The Vergecast - Cambridge Analytica, Casey Neistat, and Apple's education event

Episode Date: March 23, 2018

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

This episode of Verchast 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 associates degree. 90 P-Tech schools are already preparing graduates for tomorrow's STEM careers. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at IBM.com slash P-Tech. Hello and welcome to the Verstcast, the flagship podcast of this week and every week in your life. Just mixing all the jokes together.

I'm Nilai. Paul is here. Hello. Dieter. Hi. Good. Dieter has arrived, everyone. Deeter is here.

Casey Newton is joining us this week. Hi, Casey. Hey, gang. Nice to be here. It's good to have you, Casey. This is like an all-Cy show. So here's what's going to happen. This is true.

Earlier this week, Casey Nystatt, the internet's Casey Nystatt just arrived at the verge offices on a boosted board, bearing a gift of hot sauce. Hot sauce is delicious, by the way. What kind of hot sauce? his own brand of hot side has his face on the label it's very it's perfectly unbrand he stole case and i set showed up we've been talking for a while about having on the road chest 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 so here's what we're going to do on the verge test this week the four of us are going to talk about Apple for a minute, because there's an Apple event next week. Then we're going to run an edited version of the Casey interview.

Then we come back, and Casey Newton is here. And I really want him to talk to us about what is happening with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Yes. And if you want to hear the whole crazy hour of Casey Nystatt and me just chatting, we're going to stick that in the feed. I will tell you that this is a controversial plan, and Aditer 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. And if you think fights about where to place an interview on a podcast are hilarious, please tweet all of us because we would all love to hear that. Anyway, so that's what we're doing this week. Trying something new. It was a really fun conversation on 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.

I was going to say, uh, there's obviously that. But Apple announced an event. Just like quietly announced an event for next week in Chicago, which is new for Apple. They're having it at a high school, a public school in Chicago, a tech public school. Have they done that before? No. 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. No, they did it at a college. The Apple Watch was going to like a community college. That 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 their campus for the day. Yeah, they were teaching us all how not to make an Apple Watch. Later on, they learned how to do it right. Deeter, that's on Tuesday? Yes, Tuesday, it is starting at 10 a.m. Central time, 11 a.m. Eastern time, 8 a.m. Pacific

Time. Times are hard. Central time, however, the best time zone. The single best time zone in the world. I say this is a proud Midwestern. I don't know what Dieter's saying some traitor stuff right now. I grew up on Central Time. Central Time is a friend of mine. Central Time is a bad time zone. Disagree. Anyway, I'm not going. This is true. I like to go to Apple Events, but I can get out of this baby any minute. Doctor told me not to go. Actually, didn't tell me not to go. I said, can I go to this work event? He trolled you. 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. 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, Deeter? What's your, what's your vibe? Well, so Bloomberg just had a thing that they're pretty confident they're going to 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 like swirling rumors that they're going to make a cheaper iPad. We get way into that. There's also this thing that has been spotted in the beta is called Class Kit, which is apparently a thing for developers to make apps that work in the classroom. And then the other, like, there's other questions. question marks. So definitely books. I'm pretty confident saying definitely iPads, definitely class kit. But then there have been rumors of a cheaper MacBook Air. I have many feelings about that. It's already the cheapest laptop they make. Yeah, you just make it cheaper. So you think the same non-ret. Let me say. Here's an idea. It's unapologetically cardboard. No, I mean, like it's already it's already way behind, right? It's got a non-retinous screen, it's USBA. Well, it's been replaced by the MacBook, which has everything you can need. It's got a whole USBC port.

So you think they're going to like retinify the MacBook air? I don't know what I think. If they do it, they have to leave USBA on it because that is what like schools are not going to truck with dongles. That's just the kids are going to swallow them. They're going to throw them at each other. Like, I don't trust kids with don't trust kids with don't gongles at all, right? So they have to have regular USBA port on it. And if they release a Mac with, like, USBA ports, everybody on the planet's going to be like,

oh, wait, I want that one. So they have to somehow nerve it such that nobody will actually want it except for classrooms. Yeah. And I'm imagining they're going to position it as like the education Mac that's like dirt cheap, has an underpowered processor, doesn't even have a retina. It's basically the current MacBook error, honestly.

They'll just like, they'll reduce the price and make it out of plastic so that you can throw it throw out of people and it won't hurt them. And then they'll call it the EMAC, EMA 2018. If you don't remember what the EMAQ was, it was... An IMA.

The best Mac ever. It wasn't an IMAC. It had a different design. It looked like an IMA. Yeah. But it was white. It was like a little bit more bullet shaped. It was a cool computer.

It was massive. It was massive. Yeah. And they made it only for education. And Dieter told me that he snout. I mean, if by snaked one, you mean that I was a student and therefore was allowed to buy an education Mac, then yes. It was also, my wife at the time was a teacher. So, you know, we had our ways to sneakily pop back.

You were in the cabal of EMAC purchase. Did you also have an EMA 300? Oh, my God. I did, actually. Of course you did. The EMAC had headphones, another audio jack. I think that might be a microphone port. No, there's two headphone jacks on the front.

Three USB ports, two firewire ports, a modem jack, Ethernet, and, is that display? What is that? What is that? What is that? What is that? What is that? What is that? It's a big display port? Yeah. I don't remember. Big display port. It was the most famous monitor. Now, it had two headphone jacks on front. So two students could look. What is that plug? What is that plug right there? That was Apple's weird mini VGA connector. Oh. Yeah. So here's the question that I don't know the answer to about this. 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. Yes, by Johnny Eye himself. And 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 going to, are they just going to make the cheap? Is it going to be the iPad?

Is it going to be a cheaper iPad just for education that happens to support the Apple Pencil? What are they going to do? So they already have a cheap iPad, right? It's 329. Yeah. It's the iPad. Yeah. Doesn't support the smart keyboard.

Yeah. Or the Apple Pencil. Or the pencil. So why wouldn't you just bring, literally leave that product alone and have a smart connector and pencil support to that and call it the iPad? 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. And then no one will buy an iPad Pro.

Yeah. Right. Why would you buy an iPad Pro? Yeah. Casey. 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. 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. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I thought they lost before the Chromebook came along. Maybe, but the Chromebook has taken over. So, Casey, 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 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 available to students. 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. So to take a little bit more, I don't know, crazy view of this, like not grounded in practical reality. When I was like little, computers and schools were Apple 2E's. that was neat

and they were just like inherently multi-user because nothing happened there like it didn't matter if like it was the concept of counts and happened because all we were doing is like playing Oregon Trail

what was the game with the fish Odell's Lake Odell Lake that game was the best I didn't play that one I had number munchers and word munchers on my Apple to be in elementary school

very fun games by the way then sort of the next wave of that was Max and I distinctly remember none of the Macs in any of my schools or the Macs when I was like the IT dude in the college science library had any user account stuff going on. You need an admin privilege to mess with the system, but everyone used the same user account because all of your files you were either saving to your network drive, which you could log in

too easily and then log out of, or you're saving them literally on physical removable discs. Yeah, you'd save everything to a floppy disk and carried floppy disks around your back. I live that zip disk lifestyle, but whatever. Then they failed instantly, and I had nothing. 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 in your wrist and they're putting AirPods in your ears. All of their products are these intensely designed for one person experiences. It's like, didn't they have an eyebook for every student type of thing? Like, look at this cool school where they bought an eye book for everybody. 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's just, fuck your family. 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 teacher 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 just that alone, and then the ease of administration, the ease of user accounts 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 in vision right now is like, we will, we will gillowling. you in bibles that connect to iCloud. 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 Iclad account. Like, would they ever have an incentive to do that? I mean, everyone's been asking them to make a clamshell iPod since, or iPad since time immemorial. By the way, a clamshell iPod would be awesome. Yeah, I support that. 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 a touchscreen. It works perfectly well in Chrome, and she closes it. So she has all of her Apple stuff, all the sort of, like, sinking that she may or may not want to do with her phone. Everything except I message. Right. Yeah, but, I mean, I'm not looking to up my mom's rate of texting me.

I love you, mom. I don't think you listen to this show. But if you are, know that 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, eye work isn't in there, right? They'd have to build all of that. I don't know.

I think 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 school gives Windows PCs to everybody. 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 idea that Apple stuff does not do multi-user well is, it's 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? Yeah, I don't know. I feel like it has been on the iPad historically, right? Yeah. But I don't know, how many parents that have an

iPad are not like, fine, handing it to their kid, right? Like, everybody. It's still boggles my mind that there's not better systems for that. Maybe this is the moment when they will do that. I understand multi-user is very important. 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 docks, which is how you do. do your homework. Yep. 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' eye message because that's what all these kids want. Yeah. They all, 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 an iMessage device, you're feeling pretty good about yourself.

On your iPad with a keyboard? You are the least cool kid in the club. Like, hold on, let me drop this iMessage. What do you mean? You're a home eye messaging. Yeah. I'm with you. You've got access.

To iMessage. To iMessage. There's another thing we haven't talked about here. Yeah. Much like Apple, we have completely forgotten about the existence of the iPad Mini. Yeah. I don't get the iPad Mini. Every once in a while you hear from people in there like, I love my iPad Mini so much.

Well, Mossberg loves his iPad Mini. Yeah, I don't get it. Like, if you have an iPhone 10, you basically have an iPad Mini. That's the thing, right? I think it was, who was it Dan or Tom in our little Apple planning meeting yesterday that pointed out that the only place in Apple's website where the iPad Mini is prominently featured is like their education portal. Yeah.

The iPad Mini, I will say an iPad Mini that you could sketch on, it's much closer to like a Molsheen size, or if Apple made a pencil that worked on the iPhone 10. I think we're here's my prediction. I think we are completely overthinking this.

Okay. I think they're going to put out, they're going to upgrade that 329 iPad. They're probably going to leave the process of the same. They're going to add the keyboard. connector and maybe a cheaper stylus thing. Okay. And keep the, because the pencil is like not a, you don't want to, like, you don't want

a thousand kids to have that product. Like the cap is going to get lost. In that meeting, by the way, I just kept on yelling, passive stylist, anytime anybody tried to say anything. I like, I interrupted Lauren Good and felt terrible about it because she was like, oh, I have an idea. I was like, passive stylist. It was the whole thing.

Just kept on screaming passive stylus over and over again. It was really disturbing, quite honestly. Passive stylist sounds like a Depeche Mode album. Wait, now I really want to go to this event. What if the musical guest is to Pesh mode? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

That would be amazing. I think that it'll be a cheaper stylus, and the upsell to the iPad Pro will be faster, processor, better screen, active stylus. Speakers. And then if they do a MacBook Air, it'll be just like another processor bump to the MacBook Air at a lower price. 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 want to upgrade it until 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 until the fall for that or later. Pretty sure we're waiting until later for that. Yeah. That's not good news for me. I kind of don't understand Apple's upgrade cycles anymore. Like, you know the iPhone will come out in the fall. Yep.

That I understand. That's like all I get. The rest of it, who knows, yeah. I think it depends. They realize that the iPad is something that people upgrade infrequently and therefore they should update it infrequently. Yeah. 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. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, okay, let's do this.

Yeah. I'm going to read this ad. Then we're going to come back, my little half of my conversation, Casey and I stat, basically. Which got wild, by the way. We talked about a lot of things. It's very real. Then you come back. Casey Newton is going to tell us what the hell is going on with Facebook.

So I read this ad and we'll have Casey Nice that. This episode of Ourcast, as you know, brought to you by IBM. By 2050, the world population will reach nearly 10 billion in food production will lead 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

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Casey Nistad is here. Casey is here. Casey, I've been trying to get you on this show for a year, since we met at South by Southwest a year ago. You know, that makes it sound like this is some sort of like elusive.

I live two blocks from here. My office is three blocks. It's just been, like, you should public. publish our DM thread alongside this podcast. It's just like this Tuesday and it's like, nah, it doesn't work. How's Wednesday?

Not good for me for 365 days. So can I tell the story of when we hung out at South by Southwest? One of the most insane dinners of my entire life. And that'll get us in the first. I think I may have been hosting that dinner. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It was very strange. So CNN and just acquired Bean.

That's right. And Casey did me, he invited me to dinner. CNN's hosting dinner. There's like an insane guest list. you were there. Corey Booker was there. It was a big dinner. Jeff Zucker was there.

Alexis was there. Alexis was there. Alexis Hanyan was there. It was a great dinner. Then there were some outliers there. I was there. The CMO mark of Samsung was there. 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.

I was also dressed like a piece of crew. And then there were a couple people like in the corner that were like, what did you invite me to? I'm wearing sweatpants. So it's this big fancy dinner. It's supposed to be on the roof of a hotel in Austin. Private chefs. And it was raining.

Torrential. Torrential rain. So it got moved inside. And Jeff Zucker was very angry that it had been moved inside. We all were. 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.

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 can watch the chefs cook your meal. And the door just starting to go down. Separating the two, yeah. And the light on the fire alarm was like flashing. You jumped up and put your hat over the light because it was so distracting.

It was bright. And then we're like, we should hang out more. 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 escape into the stairwell going all the way around. So we weren't able to get our food. I didn't really notice their care, but I think the folks from CNN who organized it were like super upset about it. Senator Booker seemed pretty chill about the whole situation.

He was very chill. Food, food is great. You know, if you're a guest and I imagine a lot of people there are like professional guests, they go to a lot of events, your job is to be chill and not make a scene. If you're the host in that situation, you are losing your shoes. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm like a, you know, I ate at McDonald's four days a week. Like, this fancy dinner. Like, I had alarms just felt normal to me, but they were really stressed out about it.

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've been, I mean, why do 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 at 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 I want to start with you. Please. So that was a year ago. We were celebrating Beam. Tell me a little bit about Beam. What's that story?

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 temple and capture what you're seeing and share it to the world. Yeah. 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 sort of kept shifting and changing and growing and 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 but in parallel with that life cycle of the software development company that was being was my YouTube channel and the launch of my daily show on my YouTube channel, which was very much so

about being the tech company. And I think it was a confluence of, you know, 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. In Turner, CNN was most attracted and put forth, I think, the most interesting offer for Matt and myself. Yeah. And that is what led to the acquisition in November of 2016. What did you want it to be at Cina? Because I heard a couple 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?

Well, 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. But was it going to be, when you launched Beam as just your own company, it was like hold it to your chest and it was purely, yeah, it was purely a software couple of. And then when you went to CNN, it was like, we're going to 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? Yeah, I mean, well, that's where I was going with my diatribe there. Sorry if I was drifting. But the idea, like, what, 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 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 like innovators thinking just doesn't really mesh necessarily well with a larger entity like a Turner. And that was where kind of 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. Really? This is what we were confronting here. So the classically, our audience knows the innovator salon. I'm going to 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's 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? 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 is large as as an old-school media company can do. Does that make sense?

Yeah. 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.

Right. You made a very heartfelt video when you went out of town. Yeah, and that's because I believe that. Like, you know, CNN was an incredible partner, and they wanted us to do what we thought we needed to do to succeed. Unfortunately, you know, the first thing we do is hire a bunch of people. In retrospect, huge mistake.

Like, 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 real, like, innovative spirit comes from. So you think you got too big, too fast inside of CNN? 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. Right. And that is a very... But you need to have something to scale. Sure. Right. And that's like the main problem.

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 William through it.

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

You sent a text? It was not my decision. Okay. 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.

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, um, we were excited about and some we weren't excited about. But ultimately, a company of that size and a company with that kind of balance sheets looks at things in ways that is not the way an entrepreneur would look at things. You know, when I was building Beam with that, it was like survival and

success at all costs, pivot, shift, wherever 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. So here's my question. So that's being.

But Facebook announced it's like Patreon clone, right? They want to attract creators to that platform. Does that interest you? That's what I feel like YouTube seems like you can't get away from it. 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's a better word that influencer, because that's just such a dirty, disgusting word, but generically an influencer, someone who,

peddles their influence in exchange for goods and service. 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, a 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? what's socially and culturally relevant right now.

Yesterday I tweeted Ninja, who's a huge gamer, a 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. And you've been doing stuff on Twitch recently. 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. Practically, unemotionally, they're all correct. 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 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 so did CNBC of painting it as that when they're talking about the monetization opportunities and the platform and Twitch Prime and all these things that sounds so much more exciting than a five-second pre-roll that you wait to skip, and in return you get 50% of 10th of a penny or whatever it is on YouTube.

That sounds exciting. And if there are interesting people like Ninja and 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 going to go out of business this year, and I don't think Twitch is going to 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 and cool.

And Instagram is mopping the floor with them when it comes to social relevance right now. So I've seen a lot of, like, Vine Stars went to Instagram. When you think about where you're going to 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? I've always aspired to be platform agnostic. I 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 going to go to wherever my audience is. And this is why, no matter how interesting the monetization prospects are on Facebook, the majority of my audience right now is not there. 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.

Yeah. How do you bounce that out? I mean, you got to eat? Yeah, and I think it's very challenging. Yeah. 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 and places like that. It's experimental 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. 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... You guys are such fanboys. It's the reality of the situation. But, you know, that's 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? I think it's tough. And I think it's that that challenge is exasperation. by my own fuck-ups of past. Like I have worked with Samsung

and not been clear with my audience on it before, which was just stupid. 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. I've always been transparent with the fact that like It's true, he's got a 10 and what's that? That is an LG.

It's not even a Samsung phone. I'm playing with it's LG right now. I've found Jack. I'm just pointing it out to everybody. Yeah. The S-9 is super, super sexy, by the way. I just don't have one of 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 going to buy my favor and I know that in my heart but I expect my audience and that's not fair that's totally like

Especially as your audience It's bigger 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 Team 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, 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah.

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? Yeah. And the onus is on me. The onus is on the creator. And 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.

Yeah, in fairness, I will say, I don't. The reason that we never do that is because I don't know how to self that problem. Sure. Right? Like, I think it's more important for us to say, just 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 think that's a huge problem, especially as these platforms hoover up more and more of the ad dollars. hoover up more and more of the attention. You either got lucky and you started the Virgin 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 has to be a middle ground. And I honestly, I don't know what the answer is. And I'm happy on my side. I think the people on YouTube, I love a lot of tech YouTubers. I love your channel. You have to make different decisions to run that kind of

business. And I look at it and it seems really hard. It's tricky. And it's tricky. And it, look, this is a really simple thing that I'm looking, pushing ahead. You know, when I was with CNN for the last year, I wasn't really looking or courting any brand deals. But now, again, I got to pay the bills, and I have to focus on my business. So 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 see the Floyd-Nay Weather fight at the end of last summer. And it was with Seekkeek. Yeah. And I was super over.

I was like, this is a sponsored video by Seekkeek. Thank you, Seek. And my audience didn't mind. Yeah. 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. Yeah. I don't hate the verge because I see that you've got Ford ads that are the top 60% of your homepage. I understand you guys you guys have bills to pay. Right. And I think my audience and you. YouTube's audience at large.

They don't mind that you have to do brand deals. And they don't mind that I'm doing a Sikh geek deal because there's no conflict there. 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. 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. 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 Seekkeek 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.

I think that's where the Patreon-type models come in, the Kickstarter drip type models come in. Well, 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. This is interesting because I am Twitch I've just started playing with, and I absolutely 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. I 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 a myriad. They're not just sort of a single-payer. which is AdSense. Yeah.

But the question then is like, why doesn't YouTube just copy Twitch? I don't think they ever could. Really? 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 A-Vod 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 and understanding of what it looks like, especially when it comes to money. It's why 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. 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. And on Twitch, it's the norm. So let's end your starting a new series.

Can you talk about it? What's your next thing? 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 B. 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 realize 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 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 what transpired six months into my vlog where I was doing a million and a half years a day 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're exploring every opportunity that presents itself because of you know because of this new show that I'm hoping so it's a show will find an audience I mean it's a YouTube series

so it's a YouTube series in your channel on my channel but you're building multiple businesses around it 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. Whether you like his content or not, Jake, somebody I've known for years and is doing interesting things from a business perspective. But this is such a new thing.

And that's what I call 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? And he's got multiple lines of business. Right? He runs Team 10. Sure, and nothing I'm doing is modeled after it 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. I don't want to take the wind out of the sales because I'm really excited about the launch video. Well, when you launch, you'll come back. It won't be another year. Yeah, no, let's start the DMs now and I can be back in less than a year. Well, dude, I've taken up an hour of your time. Thank you so much. I'm excited for your next thing.

I made a really big gesture of bringing gifts by the studio here, 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. Well, it's another brand deal. Here, here's what, here's going to say. Casey brought us some hot sauce. Hey, that's all that's all that's looking for. He brought us like, what, 12 bottles?

12 bottles of hot sauce. It's in a beautiful bag. They're great. Are they for sale? You can plug the hot sauce. 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. It looks delicious. It's spicy. I'm into it. I love a good hot sauce. Everybody loves a good hot sauce. I'll use it tonight.

No, but that's not a plug. You can't buy it. I think you can buy it in the stores. I'm not selling it. If you buy hot sauce, I don't make any money. It was a very nice gesture. Casey also showed up and rode one of our video directors unicycles around the office. I appreciate that the verge offices have a unicycle.

We, it's real wacky. I describe our, our, our, the verge culture is a really high performing Montessori. Like, it's like a surprisingly productive. My three-year-old's in Montessori and I concur. That is exactly what the vibe in here is like. It's just a bunch of smart people doing whatever they want and sometimes it's good. It's like, oh, I got. I'm like, I'm happy with that. That's that 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. Uh, and it's still, 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 that's a very, very hard principled thing to do when you've been doing things the same way for 20 or 30 years. Yeah. And we see that, right? 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, it, the verge of a big, 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. Great to be here. Thank you for the unicycle adventure. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. This episode of the Vergecast brought to you by SimplySafe. SimplySafe is ready for anything

gets thrown at it. It's a home security product. If Storm takes out your power, SimplySafe is ready. Intruder cuts your phone line, Simplsafe is ready. Say the intruder destroys your keypad or Siren. SimplySafe will get you the help you need. Maybe it's overkill. Maybe you don't need ready for every worst-case scenario. But that's what makes Simpli-Safe's home security system so great. It is always ready. Simple-Safe's. SimplySafe could cost an arm or a leg, but it doesn't.

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How does this spell simply? S-I-M-L-L-L-E. s a fete.com slash version. And I want to clarify, it has no hidden feeds. Yeah. All the RSSs out in the open. There's no set of social dimension to simply see.

Paul. Yeah. Every week, buddy. Oh, dang. You do a thing. Is that already the time for that? Yeah. It's called, every week I do a segment called

Swag for me. Swag for you. Two. I don't understand the punctuation of that. It sounded like a question. Question mark and then an ellipsies. Why is it there a question mark comma? I need that all the time.

That's the whole thing. You can just... You know, there's a semicolon, which is like a colon, but a comma. Just the same thing. Exactly the same idea, but for a question mark... Is this your product of the... No. Go ahead.

There's no rules against me adding useful punctuation of the English language. This is the beginning of a long... movie where you joined a Unicord consortium? Question mark with a comma. All right. I'll get back to everybody about that. Paul's in the Unicode 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 mail room. 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. They're a crowd sourced 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 for Engadget. In 2008, I wrote the Arford's 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, but the whole screen clicked. Yeah. And I thought it was, I thought it was pretty good. It's called Shurpress.

Surepress. And I was into it. And nobody else was. So I feel like I should at least get a shirt or a mug from the BlackBerry fan league. Like literally a decade later. For their hype. Well, if you are on the Blackberry Street team. Please let us know.

I would just love to meet you. I like the idea of starting a street team when your user base is exclusively government employees who receive your devices on contract. The Scella street team. We work in the financial district at line for a sandwich. Sometimes I see a financial person typing on a BlackBerry. Are they handing out hats? No. But soon they will be.

Got it. All right. Thank you, Paul. All right, Mr. Newton. Yes. Every week. Every week, Facebook does something insane. And that is true.

Casey, you've been writing a lot about Facebook for us lately. You have an entire newsletter about social media platforms and democracy called the Interface that I'm going to 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 can be talk 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? 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 used an app like that and you gave Facebook permission to access your information, it could also access. your friend's information. So people wound up inadvertently giving away all of this 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.

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. Yeah. And to be clear, the timeline of this latest story, they also just blew it. Right. So the Guardian in the Times, those reporters said that Facebook's immediate reaction in the story was to threaten to sue those papers, which is not great. That's the 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 at MediaBlitz. And we can get into the substance of what he says Facebook was going to do. But that is not like well managed PR strategy, at least as far as I can tell. It's not. And it's surprising for them because I think their PR team is pretty good. They're pretty sensitive. They're responsive and they're good at 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. Correct me. I'm wrong.

Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete this data. Correct? 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 stole the data. Maybe that's too strong a word, but who had sort of elicitly 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... Was this form legally binding? Because that's the way that they keep characterizing it. Zuckerberg presented as them legally certifying it,

but it is not clear to me that what they signed was some sort of like affidavit or was truly legally binding. Right. Okay. And that was in 2015? That happened later. My understanding is that they wound up not going back to them asking them to delete it until 2016. Okay. Because, yeah, it seems to me like Facebook 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 snooker too. and we're going to do way better on our forms. Right. And you know, they actually have said a couple of times now that they're grateful for the work that the journals 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 us 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. Facebook argues all these people gave away their data willingly. Now, 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. So that's the heart of the argument. And that's why Facebook sent a legal nasty gram about it. And then in the middle of this, along the, those same lines, their chief security officer, his name is Alex Thamos.

That's right. Put out a whole tweet storm about why it wasn't data breach. And then he deleted his 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. Fighting on, he's trying to keep Facebook unsecure? No, he's trying to secure it more.

He has this like sterling reputation. So he was at Yahoo, who was fighting with Marissa Meyer about having to reset everyone's passwords when it got hacked. And Yahoo's executives didn't want to do that because it would be an inconvenience. Right. So 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 going to be there for a couple.

Like his team went from like 100 people like two and then he's leaving. Yeah. So that's what the Times report is. 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 what his day to day is like. But certainly it was a black eye for the company, because as you said, Neelai, he did have such a good reputation and because Facebook is under such enormous pressure to make sure that it is not influenced by bad actors or foreign states during this election, right? Like, Alex Damos is somebody who you would want to have on your team if you are a user of Facebook hoping that the platform is not misused. And 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 the, we did a piece somewhere in how to use Facebook without while giving it a minimum amount of your data. These posts exploded on our site. How to do 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 your data and they can do things with it, like give it to third-party developers with the terms of service agreement that maybe you don't have to pay attention to because what that is going to happen? Casey, are you seeing that shift as strongly as I am? 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 can I just get rid of everything I've ever liked or like, what can I do to protect myself better? To me, that seems like a very natural response. 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, talked to Wired, and he talked to CNN. That was it, right? That's right.

He did four interviews. Well, he did one interview. I'm sorry, he did four interviews wherein he gave almost identical answers. The places where those like different interviews diverged from each other was actually the most fascinating parts of it.

So you had to like, Casey did a really good job in his summation of this. He called out all the like parts of the things that were different from each other because like where he diverged where he like got off a message and started like talking about what he really feels. It was the most interesting part to me.

Here is your average daily disclosure. My wife works for Ocustucke. 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. I want to get there. But Casey, as you read those four interviews in 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. 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 felt 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 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 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 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 we're doing things that were as shady or shadier. And then we're going to have another moment of reckoning around that. Yeah. So when you say that's conservative, I read that

entire statement and I just thought to myself, why aren't you doing that already? 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. 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 Optimus, 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. 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, we're a big deal, and then 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 they'm 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. You know, you know what is a broken thing that's hanging out there, by the way? Yeah, what's that?

Is our old Verge app from, like, 2011 that is dead? No. Mike Murphy, the tech reporter, Quartz, went out that it had access to a shitload of Facebook data. No way. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's gone. I was like, we didn't know.

Anyway, Dieter, what's the difference? The difference, I thought the difference was going to be that our shit is to 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 like they change course or they you know sunset a product somebody goes back and it's like okay what's what are the consequences of this what personal data could still be out there 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 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 it. Yeah. So, yeah. Go ahead. It's a good question. 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. 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. The concept that they have so much data about people that they can manipulate their actions somehow. So 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 I think there's a quote that's like they're a great marketing company. I guess they're not good at what they'd. But let's, I don't want to come across of like, well, who cares if there's a data breach? I'm more, 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. So Facebook is not the internet. 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 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. I definitely perceived that as an illusion. So that's... Well, that's true. And there's ad tracking networks. 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. Is that the right to be forgotten? They, no, they're different, but they interact. Because, for a variety of reasons. But, like, if you collect data about, if you're a service provider in the European Union, right. And you collect data about me. Right. Theoretically, I have the right to force you to forget it. Right.

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, like sprung me into action, like immediately read a post about it, was he said, maybe we should be regulated. And he brought up in particular, and he brought this up, I believe, 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 push that forward, called the Honest Ads Act.

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 going to do. and then maybe the AI will be so smart to regulate itself. And then Nick Thompson at Wired asked him about hate speech and 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 going to 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. Do you think about chicken processing? As little as possible as how I think about it. I don't think the FDA is like, I got to update those dust numbers. Right? There's like a... They super are doing that.

Yeah, there's a taller... The USDA is doing it. The dollarable amount of poison in everything that we eat. Sure. And like rat parts and per million. Okay. But so if you like accept that, then you accept that a government agency is going to set a number of acceptability

that is healthy for the population. Like X number of hates per month. And then you, right, the second part of that is they will regularly audit your chicken processing plant to make sure that you're doing it. What do you guys think about? The difference here is, like, we accept that the government can regulate chickens, but chickens aren't speech. 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, fine, and then we're going to have this like philosophical argument at what constitutes it. But like, 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 they have. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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'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 going to fix it. 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 he had or living up. So here's why. Here's why. Like Facebook thinks it's the victim here. and in some ways I think they can actually make a very credible case, right? Like they set up this platform, this platform had rules, and this person totally lies to them, says he's just going to 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 this person is a fraudster, and they want to punish him, right? And so when you're in that mindset of like, hey, who the heck is this guy? We need to get our revenge. And then the rest of the world is telling you, hey, this is your fault. How are you going to fix that? 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. 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. If I was Mark Zuckerberg, when this popped up, I'd be like, oh, great, people are going to blame us for Donald Trump getting elected again. Which is what is happening without question. But that's obviously, I mean, that's bullshit. Like, people voted for Donald Trump.

Yeah. You know, like, I just don't know why. It's just very confusing. It didn't happen. 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 large platform that was abused. Yeah, because, so I'm not going to find this tweets right now, but David Roberts, who works for Vox.com, had this great tweetstorm. That's like the frame that you should look at the world right now in is everyone in the world, everyone in the world, everyone thought Hillary Clinton was going to win this election.

and they all went too far too fast because they were all ready to attack her. She was going to be the vehicle for everyone's outrage for at least the next four years. So the Republicans would attack her, the left wing, and the Democratic Party. Who went too far too fast? Everybody. And before she got elected, they started attacking her. And then she didn't win. And then this unthinkable thing happened.

And I think... It wasn't unthinkable to everybody. I predicted... Sure. To my family, like, we're all talking. Obviously, some people. I guessed it. They seemed like there was a real.

But the structure of our. Enthusiasm for one of the candidates. There was. And I don't like people vote for, I don't know. I get it. But the entire world was predicated 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 going to win, 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 what happened and not made plans for. And now we're looking to explain this thing that seemed unthinkable. And there are. And the election was close.

Don't forget, like, you know, 3004, whatever the number was, the number of voters in the three states that like turned the electoral college. And when when an election is that close, you can 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. 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 the, the bumbling, inept, good at marketing, bad at actually executing Cambridge Analytica, you want to believe could have been the thing that made it happen.

Right. The closer it is, the more you're willing, to believe anything. Yeah. I should have gone to Wisconsin. Let's be honest. Just go home, talk to everybody.

So I get it. Like, people voted. But I think this thing that did, on that type of a margin, did anything win? And then I think the other thing in 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 sample. People just don't trust Facebook. 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 is built on a foundation of little mistakes and other fuckups. And for years, people, you know, writing and posts on Facebook, I do not authorize you to use my data. Liking this post just makes this a contract, right? Like, people, like, that's been there the whole time. Here's a thing.

Yeah. 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 preexisting 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. Hoisted on your own patar, Facebook.

All right. So, Casey, what happens next? So there are going to be a couple of things. There's an employee Q&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 could 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? So lots of things are kind of swirling around that are going to far outlast the data privacy scandal, I think. And if somebody wanted to receive an email digest of this news every day, where might they find such a thing? Nila, I'm so glad you asked. If you go to my Twitter profile at Casey Newton. There is a link there to a daily newsletter about social networks and democracy. Are you saying link in bio?

I'm saying link and bio. 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. It's an amazing story. 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 make Instagram. So. Yeah, everybody loves Instagram and forgets that Facebook makes it, which is like a huge competitive strength that Facebook has. Shut it down and ran Instagram. Fine.

Anyway, there's other stuff to listen to. Why did 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 of me. But anyway, listen to it. Caitlin Ashley, do a much better job in telling that story than I do. So that's happening. Megan Frankmanash wrote a great feature

at Tell Tell Games this week that you should read if you were the sort of person who wants to build a product or company. Just how the culture just got out of control. It fell apart.

Go read that. Lauren Good, still doing verses on the YouTube's. Watch that. She's also got a podcast called Too Embarrass to Ask. Kara Swisher has a podcast called Recode

Decode, Peter Coughke 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. So, listen, that's... Casey, I thought you were going to have a podcast. Oh. You got there.

Yeah, well, you know, it's very much forthcoming. Although, as you might imagine, this week's Facebook apocalypse has been top of mind. But, yes, that we are moving, and I think I'm going to have a lot to say about that very soon. I'm so super into it. So excited. Converged with Casey Newton, a podcast that you cannot currently subscribe to an Apple podcast, but all those other ones are there for you.

Casey said he'll give you five bucks if you can guess the XML feet. That's 100% true. It hasn't been created yet, so to guess it would absolutely be worth $5. You can find us all on Twitter. Paul's future Paul, Casey's Newton, Dieter's back alone, 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.