Cambridge Analytica, Casey Neistat, and Apple's education event

It’s loaded Vergecast this week. Nilay, Paul, and Dieter welcome back Silicon Valley editor Casey Newton to break down the Cambridge Analytica scandal at Facebook, after talking through predictions for next week’s Apple event. But first, another Casey makes his debut on The Vergecast — Casey Neistat! Nilay talks one-on-one with Casey about a multitude of topics, including Beme, his view of YouTube, Twitch, and other platforms, sponsorship, and what he’s up to next. It’s exactly what you’d expect from Neistat, honest and direct. 02:36 - What to expect from Apple’s education event 20:56 - Casey Neistat interview 52:07 - Paul’s weekly segment “Swag for Me? Swag for you too” 54:59 - Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data scandal, explained 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 episode of Vergecast is brought to you by IBM. 16 million new collar jobs will be created by 2024. And to help fill them, IBM's new education model gives high school students workplace experience and associate's degree. 90 Ptech schools are already preparing graduates for tomorrow's STEM careers. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at ibm.com/ptech.

• 0:25Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of this week and every week in your life. Just mixing all the jokes together. I'm Eli. Paul is here.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:33Nilay Patel?

  Dieter. Hi.

• 0:37Nilay Patel?

  Good. Dieter has arrived, everyone. Dieter is here. Casey Newton is joining us this week. Hi, Casey.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Hey, gang. Nice to be here.

• 0:43Nilay Patel?

  It's good to have you, Casey. This is like an all Casey show. So here's what's gonna happen. This is true. Earlier this week, Casey Neistat, the internet's Casey Neistat, just arrived at the Verge offices on a boosted board, bearing a gift of hot sauce. Hot sauce is delicious, by the way. I tried it. What kind of hot sauce? His own brand of hot sauce. Has his face on the label. It's very, it's perfectly unbranded. He, Casey Neistat showed up. We've been talking for a while about having you on the Vergecast. He showed up. He stole a unicycle from one of our video directors, unicycled around the office, and we talked for an hour, on the record, about everything. Just wild stuff. We talked about Facebook and platforms, what he's doing with YouTube. We talked about what happened at Beam.

• 1:28Nilay Patel?

  So here's what we're gonna do on the Vergecast this week. The four of us are gonna talk about Apple for a minute, because there's an Apple event next week. Then we're gonna run an edited version of the Casey interview. Then we're gonna come back and Casey Newton is here, and I really want him to talk to us about what is happening with Facebook and Karen Boudinolitka.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  And if you want to hear the whole crazy hour of Casey Neistat and me just chatting, we're gonna stick that in the feed. I will tell you that this is a controversial plan, and that Dieter hates this plan. So if you hate this plan, please tweet at Backlon where he will agree with you. If you think this plan is smart, please tweet at Backlon where he will disagree with you. And just keep this whole conversation away from me.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  And if you think fights about where to place an interview on a podcast are hilarious, please tweet at all of us because we would all love to hear that.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so that's what we're doing this week. Trying something new. It was a really fun conversation with Casey, so look forward to that. But let's start with, basically what I think is the only news of the week. There's not, besides the Facebook stuff we're talking about, but.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, uh.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  There's obviously that, but Apple announced an event, just like quietly announced an event for next week in Chicago.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:42Nilay Patel?

  Uh, which is new for Apple. They're having it at a high school, a public school in Chicago, a tech public school.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Have they done that before?

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Hmm, it's been a long, if they have, I don't remember. I feel like they've done something where they're like on the scene of.

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  No, they did the Apple Watch, it was a bit like a community college. But it wasn't like, that wasn't an education focused event. That was like, a bunch of community college students had to contend with Bono showing up on campus for the day.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were, they were teaching us all how not to make a, an Apple Watch. Later on, they learned how to do it right.

• 3:12Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, that's on Tuesday?

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Yes, Tuesday, it is starting at 10 a.m. Central time, 11 a.m. Eastern time, 8 a.m. Pacific time. Time zones are hard.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  Central time, however, the best time zone. The, the single best time zone in the world. I say this as a proud Midwesterner. I don't know what Dieter's saying, some traitor stuff right now.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  I grew up on Central time. Central time is a friend of mine. Central time is a bad time zone.

• 3:39Nilay Patel?

  Disagree. Anyway, I'm not going. This is true. You know, I like to go to Apple events, but, uh, Becky has baby any minute. Doctor told me not to go. Actually, he didn't tell me not to go. I said, can I go to this work event?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  He trolled you.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And he looked at me and he said, well, it probably won't happen, but if you go, it definitely will. And then he just sort of like smiled and walked out of the room. I'm like, thanks, Dr. Leonard. Jeez, man. He placed you under a curse.

• 4:07Nilay Patel?

  So I'm not going with Dieter and Dan and Lauren are going. That'll be very exciting. We're thinking it's just iPads, Dieter. What's your vibe?

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Well, so Bloomberg just had a thing that they're pretty confident they're gonna release a new version of iBooks. It will just be called Books, or maybe Apple Books. We're definitely expecting iPads. Apple has one regulatory approval for a couple new iPads in Europe, I think it was. Yes. And there's also just been swirling rumors that they're gonna make a cheaper iPad. We get way into that. There's also this thing that has been spotted in the betas called ClassKit, which is apparently a thing for developers to make apps that work in the classroom. And then the other, like, there's other question marks. So definitely Books.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  I'm pretty confident saying definitely iPads, definitely ClassKit. But then there have been rumors of a cheaper MacBook Air.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  I have many feelings about that.

• 5:08Nilay Patel?

  How do you make the MacBook Air cheaper? It's already the cheapest laptop they make.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, you just make it cheaper.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  So you think the same non-retina?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Here's an idea. It's unapologetically cardboard.

• 5:21Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, like, it's already, it's already way behind, right? It's got an on-retina screen, it's USB-A.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Well, it's been replaced by the MacBook, which has everything you can need. It's got a whole USB-C port.

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  So you think they're gonna like retinify the MacBook Air?

• 5:40Speaker 03

  I don't know what I think. If they do it, they have to leave USB-A on it, because that is what, like, schools are not gonna truck with dongles. That's just, the kids are gonna swallow them, they're gonna throw them at each other. Like, I don't trust kids with dongles at all, right? So they have to have a regular USB-A port on it. And if they release a Mac with, like, USB-A ports, everybody on the planet's gonna be like, "Oh, wait, I want that one." So they have to somehow nerf it such that nobody will actually want it except for classrooms.

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  And I am imagining they're gonna position it as, like, the education Mac. That's like dirt cheap, has an underpowered processor, doesn't even have a retina screen. It's basically the current MacBook Air, honestly. They'll just like, they'll reduce the price and make it out of plastic so that you can throw it at people and it won't hurt them. And then they'll call it the eMac, eMac 2018.

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  The, the, if you don't remember what the E-Mac was, it was

• 6:35Speaker 01

  An iMac.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  The best Mac ever.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't an iMac. It had a different design. It was an, it looked like an iMac.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:40Nilay Patel?

  But it was white. It was like a little bit more bullet shaped. It was a cool computer.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  It was huge.

• 6:46Nilay Patel?

  It was massive.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  And they, they made it only for education. And Dieter told me that, uh, he, he snaked one when he was in grad school.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  I mean, if, if by snaked one, you mean that I was a student and therefore was allowed to buy an education Mac, then, then yes. Uh, it was also, my wife at the time was a teacher. So, you know, we had our ways.

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  You were in the cabal of E-Mac purchase. Did you also have an E8300?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  The, the E-Mac-

• 7:12Speaker 03

  I did, actually.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  Of course you did.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  The E-Mac had headphones, another audio jack. I think that might be a microphone port.

• 7:20Nilay Patel?

  It's two headphone jacks on the front.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Three USB ports, two firewire ports, a modem jack, ethernet, and is that just, what is that? A big display port?

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  I don't remember.

• 7:35Nilay Patel?

  Big display port. It was the most famous monitor standard. No, it had two headphone jacks on the front. So two students could like-

• 7:40Speaker 01

  What is that plug, what is that plug right there?

• 7:41Nilay Patel?

  That was Apple's weird mini VGA connector.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. So here's the question, um, that I don't know the answer to about this, uh, let's take a field trip event. The invitation that Apple sent is a line drawing, clearly, you know, meant to have been drawn by an Apple pencil.

• 7:57Nilay Patel?

  Yes, by Johnny Ive himself.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  And the only, the only iPads that support the Apple pencil are the Pro iPads. And if Apple's going to release an education iPad, what is it going to support the Apple pencil? Are they gonna, are they just gonna make the cheap, are they, is it gonna be the iPad? Is it gonna be a cheaper iPad just for education that happens to support the Apple pencil? What are they gonna do?

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  So they already have a cheap iPad, right? It's 329.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  It's the iPad. Yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  It doesn't support the smart keyboard.

• 8:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Or the Apple pencil.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Or the pencil.

• 8:27Nilay Patel?

  So why wouldn't you just bring, literally leave that product alone and add a smart connector and pencil support to that? And call it the iPad?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  It's the same problem that Dieter pointed out with the MacBook Air. You have created a really good product for a really good price.

• 8:45Nilay Patel?

  And then no one will buy an iPad Pro.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Why would you buy an iPad Pro?

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Casey.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  I have a question. So my understanding is that one reason why Apple may feel compelled to do this is because Google in particular has had a lot of success getting into the classrooms. So I would love to hear from you guys what sort of competitive pressures Apple is under right now to not lose the education market and how all of these products that we're theorizing about might actually help them claw back some market share from Chromebooks.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  So they've lost. They lost. Apple has lost the education market. They have to try and win it back. It's not lose more. It's like they're getting spanked.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Correct me if I'm wrong. I thought they lost before the Chromebook came along.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Well, maybe, but the Chromebook, the Chromebook has taken over.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  So, Casey.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  And it's taken over because they're cheap and because they require zero like IT maintenance and you don't, you can like, you just log into your Google account and your stuff shows up and there's no like, there's nothing else that like really teachers or IT administrators have to do. And so they're dirt cheap. They're easy to maintain. If you lose one, it's fine. And like, all the stuff is like in the cloud anyway. And so it just sort of, you turn it on and it works. And then Google has done enough with the Google Suite, the G Suite, to make classroom stuff better. And so like you add all that up and it's like great for classrooms. And to try and catch up, Apple has added a sort of multi-user thing, kind of, to the iPad, but it's very complicated and silly and only

• 10:18Speaker 03

  available to students in classrooms anyway. It's not true multi-user like you can do on a Chromebook or a Windows machine. And then also like 329 for an iPad is still like kind of expensive, especially when you have to buy a keyboard, a Bluetooth keyboard to go along with it. You know, you can go buy a Chromebook for 175 bucks and like it'll do fine for a fourth grader. That is not the case with an iPad.

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  So to take a little bit more, I don't know, crazy view of this.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  Like not grounded in practical reality. When I was like little, computers in schools were Apple 2Es. That was neat.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:51Nilay Patel?

  And it, they were just inherently multi-user because nothing happened there. Like, it didn't matter if like, it was, the concept of accounts didn't happen because all we were doing was like playing Oregon Trail. What was the game with the fish? Odell's Lake. Odell Lake. That game was the best.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't play that one. I had number munchers and word munchers on my Apple II in elementary school. Very fun games, by the way.

• 11:14Nilay Patel?

  Then sort of that back. The next wave of that, uh, was Macs. And I distinctly remember none of the Macs in any of my schools, or the Macs, uh, when I was like the, the IT dude in the college science library, had any user account stuff going on.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:30Nilay Patel?

  They, you needed admin privileges to like mess with the system, but every, everyone used the same user account. Because all of your files, you were either saving to your network drive, which you could log into easily and then log out of, or you're saving them literally on physical removable disks.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you saved everything to a floppy disk and carried floppy disks around your back.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I lived that zip disk lifestyle, but whatever.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  Then they failed instantly and I had nothing. Um, but that meant that Apple never really contended with the paradigm of multiple users. Like, it just never occurred to them. And where they went to was these extremely personal products. Right? And you can see that now as you pull the thread all the way out, like, they're putting a watch on your wrist and they're putting AirPods in your ears. All of their products are these intensely designed for one person experiences.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  It's like, didn't they have an iBook for every student type of thing? Like, look at this cool school where they bought an iBook for everybody.

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  Or they bought an iPad for everybody. And the idea that every student had this like one-to-one relationship with a product, or you as a consumer have this one-to-one relationship with a product that you bought, is still pervasive in Apple world. Like, we talk about the Apple TV all the time. Like, the Apple TV's greatest flaw is that it refuses to recognize that you might have a family. It just, fuck your family.

• 12:48Nilay Patel?

  It just doesn't like them. So I think, Casey, the thing with the Chromebook is Google accidentally and then very aggressively has embraced the idea that the physical computer is disposable in that paradigm. It's basically a netbook. So, you know, the classroom can be full of them and the students don't take them with them. Or you can give one to every student and like Dieter said, if they break, it's fine. There are no stakes to that device failing. The students can graduate and you still have them all. You don't, you know, if you run a lower income school, you can just buy a bunch with a grant and then you have a bunch. And I, just that alone and then the ease of administration, the ease of user accounts

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  has just, Apple has to come in with a more compelling multi-user solution at a price point that is like more fleet oriented. And their entire brand envision right now is like, we will, we will gild you in baubles that connect to iCloud.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Okay, so you mentioned crazy ideas earlier. So is this, tell me how dumb this idea would be. Apple makes like a Chromebook clone that you just log into with your iCloud account. Like, would they ever have an incentive to do that?

• 14:02Speaker 03

  I mean, everyone should ask them to make a clamshell iPod since, or iPad since time immemorial. By the way, a clamshell iPod would be awesome.

• 14:11Nilay Patel?

  You know, a super underrated part of Apple's entire suite is iCloud.com. It's a weird thing to give them credit for. But, you know, I bought my mom a Chromebook Pixel, the first gen one. And she logs into iCloud.com on it all the time and like uses it like an iPad because it has touchscreen. It works perfectly well on Chrome and she closes it. So she has all of her Apple stuff, all the sort of like syncing that she may or may not want to do with her phone, happens.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Everything except iMessage.

• 14:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but, I mean, I'm not looking to up my mom's rate of texting me, so that's...

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  I love you, Mom. I don't think you listen to this show, but if you did, if you are, know that I, I value you. But yeah, it's like, I think they could do that case because they have this product that's like so close to it already. Right. But do you want to use, iWork isn't in there, right? They'd have to build all of that. I don't know. I, I, I think, I, that's to me, the fundamental reason Google is pulling away. And now Microsoft has done a bunch of that stuff as well. My niece and nephew's school gives, uh, Windows PCs to everybody. And it's the same kind of idea, and they're making ever cheaper versions of Windows and ever cheaper Windows PCs. But fundamentally, the, the idea that Apple's stuff does not do multi-user well is, is just real. It's always been real. And is that like strategic for them though? Because they're just trying to sell more hardware? Who knows, man?

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. I feel like it, it has been on the iPad historically, right? But I don't know, how many, how many parents that have an iPad are not like fine handing it to their kid, right? Like all, everybody. It's, it, it still boggles my mind that there's not better systems for that. Maybe this is the, the moment when they will do that.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  I, I feel, I, I, I understand multi-user is very important. But I feel like the essential edge Apple has in this scenario is that there are so many wonderful apps for creativity on iOS and especially on the iPad. And the edge that Google has is Google Docs, which is how you do your homework.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  So your school, do you want to help kids do their homework? Or create sick beats with a music app that they downloaded? The other thing, the other thing I've been wondering about is how can Apple subtly, without letting any of the parents or administrators know, give all of these kids iMessage? Because that's what all these kids want.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  They all, they, they wish, there's no, the iPod Touch is basically dead. I guess a lot of kids just get iPhones now, but that's a pretty expensive thing. But man, if you just walk out of your school one day and now you have a, an iMessage device, you're feeling pretty good.

• 16:55Nilay Patel?

  On your iPad with a keyboard? You are the least cool kid in the club. Like, hold on, let me draw this iMessage.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  What do you mean? You're at home, iMessaging.

• 17:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm with you.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  You've got access.

• 17:10Nilay Patel?

  To iMessage.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  To iMessage.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Uh, there's another thing we haven't talked about here.

• 17:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Um, much like Apple, we have completely forgotten about the existence of the iPad Mini.

• 17:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  I don't get the iPad Mini. Every once in a while, you hear from people and they're like, I love my iPad Mini so much.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Walt Mossberg loves his iPad Mini.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't get it.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Like, if you have an iPhone X, you basically have an iPad Mini.

• 17:33Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  That's the thing, right?

• 17:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think it was, um, who was it, Dan or Tom in our little Apple planning meeting yesterday? That pointed out that the only place on Apple's website where the iPad Mini is prominently featured is like their education portal.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  The iPad Mini, I will say, an iPad Mini that you could sketch on, it's much closer to like a Moleskine size? Or if Apple made a pencil that worked on the iPhone X?

• 17:59Nilay Patel?

  I think we're, here's my prediction. I think we are completely overthinking this.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  I think.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  I think they're gonna put out, they're gonna upgrade that 329 iPad. They're probably gonna leave the processor the same. They're gonna add the keyboard connector and maybe a cheaper stylus thing.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And keep the, cause the pencil is like not a, you don't wanna, like, you don't want a thousand kids to have that product. Like, the cap is gonna get lost.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  In that meeting, by the way, I just kept on yelling, passive stylus! Anytime anybody tried to say anything, I like, I interrupted Lauren Gooden, felt terrible about it, cause she was like, oh, I have an idea. It's like, passive stylus! The whole thing. Just kept on screaming passive stylus over and over again.

• 18:38Nilay Patel?

  It was really disturbing, quite honestly.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Passive stylus sounds like a Depeche Mode album.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  Wait, now I really wanna go to this event. What if the musical guest is Depeche Mode? In a high school on the west side of Chicago?

• 18:52Nilay Patel?

  I think that it'll be a cheaper stylus and the upsell to the iPad Pro will be faster processor, better screen, active stylus.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Speakers.

• 19:04Nilay Patel?

  And then if they do a MacBook Air, it'll be just like another processor bump to the MacBook Air at a lower price.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Right. Now, you know, I love the iPad more than most people and my iPad is like three and a half years old, but I don't wanna upgrade it till I can get Face ID on it. So I can stop logging in with Touch ID like an animal, but that's not happening next week, right? Like, I have to wait till the fall for that or later?

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Pretty sure we're waiting until later for that, yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  That's not good news for me.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  I kind of don't understand Apple's upgrade cycles anymore. Like, you know the iPhone will come out in the fall.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 19:34Nilay Patel?

  That I understand.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  That's like all I get.

• 19:35Nilay Patel?

  The rest of it, who knows? Yeah.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  I think it depends. They realize that the iPad is something that people upgrade infrequently, and therefore, they should update it infrequently.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  I think they're trying to match their update cycle to people's upgrade cycle, which is why they're really slow in building new laptops.

• 19:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, okay, let's do this.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna read this ad, then when I come back, my little half of my conversation Casey Neistat, basically, which got wild, by the way. We talked about a lot of things. It's very real. Then I'm gonna, you come back.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  Casey Newton is gonna tell us what the hell is going on on Facebook. So I read this ad and love Casey Neistat.

• 20:21Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Verchast, as you know, brought to you by IBM. By 2050, the world population will reach nearly 10 billion and food production will need to grow by 70%. "What if artificial intelligence could help?" asks IBM. Farmers are already using it to increase crop yields. Watson and the IBM Cloud provide access to weather data and analyze satellite imagery to help them monitor soil moisture levels and reduce water waste. So as the population grows, more food can be put on tables. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at ibm.com/smart. Casey Neistat is here.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  Casey is here.

• 20:53Nilay Patel?

  Casey, I've been trying to get you on this show since, for a year, since we met at South by Southwest a year ago.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  You know, that makes it sound like, um, this is some sort of like elusive. I live two blocks from here. My office is three blocks from here. It's just been, like, you should publish our DM thread alongside this podcast.

• 21:11Nilay Patel?

  I should.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  It's just like this Tuesday, and it's like, nah, it doesn't work. How's Wednesday? Not good for me.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  For 365 days.

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  So can I tell the story of when we hung out at South by Southwest?

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  One of the most insane dinners of my entire life.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think I may have been hosting that dinner.

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  You were hosting that dinner.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  And I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

• 21:28Nilay Patel?

  It was very strange. So CNN had just acquired Beam.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 21:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and Casey, did me, he invited me to dinner, CNN's hosting dinner. There's like insane guest list. You were there. Cory Booker was there. It was like, it was a big dinner. Jeff Zucker was there.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  Who else was there? Alexis was there.

• 21:44Nilay Patel?

  Alexis Ohanian was there. It was a great dinner.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  There were some, and then there were some outliers there.

• 21:49Nilay Patel?

  I was there.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  The CMO, Mark, of Samsung was there.

• 21:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 04

  And I remember, like, I was dressed, as I'm dressed now, like sweater and jeans or something. There were some people there in suits.

• 22:02Nilay Patel?

  I was also dressed like a piece of crap.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  And then there were a couple of people, like, in the corner that were like, "What did you invite me to?

• 22:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  I'm wearing sweatpants."

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  So it's this big fancy dinner, and it's supposed to be on the roof of a hotel in Austin.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Private chefs.

• 22:15Nilay Patel?

  And it was raining.

• 22:16Speaker 04

  Torrential.

• 22:17Nilay Patel?

  Torrential rain, so it got moved inside. And Jeff Zucker was very angry that it had been moved inside.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  We all were.

• 22:23Nilay Patel?

  And then the fire alarms went off, and the door between us and the private chefs that were cooking for us began to slowly close by itself.

• 22:32Speaker 04

  And if I could paint the picture a little bit more, it's like a big, big room, like a substantial room. And the chef's kitchen was open to the dining area, like a, sort of like a fancy restaurant situation. So you could watch the chefs cook your meal.

• 22:48Nilay Patel?

  And that, and the door just started going down.

• 22:51Speaker 04

  Separating the two, yeah.

• 22:51Nilay Patel?

  And the, the light on the fire alarm was, like, flashing. You jumped up and put your hat over the light, because it was so distracting.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  It was bright.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then we were like, "We should hang out more."

• 23:03Speaker 04

  I mean, there are more details to that story, too. The whole point is the chefs were supposed to serve us, but they couldn't get to us, because there was a firewall between us. They had to go out through the fire, uh, escape into the stairwell, going all the way around. So we weren't able to get our food. I didn't really notice or care, but I think the folks from CNN who organized it were, like, super upset about it. Um, Senator Booker.

• 23:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Seemed pretty chill about the whole situation.

• 23:26Nilay Patel?

  He was, he was very chill. Every, there was.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  Food, food was great.

• 23:29Nilay Patel?

  You know, if you're a guest, and you, I imagine a lot of people there are, like, professional guests that go to a lot of events. Your job is to be chill and, like, not make a scene. If you're the host in that situation, you are losing your shit.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, look, I'm like a, you know, I'm, I eat at McDonald's four days a week, like, this fancy dinner, like, I had alarms. This just felt normal to me, but they were really stressed out about it.

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so that was one of the first times we, like, seriously hung out. A year ago, we've been DMing ever since and I've been, I mean, why don't you come on the show? For a couple of reasons. One, I'm just interested in what you're doing. Two, and I want to talk about that. Two, whatever is happening right now with platforms, it just seems out of control. And I think you're obviously one of the smartest thinkers about YouTube as a platform, but you think about all the other platforms too. So I want to talk to you about that stuff. Because I think whatever's happening with Facebook right now is coming for YouTube next. And I really want to kind of get your thoughts on that. But let's, I want to start with you.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Please.

• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  So that was a year ago. We were celebrating Beam. Tell me a little bit about Beam. Like, what's that story?

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Ah, I mean, the whole story abbreviated and jump in for details, but you know, I started that company. It was an idea and it was, the original idea was still an awesome idea, but basically it was, everybody's going to be wearing Google Glass or something like it in the future. And imagine if you could just tap your, your temple and capture what you're seeing and share it to the world.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  And the idea was conceived before Snapchat launched Stories. But I got really excited about that idea and I raised money and then partnered with Matt Hackett and then launched as a tech company and Google Glass then died and then Snapchat really came up and it, it sort of kept shifting and changing and growing and, you know, had a really successful launch, but like most apps do, sort of leveled off. And then Snapchat got really awesome, way better than us. And I think we struggled in that space.

• 25:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  But, you know, in parallel with that life cycle of the software development company that was Beam, was my YouTube channel and the launch of my daily show on my YouTube channel, which was very much so about Beam, the tech company. And I think it was a confluence of, you know, the, the technical prowess demonstrated by the team more so than what the product accomplished itself, combined with what I did in the new media space via the vlog, that ended up being an attractive prospect to a couple of companies. Intern or CNN was most attracted and put forth, I think, the most interesting offer for Matt and myself.

• 25:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  And that is what led to the acquisition in November of 2016.

• 26:01Nilay Patel?

  What did you want it to be at CNN? Because I heard a couple of different versions from you and some other folks there, that it went in a couple of different ways. What did you ultimately want it to be?

• 26:11Speaker 04

  I think what I wanted it to be and what they wanted it to be didn't exactly look the same. And it unfortunately took a long time to really understand that. But what I wanted it to be was, I was excited about technology and that's why I started Beam. Media and YouTube, those are things that I've always understood and I love doing. But technology was a new frontier for me. So with CNN and them expressing what their desires were in the tech space. You know, they have an app and they have some interesting tech. But they don't have anything that I would describe as outside of the realm of what you'd expect from a news media company like Turner or CNN. So I saw an opportunity there for us to make some really forward-thinking software products.

• 26:51Nilay Patel?

  But was it gonna be, when you launched Beam as just your own company, it was like hold it to your chest?

• 26:56Speaker 04

  It was purely, yeah, it was purely a software company.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  And then when you went to CNN, it was like, we're gonna take in all this input and make a daily show. And then you made a bunch of like, kind of standalone YouTube videos about some interesting topics. Was that the final decision?

• 27:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, well, that's where I was going with that. Diatribe there, sorry if I was drifting. But the idea, like, what excited me was to develop forward-thinking apps leveraging all the amazing resources that CNN had. And then to have a media component of it as well. A media component that leveraged the information that the technology enabled. And then disseminate that via new media channels. So YouTube and social media and things like that. So that's a very like, high-level, sort of wishy-washy elevator pitch for a company. But to me, it felt like enough. And then from there, and I think this is where your confusion's coming from. I think the world's confusion with what the hell we were doing came from. From there, like, that was enough of a foundation for me as a tech entrepreneur and as somebody

• 27:53Speaker 04

  who's really sort of freewheeled my way through new media to build a company on. Like, here's a tiny foundation of an idea, go. And what works, do more of, and what doesn't work, move on from immediately. And I think where I struggled is that kind of entrepreneurial thinking, that kind of innovator's thinking, just doesn't really mesh necessarily well with a larger entity like a Turner.

• 28:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  And that was where a lot of the struggles came from. As things were winding down early this year, Matt and I looked back and we're like, this is literally a case study for the innovator's dilemma.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 28:28Speaker 04

  This is what we were confronting here.

• 28:30Nilay Patel?

  So the classically, our audience knows the innovator's dilemma, I'm just gonna say it out loud. That's when a company has an existing product line, I think the classic example is like IBM and mainframes, and then a cheaper product comes along, that disrupts it, and they can't invest in the cheaper product and compete in that market because they have to protect their larger market. So you're saying CNN was, they have to protect cable so they couldn't come at you because you would destroy their existing business?

• 28:56Speaker 04

  I think that's a very literal interpretation of it, but I think it had to do with the kind of nimble thinking that enables startups to operate and disrupt, isn't necessarily the kind of nimble thinking that a company as large as an old school media company can do. Does that make sense?

• 29:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  I know I'm being a little bit evasive here, and I'm trying to speak carefully because CNN was a fantastic partner. And that's why I was very vocal in owning the failures and the shortcomings of Beam is not a product of CNN, but a product of my own shortcomings.

• 29:33Nilay Patel?

  Right. You made a very heartfelt video when you went to town.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's because I believe that. CNN was an incredible partner, and they wanted us to do what we thought we needed to do to succeed. Unfortunately, the first thing we did was hire a bunch of people. In retrospect, huge mistake. Top heaviness is not something that is conducive to a startup environment. Bootstrapping, where you have to hustle and you force yourself to go beyond your comfort zone, and you force yourself to assume responsibilities that go beyond your specific set of responsibilities, that is where a real innovative spirit comes from.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  So you think you got too big too fast inside of CNN?

• 30:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think that, you know, that getting too big, too fast goes back to, again, that sort of innovator's dilemma analogy, which is that the way a big company like that works is let's make sure we have the staff and the resources to scale the way we want to scale.

• 30:25Nilay Patel?

  Right. But you need to have something to scale.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Sure, right.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  And that's like the main problem.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  Right, and I think that's exactly the stress point that I'm trying to articulate. There was no malice there. There was nothing that I would fault CNN for. They did what they believed was really right, and I think that they were wonderful in that capacity. And we were trying to do what we knew how to do, which was the best, you know, west wing. And ultimately, those two, the convergence of those two ideologies were in conflict, not in concert. And that was a really challenging environment for Matt and I to operate in.

• 30:57Nilay Patel?

  Can you, what was the day that you decided to wind it down? Can you say, like, who'd you talk to? You're like, I'm done. You sent an email, you sent a text?

• 31:03Speaker 04

  It was not my decision.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  It was not my decision. And, you know, I think towards the end, the last couple of months, Matt and I were really exploring and presenting with CNN myriad ways forward that we saw would yield success. And CNN was incredible in that capacity as well. Like, they had a number of ideas. And the process was a process of mutual exploration, meaning that, like, you know, the heads of CNN that we worked with, incredible, really, really smart thinkers, they presented us with opportunities, we would complement them back with other opportunities. And there was a lot of goings-ons there that we were excited about and some we weren't excited about. But ultimately, you know, ultimately, a company of that size and a company with that kind

• 31:49Speaker 04

  of balance sheets looks at things in ways that is not the way an entrepreneur would look at things.

• 31:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  You know, when I was building Beam with Matt, it was like survival and success at all costs. Pivot, shift, whatever the fuck it takes to make this company a success. But when you've got an entity as large as that, that's not necessarily the way they think. And I think... At the end of the day, ultimately, they saw being more financially responsible to absorb, you know, the assets that we had accrued over the course of a year of operating independently, absorb them into the company itself, absolve itself of the expenses that were keeping us external, and let Matt and I go.

• 32:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  And, you know, Matt and I really were empathetic to that position, and it was a, you know, it was a sort of a collective, we arrived at that place collectively.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So here's my question. So that's me.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Please.

• 32:45Nilay Patel?

  But Facebook announced it's like Patreon clone, right? They want to attract creators to that platform. Does that interest you?

• 32:50Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  That's what I feel like YouTube seems like.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  You know.

• 32:54Nilay Patel?

  You can't get away from it.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  So your question was, is Facebook's new monetization opportunity exciting for creators? The short answer is yes. I think that as a creator, I wish there was a better word than influencer, because that's just such a dirty, disgusting word, but generically, an influencer, someone who pedals their influence in exchange for goods and services. You know, as someone who makes a living on social media, there's always a desire to find new outlets for monetizing the content that you create. And I think if Facebook is coming up with inventive ways to do that, sure, that's interesting. That's a very pragmatic, practical answer. I think a more romantic or more emotional answer is just that, what's cool right now? Where are the eyeballs right now?

• 33:38Speaker 04

  What's socially and culturally relevant right now? Yesterday, I tweeted Ninja, who's a huge gamer, huge streamer on Twitch. I tweeted his interview with CNBC, and I said, if YouTube's not scared of Twitch yet, they should be now.

• 33:54Nilay Patel?

  And you've been doing stuff on Twitch recently.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think Twitch is a really interesting platform, but there was a lot of people that came back to me who were not creators on either platform, and they're like, YouTube is, you know, bigger than Twitch by a multiple of X. YouTube has nothing to worry about. YouTube is not for streaming. YouTube is not for gaming. Twitch is only... Totally reasonable responses that I, practically, they're, unemotionally, they're all correct.

• 34:20Speaker 04

  Except when you put the X factor of emotion, you put the X factor of culture, you put the X factor of cool in there, and all of a sudden it becomes a very real existential threat, not to YouTube as a viable search engine for video that is the, you know, global standard for searching for video, but the community, the community of creators and their audience, which is a huge, extremely exciting, extremely valuable piece of property in the media space, I would argue the most valuable piece of property in the media space. They're vulnerable. YouTube is vulnerable. And if Twitch is seen as the new cool guy, cool kid in town, which like Ninja did an amazing job and sort of CNBC of painting it as that, when they're talking about the monetization opportunities and the platform

• 35:05Speaker 04

  and Twitch Prime and all these things that sound so much more exciting than a five-second pre-roll that you wait to skip and in return you get 50% of, tenth of a penny or whatever it is on YouTube, that sounds exciting. And if there are interesting people like Ninja and the other, the other people that are really dominating Twitch as a platform, combined with the mass frustration that's taking place with the creator community on YouTube, that's what I see as an existential threat. I don't think YouTube's gonna go out of business this year, and I don't think Twitch is gonna become, eclipse YouTube anytime soon, but I do think in the months and the years, tides shift. And when they shift, like, Snapchat seemed like this impenetrable, invulnerable monster when it came to being socially relevant

• 35:47Speaker 04

  and cool. And Instagram is, is, is mopping the floor with them when it comes to social relevance right now.

• 35:53Nilay Patel?

  So, I've seen a lot of like Vine stars went to Instagram. When you think about where you're gonna be, is your home YouTube and you're like, looking for something else, or are you trying to be distributed everywhere, or, how do you see that playing out?

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Um, I've, I've always aspired to be platform agnostic. I, I've always said I'm only loyal to my audience. I have no loyalty to a platform. I love YouTube, but if my audience is not on YouTube, I'm gonna go to wherever my audience is.

• 36:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  And this is why, no matter how interesting the monetization prospects are on Facebook, the majority of my audience right now is not there.

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  So even if they had really compelling ways to pay me, if my audience isn't there, I don't care. Inversely, if there are places that I'm not making any money at all, but my audience is there, I'll go there.

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. How do you balance that out? I mean, you gotta make, you gotta eat.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think it's very challenging.

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  But I think that how I balance that out is the main reason why YouTube is such a priority for me. It's where the majority of my audience is. So what you see me doing on Facebook, what you see me doing on Twitch, what you see me doing on Instagram, places like that, it's experimental. It's to see like, how does the audience respond to stuff here versus what you would see me doing, and you have seen me doing on a platform like YouTube, which is a much more committed, consistent respect for both the audience, the content, and the platform.

• 37:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So another thing I want to ask you about, you very famously have a deal with Samsung. I always think about that when we do our videos, because that's a line that we as journalists and reviewers just can't cross. Like, Samsung can't pay me to do anything. They offer, we say no, like, all the time. Apple can't pay me to do anything. Everyone believes Apple pays us to do everything. It's just the reality of the-

• 37:35Speaker 04

  You guys are such fanboys.

• 37:36Nilay Patel?

  It's the reality of the situation. But, you know, that's like, just a line we don't cross. You live on the other side of that fence. Do you ever feel pressure from your various brand deals to do something or say something? Do you think of yourself as a journalist? When you were at CNN, that was a question I always wanted to ask you the most. Like, are you doing journalism here while you have this brand deal? But now you don't, so where do you see yourself in that spectrum?

• 37:59Speaker 04

  I think it's tough, and I think it's that that challenge is exasperated by my own fuck-ups of past. Like, I have worked with Samsung and not been clear with my audience on it before, which is just stupid. And, no, I mean it. And looking back at it, like, I recognize the stupidity there. And the tough thing is, and this is an excuse, this is merely me trying to share my thought process, but I've always sort of maintained an objectivity. I've always been super transparent about the fact that no matter what contract I might have with a Samsung or something like that, I still carry an iPhone.

• 38:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  I've always been transparent with the fact that, like, no matter what-

• 38:37Nilay Patel?

  It's true, he's got a 10, and what's that?

• 38:39Speaker 04

  That is an LG, it's not even a Samsung phone. I'm playing with the LG right now.

• 38:44Nilay Patel?

  I found Jack, I'm just pointing it out to everybody.

• 38:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. The S9 is super, super sexy, by the way. I just don't have one on my service provider yet. So I've screwed up in the past, and I should have been much, much more transparent in the past with it. But again, it's like, the way I think is, it's like- No one's really gonna buy my favor. And I know that in my heart. But I expect my audience to know, and that's not fair. That's totally like-

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  Especially as your audience gets bigger.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I'm an asshole for even thinking that. And I think that that's something I've learned is, as my audience has grown, is like, you know, we were talking about earlier, a mutual friend of ours who works in the tech space, who right now is like posting for T-Mobile. And it's not a big deal for him. You know, he's got 20,000 followers and it's not, the consequences are small. And I think that when I look at the times I've screwed up egregiously with not being super transparent about my brand partnerships, it's just been because of failure to really acknowledge the repercussions of that. But to answer your question, I think as long as that transparency is there, and you're overt about it, I think it's okay. I think I am unique in that capacity, because I love doing tech reviews.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  And I've never once been paid by Samsung or anybody else to say something favorable about their device. And this is, again, these are distinctions that I expect my audience to understand, and that expectation is completely unrealistic. But it's like, every brand partnership I've ever done with Samsung has never been about promoting a device.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  I mean, go back and look at every single video. We did a video for Christmas, and it was about, you know, turning a shopping mall into a playground for kids. And we did a video this last summer that I got really, really beat up on social media for. But it was just about me and my best friend like goofing off in France. And before that, we did a video where I flew on a drone, and like, we shot that on Canon cameras. I don't even think there was a Samsung phone in that video.

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  So again, it's like Samsung is a sponsor and enables these big ambitious projects. But then I'll do a review of one of their phones. And like, how's my audience possibly supposed to understand a distinction there?

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  And the onus is on me. The onus is on the creator. And I think that, I think that the creator needs to do a really good job of being really clear with that. And I have not done a good job.

• 40:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, in fairness, I will say, I don't, the reason that we never do that is because I don't know how to solve that problem.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 41:03Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like- I think it's more important for us to say, just have, always have that answer at the ready. They can't do that. We don't allow them to do that. And it's like, always in my back pocket and we always say it. But I look at the future of creators on these platforms, and I don't know how you grow a business without doing that stuff. Like, quite honestly. And I, I think that's a huge problem, especially as these platforms hoover up more and more of the ad dollars, they hoover up more and more of the attention. You either got lucky and you started The Verge in 2011 before they existed and you have enough scale. Or you have to play, if you want to start something new, you have to play in that game. And there, there has to be a middle ground. And like, I, I honestly, I don't know what the answer is. And I'm, I'm happy on my side. I think the people on YouTube.

• 41:48Nilay Patel?

  I, I love a lot of tech YouTubers. I love your channel. You know, you have to make different decisions to run that kind of business and I, I look at it and it seems really hard.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  It's, it, it's tricky. And, and look, this is a really simple thing that I'm looking, pushing ahead. Um, you know, when I was with CNN for last year, I wasn't really looking or courting any brand, brand deals. But now, again, I gotta, I gotta pay the bills and I have to focus on my business. So I, I am looking for brand deals and companies that I think I can align with. And what was really interesting to me is I did a brand deal. I don't even think they paid me. They just gave me tickets to go to both the Super Bowl and then go to, um, to see the, uh, Floyd Bane weather fight at the end of last summer. And it was with SeatGeek.

• 42:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 04

  And I was super over it. I was like, this is a sponsored video by SeatGeek. Thank you SeatGeek. And my audience didn't mind.

• 42:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  They didn't object. And I think like, and again, in retrospect, this is such a 20, you know, hindsight's 2020. This is such an obvious distinction. But I think the audience respects that you have to pay the bills.

• 42:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  I don't hate The Verge because I see that you've got forward ads that are the top 60% of your homepage. I understand you guys got bills to pay.

• 42:56Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  And I think my audience and YouTube's audience at large, like, they don't mind that you have to do brand deals. And they don't mind that I'm doing a SeatGeek deal because there's no conflict there.

• 43:05Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  What's challenging is one of my closest friends, huge YouTuber, and all of his videos are about beautiful cinematography and cameras, and he's fully sponsored by Canon.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  So how does the audience know if Canon really is the best, or he's being paid to say? That's where the conflict comes from.

• 43:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Speaker 04

  So looking ahead, it's being much, much more clear and transparent in what brands I'm working with, and which brands don't present conflicts. You know, I am not a company that sells discounted tickets to events, so when I talk about SeatGeek and thank them for sponsoring my channel, there's no conflict. There's nothing like that. So I do think there are ways to navigate this minefield, but it is tricky.

• 43:45Nilay Patel?

  I think that's where the Patreon-type models come in, the Kickstarter drip-type models come in. Where now, you're just taking money from an audience. Right? And you don't have this, like, third-party that may or may not influence you.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  This is interesting, because Twitch I've just started playing with, and I absolutely, like, love Twitch. What an incredible platform. And Twitch's monetization tools on there, like, the way that you're able to make money off of Twitch is wildly different from the way you make money on YouTube, even though you're essentially disseminating the same kind of content, monetizing the same kind of content. And it feels so much more organic, so much more fair, so much more honest. And the opportunities there are myriad. They're not just sort of a single-payer method, which is AdSense.

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  But, the question then is, like, why doesn't YouTube just copy Twitch? I don't think they ever could.

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 44:34Speaker 04

  I don't. I think slowly, over time, they could introduce monetization products that maybe look like it. But the trouble is, you go to YouTube and you expect to see it for free. You expect everything to be AVOD, because that's how it's always been. So the minute on YouTube you're asking for money, you're a bad guy. This isn't how YouTube works. And I think it's that sort of collective understanding that is really challenging. You can't innovate. You can't innovate once the audience has a built-in understanding of what it looks like, especially when it comes to money. It's why, you know, a lot of YouTubers on, a lot of YouTube creators that use Patreon get a lot of shit for using Patreon. It's understood. If you use Patreon as a YouTuber, you will be, like, you will be given a hard time by the audience.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  You'll be picked on for saying things like, "Why are you asking your audience to pay you money for your channel? This isn't how this works." It's a big topic of conversation on YouTube. I don't agree with it. But it is a big topic of conversation. And then you go over on Twitch with things like a tip jar and subscribers and Prime subscriptions. It is the same exact, exact method of giving someone money.

• 45:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  And on Twitch, it's the norm.

• 45:45Nilay Patel?

  So, let's end your starting a new series. Can you talk about it? What's your next thing?

• 45:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, so kicking it off like kind of the first week of April. It is something I'm much, much, much more excited about than I have been probably since I started Beam.

• 45:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  Like the butterflies in my stomach I haven't felt since I was raising capital for my tech company. But the short of it is, you know, I'm going all in on content creation because after years of, you know, building tech and everything else, I realized that's the thing that I just find most satisfying is actually making things. It's what I love doing. And the approach this time around and the way that I'm scaling it and turning it into a business is that I now know the, sort of the value and the opportunities that come along with having a successful series online. Having that level of influence, having, you know, what transpired six months into my vlog where I was doing, you know, a million and a half views a day.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  And the opportunities that were coming at me that I was just leaving everything on the table because my focus is on the creative. So with some understanding of what that looks like, I'm now building infrastructure around myself and a business. Businesses around myself to absorb, to mitigate and to, you know, to make sure we are exploring every opportunity that presents itself because of, you know, because of this new show that I'm hoping

• 47:10Nilay Patel?

  So it's a show?

• 47:11Speaker 04

  We'll find an audience. I mean, it's a YouTube series.

• 47:13Nilay Patel?

  So it's a YouTube series on your channel?

• 47:14Speaker 04

  On my channel.

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  But you're building multiple businesses around it?

• 47:17Speaker 04

  Preemptively. And that's something that I think is certainly new for me. And I don't know, this is going to sound crazy to say and your audience is going to give me hell for saying this. I spent a half an hour on the phone last night with Jake Paul getting advice.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  You know. Whether you like his content or not, you know Jake's somebody I've known for years and is doing interesting things from a business perspective.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  But this is such a new thing, and that's why I called Jake. This is such a new thing to really figure out and understand what the value of having a successful YouTube series is. And how do you take advantage of all that value?

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  Right. And he's got multiple lines of business, right? He runs Team Ten.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  Sure, and nothing I'm doing is modeled after or looks like what he's doing, but the point is, he does have those things. There's no objectively stating he does have those things. And I want to be in a position where I'm able to really, really make sure that I'm not leaving opportunity on the floor because I'm focused on making my videos. Instead, let's build an infrastructure. Let's have the right people in place. Let's have the right physical space in place. Let's have everything around me that I need to have around me, so when my creative does find its audience and that audience is excited by it and the opportunities that beset that, I'm in a position to really not miss out on them. So that's the most sort of ambiguous way I can talk about what I'm doing.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  I don't want to take the, I don't want to take the wind out of the sails because I'm really excited about the launch video.

• 48:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, when you launch it, you'll come back. It won't be another year.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, let's start the DMs now and I can be back in less than a year.

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, dude, I've taken up an hour of your time. Thank you so much. I'm excited for your next thing.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  I made a really big gesture of bringing gifts by the studio here.

• 49:03Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  And I thought you'd make a fuss out of it to make me seem like a good guy in the podcast. You haven't even mentioned it.

• 49:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's another brand deal. Oh, here, here's what I'm gonna say. Casey brought us some hot sauce.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Hey, that's all I was looking for.

• 49:15Nilay Patel?

  He brought us like, what, 12 bottles of it?

• 49:17Speaker 04

  12 bottles of hot sauce.

• 49:18Nilay Patel?

  It's in a beautiful bag.

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Alright.

• 49:20Nilay Patel?

  They're great. Are they for sale? You can plug the hot sauce.

• 49:23Speaker 04

  Oh, I don't need to plug it. I told you, I'm not getting paid for the hot sauce. It's my friend's company. He gave me free juice and he put my face on a bottle of hot sauce.

• 49:30Nilay Patel?

  It's, it looks delicious.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  It's spicy.

• 49:32Nilay Patel?

  It's, I'm into it. I love a good hot sauce.

• 49:34Speaker 04

  Everybody loves a good hot sauce.

• 49:35Nilay Patel?

  I'll make you, I'll use it tonight.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  No, but that's not a plug. You can't buy, I think you maybe can buy it in the stores. I'm not selling it. I don't make, if you buy hot sauce, I don't make any money. I just, I just, you know.

• 49:44Nilay Patel?

  It was a very nice gesture.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  Hey, that's all I'm looking for.

• 49:46Nilay Patel?

  Casey also showed up and rode one of our video director's unicycles around the office before we started.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  I appreciate that The Verge offices have a unicycle.

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  We, it's real wacky. I, I describe our, The Verge culture as a really high-performing Montessori. Like, it's like a surprisingly productive.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  My three-year-old's in Montessori, and I concur. That is exactly what the vibe in here is like.

• 50:04Nilay Patel?

  It's just a bunch of smart people doing whatever they want, and sometimes it's good. That's like all I got. I'm like, I'm happy with that. That's the, we talked a lot about scaling up a business. It's surprising to me that we're as big as we are inside of a company that has gotten way bigger, and it's still.

• 50:20Speaker 04

  You have to have a, you have to have a long enough rope, a long enough leash to really find your voice in media to succeed today. And I think that's why the bigger companies that are slower moving are struggling against smaller, more nimble companies, is because it's a very, very hard, principled thing to do when you've been doing things the same way for 20 or 30 years.

• 50:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And we see that, right? We're, now we're a bigger media company, but there are bigger media companies that want to come work with us, and a lot of those conversations, we just sort of let them taper off. Because it, The Verge is a big thing that feels small, and I want it to feel small for as long as it can. But thank you, not to talk about us at the end, but thank you so much for showing up. Thank you for the hot sauce.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  Great to be here.

• 51:00Nilay Patel?

  Thank you for the unicycle adventure.

• 51:02Speaker 04

  Thanks for letting me ride it.

• 51:04Nilay Patel?

  Thanks, man, I appreciate it.

• 51:07Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast brought to you by SimpliSafe. SimpliSafe is ready for anything gets thrown at it. It's a home security product. If a storm takes out your power, SimpliSafe is ready. Intruder cuts your phone line, SimpliSafe is ready. Say the intruder destroys your keypad or siren, SimpliSafe will get you the help you need. Maybe it's overkill, maybe you don't need to be ready for every worst-case scenario, but that's what makes SimpliSafe's home security system so great. It is always ready.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  SimpliSafe's.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  SimpliSafe could cost an arm and a leg, but it doesn't. Instead, they only charge you what's fair. 24/7 professional security monitoring is only $14.99 a month. There are no contracts and no hidden feeds. Just go to their website and check it out. It's simplisafe, simplisafe.com/verge. That's simplisafe.com/verge. Protect your home and family today. How does it spell "simply"? S-I-M-P-L-I-S-A-F-E.com/verge.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  And I want to clarify, it has no hidden feeds.

• 51:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All the RSS out in the open.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  There's no kind of social dimension to SimpliSafe.

• 52:07Nilay Patel?

  Paul.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:08Nilay Patel?

  Every week, buddy.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Oh dang.

• 52:09Nilay Patel?

  You do a thing.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Is it already the time for that?

• 52:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  It's called, every week I do a segment called Swag For Me, Swag For You, Two.

• 52:21Nilay Patel?

  I don't understand the punctuation of that. It sounded like a question mark and then an ellipses.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Why isn't there a question mark, comma? I need that all the time.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  That's the whole thing. You can just.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? You know, there's a semicolon, which is like a colon, but a comma. Just the same, exactly the same idea, but for a question mark.

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  Is this, is this your product of the?

• 52:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 52:47Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  There's no rules against me adding useful punctuation to the English language, right?

• 52:54Nilay Patel?

  This is the beginning of a long con movie where you join a Unicod consortium?

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Question mark with a comma, alright. I'll get back to everybody about that.

• 53:05Nilay Patel?

  Paul's in the Unicod meetings being like, gentlemen, I've come to present you with my idea. Everyone's like, who is this young scamp? He started in the mailroom.

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  BlackBerry's Fan League will give you swag for hyping its poorly selling phones. So BlackBerry has a fan, basically they're trying to start a street team.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  A crowdsourced grassroots street team. And I just thought this was a really good time to remind everyone of my greatest failure as a gadget journalist. When I hyped the BlackBerry Storm.

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  For NGadget in 2008, I wrote the, our first hands-on of the BlackBerry Storm. I thought a clicking, the whole screen, if you don't remember the BlackBerry Storm, it was a touchscreen phone. The whole screen clicked.

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  And I thought it was, I thought it was pretty cool.

• 54:05Nilay Patel?

  It's called Surepress.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Surepress. And I was into it. And nobody else was. So I feel like I should at least get a shirt or a mug.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  From the BlackBerry family.

• 54:18Nilay Patel?

  Like, literally a decade later.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  For their hype.

• 54:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, if you are on the BlackBerry street team.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 54:24Nilay Patel?

  Please let us know. I would just love to meet you.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 54:28Nilay Patel?

  I like the idea of starting a street team when your user base is exclusively government employees who receive your devices on contract.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  I see.

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  The Acela Street Team.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  We work, we work.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  We work in the financial district at line for a sandwich. Sometimes I see a financial person typing on a BlackBerry.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  Are they handing out hats?

• 54:54Speaker 01

  No, but soon they will be.

• 54:57Nilay Patel?

  Got it. All right. Thank you, Paul.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:59Nilay Patel?

  All right, Mr. Newton.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  Yes, every week.

• 55:02Nilay Patel?

  Every week, Facebook does something insane. And that is true. Casey, you've been writing a lot about Facebook for us lately.

• 55:11Nilay Patel?

  You have an entire newsletter about social media platforms and democracy called The Interface that I recommend everybody subscribe to. But you wrote a piece this week, and you had a line that just really resonated with me, which is, Facebook is racking up crises faster than the company can, like, mine them. And contend with them. And then, obviously, this week Zuckerberg was on CNN. He's apologizing for Cambridge Analytica. You made a video about the Cambridge Analytica situation when people can watch. But just walk us through it. What the hell is going on?

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's such a weird scandal, as I said in my video, because the basic details were known two years ago, which is that this political strategy data mining firm named Cambridge Analytica got a hold of up to 50 million user profiles on Facebook because they were working with this researcher named Alexander Kogan, who created a personality quiz app and gotten all these people to download it. And at the time, if you took, if you used an app like that and you gave Facebook permission to access your information, it could also access your friends' information. So people wind up inadvertently giving away all of this.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Data and then Cambridge Analytica turned around and during the 2016 election, used it to do what they call psychographic profiling. And the idea, it's somewhat controversial and not perfectly understood, but the gist is that by understanding what you like on Facebook and what you do on Facebook, an advertiser might be able to understand your personality so as to better target advertising at you. And where this nets out is maybe, just maybe, this gave Cambridge Analytica an unfair advantage over the Hillary Clinton campaign, who didn't have to steal data from some shady researcher at the University of Cambridge. But the thing is, like, all of that was known two years ago, with the exception of the scope of it.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  And what happened last Friday was that the New York Times and the Guardian published this blockbuster investigation that said, hey, the scope of this was actually way bigger than we thought. Facebook had actually never even acknowledged that this happened officially two years ago. But when the Times and the Guardian showed up this time, they said, okay, yes, that's true, and we're going to investigate. And at that point, it was sort of all hands on deck. And we've sort of been dealing with the fallout ever since. But the point that I've tried to make yesterday is that the reason that I think this blew up is that trust in Facebook has never been lower, precisely because it does seem like every week or every month now there is some new crisis or some new scandal that it feels like it can't wrap its arms around.

• 57:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And to be clear, the timeline of this latest story, they also just blew it. Right? So the Guardian and the Times, those reporters said that Facebook's immediate reaction to the story was to threaten to sue those papers, which is not great. And that's at least the claim. Then they tried to end run the story by putting out blog posts, copying to suspending Cambridge Analytica. And then there was, what, four days or five days of where is Mark Zuckerberg? He didn't say anything. And then yesterday was like this, like, you know, announcement media blitz. And we can get into the substance of what he says Facebook is going to do. But that is not like well-managed PR strategy, at least as far as I can tell.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  It's not, and it's surprising for them because they think their PR team is pretty good, they're pretty sensitive, they're responsive, and they're good at managing this kind of stuff. I've certainly had run-ins with them over the years, but by and large, I don't think that's a dumb team of people. But something happened on this story where it seemed like absolutely every single thing they did backfired.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Correct me if I'm wrong, Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete this data, correct?

• 59:00Speaker 02

  Right, and this goes to the heart of why some people were so mad about what happened. It's that when Facebook learned that there was a problem, they went to the people who had essentially stolen it. Maybe that's too strong a word, but who had sort of illicitly gotten a hold of this data. And they said, hey, you're not allowed to have that. You need to delete that. And please fill out this form saying you deleted it. And so they did that, but then they didn't follow up afterwards. And the allegations-

• 59:28Speaker 03

  Was this form legally binding? Because that's the way that they keep characterizing it.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Zuckerberg presented as them legally certifying it. But it is not clear to me that what they signed was some sort of affidavit or was truly legally binding.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  Right, okay.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  And that was in 2015?

• 59:48Speaker 02

  That happened later. My understanding is that they wound up not going back to them, asking them to delete it until 2016.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Okay. Because yeah, it seems to me like Facebook could have just said, wow, thank you newspaper people for finding out that we've been lied to. We feel like we've been fooled. And obviously, this is a betrayal of trust to our customers, but we got snuckered too. And we're going to do way better on our forms.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  And you know, they actually have said a couple of times now that they're grateful for the work that the journalists have done on this story. The reason that they maybe threatened to sue, or at least kind of sent a pretty strongly worded note to The Guardian, was that The Guardian insisted on calling this a data breach. And some companies believe that the words "data breach" trigger this mandatory response from companies. And so they hate it when you call it a data breach when their systems weren't actually penetrated, right? Facebook argues all these people gave away their data willingly. It was misused after the fact, but in the moment, they gave it away willingly. So this isn't a breach. That's the Facebook argument. And The Guardian basically said, screw that, like 50 million people lost control of their data. That's a breach.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  So that's the heart of the argument, and that's why Facebook sent a legal nastygram about it.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  And then in the middle of this-

• 1:01:12Nilay Patel?

  Along those same lines, their chief security officer, his name is Alex Stamos.

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:01:17Nilay Patel?

  Put out a whole tweet storm at why it was a data breach.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Deleted his tweet storm.

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  Deleted that tweet storm, and then the Times reported that he was leaving the company because he was fighting about how secure Facebook should be. Which is just like another thing, like it's another branching.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Fighting, fighting on, like, he's trying to keep Facebook unsecure?

• 1:01:37Nilay Patel?

  No, he's trying, he's trying to secure it more. He has this like sterling reputation. So he was at Yahoo, he was fighting with Marissa Mayer about having to reset everyone's passwords when it got hacked. And Yahoo's executives didn't want to do that, uh, because it would be an inconvenience. Right? So he, he has this reputation as like an idealistic fighter for security. And he wanted, at least according to the Times report, wanted to be more upfront with what was happening with Russians on the platform and he was getting pushback. And so Casey, now he's just out, right? He's gonna be there for a couple, like his team went from like a hundred people to like two and then he's leaving.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  That, yeah, so that's what the Times reported. Uh, reportedly, he's going to be staying on through August. And he says that he's working on the kinds of things that you and I would probably hope that he would be working on, which is sort of threats that haven't manifested yet. How else could Facebook be misused in the midterm election? So that's what he says he's working on. It's pretty hard to determine from the outside, uh, what his day to day is like. But certainly it was a black eye for the company because as you said, Neil, like he did have such a good reputation. And because Facebook is under such enormous pressure to make sure that it is not, um, uh, influenced by bad actors or, or foreign states during this election, right?

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Like Alex Stamos is somebody who you would want to have on your team if you are a user of Facebook, uh, hoping that the platform is not misused.

• 1:02:58Nilay Patel?

  And I, so I think, I want to talk about the Zuckerberg stuff, but real quick, that seems to me in the heart of it. I have always worried that we can't get any traction on like Facebook news or Facebook privacy stories or privacy stories in general. And then, you know, just in the midst of this, like, everyone sort of did the service journalism of how to delete your Facebook account. And we did a piece, similar vein, how to use Facebook while giving it a minimum amount of your data. These posts exploded on our site. How to use Facebook while giving it a minimum amount of your data did way better than how to delete Facebook. It suddenly seemed like there's this huge consciousness of the fact that Facebook takes

• 1:03:40Nilay Patel?

  your data and they can do things with it, like give it to third-party developers with a terms of service agreement that maybe you don't have to pay attention to because what the hell's gonna happen? Casey, are you seeing that shift as strongly as I am?

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  I think so. I think that trust in Facebook has never been lower because it has this overlapping set of scandals and crises that it's dealing with and it's having trouble fully containing any of them. And so the net effect of that is if you're just kind of a person on the internet, every few days you see another story about how Facebook is being misused or another problem that Facebook has caused or something that Facebook can't get a handle on. And so your trust in it declines over time. And so when a big story comes along and kind of captivates the world, I do think all of a sudden there's this instinct to understand, you know what, if I wanted to delete my Facebook profile, how could I do that? Or let's say I don't want to delete it, but like, can I just like get rid of everything

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  I've ever liked or like, what can I do to protect myself better? To me, that seems like a very natural response.

• 1:04:42Nilay Patel?

  So, looking at Zuckerberg, yes, he finally like emerged from his shell. And he talked to Kara at Recode. He talked to The Times. And Kurt at Recode. Kara, it was Kara and Kurt at Recode. He talked to The Times, he talked to Wired, and he talked to CNN. That was it, right?

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  That's right. He did four interviews.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  Um, well, he did one interview. I'm sorry. He gave you did four interviews wherein he gave almost, almost identical answers. The places where those like different interviews diverged from each other was actually the most fascinating parts of, of it. So you had to like, Casey did a really good job in his summation of this. He like, he called out all the like parts of the things that were different from each other. Uh, cause like where he diverged, where he like got off message and started like talking about what he really feels, uh, was the most interesting part to me. Here is your average daily disclosure. Uh, my wife works for Oculus, which is part of Facebook, but like, that's where like he gets into like the chicken dust, right? Like that was the most, the most fun parts of those.

• 1:05:38Nilay Patel?

  I want to get there, but Casey, as you read those four interviews and his responses, questions and his statement about what Facebook's, walk us through what Facebook is going to do and then tell us how you kind of read all that.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there was kind of a spectrum of actions that you could anticipate Facebook taking in response to this, like from conservative to crazy aggressive. And I would say that they fell on kind of the more conservative end of that spectrum. So two big things that they're doing. One, if you have any app connected to your Facebook profile and you don't use that app for three months, Facebook will cut off that app's access to your data. And this is really important because it's very common if you download a new app to log in once with Facebook and then you decide you hate the app and you delete it. And then six years later, that developer is still theoretically gathering information about you and, and doing who knows what with it. So that's the first big thing. And I think probably the best step that they're taking. And then the second thing that they're doing is a big cleanup

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  action. So again, before 2014, developers could get access to information about your friends when you logged into their apps using Facebook's login. And so there are thousands of apps that apparently had access to this huge amount of information. Facebook's going back to them and saying, hey, we're going to audit you now. You have to submit to an audit. You need to show us what you're doing with that data, if you misused it. And if you say no, we're going to kick you off the platform. So that's going to be the kind of their big effort to come back and say, you know what? And by the way, this is going to be another round of tough headlines for them, I think. But they're going to come forward with a bunch of other apps that were doing things that were as shady or shadier. And, uh, and then we're going to have another moment of reckoning around that.

• 1:07:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, so that, when you say that's conservative, I read that entire statement and I just thought to myself, why aren't you doing that already?

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  Like, what is the, there's something at Facebook that just prevents them from thinking about this stuff before it's a scandal. And to me, that's like the biggest problem.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's the, it is a persistent and I think valid critique of Silicon Valley, which is that it is run by optimists, which on one hand is the only reason that Silicon Valley functions to begin with. But on the other hand, it means it's full of people who do not spend enough time thinking about the negative consequences. You know, so when I write this daily newsletter about social media and democracy, and I think of it as a journal of unintended consequences, because people just never see around those corners. And this was a huge and important corner they didn't see around.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  Well, to me, it's, I don't know, The Verge as a website has weird legacy corners of it that like, we thought were really important, were a big deal, and then eh, maybe it's not as big a deal. And they're still sort of hanging out somewhere in the corners of the website. And they pop up every now and then like, oh, oh yeah, that still exists. It's kind of broken. Actually, it's super broken. Well, whatever. We moved on. We thought it was important. Turned out not to be. We did something else. That broken thing can hang out there. It's fine.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  You know, you know what is a thing, a broken thing that's hanging out there, by the way?

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, what's that?

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  Is our old Verge app from like 2011 that is dead?

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  Mike Murphy, the tech reporter at Quartz, found out that it had access to a shitload of Facebook data.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  No, really?

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's gone. I was like, we should, we didn't know. Anyway, Dieter, what's the difference?

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  The difference, I thought the difference was going to be that our shit doesn't have the personal information of millions of users, and Facebook shit does. And so maybe they should like, not have that same like, forget about it attitude towards that. They actually need to be like, hyper vigilant about all of this stuff. So that when they like, they change course, or they, you know, sunset a product, somebody goes back and is like, okay, what's, what are the consequences of this? What personal data could still be out there?

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  I mean, I agree. They, I think it's hard to have that mentality of combing through your past and fixing all your mistakes. But the, isn't there an aspect of like, well, everybody's doing it? Because whenever I hear these privacy things, like, I just assume that everything that I've ever done on the internet is known by anybody who wants to know.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Go ahead.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  It's a good question and, and I think sort of what you're getting at is like, why does everybody care this time? And something obvious that we haven't really underlined is the reason that a lot of people care about this is the suggestion that because our Facebook data got away from us, it helped Donald Trump get elected. And there's a lot of people who wished that he hadn't been elected. Right? So often in privacy scandals, the reason they don't really resonate is because the consequences seem very abstract. This was a case where they seemed very concrete.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  And our science team, Angela Chen, wrote a great piece pulling apart the fact that Cambridge Analytica is kind of bullshit. Like what they claim to be able to do with this data doesn't really hold up to like particular scrutiny.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  The concept that they have so much data about people that they can manipulate their actions somehow.

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  So that I think that concept has a basis in reality. Right? Like if I know a lot about you, I can probably craft a more persuasive message. But the reality is that Cambridge Analytica, in particular, who knows? Right? And they're, I think there's a quote that's like, they're a great marketing company.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  I, I guess.

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  They're not good at what they.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  But, but let's, I don't want to come across as like, well, who cares if there's a data breach? I'm more think, the way I think of it is that every, okay, let's say I've liked seven movies anywhere on the internet. I kind of all automatically assume that any other entity in the world that wants to figure out what I like knows it.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Ah, so Facebook is not the internet.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  I never.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Like it is for a lot of people, but in theory, the other reason I think that people freak out about this is Facebook gives you this thing, which may be an illusion, that you can limit what is seen to just your friends and it's, you're not just out there in the world naked before the web. You are in your safe little Facebook house with just your Facebook friends.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  I definitely perceived that as an illusion. So that's.

• 1:11:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, not true. And there's ad tracking networks. There's, um, there's like, you know, the European Union has a huge new privacy law called the General Data Protection Act, which is GDPR. Like, it's a lot. There's a lot of action in this world.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Is that the right to be forgotten?

• 1:12:00Nilay Patel?

  They, no, they're different, but they interact. Um, because, for a variety of reasons. But like, if you collect data about, if you're a service provider in the European Union,

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:10Nilay Patel?

  and you collect data about me,

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  theoretically, I have the right to force you to forget it.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:14Nilay Patel?

  But you have a speech right, like, there's a lot. It's a lot. You know, Casey, to me, when I was watching Zuckerberg on CNN last night, the thing that like sprung me into action, like immediately read a post about it was, he said, maybe we should be regulated. And he, he brought up, in particular, and he brought this up, I believe with the, with Wired as well, the idea that when you see an ad on Facebook, you should know where it came from and why it's there. Right? And there's like some regulation in the United States to, to push that forward, called the Honest Ads Act. And then, and then he took this weird, swerving turn into like, how you can't really regulate well because you don't know what AI is gonna do. And then, maybe the AI will be so smart it'll regulate itself. And then,

• 1:12:56Nilay Patel?

  Nick Thompson at Wired asked him about hate speech, and like regulating that on the platform. And he said, well, my understanding of food regulation is that there's a certain amount of dust that gets into the chicken. And we want to keep that amount low. But we understand that to feed so many people, you're just gonna have to deal with it. And that's how I think about hate speech. And that, to me, is like, off the rails insanity. Because I don't think, A, that's not even how we think about chicken processing.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  How do you think about chicken processing?

• 1:13:27Nilay Patel?

  As little as possible is how I think about it. That's, like, I don't think the FDA is like, ah, I gotta update those dust numbers. Like, right? There's like a- They, they, they super are doing that.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a, there's a taller, tolerable amount of poison in everything that we eat.

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  And like rat parts and per million.

• 1:13:48Nilay Patel?

  But so if you like, accept that, then you accept that a government agency is gonna set a number of acceptability that is like healthy for the population.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Like X number of hates per month.

• 1:14:00Nilay Patel?

  And then you then right, the second part of that is they will regularly audit your chicken processing plant to make sure that you're doing.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  What do you guys think about?

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  The difference here is like, we accept that the government can regulate chickens, but chickens aren't speech.

• 1:14:15Nilay Patel?

  Right, I don't think that there is an acceptable amount of hate speech. And I realize like in the free speech debate, that actually places me into a camp that makes a specific kind of argument. But I think the answer for these platforms is no amount of hate speech on our platform is acceptable. And then you have to find, and then we're gonna have this like philosophical argument what constitutes hate. But like, I, I think that there is definitely some stuff that should just not appear, right? And how do you manage it and moderate it? And I just look at Zuckerberg's answers, and what I see is somebody who is yet to contend with the enormous amount of responsibility that that they have.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  Well, there's this really amazing quote, which will be in my newsletter that is going out tonight. But he said it to Kara Swisher, and what he said, because it was also in response to a question about hate speech and how he thought about all of that. And what he said was, things like, where's the line on hate speech? I mean, who chose me to be the person that did that? I guess I have to, because we're here now, but I'd rather not. So, so the answer to who chose me is Mark Zuckerberg, right? Like, this is a person who has ruthlessly pursued growth around the world, he has bought

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  up or attempted to kill off all of his competitors, and he's worked very hard to maintain almost total individual control of the company, right? Like, his, his board is very weak. So it's like Zuckerberg himself who has put himself in that position, and yet we sort of found out yesterday that he has not come to terms with how much responsibility that he has.

• 1:15:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he also, there was another part where he was talking about, maybe about like AI and like, you know, pre-vetting posts before they go up and can AI identify, identify hate speech? And he's like, it's a really interesting intellectual exercise. It's like, it's one of the most fascinating intellectual questions ever. It's like, well, also, it's not just academic, like also, also, this is happening right now. And so that was the thing, when I watched, in particular, when I watched this CNN interview, I started to understand why he'd been hidden for four or five days? Because he doesn't seem ready for this moment, right? He, he's, what you want from Zuckerberg in this moment is like, forceful decision making. Right in the sense of, well, this is my thing. I'm gonna, I'm gonna fix it.

• 1:16:32Nilay Patel?

  And he said a lot of words that indicate that, but I, at least for me, I did not see a presence that was grappling with the amount of personal responsibility that he had.

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  So here's why, here's why, like, Facebook thinks it's the victim here. Um, and, uh, and, and in some ways, I think they can actually make a very credible case, right? Like, they, they set up this platform, this platform had rules, and this person totally lies to them. Says he's just gonna do some academic research, creates this very innocuous seeming app. And then it turns out he's giving it away to Donald Trump's data operations team, right? And so from Facebook's perspective, they have been scammed and, and this person is a fraudster. And, and they want to, um, punish him, right? And so when you're in that mindset of like, hey, who the heck is this, this guy? Uh, we need to get our revenge. And then the rest of the world is telling you, hey, this is your fault. How are you gonna fix that?

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  I think there was just a kind of breakdown that it took them five days to work their way through and figure out how are we going to swallow hard and say, well, you know what? Maybe we should never have made that data available in the first place. And maybe we should have investigated these apps much more than we did. Um, but like, that was an emotional journey. And I think there was still a lot of biting his tongue going on last night when he gave those interviews.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  If, if I was Mark Zuckerberg, when, when this popped up, I'd be like, oh, great. People are gonna blame us for Donald Trump getting elected again.

• 1:17:58Nilay Patel?

  Which is what is happening, without question.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  But that's, I mean, that's obviously, I mean, that's bullshit. Like, people voted for, for Donald Trump.

• 1:18:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  You know, like, I just.

• 1:18:08Nilay Patel?

  I don't know why. It's just very confusing.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  It did happen. This, I mean, there's like, I feel like there's a big effort to assign a blame, to shift the blame from the free will of people to a, a, a large platform that was abused.

• 1:18:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because, so, um, there's a, I'm not gonna find the tweets right now. But David Roberts, who works for Vox.com, had this great tweet storm. That's like, the frame that you should look at the world right now in is everyone in the world, everyone thought Hillary Clinton was gonna win this election. And they, they, they all went too far too fast because they were all ready to attack her. Right? She was gonna be the, the vehicle for everyone's outrage for at least the next four years. Right, so the Republicans attack her, the left wing of the Democratic Party.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Who went too far too fast?

• 1:18:59Nilay Patel?

  Everybody. And they, they, before she got elected, they started attacking her. And then she didn't win.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:19:05Nilay Patel?

  And then this unthinkable thing happened. And I think-

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  It wasn't unthinkable to everybody. I predicted-

• 1:19:11Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  To my family, like, we were all talking-

• 1:19:14Nilay Patel?

  Obviously, some people-

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  I guessed it. There seemed like there was a real-

• 1:19:18Nilay Patel?

  But the structure of our-

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Enthusiasm for one of the candidates.

• 1:19:21Nilay Patel?

  There was. And I-

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  You know, like, people vote for, I don't know, it's just-

• 1:19:25Nilay Patel?

  I get it, but the entire world was predicated-

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:19:30Nilay Patel?

  On her winning. It's just true. Like, when we cover net neutrality, my number one talking point is, when these companies thought Hillary Clinton was gonna win, their, their investment plans were still going up. Right? Like, they all made assumptions. Everyone made this assumption. And this thing happened that most people did not assume would happen and had not made plans for.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:19:52Nilay Patel?

  And now we're looking to explain this thing that seemed unthinkable. And there are-

• 1:19:56Speaker 03

  And the, the election was close. Don't forget, like, you know, 304, whatever the number was, the number of voters in the three states that, like, turned the Electoral College. And when, when, uh, when an election is that close, you could, you can make the case that any number of tiny things are the thing that pushed it over. And of course, it was an accumulation of all of those tiny things. But every time something new pops up, it's like, oh, God, maybe that did it. Uh, you can, you could, like, it sounds reasonable to say, oh, well, that's the thing. Because it was such a small number of people across three states that it's conceivable that any, even, even the, the bumbling, inept, uh, good at marketing, bad at actually executing, Cambridge Analytica, you want to believe could have been the thing that made it happen.

• 1:20:39Nilay Patel?

  Right. The, the closer it is, the, the more you're willing to believe anything.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  I should have gone to Wisconsin. Let's be honest. Just go home, talk to everybody.

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  So, I, I, I get it. Like, people voted. But I think this thing that did, on that tight of a margin, did anything win. And then I think the other thing, and Casey has been making this point, is when we did our survey last October of how people feel about Facebook and all the big tech companies, like, we didn't run that survey. We hired an outside consultant to do it, nationally represented a sample. People just don't trust Facebook.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  They just don't. And I think these compounding stories about how Facebook is a bad actor, like, now you can point to a big bad, but that-

• 1:21:22Nilay Patel?

  That is built on a foundation of little mistakes and other fuckups. And for years, people, you know, writing in posts on Facebook, "I do not authorize you to use my data." "Liking this post is..." "Makes this a contract." Right? Like, people, that's been there the whole time.

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  Here's the thing.

• 1:21:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  One of the problems with fake news and the viral spread of fake news, especially on platforms like Facebook, is people formed little bubbles and they were willing to believe things that they wanted to because it supported their pre-existing beliefs. They had a confirmation bias. And currently, right now, everyone is freaking out on Facebook because they don't like Facebook because this bad story about Facebook aligns with their confirmation bias.

• 1:22:03Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. Hoisted on your own petard, Facebook. All right. So Casey, what happens next?

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  Uh, so there are gonna be a couple of things. There's an employee Q and A tomorrow, is my understanding, that Zuckerberg will be speaking at, so we sort of may hear more from that. There is going to be a series of investigations of these apps that had access to more data, which Facebook will presumably tell us more about later. Facebook is also going to be notifying the 50 million people who had their information improperly shared. And that's kind of the next few steps there. But remember, this is not Facebook's only problem. They also have the newsfeed integrity problem, where you don't know if you can trust what you see there. And then you have this broader cultural reckoning over how are we spending our time on social media? Is it good for us personally? Is it good for democracy?

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  So lots of things are kind of swirling around that are going to far outlast the data privacy scandal, I think.

• 1:23:00Nilay Patel?

  And if somebody wanted to receive an email digest of this news every day, where might they find such a thing?

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  Neela, I'm so glad you asked. If you go to my Twitter profile, @caseynewton, there is a link there to a daily newsletter about social networks and democracy.

• 1:23:15Nilay Patel?

  Are you saying Lincoln bio?

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  I'm saying Lincoln bio.

• 1:23:21Nilay Patel?

  Perfect. All right. I think that's all we have for this week. Casey, thank you for explaining this to us. It is so wild and complicated.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  It's an amazing story.

• 1:23:29Nilay Patel?

  I have, I have no love in my heart for Facebook. I want to be honest with everybody. Like, every other company that we cover, like, they make some product that, I guess Facebook makes Instagram, so.

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Everybody loves Instagram and forgets that Facebook makes it, which is like a huge competitive strength that Facebook does.

• 1:23:46Nilay Patel?

  They just shut it down and ran Instagram. Anyway, there's other stuff to listen to. Why'd You Push That Button Season Two is happening. This week's episode is about taking selfies in public, which by the way, I firmly believe taking selfies in public, always acceptable, any situation, anytime. It is just a photo. If you think it's acceptable to take a photo at that time, it is acceptable to take a photo of yourself. Agreed. I tweeted that, people started freaking out at me. But anyway, listen to it. Caitlin and Ashley do a much better job of telling that story than I do. So that's happening. Megan Frackman, she wrote a great feature about Telltale Games this week that you should read if you are the sort of person who wants to build a product or a company. Just how the culture just got out of control, fell apart. Go read that.

• 1:24:29Nilay Patel?

  Lauren Good, still doing Versus on the Youtubes, so watch that. She's also got a podcast called Too Embarrassed to Ask. Kara Swisher has a podcast called Recode Decode. Peter Kafka has a podcast called Recode Media. Kara Swisher, by the way, recently had The Mooch on her podcast. Yeah, she's been on a real... She's been on a real run on that show lately. Casey, I thought you were gonna have a podcast. Oh, you got that.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know, it's very much forthcoming, although as you might imagine, this week's Facebookpocalypse has been top of mind, but yes, that we are moving and I think I'm gonna have a lot to say about that very soon.

• 1:25:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm so excited. Converge with Casey Newton, a podcast that you cannot currently subscribe to on Apple Podcasts, but all those other ones are there for you. Casey said he'll give you five bucks if you can guess the XML feed.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  That's 100% true. It hasn't been created yet, so to guess it would absolutely be worth $5.

• 1:25:32Nilay Patel?

  You can find us all on Twitter. Paul is FuturePaul, Casey's CaseyNewton, Dieter's Baccalon, I am reckless. All these things are available to subscribe to. Thank you to Casey and I sat for being on the show this week. Again, the full hour-long rambling chat, somewhere else in this feed if you want. And that is it. Rock and roll. Promo code.