F8 and Facebook's future in privacy

Facebooks F8 conference happened this week so The Verge's Nilay Patel, Casey Newton, Ashley Carman, and Paul Miller break down the biggest announcements and updates from the event including Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. Stories discussed this week:The 5 biggest announcements from Facebook’s F8 developer conference keynote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the ‘future is private’Facebook keeps asking whether its keynote makes people like FacebookFacebook Messenger is coming to the desktopThe next version of Facebook Messenger will be radically smallerWhy Facebook is making a big bet on MessengerFacebook bans Alex Jones and Laura Loomer for violating its policies against dangerous individualsFacebook could create new privacy positions as part of FTC settlementFacebook adds ‘secret crushes’ so you can see which friends are thirsting after youFacebook’s Portal is getting WhatsApp support and launching internationallyOculus Quest review: a great system with a frustrating compromiseNubia stuck a cooling fan in its latest gaming smartphoneApple explains why it’s cracking down on third-party screen time and parental control apps 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?

  On this week's Vergecast, Casey Newton, Ashley Carmen join me and Paul talk about Facebook's F8 Developer Conference, everything that's happening with Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, talk a little bit about Oculus, the Facebook Portal, and we get into Apple earnings and what Apple is doing with parental control apps. That's it on the Vergecast.

• 0:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Give you and your team more time to focus on the work that matters. This is Amex Corporate, one intelligent platform for company spending. With smart expense management to help capture details, categorize spend, and streamline expense submission and approval, there's less manual work for your team and greater visibility and control for you. Built to simplify, designed to scale. Get started at go.amex slash Amex Corporate. Terms apply.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. The show that I'm just gonna be honest, mostly is gonna be about how bad Game of Thrones was. There's a whole thing about the flagship podcast, but we're not doing that. We're just talking about how bad. No, we're not. Well, maybe a little. Anyway, I'm your friend Eli. Ashley Carmen's here.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  Casey Newton is joining up. What's up, y'all? Paul Miller's here. Hello. Dieter is off this week. He is prepping for next week's Google I/O. I miss him terribly, but as you might know, if you've listened to this Vergecast, Dieter often has to recuse himself from all Facebook conversation because his wife works at Facebook. And this episode is basically entirely about Facebook. So we miss you, Dieter. It probably worked itself out. I do want to say, however, just to be very, very clear, that last episode of Game of Thrones was horrible. It was the worst written episode of television I've ever watched in my entire life.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Oh my god, it was so good. There is no pleasing anyone. I hate that we've gone to this part of Game of Thrones where it's now watched mostly by people who hate it for the express purpose of letting them dunk on it on Twitter. Like, it's just everything I hate about the internet in a nutshell. Go find the show that you like and watch that.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  I do, I mean, I did like it. I just... One of the dragons was a coward. That's what we learned the most from Game of Thrones.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  It's a very interesting development.

• 2:50Nilay Patel?

  Sure. Anyway, speaking of Google I/O, which is what Dieter is off prepping for, that is next week. And Dieter and I are doing a live taping of The Vergecast, so if you're out there, you can go... I think we are sold out, but there's a list you can get on in case somebody doesn't show up. But you can come see us. We're interviewing Hiroshi Lockheimer, who's SVP of a bunch of stuff at Google, including Chrome OS and Android, a bunch of hardware stuff. And Steph Culbertson, who's the director of Android, runs Android. That's gonna be really cool to talk to her. So we'll have him on stage. If you have questions that you want us to ask, you can just tweet at us, and then maybe we'll ask your questions. You never know what'll happen. And that'll come out at the end of next week. No interview episode next week. We're just... We've got I/O, so Dieter and I will both be there.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  We're interviewing these people on stage. It feels like we'll just focus on that next week, but we'll be back right after that. Okay, that's enough promotional stuff. Casey?

• 3:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:44Nilay Patel?

  Facebook had a developer conference this week.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Boy, did they.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  And they did a lot. You want to walk me through what happened?

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Sure. So, the big story that Facebook is trying to tell this year is that their next set of products is going to be built around messaging. And their big idea for messaging is that it should all be encrypted, and you should be able to message anyone on any of their apps, right? So you could message from Messenger to WhatsApp and that sort of thing. And so, they made a lot of fairly incremental developments around messaging. So for example, they're going to bring Facebook Messenger to the desktop, both Mac and Windows.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  And that sort of thing. They're making Messenger radically smaller, so the entire app is gonna be 28 megabytes.

• 4:41Nilay Patel?

  There was like a round of applause and cheers when they announced the desktop version of Messenger. And I just, I thought that was great. Like, there's a part of you that's like, yep, we're announcing Mac desktop apps in 2019 and people are going nuts.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I love desktop software. Like, I sort of feel like a relic of the old world sometimes because I actually am sitting at a desktop for eight hours a day. So I love it when people make things for me. And as somebody who usually has a Messenger tab open, like, it's really great news. You know, we should say that the other really big thing that they announced, though, was this redesign of Facebook proper. So you may already have started to see it on your phone in the United States. It's a lot less blue, it's a lot more white. And as it evolves over the next year or so, and eventually it comes to the desktop version of Facebook, it's going to prioritize events and groups and all this kind of like,

• 5:39Speaker 04

  you know, more limited sharing features. And the newsfeed, like, will still be there, but it's much less central than it has ever been before. And so it seems like Facebook is really kind of chasing those newer, more popular behaviors as the newsfeed kind of starts to wither away.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  So, just to step back for a second. You were at F8. A lot of tech workers were at F8. Mark Zuckerberg stands on stage and he says, "The future is private." There's a huge slide behind him that says, "The future is private." This is like a radical change in general for Facebook.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, because for a long time, the company would say, you know, "Our notions of privacy are outdated." And, you know, a lot of people screamed when they introduced the newsfeed, and it turned out to be one of the biggest moneymakers and most popular pieces of software ever made. And so, for a long time, there was the thought that, you know, people should just share everything publicly. And like, that was just how we were going to live our lives. And then Snapchat came along and proved that that was not the only future, and might not even be the future for most of us. And so, there has been a move towards sharing in more limited numbers of people, which only makes sense because when you're sharing to everyone you've ever met, like, there's no context, it's easy for you to be

• 6:57Speaker 04

  misunderstood, you might share something you didn't intend to with the wrong person, right? It introduces all of this complexity and most people just, you know, very pragmatically decide to opt out of the whole system. And so Facebook now wants to build these series of, of smaller spaces. You know, we, we might want to talk about what Facebook means by privacy and kind of how limited its definition is of privacy. Yeah.

• 7:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, Facebook's definition of privacy is just do everything in our box so we can track you relentlessly. Right? I mean,

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. And like that. And, you know, it means end, end encryption, like that is part of privacy to them, which is meaningful. Uh, but there are other elements of privacy, right? Like, you know, Facebook, if you have location, uh, turned on, it's still going to know where you are at all times, right? Like, that's one definition of, of privacy that you might matter to you. It's still collecting all sorts of, uh, data about you that advertisers then use to target you. That's another kind of privacy that you still don't really have in Facebook in, in any meaningful sense of the word. So, um, even as the company pivots toward privacy, uh, I, I think it's probably, you know, uh, more accurate to say they're, they're pivoting toward encrypted messaging and like small group sharing and leave it at that.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Is this just a function of us basically using Facebook wrong? Like, like basically when Facebook came out, we were like, oh, it says friends. Like you are supposed to only add your friends, but then everyone went crazy and was like, I'm going to add every human I've ever met my entire life. When in actuality, you could have had this private experience if you literally just added your friend.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  Had like all kinds of ways to say which kinds of friends you are. Instagram has close friends and no one does that.

• 8:41Speaker 05

  I, I'm, I'm starting to realize that there was some serious writing on the wall when everybody was freaked out. Like, wait, all of a sudden, what I, uh, who I thought could see my posts is a lot smaller than actually who can see my posts. And I don't know which strings I need to pull to make the correct number of people. And so Facebook did all this UI design, tried to do this, all this education, but it seems like that should have been like the first flag that maybe this was going in the wrong direction.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I have to say, Facebook worked relentlessly to get you to add everyone you might know. There's a reason that that box says people you may know and not people you're really close friends with. Because like, Facebook doesn't actually care about you being friends with your friends. It cares about getting everyone on the world onto Facebook, right? And the way that it can do that is by getting all of your acquaintances, anyone you ever sat next to at a wedding. They want you to be quote unquote "friends" with that person. And so, like, to me, this is always like, one of the delicious ironies in Facebook is that Facebook itself broke Facebook by growing relentlessly and leading to this context collapse that means no one wants to share publicly anymore.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  But, is it like, ultimately, they got enough people on the platform? Now, you're not sharing enough authentic content, like, good enough data for them. So by doing this pivot, they're actually getting way better data about you. And, whatever, at the end of the day, they have their billion users, however, I don't even know how many billion they have at this point. But like, they've got all the people on the platform.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's weird, they just announced their quarterly numbers, and weirdly, they still managed to grow, like, really impressively. They're still finding, uh, large numbers of people who have not used Facebook, and it continues to surprise me.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  I feel like, Facebook sees that Discord is the actual cool, real thing that people actually use. Like, this is how young people today tell each other how sad they are, is Discord. And it's not Facebook right now. And, and so, a couple of years ago, they, "Oh, young people are using Snapchat, we need to steal all Snapchat's features." Now, I think Facebook wants to have a similar sensation as I get using Discord, which is a wonderful, very, I can choose who I'm talking to at any given time, and I have no thought that what I'm saying in a chat is a broadcast, unless someone screen caps it, basically.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, I mean, something that you're getting at is, uh, and I, and I wrote about this in, in my newsletter this week, is while we tend to write about Facebook as this behemoth that can bend reality to its will, which it is in some ways, it's also a slave to consumer behavior. And so, when consumers just stop using the newsfeed, and they just start sending a lot of private messages, Facebook has to figure out a response to that. And when they start forming a lot of small groups, and doing small group, you know, chats over audio and video, like they do on Discord, Facebook has to respond to that. So, they're always just kind of surfing consumer demand, and then, like, presenting it as their vision, um, when in reality, like, they're almost always chasing.

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  So let me just go through the announcements with you because they made a number of announcements. So they announced a redesign of Facebook, which is a pretty big deal. They announced a Messenger redesign, a slimming down of Messenger. They announced desktop clients for Windows and Mac of Messenger. Again, I remind you that the crowd literally cheered, thus proving that the desktop is not dead. They announced some Instagram stuff, which we'll talk about with Ashley in a minute. What else? Did I miss anything?

• 12:00Speaker 04

  Those are the big ones. Like something else that's interesting to me is they are really positioning Messenger as a social network in its own right. They're going to add this new tab to Messenger that will attempt to figure out who are your close friends? And then show you whatever they're doing across Facebook's family of apps, whether it's a post to their story or a post to the news feed. It really wants to make that the home for your close friends, the way Snapchat is right now for a lot of teenagers. And so I met with one of their top executives yesterday and it was just really interesting the way they talk about Messenger as a social network in its own right, when I think a lot of people still think of it as just a simple utility.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  Or just a part of Facebook, which is a social network.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Yes, also that.

• 12:43Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's just like funny to me, like what is the main feature you want from a social network? Is talking to the other people on the social network. So that's really interesting. You brought up a couple of times and we should just poke at it a little bit. They talked about their family of apps, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. They talked about unifying them. Zuckerberg was on stage a lot, being like, when we combine these backends, you'll be able to message everybody. A business on WhatsApp will find it's... That is a direct response to the just enormous amount of interest from governments around the world in literally breaking these things up in some way, right? That's what I read like to me, that they were selling the value of the combination because the Europeans are interested in the value of the destruction.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, I mean, like, to me, this all seems very clear. Mark Zuckerberg knows that a lot of smart and powerful people want to break these apps up. And so he is racing to integrate them so that when that request finally comes, he can throw up his hands and say, I'm sorry, it's too late. And in his ideal world, we're already messaging each other across these family of apps. And so there's a user revolt when they try to break them up. They say, what do you mean? I can't Instagram from, you know, from WhatsApp to Messenger anymore. Right? And people freak out. So he's racing against time.

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, racing against time. And I believe the European Court of Justice. Which is, if you're gonna be in a race, be in a race with something with a cool name is what I always say. Do you see, is that combination happening? What's the timeline on that integration? Is it now? Is it tomorrow? Is it, are they shipping those features?

• 14:17Speaker 04

  So the good news for regulators is that Facebook is saying it's gonna take like a long time. Like basically the rest of this year, they think it's going to take. And maybe longer. Maybe they're sandbagging and they're actually gonna figure out how to do it by like the fall. But everything they've said publicly is it's gonna take a long time.

• 14:34Nilay Patel?

  And then in like Germany or whatever, they're already barred from sharing data between some of these apps?

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Yes, and they're being sued because they haven't lived up to that bargain. And that's like one of their many legal fights right now.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  The endless series of legal fights. And then I just want to come back to like Zuckerberg saying the future is private. He did start with this extremely embarrassing moment where he was like, I know we don't have a great record in privacy. And there was just like dead silence. Chuckle? Yeah. He did like a chuckle emoji out loud somehow. On the stream that read very badly. What was that like in the room?

• 15:11Speaker 04

  It was very awkward. And yet, would it not be weirder if like tech CEOs had great comic timing?

• 15:21Speaker 04

  Like, I don't know why any of these speechwriters writes any jokes at all for these these poor folks. Like, they're good at a lot of things, but delivering zingers is is just never gonna be one of them.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The only, the only tech CEO who's ever been good at delivering zingers was Steve Jobs when he talked shit about other products.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Yes, Steve Jobs had a wonderfully clarifying honesty about him.

• 15:43Nilay Patel?

  No, but it was, but only in that zone, right?

• 15:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, he also did jokes like, he made Phil Schiller like, jump out of a tree to demonstrate that the MacBook Air had wifi. Like, he had, he had that sensibility.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  Wait, is that true?

• 15:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he made like, Phil Schiller like, jump onto a Mac. It was like, ridiculous.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  I was expecting you to say like, Steve Jobs made Phil Schiller jump out of a tree to prove his loyalty. Like, that's a story I would believe.

• 16:09Nilay Patel?

  Perhaps. I mean, it's all, there's layers, Casey. Yeah, when the, when like, the first MacBook Air came out, it had like wifi, or no, the iBook came out, it had wifi. There was like, a moment where they were like, "Steve, no wires!" And like, Schiller had to like, do something like, silly. Uh, but then Steve Jobs would be like, "You know what, you know why these products suck? Cause look at these fucking buttons!" And like, that always hit home.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Facebook. Well, I just, that is the, the context for all of this, is Facebook has had this like, enormous series of scandals. And then this is, and most of those scandals are rooted in the developers and the platform are acting badly. This is their developer conference, they're saying it's wa, it's gonna be more private now, we're not focused on, uh, you know, sharing stuff, we're not focused on newsfeed, we're focused on integrating our existing apps. What were the developers at this developer conference supposed to do?

• 17:09Speaker 04

  So that's a great question, and it was super unclear to me. Facebook's story for developers is really weird because developers have been Facebook's biggest headache, or one of them, like, over the past year. And so, the developers that Facebook really wants are people who are essentially advertisers. So, if you wanna use Facebook to conduct a growth market- Campaign, or you want to use Messenger and WhatsApp as customer service tools, then Facebook wants to talk to you, but it's really only so that Facebook can sell you a product. You know, they do have some more traditional developer roles, like you can make video games for Oculus and sell them for money. And so those people were there, right?

• 17:53Speaker 04

  Or like, they're going to do an enterprise version of Oculus and you'll be able to make business software for it. So there are some of those like traditional developer conference developers there, but a lot of it is like, you know, still building Messenger chatbots.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  Is the Business Oculus Conference called Biznoculus?

• 18:09Speaker 04

  It actually is.

• 18:11Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely should be. Welcome to Biznoculus 2019.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  They also had the Instagram face filter creators there. Like they spent a solid two minutes on one woman, who we wrote about actually at The Verge, Johanna. And I thought that was interesting because it kind of seems like the developers there are just people who make AR filters that make people want to use Instagram.

• 18:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Which is like, okay, and they don't pay them.

• 18:36Nilay Patel?

  They were just there.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  They're just there and then they feel special because Facebook's like, look at them.

• 18:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we have some AR stuff too.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:42Nilay Patel?

  Look at this.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they did it.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  That's great. So, okay, I want to actually get to Instagram, but I want to just wrap up on sort of the the major Facebook news. So that was F8, which I actually, I don't understand why it's a developer conference still. And I don't understand why it continues to be called F8. Like, it doesn't stand, it doesn't, there's not eight Fs that they're referencing, right? Fate. It stands for fate. Well, sure, but that's extremely existential. We will all die, Neelai, soon.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh.

• 19:11Nilay Patel?

  It's just a very confusing conference, but it happened. And Zuck made this commitment to privacy and he said all this stuff. And then over the past, what, two days, Casey, there's like been two more gigantic Facebook stories. One is that the FTC is like considering this massive fine that Facebook is trying to front run. And they might install regulators inside of Facebook in some way, which I don't understand. And the other one is they banned a bunch of people today. So let's take them one by one. What, what's happening on the FTC side?

• 19:41Speaker 04

  So there has been the, these ongoing negotiations toward a settlement. Facebook signed a consent decree in 2011 that said, basically, we, we pinky promise that we're not going to violate anyone's privacy. And then eight years later, regulators had heard enough stories about Facebook privacy violations that they said, well, you know, maybe we should look into this. And so what has been reported so far is that they're considering a three to $5 billion fine. You know, two things about that are true. One is if it happens, it will be the biggest fine the FTC has ever levied. And then the other important fact is that it's absolute chump change to Facebook, you know, which earned more than that in profits last quarter. Right?

• 20:25Speaker 04

  But then the reporting this week was that they were considering some sort of external monitoring that would be doing presumably more regular audits of Facebook's privacy policies and, you know, might require them to open up their books more than they have in the past.

• 20:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then they might have, be forced to hire these like privacy focused executives, which is to me, the weirdest piece of this puzzle. Like your fine, your punishment is you have to hire someone who reports to you that complies with us. Like it makes no sense to me.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's kind of like, you know, the Seinfeld where it's like, you know, the pilot that they made was like Kramer had to be Jerry's butler or something. It's like, feels like it's in that universe.

• 21:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Are people happy with this, this FTC? It seems like, it seems like Facebook announced it during its earnings report to say the biggest fine ever is coming, $3 billion. And then it, that strategy backfired because everyone was like, that's not enough.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, I, I would say that it's important that we see what this agreement actually looks like and, you know, not just the reporting on it, although I have no reason to doubt any of the reporting. I think it's also a good exercise to ask yourself, like, what would be meaningful action against Facebook to you, right? Like, I think a lot of us believe that antitrust action and, and breaking up, you know, requiring the spinoff of Instagram and WhatsApp is really the, the only truly meaningful thing that you can do here. You know, short of that, a big fine, some extra, you know, bodies, you know, keeping an eye on the action, it all seems okay. But, you know, I wrote about last week how all of this feels a little bit theatrical, right? Like, the FTC has been under a lot

• 22:06Speaker 04

  of pressure from lawmakers who are saying this is a toothless agency that isn't, you know, living up to its, um, its job responsibilities. Um, and, and so they're motivated to show that they're taking really strong action. And Facebook, I think, is actually very, gonna be very happy to pay this fine because they want to be able to say, "Look, we know we had a really, you know, bad couple of years, but we just paid the largest fine in the history of America, and so please get off our backs," right? So, they're sort of motivated to do this, and both entities are motivated to make whatever the outcome is seem like a really big deal, even if it's not. And so, that's why it's gonna be up to us, you know, journalists to try to put these things in a perspective.

• 22:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And also, the revolting Facebook users who are like, "I can't WhatsApp my Instagram." That's great. I can't wait for those tweets. It's gonna be great. Okay, and then today, they banned a bunch of people.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  Yes. So, uh, as you may have seen, we have a problem with far-right extremists on the internet, and many of them have used Facebook and other platforms to grow really large audiences, uh, sometimes because, uh, Facebook's, uh, recommendation algorithms have helped people find them. So, this is people like Alex Jones, uh, Laura Loomer, Paul Nealon, Louis Farrakhan, and a handful of others, and they have now been banned from Facebook and Instagram, uh, basically for violating what Facebook calls its dangerous individuals policies. Um, and that has a lot to do with using the platform to spread

• 23:39Speaker 04

  hate speech against, um, you know, religious or ethnic minorities, or like associating with, uh, people who have been identified members of other, like, you know, white nationalists or right-wing extremist groups. Uh, so, yeah, so they brought the ban hammer down pretty hard today.

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  And is that gonna be an ongoing thing that they're doing? Or is this, I mean, they made news with it today, right? Like, they briefed reporters about it, but are they gonna keep going?

• 24:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, this is always a game of whack-a-mole, right? Like, all of the people that I named could conceivably try to get back on to Facebook or Instagram in some way. And so, you know, Facebook will kind of have to monitor that on an ongoing basis. You know, one of the things I think we've seen over the past several months is we've had this, you know, horrible outbreak of extremist violence around the world is that these figures are linked, that it is a network, it is an ecosystem, they all promote each other, they all go on each other's YouTube channels and Instagrams and, and sort of one leads to the next, leads to the next.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  And it is that kind of ecosystem that has sucked in, you know, a lot of men who have then, you know, gone on to kill people all around the world. So it is in the interest of these networks to kind of dismantle, I'm sorry, it's in the interest of these platforms to dismantle these networks.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  So you, I mean, you write the interface about social networks and democracy literally every day. You can, you can get it if you're listening, just in case he will email you every day, if you want.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  I will.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this obviously has some troubling repercussions, right? Like, Facebook is exporting American values in a certain way, like, do they talk to you about how they're making these decisions?

• 25:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, they, they like to rewrite history a little bit and say hate has never had any place on Facebook whatsoever. And of course, the truth is that everyone I just named has been on Facebook for a very long time. None of these people said a problematic thing for the first time last week, right? Facebook has typically been loathe to act, in part, I think, just due to actual negligence, like, not understanding what was happening on the platform. And then later, I think there was a lot of concern around, you know, wanting to ensure the maximum amount of speech, which is sort of a very American value. But the world has changed over the past couple of years.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  In part because lawmakers around the world are now saying they're going to regulate Facebook and make it much more difficult for Facebook to operate within their borders unless they do a better job at removing hate speech. And so, you know, for all of those reasons, Facebook has had to not just develop policies, but but actually enforce them. And, you know, it's it's been a really long time coming. Like, like Alex Jones was banned from Facebook today, but you probably, you know, you may remember, we had a month-long debate about what to do with Alex Jones last July and August on all of these platforms.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  And Facebook ultimately didn't act until Apple, you know, took his podcast down. And that was, what, like nine, nine months ago or something like that? So these things have been taking a really long time.

• 26:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it just seems, they picked a list of sort of the famous figures. And my question is, there's a lot of other less famous people. Are they going to face the same consequences at the same scale?

• 27:08Speaker 04

  It it remains to be seen. I do think the right move, though, is to start at the top, right? You want to get rid of the most prominent voices who have the biggest audience. And then you want to look again at your recommendation algorithms and all the way that you are surfacing those extreme voices to your users, right? Like, a classic example is, you're, you just had a baby and you join a new mom group and Facebook says, oh, hey, you should join this group about how vaccines will kill your baby. And this was something that was happening until last month, by the way, right? So it is like those kinds of mechanisms that are going to help people find the next Alex Jones, the next Laura Loomer.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  And so that's where I hope Facebook is really focusing, is looking at at how the viral mechanics of the platform are being hijacked by whatever the next generation of extremists is, because I'm sure it will come. And how do you prevent them from getting to a place like an Alex Jones or a Laura Loomer did, where they had hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers across Facebook who they might never have reached otherwise?

• 28:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it's as complicated as anything, right? I mean, a lot of these people are better at using Facebook than Facebook is.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  They're great, but you know, what we've learned is that the best way to grow an audience on any social platform is to make people outraged and terrified, right? It's the cable news formula. So you just get on there and you say, you know, this group of people is gaining an unfair advantage over you, and they're probably going to commit crimes against you, and then they're actually going to replace you. And if you just say that enough times to enough people, people will pick up guns and go start, you know, shooting up houses of worship. So we know how this stuff works, and platforms have to do a better job of nipping in the bud.

• 28:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I feel like my next generation Vergecast plan has to change because I was planning on games from these viral mechanics. I'm gonna have a big rethink. Okay, we're gonna take, thank you very much, Casey. We're gonna take a little break. And we're gonna talk about Instagram.

• 29:11Speaker 06

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

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports. Receipt chasing. Month end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash AF.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Okay, Facebook, as we've noted, doesn't only own the viral mechanics of hate, which is their main app. They own Instagram, the happy one.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Instagram's gonna be ruined, y'all.

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  It's already coming. I mean, there's plenty of reporting about it. But they think it's happy. And for me, it's the happy one.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. That's because we didn't friend everybody we know from high school on Facebook.

• 30:42Nilay Patel?

  That is true.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  We got out.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  We got out. We met new people. Stocked them on a different app. So what'd they announce at F8?

• 30:50Speaker 03

  So they didn't announce too many interesting product features. They had one that was a new donation sticker, which is like, cool, nice, great, goodwill. They announced an interesting test that they're going to be running in Canada, which is that users can select whether they want their likes that they receive on content to be public. So you can hide your likes, which is actually just a big deal. Like, it's just a test in Canada, but that is a fundamental rethinking of how Instagram works. Like, obviously, people are incentivized to post because they get likes and it's serotonin boosts and it makes us feel good.

• 31:24Nilay Patel?

  Are they taking them away or just hiding them?

• 31:26Speaker 03

  They're hiding them from the public. So if you're a creator or influencer, I've been looking into a story about how this is going to impact influencers. And like, the influencer industry has moved past likes. Like, they don't actually, they care about likes a little bit, but they're like, oh, we want to see you get comments. We want to see that you get DMs. We want to see that you sell stuff, which is another feature they just announced, is that creators can now tag their posts with things that they're selling and sell directly from the post.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  So basically, like,

• 31:55Nilay Patel?

  The catalog.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Jade eggs. Jade eggs, fit tees.

• 31:59Nilay Patel?

  So Instagoop.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Yep. Yeah. So anyway, the likes is more, I mean, Instagram is sort of positioning it as like, this is a mental health thing. Like, we want people to not feel so much pressure to post. It's gonna be more of an authentic platform now. I don't know. I don't really buy that. You still see your likes. It's not like you don't know that you're gatting likes. Like, I know what's performing. Just you don't know. Do you really care how many likes I get? I don't know.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  Well, and like, those likes will still be used to inform what you see in your feed, right? It'll determine the order that you see posts. It'll determine what shows up in the explore tab. But that's not to say that Instagram couldn't change that over time. And if they are gonna make a big change, this probably is what that first step will look like. You know, I'm excited about this for one reason in particular, which is something that always bothers me is how many likes ads have. It's like, it's like you're scrolling through and you see all like your close friends and their babies and you know, they've all got their like 30, 60, 80 likes. And then there's like a picture of a shoe. It's like 65,000 likes.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  And it kind of just feels like a middle finger to like you and everyone you love. So like, if nothing else, like, get rid of the likes on ads forever.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  I mean, this comes back to why'd you push that button's impetus.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  The Emrata butt pic.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  That's literally why did you like?

• 33:26Speaker 04

  That dude's gone.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Paul was there for this whole discussion.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  I was. I remember it well.

• 33:29Speaker 04

  Is that dude still around?

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Emrata?

• 33:32Speaker 04

  No, your dude, your ex-boyfriend.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  Oh, my boyfriend? No, he's gone.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Okay. So they announced hiding likes.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  Hiding likes. The biggest visual change is this thing called create mode, which is really interesting too, because again, if likes is a fundamental change of how Instagram, at least functions on the outside to people who are consuming content, create mode really hints at the fact that Instagram is a bloated app now.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  You now can start an Instagram stories post without even having a photo or video. You could just have a gradient. And from there, you can build your content. And I'm just like, this shows Instagram's future. It's not, it's not a photo sharing app anymore. Not that it has been for a while, but like, it's really not.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  It's Microsoft Paint with a social network.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  It's a WordPress blog. That's amazing.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Honestly.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  Instagram just becomes the future of blogging.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, there's a world in which.

• 34:28Nilay Patel?

  So is that, and then the shopping thing?

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  This has been rumored for a long time that they're just gonna take your credit card and let you shop directly from the app.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, they let you do that, and now the creators themselves can tag posts, which up until now, certain businesses could tag their posts. You could see them in ads and shop from the ads, but it's the fact that the influencers themselves, you can shop the influencers.

• 34:50Speaker 05

  And influencers get a cut?

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  No, they don't.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  If they're using affiliate links, right, they could.

• 34:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, I asked Facebook, like, okay, so influencers can, you know, start tagging what they're wearing and sell it. Like, is Facebook taking any cut of that? And they said no. But yeah, I guess you're right that the influencers themselves could add affiliate links.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, no, Facebook, yeah, when we interviewed them for Why'd You Push That Button? Yeah, they were like, yeah, we're just doing it because it's for the good of the platform. We just want our creators to, you know, make money off of it's their platform.

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, of course. And Facebook also wants to know everything that you buy.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  What you buy is what you're looking at.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  But if you're an influencer and you get paid to do a sponsored post, you already got paid. So why would you get paid a second time? You have to be putting stuff out.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  This would probably be more if you're like, I just love to wear Adidas track pants. And you think I look great in my Adidas track pants?

• 35:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Let me help you out here.

• 35:43Speaker 05

  I don't know. This seems like a big deal. I'm just thinking back to like my childhood and receiving like, like a Walmart brochure and being fascinated that like Walmart employees were photographed for the, you know? Do you remember that? Do you remember the good old days with Walmart brochures?

• 36:00Speaker 03

  Everyone's aspirational catalog, the Walmart catalog.

• 36:03Nilay Patel?

  I definitely had a friend in high school and it was revealed that he was a child model in a Kohl's ad. And he never, ever lived that down. To this day, I'm like, remember when you were a baby model for Kohl's?

• 36:16Speaker 03

  I mean, it is really wild that you just, they built a platform of people who are literally just model catalog. It's a catalog.

• 36:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  It's so crazy.

• 36:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. Okay, a more modern example, if you get a modern beauty magazine, it's half fashion ads, right? But there's no call to action. And then, and then Instagram is, has been half fashion models, but not enough ads. And now.

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  I do.

• 36:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, call to action.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  It's a whole new world. So Adam Mosseri is like, you know what the problem with these print magazines is? People are clicking on these ads. Nothing's working.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  I mean, the problem with Pinterest, this is, this is coming for Pinterest lunch money.

• 37:00Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I think, I think people use Pinterest way differently.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  Really? I mean, this is like, you see the inspo, I cooked a really good meal. Why don't you click through and buy what I did? I have an amazing apartment. It looks beautiful. Why don't you click through my Wayfair?

• 37:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, that's just like, yeah, you're right. And that's true. I will be putting your apartment into my shopping cart soon. Um, no, I just think people use Pinterest to like build out these like big ideas, like-

• 37:26Speaker 03

  The boards.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  The boards.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  But now you can do collections. Yeah, you can do collections.

• 37:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man. Instagram's coming for us.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Pinterest is, I don't know. Pinterest.

• 37:35Nilay Patel?

  Uh, my favorite Pinterest story recently was, uh, they just, they just IPOed.

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Yes, they did.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  And so we, we work just down the street from the New York Stock Exchange. And they, whenever a new company is IPOing, they put up the big banner, right? So Pinterest hung up the big banner on the, on the front of the New York Stock Exchange, but they didn't put the word Pinterest. It was just the P logo. So like, all of these tourists were like, what's that? And I was like, this isn't gonna go well for them.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  Oh, no. Missed opportunity.

• 38:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, it was very, it was very entertaining to walk through that intersection. Okay. Secret crushes. Facebook Dating. So last year at F8, they announced Facebook Dating.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  I can't believe it.

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  Is it real? Is it, are people dating on Facebook?

• 38:19Speaker 03

  I mean, I've tried to monitor a little bit of the response online. And from what I've seen, because I've reached out to some people, the people who have used it hate it.

• 38:28Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 38:29Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, I've reached out to like younger women. And they're like, yeah, it's creepy old guys.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  So that, so actually, it's so interesting that you say that. So I was at F8 and, um, this journalist from Colombia came up to introduce herself. Uh, turned out she was a newsletter fan. I'm sorry to brag. But she told me that, um, she had used Facebook Dating, because I'd asked her, you know, uh, because I knew that Colombia is one of the five countries where it's been available. Facebook is bringing it to 14 more as of this week. But I said, you know, do you, do you like it? She said, no, I hate it. And I said, why? And she said that it was because even though she had set her preferences to only match with guys in their twenties and thirties, she was hearing constantly from men in their fifties who she did not want to be hearing from. And so she felt, she, she sort of thought of it as like being pestered.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just, I, again, it's not in the US. I don't know anyone who uses it personally. But, okay, so at F8, this, so they said they're expanding this test. And now they have a new feature called secret crushes. And the more I think about secret crushes, the angrier I get. So secret crushes is this feature where you can select, is it nine Facebook friends?

• 39:44Speaker 04

  Yes, nine Facebook friends.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, nine Facebook friends who are your secret crushes. Kaitlyn wrote a really good piece for this for the good, it's about like, who has nine crushes? I literally don't know nine single men. Like, I don't know.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Anyway, so you're supposed to pick nine crushes. And these crushes will get a notification that, oh, someone has a crush on you. You need to pick your, your crushes. And if you pick the same person, you guys match. And we made, we made a connection here. That, to me, is so messed up.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  That is like, that push notification to me feels so unethical.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  Like, someone has a crush on you?

• 40:26Speaker 03

  It just feels wrong. Like, it's, it's taking, it's playing, it's manipulating people. It's manipulating someone's curiosity to grow Facebook Dating. Like, that, what is going to make you sign up for Facebook Dating other than someone has a crush on you, but you won't know unless you sign up for Facebook Dating? Like, there is no other push notification that could immediately get you to sign up, except for that one.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  And I think that's, I just, I hate that. I think it's a weird growth mechanic, and I just think it's icky.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree with you. It's totally a growth hack.

• 41:00Speaker 05

  I'm trying to, I'm trying to think of a cool, subversive way to co-opt this. Like, in my friend's group, when I was in New York, if you saw a friend on Tinder, you'd swipe right and you'd message them, just, "Ha ha, I found you," you know, that kind of thing. Like, is there, and someone was very mad at me, saying that I had skipped over them, and, because they super liked me, I don't know, it was a whole thing. But I'm just wondering, can you, can you subvert this by just marking crushes on people that you don't have crushes on, and then you just ruin Facebook's whole play?

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  No, because they're still getting it at push notifications, like, someone has a crush on you, and they're going to sign up for Facebook Dating, and then Mark Zuckerberg is just going to swim in his swimming pool full of muddy.

• 41:41Nilay Patel?

  But he obviously has.

• 41:43Speaker 05

  You make a good point, you make a good point.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  I mean, it'll be interesting to see, like, Facebook diversifying its revenue stream and how it's moving away from the newsfeed, how dating could play into that.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Tinder, the top paid app in the App Store. Tinder is Match Group's friggin' golden cow, it is, it makes them so much cash.

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  It is the interactive corporation.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's huge.

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  Tinder's owned by a company called IAC, that was really lame, extremely lame media joke.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  I was gonna just let you just, I was just, I wasn't gonna even acknowledge, I was like, "Yeah, man, IAC." But, you know, I just wonder how this will play out with revenue. They must think there's a market there.

• 42:23Speaker 05

  Facebook's failure to implement such a basic feature as age gating your matches does seem, it's something just to the larger, "Oh, we're gonna rewrite every single app in our catalogs, so they'll all be integrated, and they'll all talk to each other, and they'll be lighter weight, and they'll be faster, and they'll even be on the Mac desktop." Like, they have signed themselves up for a very ambitious software development job that I don't know if they're actually capable of.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Facebook with Facebook Dating is just really smart because of the events feature where it matches, it lets you look at people who are going to the same event as you. And Tinder's starting to do that now. Bumble has places it designates Bumble spots. Like, in real life, meetups is how the dating industry is moving. What'll be interesting to see is who can eventually get the most data about whether people actually met up and whether they liked each other. That's gonna be the next area for dating that's like important to winning the war.

• 43:20Nilay Patel?

  Is this a big plan to capture younger users? I mean, this is like the thing with Facebook, right? Like, the teens have moved on to TikTok.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  I mean, I think if they did this on Instagram, why young people are on Facebook?

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's like a way to retain older users, honestly. Like, I really think that the main thing that's gonna come out of Facebook Dating is a lot of extremely adorable stories about like, couples in the heartland of America meeting later in life.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's why you held on to your high school Facebook friends for so long.

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  That's how you monetize that graph.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  Post-divorce.

• 43:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god, this is like a nightmare coming. It's like, literally TikTok is full of like 12-year-olds dancing and Facebook is full of like, middle-aged divorcees being like, "I loved you in middle school." That's great, I actually support that. That's very heartwarming. I'm there for it. Okay, we're gonna take another quick break, we're gonna come back and wrap up with Portal, which is hilarious, some Oculus stuff, and we gotta talk a little bit about Apple. We'll be right back.

• 45:03Speaker 07

  Support for the show comes from USA Facts. Income inequality, entitlements, housing costs. Want to really see what the government is up to, what it costs and who is benefiting? Check out a debate on the American dream between Scott Galloway and Ben Shapiro. It's not your typical soundbites from boring politicians reading talking points. The debate is framed by an informative set of government facts from USA Facts. And then Ben and Scott get into it. There are sharp differences, some common ground and data and facts that leave you knowing more. Check out the full debate now on the USA Facts YouTube channel.

• 45:46Speaker 05

  Paul, every week, I never forget it. It never happens. You do a segment. What's it called? It's called, Did I Ever Tell You About The Time I Built My Own Computer? No. Yeah, right. It's a call to response that you always say, no. That hilarious bit that we do. I remember that. We just did it last week. So the Nubia Red Magic 3, industry first cooling fan in a gaming smartphone. They've done it. And what, what Nubia reminded me of is the fact that, once upon a time, I built my own

• 46:30Speaker 05

  computer and I got it all wired up. I got it all installed and it was great. And there's a CD or a DVD that comes with the motherboard, full of like junky software to control fan speeds. I didn't worry about that. So I, my computer just runs kind of at the default fan speeds. And I think it's running the fan speeds a little high and it wears out the fans. And once the fans wear out, they make a really loud noise. But. If you hit the computer, they stop, they are as loud. And once the computer's like turned on and been on for a little while, they actually slow down a little bit. Uh, and so that's what happened when I built my computer. And now Nubia put a fan in a smartphone.

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  What's the fan there to cool exactly?

• 47:17Speaker 05

  Uh, gaming.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  Just generally gaming.

• 47:21Speaker 05

  Have you ever played a video game on a phone, Eli? The phone gets hot.

• 47:25Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 47:27Speaker 05

  And as, as something I, I'm, I'm, I follow this channel on YouTube, I think it's called ETA Prime. He buys like small, single board computers that are basically typically the guts of an Android phone. And he uses them to like run emulators and stuff. And it's all about cooling. If you add more heat sinks, more fans, better cooling to almost any chip that is in a current mobile hardware, it can run way faster than it can run right now. So I, I mean, this is a total gimmick, but it actually could raise the performance. See, I mean, they've got a Snapdragon A55. You, you might actually get more, more Fortnite frames. Or this could just be a gimmick.

• 48:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think we have to obviously get one and then see if hitting it makes it work better. All right. Speaking of Snapdragon chips, Oculus finally announced the Oculus Quest, which we've been hearing about forever. Addie wrote a great review of it. She says it's a little compromised, uh, which is true. I actually got to try one a couple of weeks ago, uh, outside of like the Facebook world. I was at a conference and somebody had one and they allowed me to like play with it on the sly. It's great. Like this is the, this is the next gadget I'm going to buy for sure. It's self-contained VR, like it does the thing. You, you like put it on, you don't need any wires or cables or a gaming PC. Um, you, it has inside out tracking, so it has cameras.

• 48:48Nilay Patel?

  And it does this really cool thing where, um, to create the space around you that you can operate in, it lights up the front cameras and you can like see the world. And then you just paint lines on the ground in VR. To be like, this is the space that you should put the interface in, which is awesome. And then it just works. It just like lights up and works. And I was at a busy conference and it was like complicated and it figured out the inside out tracking in that space. So I was like, pretty cool. And it works. Getting rid of that cable is like a big deal. I know I dunk on AirPods all the time, but it is true that getting rid of heavy cables attached to your head is a notable improvement in the user experience of things.

• 49:27Speaker 05

  I own an Oculus Go and it's not just the cable. I mean, you know, because they're also launching the Rift.

• 49:35Nilay Patel?

  S?

• 49:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. So that also has inside out tracking, but like my problem's always been, I typically have a small room. And so you've got to set up the cameras and then stand far enough back from the cameras. And so your room has to have a perfect layout. Right? So if you're the room where your computer is, you know, it's a twofold thing. The fact that you can use the Quest anywhere. So you just go find the best room in your house for it. You don't have to move your PC there, which I have done to be able to do VR. And, and no cable and don't have to worry about how you are spaced in relation to cameras. I mean.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  It's great. It's a, it's like, it's a complete product. So I think Oculus is saying this is the end of their like first phase of development. Right? The Rift S is like the end of that and like they're moving on to the next phase. And it's just like, this is the thing people want. The compromise Addie's getting at is like, it is not as powerful is the other stuff. So there's a bunch of games you can't play. There's a bunch of things you can't do. So you have finally the user experience that you want. But to do all the most interesting things in VR, you still need this other expensive setup. And that's like, only time solves that problem, I think. But I'm definitely going to buy one. I don't know if I'll wear it more than once. But I like, I had so much fun just playing around with this app that I got to use at this conference.

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, this is the thing that's going to make people actually want this as opposed to any mobile VR or daydream stuff or whatever else is going on. It's very much like, here's this complete product.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  I wonder if Oculus made single use VR headsets if they could sell them for cheaper.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  Incredible.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  Something to think about.

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we should get, we should get right on that. We'll call Oculus today. We'll go to the Bismaculus conference.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  Great.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  It's gonna, it's gonna be the keynote at Bismaculus.

• 51:28Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so that's, so I think Oculus is doing great. If you, the question's like out, you can go like, go play with it at Best Buy. You should go play with it. It's worth it. Didn't they also announce that like, the portal is a success? The, if you recall, the portal is the camera that Facebook wants to put in your home, um, which on its face seems confusing, uh, but they're adding apps to it. They're adding a WhatsApp app to it. They're expanding it to more countries. Is it actually a success, Casey?

• 51:55Speaker 04

  Well, so I talked to an executive there who told me that it is, that like, sales are very good. Um, I have no reason.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  I just can't believe it. I can't believe it.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  We'll believe it when they announce a number of units sold, or they like, start breaking it out as an individual category on their earnings report, right? Like, that's, that's what we'll take it from, um, I've heard that it's maybe doing better than you think, to like, it's actually doing well. Um, also, this is the sort of thing that Facebook just has to keep iterating on forever because they can't afford to be nowhere in the home with, you know, Amazon and Apple and Google all gunning for that space.

• 52:33Nilay Patel?

  True. I, and I buy that. I just, there is, just that when they're like, people love their Facebook portals. I was like, I don't, who? I know a lot of nerds. If you have, if you bought a Facebook portal and you're using it, please tweet at me and Casey, because we just need to talk to you.

• 52:50Speaker 05

  We've all FaceTimed with our parents. Like, I don't know, my, I love my parents, but they're not very good at finding a way to prop up an iPhone or iPad. They own both.

• 53:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 53:01Speaker 05

  They're not great at, at setting it up in such a way, like, they, they, they lean it up against like, the napkin holder in the middle of their dining room table, and then it falls over, and it's, you know, like, like, there, there, there clearly is a need for something of this ilk, uh, you know, but yes, I don't want a Facebook camera.

• 53:22Nilay Patel?

  I'm like, fairly sure my daughter thinks that my mother's head stops at her nose. Because we only ever see like that part and we FaceTime every day.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what's going on there, but yeah, I just don't want Facebook to have a camera in my house.

• 53:38Speaker 04

  Maybe FaceTime every day. I mean, I think it could make some sense. I it's weird like I mostly talk to my parents on the phone, even though, you know, we're all at home on wifi and could easily like FaceTime or use one of the many other tools that we have. I think, you know, it just winds up being a lot more comfortable to be audio only so that you can also, you know, like empty the dishwasher or wherever, you know, and not make people think that you're ignoring them. But clearly there are a lot of people who love doing those calls. So it's, you know, it's not implausible to me that Portal could be a modest hit for them. And I have to confess, I even thought about getting one just because I was like, even if Facebook did like spy on me, like there'd be such a great story for me personally.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  That it would like almost be worth it. But I'm not, I'm not gonna get it.

• 54:21Nilay Patel?

  Katie Natapolos at BuzzFeed wrote a story. She was like, she bought two for the BuzzFeed offices and she's like, I love them. So.

• 54:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  Go read that. I will say, we only started FaceTiming when we had the baby because the baby gains new capabilities every, every, in like a way that I don't. So I'm like, look, she's walking. Everyone's like, thinks that's incredible. Whereas I'd be like, look, I'm home drinking again. I learned a new word this week.

• 54:45Nilay Patel?

  I finally beat that level in Spider-Man. You want to watch this?

• 54:50Nilay Patel?

  All right. Hard pivot off of Facebook. There's one big story I definitely want to talk about, which is it was, um, this happened over the weekend and it kind of led into earnings. So Apple had its earnings. They are doing fine. Uh, their iPhone sales went down, uh, but their stock went up because their services business is going up real fast. So if you look at their total mix, iPhone sales down two quarters in a row. Um, they're, they are leveling out though, which I think is important. They appeared to have, you know, they cut the price in China. It turns out when you cut the price of an iPhone, people buy more of them. Little supply and demand action there from Tim Cook and they are just some huge number of people now active Apple services people, right?

• 55:31Nilay Patel?

  So the stock goes up because of Apple services. They say, this is our future. We're going to sell fewer iPhones, but attach more services to those iPhones. That is important. It is appears to be working for them. So you can go read about Apple earnings. But the thing that is the danger for Apple is that because that is their economic future, that they will start to disadvantage their competitors for services.

• 55:56Speaker 05

  They'll start to.

• 55:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. So, or they already have and they will become even more aggressive. The thing I always say is they will, they will, they've already started in bits and bobs to, to affect the user interface of the phone to upsell their services. So like my, a lot of people tweeted me about this, like when you buy a new iPhone, if you don't buy Apple Care, that phone just terrifies you for a month. It's like you have 2,000 hours left to buy Apple Care or you die. And it's in the interface of the settings. You get pushed to Apple Music constantly. You know, like the, the TV app sends just the worst notifications in history. I was halfway through this horrible Game of Thrones episode where literally nothing paid off ever.

• 56:43Nilay Patel?

  And the TV app sent me notifications. Like Game of Thrones is starting. Like, I don't.

• 56:48Speaker 04

  You just said nothing paid off in an episode in which the Night King died?

• 56:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, nothing paid off.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Is that a spoiler, Casey?

• 56:55Nilay Patel?

  It's not a spoiler. If you, if you care, you've already seen this episode.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  I don't watch the show. I have no idea what that even meant.

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  The Night King is like this dude, he sells tamales. I'm just trying to unspoiler.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  In Chicago, there's a dude with the tamales.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know the tamale guy. Geez.

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  This is the dumbest, this is like a private joke that I have, which is everyone should call the tamale guy the Night King.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  Cause he's the king of the night.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  It's true. He shows up. He's always the MVP. It's true. Chicago has a weird nightlife.

• 57:26Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I can't believe I said that out loud. I've been thinking it for like two years.

• 57:33Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, Apple services. So, over the weekend on Saturday, so this is, I think, the thing to monitor with Apple, right? Are they blocking competitors unfairly because they own the store? They want to sell their own services? Are they degrading the user experience of the phone to sell their services? As they make this pivot, these things are a big deal. So, over the weekend, last weekend, the New York Times published a big story that said all of these parental control apps got kicked out of the App Store. It's like 11 out of 17 vendors got kicked out of the App Store, right after Apple put out iOS 12 in Screen Time. This is like a big New York Times story. Apple obviously responded. Phil Schiller did the thing where, instead of like, responding to the New York Times directly or being interviewed, like a customer emailed

• 58:15Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cook, and then Phil Schiller sent a long email that got leaked to MacRumors. One of the oddest PR strategies in the world, but that's what they do. So, there's a long explanation of why, and then Apple put up a blog post being like, "Facebook does this," and I swear to God, this is horrible. A negative story comes out, and the tech company puts out a blog post that's like, "The facts about the negative story," instead of just engaging with the reporter or the outlet. So, Apple does this. And so, their version of this is that all these apps are built using multiple device management technology, MDM technology, which honestly gives whoever installs the app, like, full control of your phone. So,

• 58:57Nilay Patel?

  the most common example is you work at a company, the company gives you a laptop or a phone, they've installed MDM software on that to manage that laptop. So, our work laptops at Vox Media have MDM software on them called Jamf, which is Apple's preferred vendor. Like, Apple loves, like, Jamf manages Apple devices, Apple pitches people on Jamf. Dieter told me that when he talks about iPads in schools, Apple often mentions Jamf. So, there's this MDM vendor in the world. There's hundreds and hundreds of MDM vendors. And Apple's point is, it's fine for your boss to put MDM on your work laptop, but it is not fine for parents to put MDM on their kids' laptops, because we can't trust these vendors to not leak data. And so, the vendor's like, "Okay, fine, maybe that's technically true," but

• 59:42Nilay Patel?

  one of them, our pact, literally their app was approved in the store 39 times, 11 times after iOS, or before iOS 12 came out, and then Apple put out Screen Time and kicked them all out of the store. So, I think there's this enormous... Confusion here that points to this problem that Apple has, which is as they pivot to services, every move they make, even if their motives are pure, even if they do think these parental control apps are stealing data from kids, they will be seen in the competitive landscape because they are kicking out competitors through their own platform. And I, I can't quite figure out the parental control story, like Hyam has been working

• 1:00:25Nilay Patel?

  on a story, hopefully it goes up by the time this podcast is out, you know, he's talking to all the vendors, trying to talk to Apple. My sense of it is, you don't want some shady ass company to have full access to your kid's phone, right? Like, that's probably bad. Facebook just got in a lot of trouble for that. Apple did build MDM for enterprise use. It's massively important for them to get iPads into like the Fortune 500, Tim Cook talks about it all the time. It's massively important for them to get iPads into schools. So they need to build these hooks. And they say, "These were never for consumer use." Okay, like, all of that sort of makes sense. But you cannot tell me that employers should have more control over their employees' laptops than parents should have control over their kids' phones. Like, that doesn't track at all. And then it comes, so then it comes down to, "Well, we don't want you to market this

• 1:01:09Nilay Patel?

  to consumers," which is hard, because the free version of Jam is free. So you can get a version of MDM software that controls three phones for free from Apple's preferred vendor. Is that illegal? Because a consumer can just go get that. That's weird. And they advertise that all over the place. Or is Apple just saying, "We don't trust you. We think parents are stupid, and so we'll build the tool later and that'll fix the problem." Which does get you into that anti-competitive set. I honestly cannot puzzle out the path forward for them that doesn't make someone mad.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  I mean, do we think these apps were making that much money? Like, I do have a hard time believing that, that this move is motivated primarily out of greed on Apple's part, even though I think Apple is a profoundly greedy company. Like, I mean, to me, this just seems like two things happened. One is, they built it into the operating system, therefore obviating the need for third-party software, and they're betting their whole band on privacy, and so wherever they can like lock down the platform to make it more private, they can do that and like spare themselves the reputation risk of the inevitable breach. Like, couldn't it just be that simple?

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it could. I mean, do I think that this market is so big that it can support 17 vendors? When the market to stream music can only support two? Like, I don't know about that. Like, yeah, it seems, it seems like there's like, it's a crowded market and something else has to be happening. There was a case that went to the FTC where the FTC love you to find where a company that managed computers for kids was actually like anonymizing the data and sending it to an ad service and they weren't telling parents. So like, yeah, bad stuff happens. But like a cornerstone of all life is like you pays your money and he takes your chances. And so if consumers are buying these apps, like you have to trust them.

• 1:03:11Nilay Patel?

  And like, it's weird for Apple to say, we can't trust any of them. The Microsoft move, like the classic Microsoft approach to this is to say, we've built these powerful tools for parental controls. And we're only whitelisting three approved vendors. Right? So you can buy this one, this one, or that one. They're Microsoft approved. They get access to the API. I don't know why Apple just doesn't do that. And I really, truly do not know how you can like ethically square the idea that employers should have more control over their employees' devices than parents should have control over their kids. And the only way you get to that is, well, you know, you're a company, you've got like a CIO, there's an IT department to care for you.

• 1:03:53Nilay Patel?

  But like companies, like some IT departments are bad. Some CIOs are evil and some companies don't have any of that, right? Like if you're installing Jamp now for free because you own a flower shop, you shouldn't be in a more trusted position with Apple than parents of children. And so like, you know, like that story hit had nothing to do with earnings, but the story of Apple's aren't like directly. But the story of Apple's earnings to me are, is as they push to services, as the attach rate to you own an iPhone turns more and more into how much of the Apple bundle are you buying? How much are they gonna be seen disadvantaging everybody else? And I, I think the sensitivity is way higher than Apple expects because these stories are just gonna keep happening.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's true. And I think it continues to be like a scandal how few good mobile businesses there actually turned out to be, given that everyone in the world bought one of these fricking phones.

• 1:04:51Speaker 04

  You know, it's like even like things we think of like big successes like Uber are still losing $2 billion a year, you know, so it's, I don't know, it's like games make a lot of money and then everyone else is just like trying to figure it out.

• 1:05:04Nilay Patel?

  Desperately trying to make a cent on the side. Actually, a long, long time ago, I was talking to a Microsoft executive and I was like, why don't you make a phone? And he's like, well, we don't want to, but we think we have to. This is ages and ages ago, before they bought Nokia, which is an interesting, so ages and ages ago, I was talking to this executive and he's like, we think we have to because there's no software business in mobile. It doesn't exist for us. Can you think of one company that's successful selling mobile software the way we sold old software? And then obviously they pivoted, now everything's a service and everything's fine and Microsoft's a trillion dollar company. But that, they saw that very clearly, that the old model of just, we're going to sell your software for a price was gone and they needed to do something else. And now everything, Ashley just made a video about this. Everything is a subscription. You should go watch that

• 1:05:49Nilay Patel?

  video. Okay, I'm gonna wrap it up. I do want to say one thing, well, two things. One, Samsung made a vertical TV for millennials. It's called the Cero. It's just the best thing.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  So you can watch all your IGTV.

• 1:06:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's amazing. I really hope it comes here and we're gonna get one. So just look at that. I was, Paul, I was really hoping that was gonna be your segment, was the vertical TV. It was either that or the fact that I think it's Huawei said they're putting out a 5G AI TV. It's like.

• 1:06:19Speaker 05

  No, no, no. AK 5G. Like I said a long time ago, the AI is to upsample the 4K that you're receiving over 5G to upsample that to 8K.

• 1:06:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 05

  That is my stance on the 5G AI 8K.

• 1:06:38Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so that is the transition. And the last thing I want to mention, which is, you're listening to this on Friday. This Friday will mark three weeks since The Verge reported that Foxconn's buildings in Wisconsin are empty, the day after which Foxconn's Alan Young, who's their head of the project there, said he would issue a correction. And that the buildings were not empty. Uh, the day you're listening to this Friday, it will be three weeks since he had his correction was forthcoming. Uh, the buildings are still empty. The Wall Street Journal actually reported that the buildings are empty.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  We just need to get you like a landing page.

• 1:07:10Nilay Patel?

  How many days?

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Nilay Patel?

  Foxconn.

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  This would be a good gift for you.

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  They should put out a statement just so I can stop counting the days. It's like basic PR strategy.

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  They won't until you get the landing page.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  And put out a press release.

• 1:07:21Nilay Patel?

  All right. Next week is Google I/O Live Vergecast. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Steph Cuthbertson. Uh, it's gonna be super exciting. If you can make it, please come. If not, it'll be out. Dieter and I are doing that interview. Let us know what you want us to ask. We're very curious. We will see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Promo code.

• 1:08:00Speaker 08

  Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheet. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo.com/vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox.

• 1:08:36Speaker 06

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