupt the market is.

Well, there’s something to be said for that. One of the kind of disturbing but semi-hilarious things to come out of this is so many people who were kind of new to the market, and very smart people, were accusing me of being on the side of hedge funds.

Yes.

I don’t know anybody at hedge funds. I don’t care about hedge funds, hedge funds don’t pay the bills. You know what pays the bills at CNBC? It’s retail investors, people at home watching it and being invested over the long term and people like me, my biggest incentive is to be right, and to be smart, and to have access to smart people because I’ve been right over time. Hedge funds are just not part of the equation for me. No contacts from hedge funds in my phone. I don’t call any hedge fund managers. There are people here who do, but that’s because they cover hedge funds.

So my interest primarily is in technology, but also the business around technology, the public companies that are so big that we talk about so much when you come on Squawk Alley, Nilay. Is the market complicated? Yes. Do people with a lot of money and power have outsize influence in the market? Yes. Does that mean that the little guy can’t win? It absolutely does not mean that.

One of the things that really grabbed me though from the very beginning was the incredible rush to build a narrative around what happened with GameStop — disconnected from the company GameStop itself, but from the notion that Melvin Capital Management would go under, that it would be bailed out, that the regulators were stepping in in some way, that another company would pressure Robinhood, the retail trading platform, to stop trading. It just quickly felt like a conspiracy theory to me. But in the way that felt good, right? I don’t know how else to describe it.

Conspiracy theories are supposed to feel good or else they’re a bad conspiracy theory.

We’ve had a couple of years of conspiracy theories driving the entire narrative of the United States. This one was, I kept on describing this as Fight Club fanfiction. We just keep writing the story about how the little guys are finally banding together to take down the big guys. Because of the year of conspiracy theories in America, all of my disinformation, misinformation alarm bells kept ringing. I don’t know if this is true. I don’t know if the guy on Reddit who says that he’s being driven by his anger at the 2008 financial crisis is real. We don’t know who these people are, but we’re just believing a lot of what they’re saying. And we’re piecing that together into a narrative.

I run a website though, and I get to sit back and maybe wait a day and tell the reporters, go find out what you can find out.

Well, that’s the journalism part, right?

Right. But you’re in the chair live.

Yes.

So I ask everybody who comes on the show, what is your decision-making framework? When you’re in the chair live and the graph is going vertical, how do you take a beat? How do you decide what to tell people?

Well, there’s a couple of things that come to mind. Number one is the filter, right? Unlike when I was primarily a print reporter, which I was for the first half of my career. There, your filter can be slow, right? Your first draft is in your head. You jot things down, you can ask questions in sort of a roundabout meandering way. When you’re on live TV, you can’t do that. It’s got to be crisp coming out. And you’ve got to filter stuff in real time. And part of what I use to do that is history. So I started in the journalism business, I guess in a way you could say in 1994, that’s when I had my first internship. I was 17 years old. I was working for the Knight Ridder Washington bureau on Capitol Hill, covering Lloyd Bentsen and Robert Reich giving testimony, trying to hear anything I could about interest rates, jot down notes, run to a payphone and call it in.

But some of the early experiences, I moved to Silicon Valley in December 1999, right before the dot-com bust. So I got to see people going all in believing in this, it’s different this time, stocks running up an enormous amount. And I saw a lot of people lose their shirts, and saw the flip side of that and heard about how the market works. A few years later, about five years later, I was a real estate and personal finance editor during the housing boom, and didn’t really see the bust coming. I was a little too young and inexperienced, but then when the bust hit, I looked back and thought, wow, where were all of our stories about that? As the editor at the time, what do I wish I had said, what rocks do I wish I had turned over?

And so when I see another moment of excitement like the one that we’re in, when I’m live, the history becomes part of my filter, because I’ve been through a couple cycles where it was different this time. I’ve been through a couple cycles where people said this can’t possibly blow up. And I have a little bit of that benefit of saying, well, if anything like this happens again, here’s what my filter is going to be and here’s what I’m going to say, because I wish I had said it back then.

So you had a front row seat to the entire GameStop news cycle. You had some notably tense exchanges on the air.

You enjoy that?

So you have the Winklevoss twins on the air with you [and] you have this remarkable back and forth and there’s just a moment where Tyler says something to you like, you’re the journalist, these are the questions you should be asking. This to me is indicative of the entire relationship between the media and the market in society right now, because we’re inherently slow. But markets, stocks move really, really fast, on sometimes bad information. I mean, that’s just to me, it’s a sign of bad faith to ask a question or to insinuate something, and for me, the journalist, or you, or whoever to say, I don’t know if that’s true, and then have it demanded that you ask the question.

Right.

And I’m just wondering how you took that moment. Because I’ve watched it several times now and it’s like the entire GameStop story in one little nutshell, in that interaction. “You should be asking the questions I’m asking,” and we’re saying, we are, we just don’t know the answers.

Well, I mean, you say that journalism is slow. It can be. Sometimes it’s pretty fast. And I think on this story, on that particular issue, it actually turned out to be pretty fast. I’ll allow that journalism is a weird business and you can’t expect people outside it to understand it, but there’s more people that work at CNBC than Jon Fortt. And it just so happens that as we were talking, Andrew Ross Sorkin was in the process of booking an interview with the Robinhood CEO on CNBC, which happened that very same day. And we got some of those answers that the Winklevoss twins were really wanting to hear.

So I hope they watched Sorkin’s interview. Also, our reporter who covers hedge funds was also reaching out to Robinhood and got a statement from them about what happened. Now, people could choose to believe or not believe that statement. But to say that Jon Fortt is not doing his job because he’s talking to the Winklevoss twins, supposes that Jon Fortt is the only employee at CNBC. And therefore I ought to be calling everyone at that very moment. And fortunately, that’s not how the operation works. We’ve got lots of people, lots of them smarter than me, so that we can get multiple things done at once and still be on live TV.

Do you think about, in the moment, we’re booking the Winklevoss twins because they’re making a lot of noise about the rise of retail investors and the destruction of the financial markets. Do you think in that moment, I don’t know if this is the right part of the story to tell?

Not really. I mean, I’m fine with guests, especially guests like Tyler and Cameron who have plenty of credibility and plenty of experience, expressing their opinions. Right?

Yeah.

Yeah. People got opinions, they’re prominent, they have opinions. People want to hear what their opinions are. What I’m not okay with is misinformation. Right? Because part of my job as a journalist is to not only have that filter on myself, but to provide that filter for the viewer. So if somebody comes on air and says, political leaders are preventing you from trading, my filter says, well, is that true? Because I don’t know that to be true. Do you know that to be true? What’s your evidence? And if it turns out that that was just a bit of hyperbole or an opinion, he could have said that, we could have moved on. I didn’t have a problem with him saying it’s the end of centralized finance. That’s an opinion, it’s not a statement of fact. But in a month where we had had a mob stage an insurrection at the US Capitol based on what they thought political leaders were doing, I’m not going to have somebody on my show accusing political leaders of something that there’s just no evidence for without a challenge. So that’s my job. That’s what I did.

I’m sure at CNBC you’ve got an ethics policy, the way The Verge has an ethics policy. The justification for our ethics policy: I can’t own any Apple stock because we cover Apple often. I know things that might move the stock, or just because of the size of our platform, I could publish a lie and tank the stock and then receive some financial benefits. So, just get rid of it. I don’t own any of the stock, we’re prevented from owning a lot of things.

Yeah.

Do you actively think about how much the minute-to-minute content of CNBC moves the markets in real time, as you are producing the news?

I try to act as if the real-time content on CNBC might move the markets, but I don’t flatter myself enough to think that it really does. I mean honestly, the stuff that you guys publish on The Verge probably has more market influence in many cases than a lot of the stuff that we do on CNBC. But I think it’s incumbent on us to hold it as a sacred trust, the fact that investors, companies, people in the markets are depending on us for accurate, real-time information. So I don’t know to what degree what airs on CNBC moves the markets, outside of it being breaking news that’s material to a company — yes, that clearly moves. I don’t know. But I try to act as though it does.

So the reason I ask is, you said you have a heightened sense for misinformation. You just have a lower tolerance for it. I feel like, again, after the past year or so, all of us feel that way, but there are stories of an activist investor showing up, driving a news cycle to pull a stock down, taking a position in a company, and then firing everybody and turning it.

This is a cycle that happens all of the time. The financial press is usually involved in this cycle, right? We’re going to buy the failing restaurant chain. I think Olive Garden is the example, right? We’re going to buy Olive Garden, we’re going to take a position at Olive Garden. We’re going to say they don’t salt the pasta. This is a real thing that happened.

We’re going to drive a news cycle of how Olive Garden is horrible, crash the stock, take a position; now we own Olive Garden. How do you reconcile those two things? Right? We don’t move the stock market, but there is an entire sanctioned information ecosystem that’s there to manipulate prices, such that people can get rich on the end.

I think we got to be careful, and what I try to do is be careful not to forget what our place is, as observers of and interpreters of the story, not as lead actors in the story ourselves. Sometimes we end up getting cast in a moment, but that should be the exception.

And so what I try to do, and what I know my colleagues try to do, is be as aware as possible of the motives of various people who are promoting certain narratives and storylines. So that we can try and make the audience aware: Well, here’s where this person is coming from. Here’s what they’re invested in. Here’s some of the actions that they’ve taken in the past. Here’s how activist investing works. We try to educate about history and the tendencies of the market, as well as informing about what’s happening right now.

And I think that’s important because otherwise, you can get taken in. If you’re just reading a press release or believing what an investor is telling you or what a company is telling you without understanding how the underlying business works, the mechanics of the market, etc., then that’s dangerous territory.

So I think another thing that is important for me to remember, for us to remember, and as much as possible for the viewing public to understand, is that, yes, our job is to report the facts. Our job is also to bring historical understanding into the picture, and our job to some degree — I know it sounds paternalistic — but it’s to try to protect at least the interests of the retail investor, by saying, you know what, things go up quickly; they can come down. Here are some of how the mechanics of a short squeeze can work. This might be set up as the little guy versus the hedge funds. I guarantee you, all of the hedge funds are not short. Hedge funds love to eat their own. There are some people who are eager to be a part of this short squeeze and drive this up.

And then those same people will reverse at the appropriate time and help drive it right back down, and make money both ways. Because, is that corrupt? That’s how the market works. And if you’re going to play in the market, understand as much as possible how it works.

So we’ve been talking around retail investing, because I just feel like the dynamics of the GameStop story had as much to do with the media as the market. So we’ve talked a lot about the media side of it. Let’s talk about the actual market. So Robinhood is an app, there are lots of apps like it. They’re a startup. Whenever there’s a news cycle about a startup, it’s always a good bet that they’re just flailing. There’s just — a startup being a startup.

That feels like a lot of what happened here. You’ve watched the tech industry grow up, basically. This is new, right? This amount of interest in financial technology, this amount of interest in democratizing finance?

No.

No?

Not really. I mean, I remember E-Trade, if you want to talk about a revolution. That was, well, I can just log into a website and click some stuff around and connect my bank account and buy this stuff myself. I don’t have to get on the phone with a broker, and I can control this, and I can type in the numbers.

That was a whole different scale of revolution than this is, in part because it was also a revolution for the long term. It allowed people to dollar-cost average in and control it themselves, to shift their plan quarterly without having to schedule a meeting with their financial adviser, etc., and do their own research. Read reports online, not have to wait for things to come in the mail, read SEC documents off the website.

That was amazing. I want to put down what this is because I think there’s a potential for — on social media, online — people to research better and more quickly, for people to develop systems of credibility, where individuals can become highly rated analysts, because of their charted reputation.

There’s the potential to encourage behaviors in communities that haven’t had it, around saving, around investing, but I don’t think that’s happening on Reddit yet. I hope it does. I think the spark of what’s happened here could lead to long-term healthy behaviors, but I think it’s an open question whether that’s actually going to happen.

Well, it’s two technology platforms here, right? There is Reddit, which is a community of people, multiple communities of people, right? There’s WallStreetBets, and then there’s also r/personalfinance and there’s r/longterminvesting. Reddit, it’s not a monolith. We’re specifically talking about WallStreetBets. Here’s this subreddit that drove the entire news cycle.

That’s just a community. The tool that most of them were using is Robinhood. And the specific difference between Robinhood and E-Trade, Robinhood makes trading free, and there’s a business model dynamic underneath that, that we should probably talk about.

Yeah, we should talk about that.

And it’s a phone app that makes it seem like a game.

Right.

And those two dynamics seem like the most important part of the story to me.

Yeah. And I’m not sure yet that those are good things.

Ok. Explain the business model to everybody.

Well, the business model is that you get to trade for free because the powers that be on Wall Street get to see what you’re doing before it gets done. They get to cheat off of your test in essence. And when you can do that at scale, you get an idea of what’s trending before it happens. And this era, data is everything we talk about; the data that Facebook has to be able to target advertising.

Well, because of free apps like Robinhood, potentially, Wall Street has data to target trades. So for most people, individuals, if you’re trading for the long term, buying some stock here or there, you want to hold for a while, maybe you don’t care who’s looking over your shoulder and getting to see, “Oh, well, I was buying 20 shares of Apple.” Which of course you weren’t, because of the ethics policy and whatnot, you’re a journalist.

But hypothetically, Apple, maybe you don’t care. But if you’re trying to put a short squeeze on the powers that be in Wall Street, you don’t want them looking over your shoulder knowing what you’re doing, right? Because then that’s mano a mano, right? So that’s the one part of it, the business model. It’s free, but it’s not free. Kind of like Facebook is free, but it’s not free.

So that, what you’re describing, is called payment for order flow, which is very controversial.

Theoretically, the big banks and trading houses aren’t allowed to front-run trades in this way, right. It’s supposed to be illegal, but there’s obviously value in it, because they’re buying it and Robinhood exists as a business.

Data is valuable.

Is that just the thing that we should make illegal? Should we just make free trading based on payment for order flow illegal? Is that the thing to regulate?

Well, I mean, you could make payment for order flow illegal. I guess that would be fine. There are probably other ways to make trading free if you’re really determined to do it. I mean, there are people now who want to try tipping, as a way to, I don’t know how that’s going to work. Yeah, I had a great experience with that trade, here’s 10 bucks for the broker.

There’s probably some advertising that could be done in this case. But I mean, I think part of what is at the root of this is, if you’re getting a good service, you should probably pay for it. Or at least, the costs should be revealed to you, so that you have the opportunity to pay.

Because I think for a lot of people, even in this Robinhood situation, where they restricted certain types of trades over time, there were people who were very upset: “How can you restrict me, Robinhood, I ought to be able to trade?” You’re not paying for these trades, right? So what level of service exactly do you expect? When they’re trying to serve everybody in a free system and they get overwhelmed, stuff is going to break, right?

Either because it just can’t handle the volume, or because they have to break it to keep from overwhelming their system. In a way it’s similar to what we saw happen with Parler, but that’s a whole different—

Very different. Although the relationship to the online community, there’s something there that’s worth teasing out.

There’s something there, yeah.

So that is the business model that enables free trades, which makes more people likely to trade. I think if the E-Trade desktop website, which I don’t know if you’ve looked at it in a while, it’s still pretty ugly, right? All of their design attention is on their mobile app.

But if the E-Trade desktop website or any other old-school bank desktop website enabled free trades based on payment for order flow, you might still not see these kinds of runs. You wouldn’t get the democratized finance experience that we’re seeing. It’s also because it’s a phone app that is extraordinarily friendly, it makes it seem like a game.

I’m not sure that’s democratized. I think you’re right in, yeah, it makes it seem like a game, it’s gamified. But I mean, is it democratized? There are some things that shouldn’t necessarily be too fun. If you’re seeing what stocks are trending and that encourages you to trade them often, and [with] payment for order flow, you want a flow of orders. You want people buying and selling often.

History shows that when you trade more often, you lose. If you make a smart buy and you hold it over time, that tends to be better. So do we want a system? I’m not saying it shouldn’t be allowed, yes, people should be allowed to do what they want, but do we want a system where the mass market of retail investors are encouraged to trade frequently, when we know that they’re more likely to lose? I don’t know. Maybe that’s a consumer protection issue. People are saying, “Let me trade, let me trade often.” Yeah, but if we know that if you trade with high frequency, you tend to lose — and we talk about putting the retail investor in a bad position, by getting them hooked on something.

Investing is not Candy Crush, right? It doesn’t work that way. And if there’s a system set up that makes it feel like that, that might just be bad for retail investors.

So there were a lot of calls to regulate various parts of the market in the wake of GameStop. At the very beginning of our conversation, you said, we still don’t know what we learned. I would say that we don’t know what part of this system we should regulate. So here’s just a… I made a quick list. Elon Musk thinks shorting stocks should be illegal.

I definitely disagree with that.

We should talk about it. I don’t really know how you would do it.

The process by which Robinhood prevented people from buying stock will be investigated by Congress. I’m sure some regulation will come out of that. When does the terms-of-service agreement for Robinhood supersede whatever expectations, I don’t know. Some regulation will be proposed there, right?

They should look into that, for sure.

AOC and Ted Cruz bizarrely agree that something about hedge funds should be investigated. I still don’t know. Elizabeth Warren seems to think that the market in general needs a new set of regulations, such that it reflects the value for companies and their workers, not over-financialized hedge fund guys. I don’t know.

I mean, that sounds good, but I’m not sure what that means.

I think she had the most holistic view. I thought her letter made the most sense.

She’s done very good work.

It’s just that at every part of the stack, it’s, we shouldn’t let you short stock, all the way to, the market should reflect the value of labor in the companies, and we shouldn’t treat it like a casino. All of those sound good. Which ones do you think are the most viable, and which ones do you think, as you’ve watched the market grow and more people participate, are the most reasonable?

Well, I think first of all, there need to be limits on short selling, right? The degree to which GameStop was shorted, and AMC, which was so crazy, that it was begging for this to happen, right? You should not have more than 100 percent. There’s all sorts of reasons why it’s not really more than 100 percent, but you should not have more than 100 percent of the float of a stock sold short.

But at the same time, I don’t think that short-selling, betting against a stock, should be illegal. And I just look back to Enron, right? Who were some of the people who called out the Enron scam? They were short sellers, in part, why? Because there was a financial incentive for them to do so. And I think that’s great. Just like there ought to be a financial incentive for people to make their argument about why Tesla is the future, and it’s so awesome, and it has the potential to be worth the $800 billion-plus that its market cap reflects. There should be people who are able to say, you know what? These Enron financial statements, they don’t make sense, this thing is a scam, it needs to be called out.

And look at the housing crisis. It’s horrible what happened at the end of the housing crisis, people losing their homes, etc. But there were people who were short mortgage-backed securities who were absolutely telling the truth about what was happening in the market, because they were incentivized to do so. That’s not a bad thing.

So if somebody is negative, but they’re right, we don’t want to outlaw negativity. We just need to learn to sort through facts and figure out what the right thing is.

Elon Musk thinks shorting stocks should be illegal. But part of the reason he thinks that is because there is a lot of short interest in Tesla against a lot of extremely vocally supportive retail interest in Tesla. That seems like the right dynamic, right?

Well…

You got a bunch of big players who were like, “I don’t think he’s ever going to make enough cars. I can bet against it.” And you’ve got a bunch of people who believe in him very specifically, who can’t afford a Tesla, who can open up Robinhood and buy some Tesla stock. And it goes up and they’re happy, and he’s capitalized enough to build more cars. How would you even stop that? Isn’t that exactly how we want that system to work?

I don’t know if it’s exactly in every case how we want it to work. I mean, with Tesla at the heights where it is right now, it’s easy to forget that a couple of years ago, Elon Musk was like, Britney Spears circa what, 2003, the man was kind of a mess. Right. We were worried about Elon Musk. I remember that New York-

Nilay Patel (00:35:50):

You just watched that documentary, didn’t you?

Jon Fortt (00:35:51):

I’ve seen the tweets about it. I haven’t watched it, but yeah. That’s it. You know how this works.

Nilay Patel (00:35:57):

Yeah.

Jon Fortt (00:35:57):

But yeah. I mean really, Elon Musk was like “the worst year of my life. It was hell and blah, blah, blah.” Now he’s riding high.

But in part, that’s because of the pressure that he was under, which is in part because of the shorts. Now, what if we had lost Tesla and all of that innovation, because some people just wanted to make money betting against it? That’s why I’m saying, there need to be some limits. We want the game to be fair, right?

It’s like when we’re watching the NBA or watching the Super Bowl and the refs are making a bad call — it’s not that we don’t want any refs, we just want consistency and we want fairness so that the best are able to win. And I think that’s really what this is about. I get uncomfortable with talks about regulation being the solution to everything. We don’t want too much regulation because then that holds back innovation. But you need enough consistent, clear rules that the right type of innovation and the right type of behavior gets incentivized. Whether you’re talking about companies and leaders, or you’re talking about people who are trading, you don’t want to give people incentives to do unhealthy things.

There is a lot of very pent-up anger out there, right? There is an entire generation that came out of college into the financial crisis of 2008. President Obama just put out his memoir. There’s a lot of regret over the size of that stimulus. Maybe we didn’t get the economy going enough. You see Joe Biden right now with his coronavirus stimulus package. He’s saying, “I’m not making this mistake again.” There’s just a lot of sense that the wrong people were helped out of the financial crisis; the banks. Not enough regular people were helped, and regardless, it wasn’t enough, and that has wrecked the economy forever. Where does that anger go? If it’s not pointed at Wall Street in the form of WallStreetBets and Robinhood, how do you make it something constructive? Is it even possible?

I think it is possible, but I think it’s partly on us as journalists to arm the people with information. And I think it’s partly on the fabric of our civil society and democracy because what’s supposed to be great about democracies, and what is great about healthy democracies, is that anger gets funneled into informed action and the ballot box. And things get changed in a smart way because people get upset. I mean, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, on and on and on. We’ve seen this; that’s what happens when righteous anger meets with good information and good leadership, ethical leadership, and righteous action. We’ve got to, I think, reinvigorate good information and reinvigorate democracy out of all of this to get things changed in the right way.

Do you think the markets have been over-financialized? To me, one of the classic examples, and this isn’t in the US market, but you and I talk about tech companies all the time. Sony has a bigger insurance business than it does a TV business, or even a film business, right? Its main business is financial services. GM is another great example, where its loans unit was big enough to once be spun out. That’s where Ally, the bank, came from. And that was just GM’s financial services division. Like they weren’t a car company, they were a bank that made cars. And then eventually we split them off and turned them into an actual bank. There’s just a lot of financialized games that happened in the economy, that most people don’t see or don’t understand, that have tectonic impacts on our lives. Is that the place to point the righteous anger and the regulatory indignation, or no?

I’m not sure that’s the right place. I mean, we’re talking about righteous anger at a time when anybody over the past decade could have made the boring, smart bet and bought the S&P 500 and they’d be doing very nicely right now, if they had the disposable income to do that. And that’s a big if, because a lot of people have been out of work; income inequality, which I think is a messed-up term. I think the distance, the space, between the poor and the rich has opened up to a crazy degree.

And so people at the lower end of the socioeconomic strata have had a whole lot of difficulty being able to afford to invest for the long term. So the market going up doesn’t mean much to them. So yes, that’s an issue. But I think the core issue again becomes what’s the fair, correctly incentivized way to make sure that every person has an opportunity to get educated, to become a productive part of the economy and then to live comfortably, right? If you’re working hard, if you have access to education, you’re doing all the right things. Maybe everybody’s not going to be Jeff Bezos, but I think people just want a shot at not having to sweat it at the end of every month. And I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Can a market where you have a retail investor and a BlackRock doing the same thing, just trading, can that market ever be fair?

Sure. First of all, why is the retail investor trading? If you’re the retail investor, hopefully you’re reading The Verge, you’re reading the reviews of the first M1 Apple laptops out. And you’re thinking, “Okay, well, based on the fact that Apple’s big enough now to vertically integrate in its hardware and get more margin out of every device, and based on the battery life that I’m hearing is coming out of this thing, do I think the stock is worth buying?” And then you’re watching CNBC and you’re seeing the earnings and you’re making a decision on whether you should own Apple for the long term.

Hopefully you’re not sitting there thinking, “Oh, well, GameStop is at $250 now. And we’re in the midst of a short squeeze. Should I buy it here?” If you want to gamble and have fun, maybe you can’t go to Vegas. You can play side bets on GameStop for this week and that’ll be entertaining for you, but don’t do that with your rent money or your retirement savings. Invest for the long term, then do you have to worry about BlackRock? Probably not much, especially since a significant portion of your retirement investing and even your long-term savings should just be in an index fund and BlackRock isn’t going to mess with your index fund money, right? Did I get wonky there? Maybe a little, but you get my point, right?

I do. You said income inequality is a messed-up term. Why do you think that’s a messed-up term?

Because we want income inequality, like how messed up is income equality? Like, I don’t want my coworker who’s working half as hard as me making the same money. Forget that. I don’t want income equality. I want income that matches my effort and I want opportunity that’s equal for everybody. I think that’s what we should want. So let’s talk about opportunity equality based on neighborhoods where people live, access to quality education, access to a basic level of food and health care that makes sure that kids can show up ready to learn, all of that. What are the things that we need to get this economy working for everyone? Because selfishly, if we’re being selfish, even as individuals, we should want every single person in the American economy trained up to the max of their potential. Because that’s going to lift everybody.

So let’s go for opportunity equality and fair rules. And then yeah, let the income be unequal, not to a degree where the poor are getting crumbs and the rich are Bezos and Musk, necessarily. There’s some issues there, but yeah, we want people to be successful. I’m not like AOC. I don’t want to outlaw billionaires. I don’t think billionaires are a sign that there’s something wrong. Hey, Apple should be worth a whole lot of money for inventing the iPhone and the people who bet on it early, both by investing in it and working there and helping to invent that stuff. I’m happy that they’re rich.

Yeah. I think about this a lot. That the place where the opportunity inequality turns into the income inequality is the problem. And I don’t think that we’ve, even when the opportunities are equal and the work is equal, we still see income inequality. And I think that gets flattened a little bit in this conversation about who makes all the money, who doesn’t make enough. But I often see the mistake of, we shouldn’t pay out against the risk— and you and I cover tech companies. Most startups just fail, that money just disappears. And you’ve just accepted the risk of that money likely just disappearing.

History books are going to spend so much time on Elon Musk and what he has done, not just with Tesla, but also with SpaceX, the guy is a phenomenon. Yes, he’ll also tweet about Dogecoin. I don’t know how the history books are going to handle that. But a guy like that, in a fair system, he gets rewarded. That’s what you want to happen. Yes, I’m an unabashed capitalist. I’m not a libertarian. I think there need to be guard rails on the road. Not saying anything about libertarians, make your argument. I just don’t happen to be one. I don’t think that the free market automatically is moral and just, because this is a country where we had a market for people not too long ago. And under the free market, that’s perfectly fine. It’s not perfectly fine. So I’m all for the necessary regulation to express the morals of the republic. And there ought to be some, but I’m also an unabashed capitalist.

Let’s talk about Fortt Media. I want to talk about the project you just put out through your company, which is very directly called “The Black Experience in America,” the course. And usually when I talk to other journalists, I don’t talk about their company and their entrepreneurship, but this is a product that you’re putting out, that you’re selling to people to help them learn what it’s like to be Black in America. Tell me where that came from and what kind of business you’re hoping to build around it.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, I didn’t come up with this as a commercial idea. This wasn’t like, I want to start a company. What should it be about — how about Black stuff? That’s not where it came from.

I hope it didn’t come off that way.

No, but I’m sure people might think, “He’s got a company about Black stuff. How did that happen? How did he cook that up?” Well, what had happened was, in all seriousness, when George Floyd was killed, I was thinking about, what am I going to communicate about this to our two sons? My wife and I have two sons right now, they are 12 and 10. And part of this was, there was a big outpouring of emotion and activism around this, people were marching. I’m a journalist, so I don’t march. I don’t go anywhere and carry any signs. It’s not my role. So this led to a little bit of confusion in the household. It’s like, “Are we allowed to go out and march, dad?” Yes, you guys can march. I’m just not coming. “Can we put a sign in the yard?” No, you can’t put a sign in the yard.

That’s my house.

Yeah, there was a lot of what I wasn’t going to communicate, but I really wanted to focus on, well, this is an important issue. What am I going to communicate? And it went beyond, it needed to go beyond “the talk” that we talk about Black parents having with their kids. I’ve had a bit of that with our kids about authority and bias and society. I want it to go a lot deeper. And so, as I thought about all of the things that I wanted to communicate to our sons, I thought, “Well, this isn’t a talk. This is the course.”

So let me think about structurally, what it should be. And so much of Black history, the way it’s taught, focuses in on slavery and the civil rights movement. And it’s like there’s a minor lead-up and then slavery, and it’s terrible, it’s terrible, it’s terrible. Middle passage, oppression, cotton, etc. And then emancipation, maybe a little on Reconstruction, eh, it didn’t really work out. But then the civil rights movement, and now everything’s supposed to be better. And is it? I don’t know, but now it’s the present. That’s a lot of how Black history is usually taught. And I thought, “Well, no, that’s not a good framing. It’s kind of too focused on victimization on the one end and hero worship on the other. There’s so much complexity, both about the Black experience and the American experience that needs to wrap into all of that.”

And so I structured something that’s in three parts, what I call cycles. The first really focuses in on identity. It’s called “Double Consciousness,” really focusing in on W.E.B. Du Bois and what he articulated in the souls of Black folk. The second part is called “How We Got Here.” And that’s meant both metaphorically, like how we got to this point, and literally, how Black people got from Africa to the Americas. And then the last part is called “False Restarts.” And that’s really a reference to this pattern that I see in history, where there are these big moments when it comes to race and culture, where we take three steps forward, but then we take two steps back. So, Civil War, emancipation, but then Reconstruction, the Black codes, two steps back. The civil rights movement, but then we have kind of botched integration, busing, pushback against that.

And so we were in this moment in summer 2020 after George Floyd was killed, where there was all of this movement and talk and action around [how] things are going to be different. I had a lot of people saying to me, “It’s going to be different this time, Jon, right? Everything’s changing.” And I was like, “Not so fast.” Yes, some things are changing, but there’s a pattern here, there’s a lot of ambition, leaps forward, but then there’s two steps back. This is hard work over time that takes study, knowledge of what’s been accomplished in the past, what’s worked in the past, what hasn’t. And so all of that is what I wanted to communicate and build into the structure of the course.

One question I had for you as I was looking over the course. You started it based on “the talk” that we’ve heard so many Black parents have with their children. And “the talk” is, when the cops come by, here’s how you act. How did you turn that into a course and how do you recontextualize that talk after the protests of the summer, after this entire moment?

Well, first of all, I think a lot of “the talk” is too abstract. And what I didn’t want to do is scare our kids. Because we live in the suburbs right now, with a pretty diverse police force. They don’t have exactly the same concerns that we see play out elsewhere in the country. And I don’t want to build up an unrealistic nightmare-type relationship with the police. I’ve had lots of interactions with the police over my lifetime; 99 percent of them have been positive. So I don’t want to overly focus on the negative, even though the negative part is important. So a lot of it was context.

What I wanted to do was first of all, on the identity piece, show them how race is relevant today. Because my mom grew up in the segregated South. And even for me, in my relationship with my mom coming up, the stuff that she was saying about race and what I needed to be afraid of, I was like, “Mom, what are you talking about? It’s 1992. Things are totally different.”

If I was thinking that in 1992, what are my kids thinking in 2020, 2021? So how do I show them how race is relevant for them? And so that’s why I did things like tie in Shakespeare and Othello, reach into Toni Morrison and The Bluest Eye to show the gender part of how double consciousness and identity plays out in a racialized society, and how there are beauty standards that don’t necessarily see beauty to the same degree in every body of every shade. And how we have to have our own sense of identity and value apart from that. And so going through some of that, showing them some history around Paul Laurence Dunbar and “We Wear the Mask” and dialect poetry, and kind of how he was limited and ran up against limits.

But later Maya Angelou had a little bit more room to run, and how that gets expressed in poetry and art. That really helped them connect with the things that they’ve seen going on in society around them that they couldn’t quite understand. Even the pressure around that Black kids put on other Black kids about what it means to act Black or talk Black or being accused of acting white because you’re doing well in school. There’s a whole lesson on internalized racism that explores some of those things. And for this generation, that was a lot of the way that they were able to connect to the continued importance and relevance of race for them.

Who is your target audience? Because you’re talking about reaching your kids, which I’m assuming is your most important target audience for everything. You’re talking about reaching this generation. But it seems like one of the bigger problems right now with race in America is there is an entire class of people in power who were under the mistaken impression that it was over.

That there was no such thing as institutional racism.

Right, it was gone. So are you trying to convince those folks? I mean, you have a platform at CNBC to do some of that work. But are you hoping that a bunch of rich, white executives take the course?

Well, it’s really in its current form that I’m building it out online, and there’s an interactive platform at ForttMedia.com — classes.forttmedia.com. But just go to ForttMedia.com, you can start. It’s $5 a lesson. Wanted to intentionally make it very accessible. It really is for everybody.

At first it was like you said, for my kids. And I also taught it over Zoom to nine other Black kids over the summer. And my core mission was for this to be available to young people, young people of color, who would benefit from it. But even as I was teaching it, I’m hearing from friends who are white, who are Asian American, “I want to do this with my kids.” I was like, “Oh, hold on. This is not for you yet.”

But then once I got through with it and looked at the material and looked at the structure of it, I understood that not much modification needed to be made for people to understand the Black experience in the context of the American experience and in the context of individual cultural experience. So I’ve had people of various different backgrounds go through lessons in the course and say, “Boy, I really connected with double consciousness because of my immigrant experience. And now I have a different sense of how that plays out in American society.”

And it’s not all negative, but it’s a lens. The Black experience is a lens through which we understand the American experience, and hopefully, we understand our own experience even if we’re not having, personally, the Black experience.

Let me connect the two parts of our conversation. A lot of people would say that the real racial justice comes out of economic justice. I would agree with those people. I would agree with that idea that the lack of economic justice in this country — what you and I talked about, opportunity equality — is what has created most of the disparities that we now see as injustice.

How do you approach it? I mean, now you have a platform where you’re teaching a course of the Black experience in America, and you have a large platform where you talk to executives every day. And I don’t think it’s a stretch to say most of the executives at CNBC are white. What do you connect to those things?

And just specifically about economic justice?

Yeah.

Well, I think, economic justice, I’m not sure I love the term but I love what it represents. I think very often once we get to talking about economic outputs, we’re talking about outcomes that are the result of something. We’re talking, really, the inputs are culture, are messages, are education, right? So we need justice at that level before I think we start talking about economic justice.

It’s not as though, if you just were able to put a big cash infusion into Black and brown communities right now, just give everybody some six- or seven-figure amount of money like that would solve the underlying issues. It doesn’t. We see what happens when people win the lottery. Sometimes it goes well for them. Sometimes it doesn’t. But what are the cultural tendencies? What are the educational systems? What are the habits that we have set up that we encourage that lead to these disparate outcomes for different communities? I think we have to look at that.

And that’s not a… I mean, I’m being intentionally and unintentionally vague, because in the Black community, there’s this thing where we have in-group conversations and we have out-group conversations. Right? And the out-group conversation is very often about justice and the need for racial justice, and that is important.

But there’s also an in-group conversation that we have about what we as a community need to focus more on. Right? When I was growing up, I was not a popular kid because I wasn’t into sports. And because I was more focused on writing and drawing superheroes, I was a nerdy kid. It wasn’t popular in a lot of Black communities to be a nerd. Now my Asian American friends, I’ve got a friend who, his little brother got a B once on an interim report card in one class. It was an interim report card. It didn’t even end up on the final report card. And in his group of friends, they started calling him Joe B for the rest of school, because he got a B once on an interim report card. That was a scarlet letter for him.

Now look at the disparity in the peer pressure in that situation. If one group is pressured to get straight As, and if you deviate even on the interim report card, you get made fun of, and another group is getting pressured to have an excellent crossover and the freshest new basketball shoes, cash infusion isn’t going to solve that. Right? There’s work that we need to do at multiple levels.

I feel like I hear that argument a lot. And, I mean, I’m an Indian American kid. I was not allowed to get Bs. I still got some Bs, I want to be honest, totally, I wasn’t perfect, but I felt that pressure and I know what you’re talking about. But I feel when I say equality of opportunity or when I say economic justice, I don’t think it’s, everyone’s going to win the lottery today.

I look around and I see, well, there were a lot of Black entrepreneurs at the beginning of the internet, but I don’t see a lot of Black entrepreneurs getting venture capital money right now. That has nothing to do with whether their friends pressured them to get straight As. Right? There’s another level of this that’s occurring that I would argue is much more important, because those are the models you hold up.

They’re both important, right? They’re both important. And I think we have to be careful not to elevate one at the expense of the other.

I had the enormously valuable experience of growing up in Washington, DC in the ’80s, in a community that was heavily Black, and I had some great Black teachers, and that helped my sense of identity. And despite the things that were happening in the larger culture, I had these opportunities and these role models. And, boy, wouldn’t trade that for the world. That’s important. The in-group stuff is important. It’s not politic or comfortable to talk about because it gets misunderstood and can get turned around and used against the community. But it’s still important.

It’s a conversation that’s got to happen in the right ways in the right context. That doesn’t mean that those other effects aren’t happening. They absolutely are. There is not enough investment going to Black and brown entrepreneurs because there are too many investors who are pattern matching, looking for somebody who looks like Mark Zuckerberg in a hoodie. And they admit it, right?

I mean, they literally have said things like that out loud.

Yes. People have said things like that out loud. So, yes, there’s work to be done on both sides of this. They’re both important goals, needles to move.

Do you see the course that you’ve put out, do you see the next version of this extending into other areas like this? Is this a long-term project for you or you’re just seeing how it goes?

Just executing on this one is a long-term project…

See, now you sound like a CEO. This is great.

I’ve covered entrepreneurs for so long. I didn’t necessarily intend to be one. But it’s one thing teaching this course live to a group of mostly middle-schoolers. It’s another thing then translating that into an interactive experience, doing web development around it, doing original writing and original illustrations around it, building up the payment system. I’ve been deep in it. And I’ve got three full lessons published, each one an hour to an hour-plus long. There are 18, lessons total.

So it’s going to take me a while to build this out, but there’s also exciting work that I’m doing, both getting it in front of a college audience, building it out as a college course. Also I’m working with a charter school locally, or actually a network of schools, that’s looking to use it. And I want to build up teacher training to prepare teachers to present this material in the classroom.

I’m not an educator, but I’m blessed to be the son of an educator, the husband of an educator. I have so much respect for educators. So I’m working with experienced teachers who are workshopping these in a way that can help other teachers to present it.

Well, Jon, it’s always great to talk to you. I look forward to seeing what happens next with the course. I’m confident that in another year I’m going to have you back and we’ll talk about the GameStop movie.

Andrew Ross Sorkin is helping to make the GameStop movie.

Of course, he is.

Of course, he is.

I was like, he’s just going to make an episode of Billions about this. But I think that movie makes a little more sense. All right, man. Jon, always good to talk to you. I look forward to talking to you again.

Thanks for having me.

Best gaming laptops 2021: Alienware, Asus ROG, Razer, Acer Predator, HP Omen and more

(Pocket-lint) – The desktop is dead, it would seem – and long gone are the days where a gaming laptop could only be a ridiculously overpowered, heavy and LED-encrusted monster that would take your arm off and crush your femurs should you try to either carry it anywhere or rest it on your thighs.

Everyone’s at it nowadays, quite cleverly realising that a slightly bumper-sized notebook is where it’s at for the modern-day video gamer. But, with so many out there to choose between, and so much cash at stake, which are the ones you really want to be thinking of? Here are our choices for the best gaming laptops on the market right now, for those who’d rather buy one than build.

Our pick of the best gaming laptops to buy today

Pocket-lint

Acer Predator Triton 500

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With the Predator Triton 500 Acer has made the sensible choice to not necessarily focus too madly on the looks – it’s a functional machine that makes performance its priority, and does so with real success. That said, the clean design of its chassis is quietly nice stuff. Underneath that metal is a spec list that can be tuned to absolutely eye-watering degrees if you’re willing to pay.

More mid-range bundles are probably advisable, though, and can still have you gaming away without hitches or lag, and connections galore mean you can hook it up to anything you’re likely to need to. The display is cracking, and performance is reliable without getting too hot, although battery life wasn’t top-class at around three hours. This is nonetheless a seriously solid effort from a manufacturer that’s a bit newer to the field.

Acer Predator Triton 500 (2020) review: Sensational gaming powerhouse

Pocket-lint

AsusROG Zephyrus G14

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If you’re looking for a capable gaming machine, but still want something that’s portable, easy-on-the-eye and powerful too, then look no further than the Zephyrus G14.

This is a 14-inch gaming laptop that packs enough power to play the latest games on the highest settings, while also having a battery that’ll support standard use throughout the day.

You can even get a variant of this machine which sports 1,000 customisable LEDs on the lid, meaning you can make it your own with various designs, logos or gifs. We thoroughly enjoyed this small notebook and thought it had plenty of character despite its small stature.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review: Good gaming in a small package

Pocket-lint

Gigabyte Aorus 17X

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This guy is a bit of a Rolls-Royce, an absolute monster of a machine that can completely crunch the latest games on their highest settings.

A 17-inch display and chunk design means it’s right on the edge of being portable at all, but the details are all finely tuned, meaning a great keyboard, trackpad and performance in all walks of computing.

It’s a pricey machine, and no mistake, but if you priority is sheer brute force, this is a great choice.

Gigabyte Aorus 17X review: Gaming to the extreme

Pocket-lint

Razer Blade 15 (2020)

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Razer’s Blade laptops were a bit of a revelation when they first debuted a few years back – although they took a few tries to get it right, the form factor and performance offered make for a fairly unreal combination. Now it feels like Razer improves the Blade every time it tweaks it, and this refresh of the Blade 15 brings ray-tracing power to the table without any compromises.

It’s about as understated as a gaming laptop comes, in a good way, and costs a bomb, but is lightning fast and crunches through current-generation games easily. It gets a little hot under pressure, although that’s hardly a unique issue. Battery life is also solid, and you won’t find ray-tracing in many current machines this small. If looks are your number one priority, the Razer Blade 15 might just be top of the pile.

Razer Blade 15 Advanced review: Fast ‘n’ loud

Pocket-lint

HP Omen 15

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HP’s Omen line has been around for what feels like ages, and has been putting out reliable machines for most of that time. The Omen 15 is a solid continuation of that heritage. It’s pretty chunky, but with a great display and genuinely reasonable starting prices is a great option for those looking to spend slightly less to get gaming.

The Omen 15 does look distinctly gamer-y, with a crest on the back of the screen that won’t go unnoticed, but makes up for it with great performance and customisation options. Its 144Hz display is a joy, while HP is one of the few laptop makers that allows you to upgrade various components down the line if you get left behind – something that we’d love to see become more widespread in this age of sealed laptops. As an all-rounder, the Omen 15 is well worth a shout, especially for smaller budgets.

HP Omen 15 review: A portable and punchy gaming machine

Pocket-lint

Acer Nitro 5 (2021)

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Acer’s latest budget laptop is really impressive despite its label, and packs in some really good specs while keeping the price down impressively.

Its build quality isn’t best-in-class, but that’s entirely forgiveable given the extremely solid performance it’ll get you in the latest games, and a really lovely display rounds out the package in style. This is a great bit of a value in a market that can sometimes be a little overpriced.

Acer Nitro 5 (2021, AMD) initial review: An affordable, customisable gaming laptop

Pocket-lint

MSI GE65 Raider

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The MSI GE65 Raider is one of those gaming laptops that pleases in many areas. It has plenty of connectivity options (including Ethernet), a decent spec setup, snazzy looks and plenty of gaming prowess too.

Highlights to this laptop include the keyboard (by SteelSeries), a remote control functionality through an accompanying app and decent performance for the price as well. With a 240Hz screen, RTX capable graphics and much more besides the GE65 Raider is certainly a gaming laptop to consider.

MSI GE65 Raider review: Portable power, understated glory

Pocket-lint

Acer Predator Triton 300 SE

There aren’t too many 14-inch gaming laptops out there – it’s a form-factor that hasn’t got too much love. Loads of people prefer a smaller laptop, though, so we’re glad to see Acer indulging in it with this excellent build.

It’s also got a far more “normal” design than most gaming laptops, which is a good thing if you want to blend in a bit more.

On top of that, of course, you get really impressive performance in the latest games, making for a great package.

Acer Predator Triton 300 SE initial review: The everyday gamers’ laptop

Writing by Max Freeman-Mills.