Facebook's bad week: a 60 Minutes interview, a six-hour outage, and a Senate whistleblower hearing

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Russell Brandom discuss Facebook's bad week: from a 60 Minutes interview, to a 6-hour outage, to a Facebook whistleblower hearing. The crew also get into Android 12, Pixel 6 rumors, iOS 15.1, and more. Further reading: Verge Tech Survey 2021 Facebook encourages hate speech for profit, says whistleblower Locked out and totally down: Facebook’s scramble to fix a massive outage Facebook is coming back after a six-hour outage Facebook is back online after a massive outage that also took down Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus Facebook explains the backbone shutdown behind its global outage on Monday What is BGP, and what role did it play in Facebook’s massive outage Everything you need to know from the Facebook whistleblower hearing The whistleblower hearing hits Facebook where the company is weakest The Facebook whistleblower hearing unearthed the danger of engagement algorithms Facebook’s whistleblower report confirms what researchers have known for years Facebook runs the coward’s playbook to smear the whistleblower ​What’s good, bad, and missing in the Facebook whistleblower’s testimony Mark Zuckerberg breaks silence to say the Facebook whistleblower’s claims ‘don’t make any sense Facebook reportedly slows feature development for ‘reputational reviews’ Google just announced its Pixel 6 event on October 19th Android 12 review: it’s mostly about the looks Android 12 will be coming to Pixel phones in the ‘next few weeks’ Pixel 6’s rumored 23W wireless charging stand and more details leak early iPhone 13 Mini and 13 Pro Max battery life: better, and a beast The latest iOS 15.1 beta includes iPhone 13 Pro camera features Halide’s latest update brings the iPhone 13 Pro’s Macro Mode to older iPhones After Epic v. Apple, a small developer is challenging Apple’s in-app payment system Apple is making it easier to delete accounts attached to third-party apps Apple’s healthcare division leaned on misleading data, report alleges Nintendo Switch OLED review: screentime Google’s latest Next doorbell and camera are not obvious upgrades Amazon is reportedly working on a smart fridge Twitch confirms major data breach after its source code and secrets leak out Taylor Swift fans are getting caught up in the Virginia gubernatorial race The Verge is now on your smart TV Announcing Springboard: The Verge’s documentary on the forgotten history of the Treo Vergecast - A Tech Podcast by Derek Rhoads bit.ly/cutthroughthenight Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, Russell Brandim and Alex Rans join the show. We talk about Facebook's horrible week, what's coming up in Android 12, some iPhone battery testing, and a little gadget lightning round. Let's come up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the bordered gateway protocol. Settle in for 90 minutes of router discussion. Russell, how does a router work at a technical level?

• 1:59Speaker 02

  I didn't expect to, I'm not, I'm not the router guy. I'm at a higher level. Do you mean like a router to cut wood? Or like?

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it spins really fast and you just.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you you can make complex cuts with it.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  I'm Neelai, I'm your friend. That's Russell Brandom. Alex Cranz is here.

• 2:18Alex Cranz?

  I am here and really fascinated to learn how these routers work.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  I didn't know Russell was so deep into woodworking. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  I am the smart fridge standing on the precipice of a long, steep stairwell.

• 2:31Alex Cranz?

  Watch out for the Amazon robot right behind you.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  You were threatening. I don't know if we talked about this on the show, but Dieter and I have definitely had a conversation where you you've been threatening to purchase a smart fridge.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  I have been threatened. I'm not currently threatening. We have. We have a need for a screen in our kitchen that is large and can display recipes from the Paprika app. This turns out to be a remarkably difficult thing to accomplish.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  And so you're going with full Android tablet.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  God damn it.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  That's high.

• 2:58Alex Cranz?

  Can you just like get some tape? Just tape it on?

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  An iPad and a roll of duct tape gets you home.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  I mean, that's that's where we live right now. We're trying to improve on that.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  I see. All right. Well, if you have thoughts on how to get a large screen in Dieter's kitchen, it's at Backlon.

• 3:14Alex Cranz?

  iPad Pro.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  It's iPad Pro. Full iMac in the kitchen. That's the idea. Okay. A lot going on this week. Facebook went down for for six hours, setting us all free. We all glimpsed sweet freedom, including Facebook employees who couldn't go to work. Like, they were like legitimately free.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Disclosure, I do not know what my partner did with her free time.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  Because she works at Oculus, a division of Facebook. Yes.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 3:37Nilay Patel?

  There's a disclosure. We did it. We got out of the way early in this one.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  Amazing. Facebook also, there was the whistleblower Francis Haugen, she testified in Congress. You gotta talk about all of that. This was one of the worst weeks for Facebook ever. There's Google stuff, there's Apple stuff to talk about later. I want to start actually by putting this all into context. So every year we do a survey, which just flatly is an idea we got in like during the election. We're like, we should do political surveys for tech companies. So every year we do a survey about attitudes about tech companies. This was our third one ever. We published it this week. We did not know that Facebook would have one of its worst weeks ever. We ran the survey in August. We ran it in partnership with the Insights team in our revenue organization. They do surveys like this. They do market intelligence.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  The methodology is rigorous as you would expect from that organization. It is, they went and found a nationally representative sample of 1,200 or 1,600 people. They matched it using census data, so it represents the population of the United States. We asked about a bunch of companies. We made sure to only ask people at companies they told us they were familiar with. Just, there's methodology. It is remarkable coming out of the pandemic, when we are more dependent on tech companies than ever, to see which companies are just rock solid and which companies have had their perceptions change radically. So, and this surprises me every time. Apple, last year, 81% of people said that a favorable opinion of Apple, 19%. This year, 79%, so it went down 2 points. Compare that to Amazon.

• 5:10Nilay Patel?

  It was 91% favorable last year. This year it's 87%.

• 5:14Speaker 04

  The big hit on Amazon is fascinating because more people are depending on Amazon than ever because of the pandemic.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  I think that's it, but, right? Like, if more stuff got delivered more slowly, or you heard more about how they treat workers, like, your exposure to Amazon got higher, but the utility stayed high. So it's still higher than Apple.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  But that's weird because you're like, is it because they were leaning on the workers too hard? Or is it because the stuff wasn't getting delivered? And people are like, where's my Amazon package?

• 5:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or like AWS went down and people were like, ah, the whole internet doesn't work, right? Like, it's hard to know. Like, we can't unpack it. But it's interesting to see. What is always interesting to me is, we talk about on the show, like, Apple is the most beloved, powerful brand in the world. I think many people in the media and in tech just assume that. And then three years in a row. The data tells us that is not true, right? They're they're pretty mid pack and it's Amazon and Google who are at the top. And Google is just like unmovable.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, 90% for all eternity.

• 6:17Nilay Patel?

  I really think it's because people think of Google as a search engine that helps them all the time for free. Right? Like, we split up Google and YouTube. YouTube went down a point that's like, you know, there's a three point margin of error on this. So like, basically the same. We talk about social networks and disinformation and all this stuff, all this stuff. Google's gonna build a testing website, y'all. Nothing, nothing changes your attitude about Google and YouTube. That's all context for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, which were bad and are getting worse. Right? So TikTok is at 54% favorable, 46% unfavorable.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  Not great.

• 6:53Nilay Patel?

  Not really not great for an app that like people love.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Well, young people love it. I feel like old people feel victimized by the young people on TikTok.

• 7:04Alex Cranz?

  That's what prompted this vote.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Because they're like Lil Nas X is out here. He's like doing crazy, wild, vibrant things that I don't feel like I have access to. I used to be young and hip and listen to like Eminem. And now there's this new thing and I don't understand it. And like, I blame TikTok, right? I worry that that's dragging down the approval rating.

• 7:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a TikTok where it's like a guy being like, have you heard the teens are calling the 80s and 90s the late 1900s? And it's like, I'm gonna kill you. I'm so old.

• 7:38Alex Cranz?

  It's the old guy yells at cloud meme, but like he's yelling at TikTok.

• 7:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and also, you know, Donald Trump tried to ban it instead of Chinese misinformation. Like, a lot to unpack in these. But so TikTok, out the gate, you know, just above 50%. Twitter, last year, 61% favorable, this year down to 58. Facebook, big drop, last year 71% favorable, this year down to 66.

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  Instagram holding steady at 72, but check this out. When you ask people how the brands impact society, only 36% of people say Instagram is positive for society. There's a big chunk of neutrals in there. Yeah, it's 46% of people say it's it's neutral, but like, that's bad, right? In in the context of this week, especially when we're hearing about how Instagram might impact how teen girls feel about themselves, how other teenagers might feel about themselves, the spirals you can go into on Instagram, they're starting from a baseline of only 36% of the population thinks are any good. And so I just want to like, we can talk about the survey. A lot of people have asked me why Sonos is on the survey.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  Because we really wanted to know that it went down 1%. That 1% of the population this year was like, you know what, Sonos, we hate you.

• 8:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's 3% of the population thinks Sonos is bad for society. Like, I don't know, man. But the reason it's there is three years ago, when we started doing the survey, we realized we were asking about very polarizing companies. And so we wanted to pick, we wanted to have effectively a control, right? Like a premium tech brand that's been around for a long time. You know, Jay-Z is like name checking Sonos and songs. Like, people know what Sonos is, but that doesn't have any political baggage. Like, Sonos isn't doing culture war stuff. They don't have a content moderation policy. It's like, hard to be mad at Sonos.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Like, it used to be everyone had to gather around the radio to listen to music and be in the same room. And now they can just go from room to room and listen to the same song. And it's, they no longer have to really interact with each other and we become alienated from our neighbors and.

• 9:42Nilay Patel?

  That's a 3%. Can I give you a preview of Decoder? So I interviewed Dave Limp, Amazon's SVP of Devices and Services for Decoder. It's coming out soon. And he just very confidently told me, he was like, look, here's what the phone did to music. It it made it individual and smart speakers have made music a communal activity again. And I was like, really? Like, people weren't listening to music together before. It was it was a strange moment, but yes, you're right. Sonos.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  How does he feel about like cars, like cars that play music?

• 10:12Nilay Patel?

  You gotta listen to Decoder, man. It's coming out in a week. All right. Bring back the Victrola. That's where I'm landing. As a media executive, I'm trying to window you into my higher value. Higher value. But Sonos is on here as a control, but because it's the one we picked three years ago, it it's like our forever control. Like, it's just a proxy for like, how do you feel about tech company? Like, we could have picked anything, but now we have Sonos. So I apologize to the good people at Sonos and to the audiences, past, present and future, that we will deeply confuse by their inclusion in this survey. Yeah. We'll make it more clear that they're a control in the future. So two more questions here that I think are really interesting. YouTube and Google, should we split into two companies?

• 10:55Nilay Patel?

  2020, 51% of people said yes. 2021, 55% of people said yes. Facebook has too much power. Holding steady, 72% of people said yes. It's okay that Instagram, WhatsApp are owned by Facebook. 2020, 66% of people said yes. 2021, 63. Like, these are tiny shifts. Some of them are, yes, they're in the margin of error. But I look at it as, man, all this bad news about one company in particular is really start, it's starting to break through in a small but significant way. Right? Like, you can just see the dial moving. Oh, man, these companies might be a little too big and I don't like them a lot.

• 11:38Nilay Patel?

  And that ladders into this last one, which is why don't you use Facebook? And there's a long list and people can rank them. Do you know what the number one was? 43% of people told us this. We don't like how Facebook does business. That is the number one reason people don't want to use Facebook.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  And it's not like because the CPMs are too high. Like, these are not probably people who have like done business directly with Facebook. It's just that like, they read the headlines, they see what's happening.

• 12:05Nilay Patel?

  Right, they read the headlines, they see the power that, again, I think because in the pandemic, it goes back to that that Amazon one, you're more and more exposed to these companies. So it's not just, you know, small positive interactions you're having. It's like endless interactions with these companies, endless package deliveries, food deliveries, everything happens through a screen or a social platform in your social life. We're just really aware of these companies now. And in some cases, if you're Google, it just doesn't matter. And in some cases, I think if you're Facebook and you're hearing the headlines and you're using the product, like Facebook, the blue app is not like a beautifully designed app. It's not like a pleasant consumer experience. So you're using it all the time and it sucks and you're hearing the headlines that it makes people

• 12:49Nilay Patel?

  bad about themselves or contribute to being disinformation or whatever. And you can just see it's, it's starting to crack a little bit. Not a lot. Like, it's not gonna fall apart tomorrow. Like,

• 12:58Alex Cranz?

  It fell apart Monday.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Nilay Patel?

  I just like, Mark Zuckerberg isn't like fire himself tomorrow, right? Like, he's the only person, the only person can fire Mark Zuckerberg is Mark Zuckerberg. I don't think he's reading our survey and being like, screw it. But I'm saying the pressure on Facebook was already, this, again, we did this survey in August, we're publishing it now after we like, did the data analysis. Already in August, it was, the pressure was high. And then this week happened. So I just want to put it in context. There's, we could talk about the survey for the whole hour, but I think that little through line to me is, is really starting to come through. Also, 3% of people really don't like Sotos.

• 13:37Alex Cranz?

  I love those 3%. Talk to us. Reach out. Why do you hate Sotos?

• 13:43Nilay Patel?

  How did you, what happened to you?

• 13:45Alex Cranz?

  They work at like Google or Amazon on their,

• 13:48Nilay Patel?

  It's like the Spotify product managers got the survey and he's like, this was sucked for me. Anyhow, so that's, that's the baseline, right? The, the winds are already starting to shift with Facebook, but not as dramatically as like, maybe we would have you believe or like you would read on Twitter. By the way, people hate Twitter. But the winds are, you know, across a survey like this, there's not any change. That leads us to, A horrible week for Facebook. Alex, do you want to walk? Let's do, let's, I want you to talk about Facebook files, Russell, I want you to talk about the outage. But the Facebook files started last week.

• 14:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they started earlier than last week, right? They started two or three weeks ago. And I think the big thing that happened and what we've heard the most about until this week was the teens and how there was research that Facebook had that this whistleblower acquired and leaked to the Wall Street Journal that said that teen girls like feel terrible when they use Instagram. Like, it makes them, their lives measurably worse when they use this product. It makes them more depressed. It leads them to be more prone to eating disorders and stuff. And Facebook kind of like reacted to it. They had their little reaction, I think, last week.

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, last week, they put out one of the slide decks and they had annotated the slide deck. And then the Journal responded by publishing the other four slide decks that they had proving this point.

• 15:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And it kind of, it kind of built up. And then Sunday, it really started, this Sunday, past Sunday, it really started to pop off because we first had Facebook themselves kind of pre-leaking this 60 Minutes interview. They, they seemed to under, they seemed to have an idea of what was going to be in the interview. And they sent out a big memo to the staff saying, hey, this is coming up. We love and respect you. Facebook is a great place. This cannot tarnish us. And it was really focused on the, the January 6 riots, right? Like, a lot of this original, initial response was focused on that and saying 60 Minutes is going to talk about it and say Facebook is responsible. We know we're not. Let's go ahead on.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And can I just do like the tiny bit of media insight baseball for the audience here? There's something devious about that, right? Like, 60 Minutes is a good news organization with like standard, standards of news gathering. They did their interview and then they went and asked Facebook for a comment on a bunch of claims.

• 16:14Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  So Facebook knew what the claims were and they sent a memo to, they were trying to front on the interview, which is like, that's a little shady.

• 16:21Alex Cranz?

  That's a little shady.

• 16:22Nilay Patel?

  But like, it's shady and it's like, it's interesting only if you're in a bar with other reporters shady.

• 16:28Alex Cranz?

  Right. Right. Like this, this room right here, we're all like, mm, but a lot of people, a lot of people weren't. And it was great though, because it actually ended up building hype, I think, for the 60 Minutes interview. I was already excited because as Russell knows, I'm a huge 60 Minutes fan.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:45Alex Cranz?

  Watch it every week.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  Amazing.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  This is shocking for me to discover.

• 16:50Alex Cranz?

  This was the real like bombshell of the week.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  By the way, how would you say, as a connoisseur of 60 Minutes, how would you say the segment like stacked up with like, how would you rate it?

• 17:04Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I just, can I preface this by underlying the word connoisseur there? When Alex was like, I was like, who's gonna do the 60 Minutes? Like, who's gonna watch it? And Alex was like, first she volunteered, this thing is happening on Sunday night. Alex volunteered and she goes, I'm excited for it. And then she goes, it depends on who's producing it. And I was like, wow, do you know the difference between, do you have a ranking of favorites?

• 17:26Alex Cranz?

  I do.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  But go ahead, evaluate.

• 17:29Alex Cranz?

  No, 60 Minutes sometimes can have not really well-produced stories when it comes to technology stuff. Like, it can be, it can be really wishy-washy. And this one was great. They, they understood everything. And I think it was really helped by the whistleblower herself. And I think that's something that we saw in her, her appearance before Congress as well, is that Halgen is just super well-prepared. She's super well-trained to talk about these, these matters. And to also be very clear when she doesn't know something, right? Which I think is really, really important. She's not gonna just pop off. She's, she's gonna stop and say, hey, I don't understand that issue. I, I don't have enough context to, to speak authoritatively about it.

• 18:11Alex Cranz?

  And she appeared on 60 Minutes. She revealed who she was. She had formerly worked at Google. She had worked at Pinterest. She's a data scientist. And she had worked at Facebook and then after the January 6 riots and then after they shuttered the, the group she was working with. She said, oh, wait, I can no longer trust this company. I don't feel comfortable with what they're doing. I think it's time to start collecting some data so that when I leave and I present this data to the SEC and to the press, there will be no way out. It'll be very, very clear that Facebook has a problem that needs to be addressed.

• 18:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. By the way, she is very well spoken. We'll get to the hearing.

• 18:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:54Nilay Patel?

  But she's Harvard MBA. She was a coder at Google. Like, she has the experience. Like, one of Facebook's pushbacks is like, she worked here for less than two. And it's like, yeah, but look at all the up. Like, she's, she has the credentials.

• 19:06Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  And she's prepared.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Neil, she was never, she was never at a decision point meeting.

• 19:12Nilay Patel?

  I want to get to, I want to spend a lot of time on Facebook's weirdo response to her in front of Congress. So that was the 60 Minutes interview. She said Facebook is picking profits over censoring hate speech.

• 19:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. What was interesting about it was she didn't spend a lot of time talking about the, the previous stuff we'd already seen, the Instagram story. She didn't spend a lot of time actually talking about the January 6 riots and, and whether or not Facebook was culpable for that. She spent a lot of time just saying the core business of Facebook is bad for the general public and has to be stopped, which was like, oh.

• 19:48Nilay Patel?

  And this is engagement-based ranking of content, like the, the news feed.

• 19:52Alex Cranz?

  Right. She was very focused on these algorithms and, and how the algorithms are making the world a worse place. And I thought she had some, like, really compelling little quotes that she gave 60 Minutes, and I thought she gave, like, some of the evidence that 60 Minutes aired was, was really, really compelling and, and felt big to me in a way that, that some of this previous stuff hadn't. But I'm also not a Facebook reporter, so I was also like, oh, wow, this is huge. And I'm sure, like, Alex Heath was like, yeah, we've heard this before.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  No, I definitely had a moment with Alex Heath and with Casey and with myself. Where I was like, oh, another Facebook scandal. Do, do, do. And I had to stop and remind myself and then remind everyone, like, this one feels very different.

• 20:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  So Howie said on 60 Minutes, there's a conflict between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. Facebook chose over and over again to optimize for its own interests. And she pinned a lot of this to an algorithm shift where Facebook deprioritized news in the feed and prioritized sharing from friends and family and then used engagement to rank that stuff. And it is easier to get people to hate, share something than love, share it. It's easier to inspire negative notions and positive emotions. We've all, everybody who's ever been on the internet knows this information.

• 21:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Nilay Patel?

  And so you get what you get, you get what happened with Facebook. So that's 60 Minutes, that's Sunday. And we're like, oh, man, what a bad week. We're expecting her to show up in front of Congress because, and have more documents. We're like, oh, what a bad week. And then Facebook, like, it got substantially worse for Facebook. Russell, what happened with this outage?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Facebook just disappeared from the internet for six hours, right? I mean, that's, immediately people were like, this must have been in response to something. People thought it was a false flag. I think all of that kind of shows you how paranoid people have become about Facebook. But, so, the technical side of it was, they had disappeared from a bunch of internet architecture stuff. Like, we know where the Facebook servers were, but the ways that computers find Facebook when you type in facebook.com, all of that, all of those cables had kind of been torn out.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Specifically, so DNS is sort of the phone book and BGP is kind of the Google Maps, I guess, like, the directions that help you find things, like, go to this hop and then this hop. And both of those, it was, it just kind of disappeared. The, the, Facebook's explanation was that their internal network, that's sort of their servers use to talk to each other, they deployed some Bad code and it was, it just went down. And then that had the cascading effect, which because of one of the computers on their network is responsible for running all of the DNS and BGP architecture.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  They just disappeared from all of that and there was no way to know when, like you would type in facebook.com and it just wouldn't know where to point you. I mean, so DNS and BGP are both very technical and they're very core parts of the internet that like the spec of how the internet works. This is like core internet engineering. And because of that, there are like bad things about it and there are complaints people have about it. And they're like legitimate security problems with BGP where like they can tell you, people can point you in the wrong direction and then spy on you or mug you or something. Like this is a real spy thing that people are concerned about.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  But Facebook has basically built its own version of that, kind of quietly in the background.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  And so it means presumably with an eye towards, well, if something bad happens on the regular internet and there's like a really bad DNS attack, it won't affect us because we have our enclosed DNS system that we built this big wall between us and the rest of the internet. And like, it really only listens to our internal network. But then as soon as the internal network goes down, of course, there's no, there's none of the resiliency that you would normally get from like being actually connected to the internet.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  And we should say that it wasn't just facebook.com that went down. It was also Oculus, we disclosed earlier, Instagram. And I think for a lot of countries, most importantly WhatsApp, because WhatsApp is more popular than iMessage. You know, I'll just say it that way. And it is an essential communication tool for a lot of people.

• 24:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so many countries have this like unofficial utility infrastructure over WhatsApp. And like their economy stopped for six hours. That's weird.

• 24:37Alex Cranz?

  That's great.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  There were other knock on effects. Facebook itself runs on Facebook's network. So their email stopped working, their building access cards stopped working. If you think about fixing it, hilarious thread to follow on that day was they had to get the engineers to the building, to the servers to fix them, but they couldn't contact the engineers.

• 25:04Nilay Patel?

  Like no one, their phone numbers are on Facebook's systems. Like they couldn't, and the engineers couldn't get into the building. There was a delightful rumor that turned out to be not true, but all of us deep in our hearts wanted to believe it, that they couldn't open the server cages. So they had to use an angle grinder to cut in the server cages.

• 25:23Alex Cranz?

  That was my favorite one.

• 25:24Nilay Patel?

  It was, it's not true.

• 25:25Alex Cranz?

  It's not true.

• 25:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm only mentioning it because like, if you're writing a screenplay about this, like make it true in the screenplay. So then when we, when we talk about that movie, we can talk about it, like just putting that out in the world. Six hours, it's a long time for Facebook. Like the knock on effects for WhatsApp are super real for people. You know, people whose, whose lives who like jobs or like buy ads on Facebook are like, what do we do? They start issuing quotes to the press, like the small business economy has hurt. Zuckerberg, who has so far said nothing about the whistleblower, issues a statement that's like, we're very sorry, we'll be back soon. Russell, how'd they fix it?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  I mean, they like rebooted the, the sort of.

• 26:05Nilay Patel?

  They unplugged it and plugged it back.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like eventually, like, I don't know, how do you fix this? I will say, so there hasn't really been a ton of like conversation about this, but I do think one of the things that gets, that one of the responses people have is like, well, it sounds like it was kind of dumb to run absolutely everything off the internal network. Like what if the internal network goes down? Don't you want to have some like backup plan? Like maybe just don't put the email on the internal network. But I also think like part of the point of putting it, like when something like this happens, you actually want it to be really bad for everyone. Because it just can't ever happen. It's really not supposed to ever happen.

• 26:51Alex Cranz?

  So make it so catastrophic.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like you're gonna feel like such a jerk that like people couldn't get into the building because of the update that like Joe and I T sent out.

• 27:05Nilay Patel?

  You know, what's funny about this is like, this is the second time computer stuff has kept Facebook employees out of buildings and from doing their work. Remember when Apple revoked their certificates?

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:17Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like all their apps stopped working. It's like Facebook. You shouldn't run into this problem twice in a couple of years.

• 27:26Alex Cranz?

  Like redundancy, it's a thing. It works.

• 27:30Nilay Patel?

  Keys. Have you thought about keys? Keys are great. Do you think Zuckerberg's hydrofoil just like powered down as he was in the ocean? Scoot in the lines like.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  He had to swim back. Yeah.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  Sunk under the waves. All right. So that is a very bad day for Facebook, right? Like billions of dollars wiped off the market cap. There are revenue implications. Facebook had already issued revenue guidance that was going to be lower than expected because of Apple's ad tracking blocks in iOS 14.5 and iOS 15. So the money's bad now that they've gone down for six hours. I think Zuckerberg himself, like his net worth went down seven billion. He's worth like 120 billion. So like, he's like, ah, no more yachts this year, but like he'll be fine.

• 28:14Alex Cranz?

  Just cancel that order.

• 28:16Nilay Patel?

  So that's bad. We're reeling. Then there's the Senate hearing and I have to say, you know, we have seen a lot of tech hearings. You know, the United States Congress is batting at like 30% on having good hearings for tech companies. Sometimes they do great. Sometimes they do horrible. This one, in my estimation, was a great one. And it's mostly because they agreed with her and she is very compelling, but they did a good job here. Russell, you want to walk us through the hearing?

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I mean, I think one big thing to remember. So before the 60 Minutes interview even, you know, the Facebook files had come out and in particular, child safety, like the idea that this was having a negative impact on the mental health of children was like really got this subcommittee's attention. It's this subcommittee from Senate Commerce Committee. And they're very focused on tech privacy issues. In particular, there's a particular law, COPA, that the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act that sort of sets stricter guidelines for kids under 13.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  This is why a lot of like online products will cut off at 13, most notably Instagram, but like. If you know someone under 13 in America or across the world, like it is very likely that they have an Instagram account because it just asks for your birthday. Like, I mean, it's just trivially easy to start an Instagram account if you are under 13. And everyone kind of knows this and like, probably they should get on that. I mean, they are on it, but like, are you really trying hard enough if JoJo Siwa can get around it? JoJo Siwa actually was mentioned in the...

• 30:04Speaker 02

  I believe it was Senator Blumenthal was like, "I talked to JoJo Siwa about Instagram." And she was like, "I've been on Instagram for years." Like, "Why is JoJo Siwa on Instagram?" And, you know, there wasn't a good answer for that.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  So prior, the previous week, so much pain could have been avoided if we kept JoJo Siwa off Instagram. Anyway, sorry, I'll stop. So, Antigone Davis, Facebook's head of sort of global safety, had testified in front of this same subcommittee. And, I mean, Senator Blumenthal, who heads the subcommittee, had said like, "Look, my staffers and I got together and made a fake 13-year-old girl Instagram account and followed a bunch of like dieting accounts. And very quickly, we were getting recommended content about like self-harm and eating disorders." And like, it went straight there. And it was this classic case of something we've heard over and over again.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  And I think people really sense day to day of this kind of flywheel of the algorithm pushing you further and further out. But, I mean, it's very real. And suddenly you have this senator asking, you know, again, not Mark Zuckerberg, because he doesn't want to be the face of defending Facebook on this. But, okay, the head of trust and safety, head of global safety is going to go out there and sort of defend it. Then the 60 Minutes things happened, the outage. Suddenly, we have this person who was... She's very smart. She's totally in command of what she's talking about. And several times, they sort of tried to... To lead her out into some other thing of, well, do you think we need a specific law about this?

• 31:47Speaker 02

  And she said, no, like, I don't think we should have rules about specific types of content. You have to go after the algorithms. A bunch of times they asked her to talk about data privacy and she was like, I don't work on, I don't work about data privacy. I don't know anything about it. I'm here to tell you about this specific thing. And she really was just relentlessly focused on the idea that ranking stuff, putting the highest engagement, you know, the content that is most likely to be engaged with in front of the most people, like bumping it to the top of the feed, is just this inherently dangerous thing that Facebook does not have a handle on how to sort of counter the dangers of it.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  And that's a really powerful argument. And I think it's intuitively very convincing.

• 32:39Nilay Patel?

  It also, I mean, she has thousands of pages of Facebook documents.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  That are the receipts for this argument, which Facebook is trying to call them stolen documents. It's just like not gonna, like Congress is like, thank you for stealing these documents. You're kind of like, you're out of moves then.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Well, the, the thing about that focus and the existence of those documents that struck me is it serves as a focusing function for the senators. Like, we didn't go off into, let's talk about, you know, la la shadow batting land. Like, everyone was like focused on the topic at hand for the most part.

• 33:16Nilay Patel?

  Ted Cruz remained focused.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you know, it's hard for Teddy. He's got to yell about whatever he's got to yell about usually.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  I will say there are already people on the right who are like, she's a false flag.

• 33:34Nilay Patel?

  There's a Hacker News thread that's like, she's a DNC plant, which is very good. Like, this is an incredible long con if she's DNC plant.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Imagine the competence that they are assuming exists at the DNC.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Like, really?

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  This is very good.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  It's not that they're not plotting, but like, the plots do not get very far out of that room.

• 33:55Nilay Patel?

  No, the DNC, at the same time they were failing to protect their own email servers from Russian attacks, was like, "You need to go work at Pinterest now, so that several years from now, you can work at Facebook." Uh, I don't, I think Occam's razor might be more accurate here. But I will say broadly, jokes aside, this hearing was very bipartisan. The senators were agreeing with each other, which rarely happens. There was the usual amount of grandstanding, which always happens. But they were focused on her, on the documents, what they had found in their own research, which some of the senators insisted on starting fake Instagram accounts and telling you what happened to their fake Instagram people. And then they were, with pretty unified voicing, "We're gonna do something about this, especially around teens."

• 34:40Nilay Patel?

  And I think there's just a lot of pressure on all of the members of Congress to go back into their districts and say they did something about Facebook. And I would take it all the way back to that survey, right? We do a survey nationally representative of the United States, and we, the data shows people are distrustful of Facebook, they don't like how it does business, and they think it's bad. And so, if, you know, for whatever reasons, you think Facebook is censoring you, you think they're shadow banning Trump, like, you think they're promoting disinformation, that whole list of things on both sides of the aisle, do something about Facebook. So now you even handed a hammer that says, "Facebook knows it's bad for teenage girls" in a specific way. Teenage girls with body issues say Facebook makes them feel worse about themselves.

• 35:25Nilay Patel?

  That, I mean, it's a hammer, and they're basically saying, "We're gonna swing it." The other thing that I really learned from this, and I think this is fascinating, Facebook is a big company, they make a lot of money, they pay their people really well, Facebook's stock just keeps going up no matter what happens to it, how it's like they struggle to hire, and because they struggle to hire, they understaff projects, which causes scandals, which then makes it harder to hire. And she says, "Projects were so understaffed, there was discouragement from discovering more problems, because we would then be understaffed to fix them." So she said, "I worked on the counter espionage team at any given time, our team could only handle a third of the cases we knew about. If we built even basic detection systems, we would then have more cases."

• 36:07Nilay Patel?

  So this to me, like, from inside Facebook, somebody who worked on this stuff, who has the data, is saying, "Facebook can't even know all the problems it has, and it's incentivized to not know them, because then it will have to staff up to fix them."

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Well, and also, I mean, the engagement-based ranking is not just the news feed, it's like an internal thing. I mean, she was saying, like, the metrics are, people are very much based on, sort of judged based on moving the numbers. The entire company is obsessed with tracking engagement numbers and getting people more and more engaged, and like, people's yearly bonuses and their raises are tied to the question of, you know, could you produce a 5% jump in engagement? And so, there is this element of, like, it's easy to talk about algorithms as like a scary

• 36:59Speaker 02

  thing, but at a certain point, it's really a management decision too, that like, like, Facebook has very successfully oriented the sort of attention of everyone in the company around this metric of, "How do we keep people on the site for longer?" And, you know, I don't think you need to point at, like, mysterious algorithms to see that that's gonna have some negative effect.

• 37:29Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think that was a big part of what she was saying on 60 Minutes. Like, she talked about the algorithm on 60 Minutes, and I think she talked about it more before Congress, and on 60 Minutes, she was very focused on its leadership. It is the company itself that cannot be trusted, because it only incentivizes this stuff. So I think, like, that's a big part of the conversation, but it would still get kind of derailed with, "Let's talk about the algorithms. Okay, let's talk about how we can use Section 230 to legislate the algorithms." So it's like, "Oh, no, we're getting off course."

• 38:01Nilay Patel?

  So Hagen brought up 230, and she has, well, it's probably a bad idea and how to change it, but the thing she said in regards to that, that I think... Was very resonant. Facebook frames the debate as though these are the only choices, and this is the natural way that all social networks behave, and that is not true. But their incentives are not constrained, and their incentives are to grow, and this is what they're always going to pick. You have to change that. I thought that was very powerful. They did keep asking her what to do. Like, if she was like, here's my idea, I'll be the algorithm czar. Like, there's a real chance the Senate Subcommittee would be like, good, you're on it, right? Like, that was their basic deference to her.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  I mean, she sort of said that. She was like, we need like, a digital sort of product agency that people who used to work at these companies can go, can like, leave the company and go work at this government agency and help keep an eye on it.

• 38:55Nilay Patel?

  I don't know about that.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

• 38:59Nilay Patel?

  So that was that idea. Her other idea, and we should talk about them both. Her other idea was amend 230. So 230 is a law that says platforms aren't liable for what their users post on them. Amend that law so that you are liable for what you choose to amplify, which is, sounds great. Like, that is, yeah, give me some of that. You know, like, great, that sounds smarter than whatever Josh Hawley is saying. Like, fundamentally unworkable. Runs into the exact same constitutional issues as just regulating the content directly. So Russell, explain the problem with that, and then talk about why, I mean, it feels obvious that having a national internet content agency is a bad idea, but let's talk about that for a bit. Those are the two solutions sort of on the table from her.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, okay, the thing with the 231, I think the big other sort of elephant in the room is Google, and specifically Google Search, which is itself an algorithm, and like, is certainly amplifying content, but it's really hard. Like, if Google Search is liable for what is the first result when you say, like, what time is the Super Bowl or something?

• 40:07Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna sue.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Any harm from that becomes potentially the subject of litigation. It just becomes impossible to like, have a search engine and really basic- Functions of the internet start to fall apart. And also, I mean, I think even this, like, it's a little bit hard to know exactly what the fix is, even if you pull back Section 230 protections for like Instagram. So anyway, I think that one is a little muddled. I'm not sure that that's the way forward. I think it does seem likely that we will get some form of, I mean, if anything changes, a plausible way that it could change would be to have some kind of

• 40:52Speaker 02

  digital services regulator, right? Like, this is Harold Feld at Public Knowledge has written on this in a really smart way. I think what you would end up with is something, so we did this 10 years ago. We had a little problem with the banks. The banks were up to some, I don't want to, I think we can call it malarkey.

• 41:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  They were definitely up to some malarkey. We wanted to end the malarkey and we created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which was supposed to keep an eye on the banks. And it turns out that when one party wants, like, if there isn't a really clear vision of what the agency is supposed to do and a ton of bipartisan buy-in on like, enabling it to do that, it's just really easy to keep it from doing much of anything at all. And like, maybe we'll get it right this time and it'll be more effective than like, any of the other agencies that could plausibly regulate Facebook.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  But like, it does kind of feel like that X K C D comic where it's like, I'm gonna, like, there are too many standards for this. I'm gonna write a new one that'll unify all of them.

• 42:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, so can I, can I say something? And then we can all pause and listen for the thundering herd of crypto people coming to kill me. Money isn't speech, right? Like, you can create a regulator for the banks without implicating the First Amendment of the United States, right? Like, you can create a regulator for cryptocurrencies without implicating the First Amendment of the United States. You create a regulator for a company like Facebook or YouTube or Twitch or whatever. At some point, what you are regulating is speech and the promotion of speech. And that is territory that our government historically, you know, tries to do, gets told it can't do. And that like fundamentally, Americans don't accept.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  I mean, we had a national radio station, right? Not to go all Tim Wu on you, but like, we were just like, the government owns radio. And we're going to have a single radio show and, and like, the president can get on whenever he wants to.

• 43:09Nilay Patel?

  Right. There's a whole, you did get all Tim Wu on me.

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  Right. But at that time, the airwaves were our scarce public resource owned by the public. That's why you have an FCC. To make sure that public's property is being used in some way. It's still dicey. That authority got challenged a lot and now no one cares, right? As we've learned, Facebook operates its own private network. That it can do access out to anytime it wants, or just fuck right off. It's choice, Facebook.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  There's just like a, there's a really hard wall between here's how we regulated banks. And here's how we're going to regulate speech on the internet. And like, all of these ideas come crashing into that wall. In a way that for me is just like deeply uncomfortable.

• 43:59Alex Cranz?

  It feels a lot like movies and TVs and games in that way. And in all of those cases. The companies all got together and said, we don't want to be regulated. And they've made new oftentimes terrible boards that did it for them, right? Like the MPAA and whatever, the ESA and stuff. And like, it feels like we're kind of at that point, or couldn't they just give us like a button that turns off algorithms?

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  Twitter did, right? You can, I mean, she, Hagen suggested reverse chronological feeds of the answer, which is great, like.

• 44:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 44:32Alex Cranz?

  Stop showing me that one teacher from high school that has strong opinions.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  But the one that you're maddest at.

• 44:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  What have you revealed about yourself, Alex?

• 44:41Alex Cranz?

  Right? Oh.

• 44:42Nilay Patel?

  But I just, you know, her, her suggestions are for there to be an external force to Facebook. That somehow controls Facebook or knocks Facebook into a different set of incentives. Instead of breaking up Facebook and have more regulation, because her argument is then you'll have a lot of little Facebooks with the same incentives. That are harder to control. And this is where I think the testimony just like kind of fell apart for me. Like, she's very compelling. She's very smart. She has all the receipts in the world. Her ideas for solutions are like, I don't know, man, like, sometimes other people are the president and they're like, I think we should sell TikTok to Microsoft. And you're just like, wait, I don't think you should have the power to do that. So, anyway, there's

• 45:27Nilay Patel?

  a lot of fallout from this. We should wrap this up quickly. Facebook has not done a good job of responding to her. Russell, you mentioned the first response. Would you care, would you care to go through it?

• 45:40Speaker 02

  You know, even at the hearing, there was a lot of like, sort of, where is Facebook's response to this? And then when we finally got it, they had sort of the immediate crisis PR response, which is usually very like much trying to deescalate where you're like, I mean, you've seen hundreds of these things at this point where, I don't know, something terrible will happen at Twitter and they'll say, well, we're very sorry, we disagree on some points, but, and just like really try to put a wet blanket on. So what they said was that they described her as a former product manager at Facebook who worked with the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision

• 46:23Speaker 02

  point meeting with C-level executives, and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question. This is, by the way, when she said, like, I don't work on that, let's talk about this other thing. That's like, good. It's not really... But also, the whole thing is just very kind of, even C-level, like, we report on corporations, so we have to know what the C-suite is. But the question of whether or not someone is in or outside of the C-suite is just such a like weird, status-obsessed middle manager thing to even think about.

• 47:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Facebook has like 100,000 employees. And you're saying like, 99,904 of them don't count.

• 47:11Nilay Patel?

  98,994 of them don't count. I think there's only six people in Facebook's C-suite. It's an awful lot of people to discount. So this was a bad job. Your friend and mine, Liz Lopato, reacted strongly to this quote. There's been a lot of comparisons to Big Tobacco and Facebook throughout this whole thing. Big Tobacco famously did a lot of research on how bad cigarettes were for you and then framed that research as being how responsible they were.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  There's a long history there. This is kind of what Facebook, whatever, that comparison is tortured and hits on some places, doesn't on others. But she's like, but this is what Big Tobacco did to its whistleblowers.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. I will say, the thing that I think kind of comes out with it is there has been this dynamic between people sort of in the tech world and outside the tech world. And we sort of get caught up in this sometimes ourselves, where like someone has a problem with something that happened. And it's like, you don't, the response is, you don't really understand what's going on. Like, you don't really understand how these things work. And like, kind of leave us alone, you know? And I think that's what they're trying to say about her, is that like, there's this core group of people inside Facebook who like, know how Facebook really works. And she never really hung out with them or talked with them.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  She wasn't one of the cool kids. Right. But you just can't, like, it just doesn't fly anymore. Like, people know what Facebook is, and how, and like, what the problems are. And it's not actually that complex or mystifying. Like, none of the stuff she's saying is all that intricate.

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  I said this at Casey's, we were watching the hearing. Usually when you get Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, or even Sundar Pichai up there, and they yell at them. They tend to reduce everything to like unsolvable philosophical concerns. Right? You're like Jack Dorsey. Why are there Nazis on Twitter? And he's like, what is a man? And like, right? He's like off in space. Right? And what Haugen represents is the idea that Facebook is knowable, that it's measurable, and that you can make judgments on those measurements that are firmly rooted in reality. Does Facebook know that 33% of teen girls feel bad about themselves after using Instagram?

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  It certainly does. Have they done anything about it? Right? Like, that is just very concrete in a way that, you know, Zuckerberg is like, I've given a speech at a local college about the nature of free speech. I encourage you to look upon my works. Right? It's like, no, no, no, hold on. You're doing a bad thing. And then the second part, and McKenna has written about this in the context of like, the rise of young GOP members of Congress. All of the members of Congress are just like shit posters now. Like, they use the apps. They're on the app. They, I would like them to stop. Right? They're spending millions of dollars on these apps as customers doing political advertising.

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  They can't stop. Have you ever seen a Chuck Grassley tweet? There's no social media manager in between him and that keyboard. It's just like crazy. Like, these apps are, they're not at a remove from the products anymore. And so the idea that Facebook is knowable, I think, has like come to a head here. So I don't know if it's gonna happen. Russell Markey, Senator Markey ended with some very strong words from Mark Zuckerberg. I think you have him.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So he said, here's my message for Mark Zuckerberg. Your time of invading our privacy, promoting toxic content, and preying on children and teens is over. Congress will be taking action. You can work with us or not work with us, but we will not allow your company to harm our children and our families and our democracies any longer. Thank you, Mrs. Haugen. We will act.

• 51:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Ooh. He's really like, he's not like, straight out saying like, Mr. Zuckerberg is a child predator. But he's really like, he's going for it.

• 51:21Nilay Patel?

  I will say like, while you think of the, there's a chance we just end up with like parental advisory stickers on Facebook.

• 51:29Nilay Patel?

  Russell, what do you think happens next here?

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Well, okay, I think the best thing Congress, like Congress is good at deliberating.

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  Is it?

• 51:37Speaker 02

  I think there are some specific laws around, like, so I mentioned the Child, Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, like, there are some proposals around strengthening it. I think that's like, kinda uncontroversial, at least so far. I could definitely see one of those passing. I think we are probably going to see Mark Zuckerberg, like, subpoenaed to testify in front of this committee. Like, it really, they seemed really unhappy that he did not come, and like, there's a lot of heat on this, and no one on the committee's defending Facebook at all. So I would not be at all surprised if we saw an actual, like, subpoena issued to him. And then I think they can also, they can form an investigative

• 52:20Speaker 02

  probe that will have subpoena power and can get more documents like this, which I think would also be a really, really interesting thing, because, I mean, now that we know that these files are within Facebook, and we have a whistleblower who is certainly happy to work with Congress to sort of point out more of them, I think it would potentially put the company in a really dicey place.

• 52:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It appears that there are more documents. So, this week was very bad for Facebook. It took us an hour to get through all the bad things that happened, and Mark Zuckerberg still hasn't. Right, I mean, to his credit, Mark Zuckerberg did put out a statement, it was the single best piece of comms Facebook did this entire week, where he was like, "I don't believe we're this company. We invest in this research for a reason. We're taking it under advisement." You know, it ends with the same thing that Facebook has been saying for a long time, which is like, "The Congress should just regulate us, and our lobbyists should write the regulations," right?

• 53:14Speaker 02

  I will say, in that blog post, Mark Zuckerberg blog post finally addressing all of this that came out after the hearing, he uses the term "industry-leading" five times. Like, "Our industry-leading research effort." And it's like, "Facebook is the industry."

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Like they're spending more on research than like YouTube is, I guess. And like YouTube's pretty big, but like Facebook's the largest company like this in the world. Yeah, okay, like spend more on it. I don't know. It's just very odd to be like, we have an industry leading like research.

• 53:52Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's also, they spent like, when the, when the Instagram story first came out, their, their whole response to it was how like, don't pay attention to any of the research. It's all minor and, and dumb. And like, it's very, very small potatoes and you should ignore it. So it's like, really weird to be like, hey, yeah, we absolutely suck at this. And then later be like, actually, we are the best and it's because we care. Like you're just watching their, their plan of action for this slowly twist.

• 54:21Nilay Patel?

  I think that people inside of Facebook doing this research are in a really tough spot and they are very unhappy.

• 54:28Nilay Patel?

  We'll, we'll see if they choose to remain there, like.

• 54:31Alex Cranz?

  They're all looking for data scientist positions right now.

• 54:36Nilay Patel?

  They're on LinkedIn, the social network owned by Microsoft, also algorithmically ranked. It's a real problem for them. I don't, I think next week is going to be even more of this, but I will end where we began, which is nationally representative survey of people in America. A huge percentage of them say they don't use Facebook because of how it does business. As a number one reason, they told us that they don't use Facebook. This stuff is just going to accelerate that curve. And then Tik Tok, whichever also is very unhappy with, is poised to grab all those young users that Facebook wants. This is a spiral. Kevin Rooster wrote a great piece this week. He's like, what we are seeing is a company in decline and we should treat it like a company in decline. It's desperate for relevance. It's fighting back. It's trying to claim its turf

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  instead of a company that's confident on the attack. I don't know, like that's, you should read that piece. Kevin did a good job writing it, but it's an interesting, it's the frame that I've been thinking about as this horrible week for Facebook has gone on. Okay, we have to take a break. Russell, thank you very much.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Totally. Thanks for having me.

• 55:36Nilay Patel?

  We'll be back to talk about some gadgets, actually. We'll be right back.

• 55:43Speaker 05

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• 56:10Speaker 01

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• 56:48Nilay Patel?

  We are back. This is a hard shift, ready? Just a hard transition.

• 56:52Speaker 04

  Here we go.

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  There's gonna be a Pixel event on October 19th.

• 56:57Speaker 04

  They're not announcing it. They announced the event. They've already announced the phone. Have they launched the phone? Unclear. They're calling it a fall launch.

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  Can I say this? Today, we ran a story about Pixel 6 leaks. And we don't, we're not in charge of our ads.

• 57:10Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  Stuff just happens.

• 57:13Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what's gonna happen. They don't bother to edit and we don't bother sales, you know? Ethics policy, the whole thing. But we ran a story about Pixel 6 leaks. And on that story, we had ads for the Pixel 6.

• 57:25Nilay Patel?

  It was just very confusing.

• 57:26Alex Cranz?

  Which you can't buy.

• 57:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyway, continue, Dieter.

• 57:30Speaker 04

  It will be somethinged on October 19th. I love that their big announce page for it had a download link for a .ics file. Prominently placed. That's very good. That's a very Google. That's amazing. Just like, it's like this little admission that like, they could have just said, add to Google Calendar, but they, you know, they, they want to get iPhone users. So they're like, this is what iPhone users get. They get an ICS file. That's amazing. The rumor, by the way, Evan Blass dropped a bunch of stuff. We're looking at a 23 watt fast wireless charger, which is interesting because usually like, you know, you can get up to the 15s or whatever. And then there's a break and then you've got like the super fast chargers on like Oppo and OnePlus

• 58:14Speaker 04

  phones. And this is sort of in the middle. The one leak that was very interesting was that there, one of the setting screens had a thing for face unlock, which Android has had face unlock for a while, but it was bad and no one used it and no one talked about it and whatever. So I'm wondering if they're trying again here or what, because we do not expect this to have the radar stuff built into it. I will also say Evan Blass have leaked some of the, you know, a bunch of like marketing materials. Good job being inclusive with your marketing materials, Google. Lot of, just lot of, lot of different kinds of people. I'm really, really proud of him for that, I guess.

• 58:54Alex Cranz?

  That's great.

• 58:55Speaker 04

  And then Android 12 hit, you know, AOSP, it's official, it's released. But weirdly, it wasn't immediately available for install on Pixels. There, it's going to be next few weeks. And it's unclear if there's like some more rough edges to polish, or if they're waiting for the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro because there's some extra features that just aren't official yet, or what. But, you know, we, we got a review, Cameron reviewed Android 12. And yeah, it's, it's mostly what we thought it would be, that it, it's all, all the buttons are really big.

• 59:30Speaker 04

  I have mixed feelings about the widgets. They're cute, but I don't know if they're going to wear well. You know, I don't know if they're going to look as like interesting and new and fresh as they do now in a couple of years, or even a year.

• 59:43Alex Cranz?

  I feel like they'll age really fast. I feel like it kind of reminds me of the early days of Android. You'd go and you'd like customize everything and make it look super cool. And then six weeks later, you'd be like, this looks old and stupid.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  Well, there's one in particular that's like the digital clock that is inside this like giant pill shaped oval. That's just like, I see what you're going for. It's cute in a way, but I'm not going to like it in a few months, you know?

• 1:00:10Alex Cranz?

  Also, there's already a clock up there.

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Welcome to Android.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  The pendulum between we're spacing everything out and we're packing everything tight is swinging back towards we're spacing everything out.

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:25Nilay Patel?

  Like across every operating system, like iPad OS 15 is like, what if we don't use this whole screen? Hmm? Thought about that? And like, this is to me, it's like, it's just part of that trend. You know, I don't know, design trends come and go, but having giant screens and then not packing them full of information has always just seemed backwards to me. And every Android phone is giant.

• 1:00:46Alex Cranz?

  You know what design trends still like, I feel like feels really new and fresh, even though I think at this point it's like eight years old, the, the Windows phone. Like, because nobody used it. It was like-

• 1:00:57Nilay Patel?

  You're just like showing up and doing violence on our show right now. You're like, you know what's great is Windows phone.

• 1:01:01Alex Cranz?

  Like, the Windows phone, bad. The UI, though, was like, that was, it just felt like neat. It felt like it was going, your faces, right now.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  Okay. First of all, here's my favorite thing about the Windows phone UI. There you go. So that's one. Second, they wanted to call it Metro, but they forgot to get trademark permission from a German grocery store and then chose not to pay the grocery store to use the name Metro. This is a real story.

• 1:01:27Speaker 04

  We cannot play these hits. We have to keep going.

• 1:01:29Nilay Patel?

  They didn't pay the grocery store. It's my favorite thing about that whole interface is that Microsoft was like, ah, we don't want to pay the grocery store.

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  Alex, if you want to have emotions about live tiles in the, the, the Windows phone interface, Tuesday's episode, I'll just give you a preview, is the Microsoft Surface Stravaganza. That includes our discussion of Windows 11, wherein I admit that I'm the one who misses live tiles on the start menu. I'm the only one.

• 1:01:56Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited for this. I'm looking forward to listening.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  So stay tuned for that, this coming Tuesday.

• 1:02:01Nilay Patel?

  I would say, it looked pretty. If you ever used it, you were like,

• 1:02:05Alex Cranz?

  It was terrible.

• 1:02:05Nilay Patel?

  Where's the stuff?

• 1:02:07Alex Cranz?

  It was awful. Yeah. Cause I got like the launcher for my Pixel. Like you can get a launcher to mimic it. And I was like, this is the best thing ever for a day. And then I immediately went back.

• 1:02:18Nilay Patel?

  I need more buttons.

• 1:02:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I was like, but there's, it's like, there's still something there. They could like, they just didn't focus enough.

• 1:02:24Speaker 04

  So Android 12, the operating system that's relevant to 2021.

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  Is pretty good. It's pretty interesting.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  I love that there's this fight over what the power button does and they've capitulated and just do, they do what Samsung and Apple have done and they like make it launch the assistant, but then that old power button menu had to go somewhere. So now it's in quick settings, but then the other thing that was in the power button menu was Google Pay. And so you look at the lock screen and the two things that were contentious were where the home, smart home controls go, where does Google Pay go? They both get buttons on the lock screen now.

• 1:03:03Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:03:04Speaker 04

  I guarantee you that there was some kind of turf war and a bunch of people lost and then they're like, but wait, there's money here. And then they, they got, they got, they clawed their way back onto the lock screen.

• 1:03:17Nilay Patel?

  So you know that the dynamic between Android trying new things and then a year later, just doing it the way iOS does it? We don't talk about the reverse dynamic enough, which is Apple just ruthlessly stealing the interface ideas from two years ago.

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Nilay Patel?

  And that's like absolutely the cycle we're in, like Google invents a thing and then a year later they back it off to where Apple was. But then the next year, Apple does the thing Google had done the year before. So my prediction is that the smart home controls will end up on Apple's lock screen sooner rather than later.

• 1:03:46Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting. Finally.

• 1:03:47Nilay Patel?

  Because they, they are, you know, they're all in on HomeKit, that we, there are these rumors that they're going to do CarKit.

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Nilay Patel?

  It's just, I'm just marking it now that this looks crazy and I agree with you. There was, there was a very contentious design review.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  Where someone was like, ah, just put it on the lock screen.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  Right? I guarantee you it gets copied because I think it's smart. I think having smart home on the, on the lock screen is smart.

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  You know how Android spent years making notification controls wildly complicated and there were like different levels and priority levels and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they finally landed on, well, how about there's like high priority and low priority. And then when a notification pops, you can like do something with it and that, that they kind of landed at something relatively simple. And Apple decided, what if we brought profiles from back, you know, like the way that profiles worked on phones in the nineties?

• 1:04:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Speaker 04

  But what if we, what if we did that? It's like they, they took all the lessons that Google learned that of the wrong way to make notifications complicated.

• 1:04:39Nilay Patel?

  This is what I'm saying.

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  And they did it, but instead of, Google made it complicated on like a notification by notification basis. Apple just did it for the entire operating system. What if we just made the whole thing hard to parse? Yeah. Anyway, I'm sure Android 12 will be fine when you get it on your phone a year and a half from now. Well, okay, to be fair, they are going a little bit faster. There is a beta already for some Samsung devices. OnePlus is out there in the world with some Android 12 stuff. So things are, you know, trucking along a little bit faster. But as always with Android, that's like, the best we could ever say. Like, Android doesn't update the entire ecosystem right away, and it never will.

• 1:05:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited about this Pixel 6. I haven't bought a Pixel on the Verge Cast in a year or two.

• 1:05:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think this will be the one.

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm sure some carrier will like, give me one for free, or even pay me to take it, just the way things are going lately. Like, just like, give me some money to take your phone.

• 1:05:31Alex Cranz?

  You're just gonna get one when you go to the supermarket.

• 1:05:33Speaker 04

  We'll see what happens after the, the final underscore final underscore two underscore final underscore finished launch of the Pixel.

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  Because the thing that has like, one of the problems with the Pixel has always been they didn't get those deals from carriers. The best they could get was Verizon kind of pretending that they cared, right? So is this the year where they have the marketing budget and they spend it on convincing all of the carriers to stop pushing iPhones and start pushing Pixels? That's the big question. Like, if they're, if they're dead serious about it, that's how we'll know. If all of a sudden, the homepages for AT&T and Verizon and T-Mobile are Pixel 6 for like, a long time, and the, the trade-in deals and the spiffs and the, you know, weird discounts are everywhere.

• 1:06:18Nilay Patel?

  We'll see.

• 1:06:19Alex Cranz?

  I'm a little nervous that they just heard this and are like, oh crap, we gotta like, call Verizon right now, make that deal.

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  Man, if that was, if that was a cause and effect, they would have done this years ago.

• 1:06:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. They, they have said that this is the year they're doing it, so we'll see. But yeah, the carriers are pushing iPhones harder than ever, and making them pivot is harder than ever. That said, they're not so happy with Samsung right now. Right? A couple weeks ago, we heard T-Mobile say like, Samsung had kind of dropped the ball.

• 1:06:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  So there's your hedge, but we'll see. Speaking of Apple and Apple world, Dieter, you updated our reviews for the iPhone 13 mini and 13 Pro Max battery tests that you ran. You've got like a, you're hot about battery quote unquote tests.

• 1:07:00Speaker 04

  Oh, God. So the results are the mini is better than I feared, but not as good as everyone hoped. It is not, it is not magic. You cannot get the same kind of battery life you'll get out of a full size iPhone. But you will get more, just your battery anxiety will kick in a little bit later, depending on how you use your phone. And then the 13 Pro Max, I always want to be conservative with making promises about how good battery life is, you know, because like there are people that use their phones differently and, you know, maybe more intensively than even I do. But man, if you can kill the 13 Pro Max in a day, you're a monster. You're just, you're just shooting 4K ProRes nonstop. That's, that's what you're doing. That, that seems to be the best way to kill.

• 1:07:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you can't, you're not doing that because you can shoot like 45 seconds of 4K Pro Max.

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  Before that you run out of space.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Nilay Patel?

  Uh, cause 15.1 came out.

• 1:07:51Speaker 04

  That's right. 15.1 beta.

• 1:07:52Alex Cranz?

  Well, you're offloading it with AirPlay or something, right?

• 1:07:55Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  No, you're not offloading it with AirPlay because AirPlay will like auto detect your computer and be like, no, we've, we've actually flattened this into a 720p file for you.

• 1:08:04Speaker 04

  You're offloading it with Lightning at USB 2 speeds, maybe USB 3 if you're lucky.

• 1:08:09Nilay Patel?

  Amazing. 15.1 came out, they added a toggle for the macro mode that some people were just much more unhappy with than us.

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. I, it's, it's fine. I, I ran into it switching once when I didn't want it to, uh, earlier yesterday. And I was like, okay, yeah, this can be annoying. If you're trying to zoom in on something that, um, you know, it can't detect if it's there and I'd like a pointy thing. But I was not as mad as everybody else because fundamentally, I think if you're getting that close, uh, and you're using the main lens and haven't switched to macro mode, you're going to take a bad photo. And Apple wants to try and prevent you from taking bad photos. That's, that's what it thinks its primary job is, is with the iPhone, is stopping you from taking crappy photos.

• 1:08:49Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if they've accomplished that goal at scale.

• 1:08:56Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, that's a, you know, I applaud them for the ambition. I just have seen the photos that my family takes. There's a Hailight update. We love this app. It lets you take macro photos using older phones. It's really more of a zoom and sharpen situation, but it's fun.

• 1:09:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, did a head to head and you can tell it's not quite, but you get out of the 13 Pro. Just gonna say it's good, but.

• 1:09:19Nilay Patel?

  If you go, if you take a Hailight macro photo and you go into it and look at it and you switch between JPG and HEIC, it'll, the HEIC will show you the zoomed out photo. It's like very clear what's happening. But it's cool. It's fun. If you, if you have macro jealousy, which who doesn't? This app is cheaper than a new phone. And then this is my favorite thing. Okay. Buttons and links, man. Epic versus Apple trial hits. There's a verdict. The judge says you have to allow buttons and links. Epic is making some noises about buttons and links.

• 1:09:50Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:09:51Nilay Patel?

  You, you know what regulatory uncertainty gives you? Startups willing to disrupt the market because they see an opening. So there's a company called Paddle.

• 1:09:59Speaker 04

  Love it. Love that it's called Paddle. I don't know why. I don't know what the metaphor is there, but I love it.

• 1:10:03Nilay Patel?

  Very good. They've announced their own payment system that gives you a link. It's like, it's a little bit of a flow. You push it, it kicks you to the web and then you hit pay and it kicks you back to the app. But their fees are only five to 10% instead of 15 to 30 that Apple charges and it's an external link.

• 1:10:17Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:10:19Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  See what I'm saying? Buttons and links, man.

• 1:10:23Speaker 04

  When you're in the external link, paying for it in Safari, if you so choose, you can pay with Apple Pay. So you can, you can get out of paying the 30%, but still use Apple's payment system. Amazing.

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  Apple did not respond to a request for comment as to whether apps using Paddle would be allowed on the App Store.

• 1:10:44Nilay Patel?

  Very good. I, look, I know not everyone's happy. Who knows what one, this little ambiguity is an opportunity for startups. That's, that's all, that's all I care about. Also, I'm excited for a court opinion about buttons and links.

• 1:10:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Nilay Patel?

  Finally, our nation's justice system is bending to the demands of the Vergecast. As soon as we get the what is a photo case, we're done here. We're going to shut it down.

• 1:11:08Alex Cranz?

  It's coming.

• 1:11:09Nilay Patel?

  Couple more Apple things. Big report in Business Insider about Apple's healthcare division playing a little fast and loose. You should go read that.

• 1:11:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:17Nilay Patel?

  It's kind of a lot of what you might have expected. Like, they made claims are reinventing healthcare with the Apple Watch. And then a bunch of doctors are like, actually, healthcare is quite complicated. Like, there's like an element of that to it, but go read it.

• 1:11:30Alex Cranz?

  Your watch can't fix that.

• 1:11:31Speaker 04

  But also, a surprising lack of firm direction and long-term planning. They're like, healthcare, it's a thing. They hired someone to be like, hey, healthcare is a thing. Make it a thing. And then, much angst. So it seems like they, they don't actually have, you know, a grand 40 chess vision of what they're doing in healthcare is what it seems like to me.

• 1:11:55Nilay Patel?

  Nor cars. If you want Apple to drive you to a doctor and then take care of you, you have a long wait ahead of you.

• 1:12:02Alex Cranz?

  You are dead.

• 1:12:03Nilay Patel?

  It's not happening for you. I just like, I read this thing, and I don't, maybe it's because my entire family, except for me, is, I'm the failure. Everyone else is a doctor. Patients are complicated, and they often do it, don't do what they're told. Sometimes they read Facebook and snort ivermectin instead of getting vaccinated. Like, people are complicated. And trying to like, optimize their behavior with a watch, is like, there's like, an element of being naive there that, I read this, and that's what I thought about it. It was my parents telling me about, like, growing up, just be a good patient. Like, was basically their message to me. I can't say any of us are. For example, I, I've mostly chosen to eat cheeseburgers and drink beer. But.

• 1:12:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I think that's a good choice. You're fine.

• 1:12:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I'm very happy. But you should read it. But just like, keep that in your mind. Like, Apple assume people are maybe less complicated than they really are. And that is a theme throughout the tech industry sometimes. And lastly, I think this one's really good. They're gonna make it easier to delete accounts, the third-party apps that you sign up for. So if you have a signup flow, you need to have a delete my account flow, which is one of those, like, control over the App Store has problems. Sometimes control of the App Store is great.

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:13:13Alex Cranz?

  Right?

• 1:13:15Alex Cranz?

  This is great.

• 1:13:15Nilay Patel?

  It's like, oh, man, I'm really happy. You guys are the dictators of all technology.

• 1:13:22Nilay Patel?

  Real, real push and pull there. All right, we gotta take a break. We got, we're gonna do a little lightning round when we come back, all the other news. But we'll be right back.

• 1:13:33Speaker 06

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 1:14:03Speaker 05

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• 1:14:49Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Dieter, you want to run through this lightning round?

• 1:14:52Speaker 04

  We have reviewed the Nintendo Switch OLED. It is as I expected. Great. It is really nice to have a big OLED screen. The end. I would be hard pressed to tell anybody to upgrade if they have a regular Switch. Like, that would be irresponsible of me, but upgrade if you have a regular Switch. So glad I have a Switch Lite. I played with one. You know, I did our hands on with it some time ago. And yeah, it's amazing. I can't wait to play Metroid Dread on it, although we also reviewed Metroid. Andrew reviewed that as well. And it's kind of dampened my enthusiasm a little bit, but that's okay. I'm still going to play it, mostly because I pre-ordered it and because I'm a Metroid fan.

• 1:15:38Nilay Patel?

  Google did this new Nest stuff.

• 1:15:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they're like, they're trying to find this weird zone of, you know, giving you features, making it work on battery, not making you feel like you have to pay a huge cloud subscription, keeping the cost down. And, you know, there's always trade offs when you try and find a middle zone and you're not just making the most expensive, nicest thing possible. And it just seems like they didn't quite nail those trade offs. That there's there's just like, in the, you know, you, we've, we've heard this metaphor of all tech is Taco Bell. It's just, you know, different variations of the same ingredients. And yeah, they, they should have, they should have stepped up to like grade B beef, you know, here. I think that they're, they just, they missed, they missed one weird trick with the trade off and the whole package doesn't go here into something that feels ultra compelling.

• 1:16:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26Nilay Patel?

  You know, we just came off the Amazon event, like Ring is like, for all of their faults, but like Ring has Jamie Simon off as CEO. He really cares about Ring.

• 1:16:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Nilay Patel?

  In a way that is often, when you talk to him, is like often like disconcerting.

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

  Right? You're like, wow, you are super into doorbells, my man. Like, and I, again, but the products are good and like they reflect his passion for making video cameras for your house and doing safety. Again, I'll probably like part and parcel of that is the controversy, but you can tell that they really care. I have not been able to tell that Google cares about Nest ever since they bought Nest. And then now right with these, with these products. And we know they're, we know the people in charge of these divisions. We've interviewed them, like, they're all smart and capable. They say the right things and you see the products and you're like, gosh, these feel half hearted. Right? There's just something about them that it just always has. And I don't know, I think I hope they turn that

• 1:17:22Nilay Patel?

  around because some of the ideas are really good. And like, you know, it, the fact that I have to run a tiny Linux computer, integrate my Ring with my Google, like, come on, guys, figure it out.

• 1:17:34Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, smart fridge.

• 1:17:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38Speaker 04

  There's a rumor that Amazon's working on a smart fridge. Of course they are. Has they made a microwave? Do you think they're not making a fridge? Samsung has a fridge with a camera inside it. How could Amazon let them get away with that market? You know, LG probably, you know, they do stuff. Amazon already makes the thing where they have a camera pointing at you, detecting whether or not you pick up food in their stores. Why wouldn't they also put that in your house? I don't know. I'm trying to get angry and worked up about it, but I can't. I'm like, I don't, I don't believe that Amazon can make the leap from Alexa that like helps you turn on the lights and tells you the weather and tells you funny jokes to Alexa that has an interface that is visual

• 1:18:22Speaker 04

  that you want to do stuff with. And something about the smart fridge is like, if you just slap a speaker and a microphone on a fridge, it doesn't count.

• 1:18:31Alex Cranz?

  They're gonna put the shopping lists.

• 1:18:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, but if you're gonna have an interface that complicated, do you think they're gonna be able to pull that off? I don't know if I believe that Amazon can do visual interfaces. This is, this is fundamentally why I'm like nervous about the Echo Show 15, the wall, the wall picture thing. It's like, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:18:46Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's kind of like the precursor for this, right? Like this, that's like the test case.

• 1:18:51Nilay Patel?

  All I'm saying to you is the words grocery store lock-in.

• 1:18:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Nilay Patel?

  You have a smart fridge that tracks what you eat and then orders the food from Whole Foods. And then suddenly you're like, I can't go to another grocery store because my fridge has locked me into Whole Foods.

• 1:19:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, that sounds great.

• 1:19:07Nilay Patel?

  It's amazing. I just did this week in lock-in. I wasn't even thinking about it.

• 1:19:11Speaker 04

  Oh, we forgot about this week in lock-in to put it in the thing. There it is. This week in lock-in, Amazon fridge.

• 1:19:16Nilay Patel?

  See, stop sending us angry letters.

• 1:19:21Nilay Patel?

  We did it. Yeah. Okay, we are way over. I'm just gonna run through these last few things. There's a huge Twitch hack. Tom Warner's all over that coverage. Literally the entire source code for Twitch, all of its apps, its payment structures, its amount it's paid to people. All that has leaked, the hacker states, part one. If you've listened to us for a while, you know, we have very conflicted feelings about reporting on hacks. Like, you don't want to, you don't want to be the hammer for the revenge plot, you know, like,

• 1:19:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:19:47Nilay Patel?

  It's bad. So we're being careful, but all that stuff is out there. It's a big deal. It's gonna have longer repercussions. Casey and Platformer talked to two former Twitch engineers who are like, Twitch has long had poor operational security practices. This was just coming for them.

• 1:20:00Alex Cranz?

  Well, and Tom and Ash did as well. They also did a story about talking with some engineers and other people at Twitch that just showed that this was a long, long time of, they could have done better and they chose not to.

• 1:20:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. McKenna has a story. This is great. I love this. Speaking of Facebook ads, there's a governor's race in Virginia. One of the candidates that race was a former CEO of the Carlyle Group. This is only important insofar as the Carlyle Group funded the purchase of Taylor Swift's masters when she was in a fight with Scooter Braun, Big Machine Records. So the other candidate is now running ads targeting Taylor Swift fans.

• 1:20:43Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:20:43Nilay Patel?

  Pointing out that the other guy bought her, is a villain. It's a villain to Swifties. It's great.

• 1:20:50Alex Cranz?

  He's like a notorious villain to Swifties.

• 1:20:53Nilay Patel?

  Right. Cause he bought the masters and now Taylor has to make Taylor's versions. But here, here's what I posit to you. If not for the actions of the Carlyle Group, would we have Taylor's versions, which are good?

• 1:21:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 1:21:06Alex Cranz?

  That's true. Ooh.

• 1:21:08Nilay Patel?

  Think about it.

• 1:21:08Speaker 04

  I feel like we could, we could, we could do this in other ways. Like the, you know, candidate for governor hates the last Airbender and just like engage that fanbase.

• 1:21:19Nilay Patel?

  Very good. And then last couple of things, we have smart TV apps out now. We've been working on them for a long time. Two years in the making because we wanted them to get. They're out for Roku for Android TV and Fire TV. There's one for the Apple TV coming. It is not out yet. I promise not to do an hour on this. It's not out yet because Apple uses a different closed captions format than everyone else. So we have closed captions for our videos. We think accessibility is important. We have to do them again to support the Apple TV app. So we are doing them again. We're gonna do it. We just have to do it. So the Apple TV app is delayed because we don't want to ship it without closed captions.

• 1:22:01Nilay Patel?

  The apps are great. You can download them. People have asked like, why are we doing them? A lot of people ask us for our videos on their TVs without all the baggage of YouTube. It's just a thing people want. We're happy to deliver it. We think our videos are great. It's also good for us to differentiate and not just be dependent on one platform, which if you've been listening to the Vergecast, you will know is dangerous for everyone all the time. So we're excited about them. Our podcasts are in them. People want to listen to our podcasts on TV. It's an easy way to do it. Most importantly, though, we're going to premiere Dieter's documentary in this app. Dieter, you want to tell them what the documentary is?

• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  It's called Springboard: The Secret History of the First Real Smartphone. Symbian fans come at me.

• 1:22:42Nilay Patel?

  We picked this, we picked this title at TRO people.

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a half hour. We're going to premiere it at the party. It will also be on those smart TV apps on October 25th. We have interviews with the founders of Handspring, a couple more. And I think it's great. And the trailer is out now. You can go watch it. You can go tell your friends to watch it. And if you want to come see the premiere, you can come to our party, our 10 year party in New York, October 22nd, 23rd. I am told there is a new promo code, a secret promo code that is dollar sign 99 now, which gets you a bunch of money off the cost of a ticket.

• 1:23:17Nilay Patel?

  Is there a URL to enter this promo code in?

• 1:23:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I don't know it.

• 1:23:21Nilay Patel?

  It's theverge.com/OnTheVerge.

• 1:23:24Speaker 04

  There it is. It's theverge.com/OnTheVerge.

• 1:23:26Nilay Patel?

  Enter promo code dollar sign 99 now. We would love to see you there. This is, it's just a party. We're going to have cool speakers. We have really cool DJs on the opening night. We have panels. We have an arcade. We have like, all these cool digital art installations. It's a party. I just want you to come. It's gonna be great.

• 1:23:43Speaker 04

  We will tell listeners of the Vergecast that might interest you that we are going to have an existential conversation about Thread with the CEO of Eero.

• 1:23:49Nilay Patel?

  That's a real thing that's gonna happen.

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  It's gonna be great.

• 1:23:53Nilay Patel?

  Joanna Stern and David Pierce are going to do a Vergecast episode with us live. It's gonna be great. It's, it's, there's a lot going on. You can go to theverge.com/OnTheVerge, find out more.

• 1:24:04Nilay Patel?

  Promo code dollar sign 99 now. Lastly, I want to thank Derek Rhodes, who did a visual, like a data visualization of every episode of the Vergecast. We'll put it in the show notes. It's bit.ly/cutthroughthennight, which is great.

• 1:24:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Nilay Patel?

  It's just very fun. Alex, you are well represented in this. Yes. It's good. So I love it when our fans do stuff like that. So check it out. Thank you, Derek. We loved it. All right, that's it. We are way over.

• 1:24:34Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot. You can tweet at us. I'm at reckless. Dieter's at backlon. Russell is at Russell Brandon. Alex is Alex H. Krans. Decoder this week was from the Co-Conference. It was to Keyjer Myokana. Next week, Dave Limb from Amazon. It's a good episode. It was fun talking to him. And then on Tuesday, Dieter, you got a special episode of the Vergecast coming up. You hinted at it. What is it?

• 1:24:55Speaker 04

  That's right. It is an episode all about the Microsoft Surface Reviews. We're gonna have Tom Warren, Manok Chen, Dan Seifertan. It's the Surface Stravaganza. And we're gonna have more topic-specific Tuesday episodes coming up. I've already started doing some interviews for them, which are very exciting. Not gonna tease what they are too much. I don't wanna, I don't wanna ruin the surprise.

• 1:25:15Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's it. A lot going on in Verge world. Dieter and I were talking today. It felt like the summer is very slow and it feels like everything is happening all at once right now, which is very exciting. Thank you for listening. Go read our website and download our apps. Goodbye. Rock and roll.

• 1:25:29Speaker 04

  Get a shot.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

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