The Vergecast - F8 and Facebook's future in privacy

Episode Date: May 3, 2019

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

On this week's Vergecast, Casey Newton, Ashley Carman, 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 and the Facebook portal. We get into Apple earnings and what Apple is doing with parental control apps. That's it on the Vergecast. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets,

Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data.

And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all.

I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

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

Hello. 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 listen to this first podcast,

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 missed you, Deeter. It probably worked itself out. I do want to say, however, just to be very, very clear that last episode of, of Game of Thrones was horrible. It was the worst written

episode of television I've ever watched in my entire life. Oh my God. It was so good. There's 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.

It's just everything I hate about the internet in a nutshell. Go find a show that you like and watch that. 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. He ran away. It's a very interesting development.

Sure. Anyway, speaking of Google I.O., which is what Deeter is off prepping for, that is next week. And Deeter 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 SEP of a bunch 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 going to be really cool to talk to her. So we'll have them 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 will happen, and that'll come out at the end of next week. No interview episode next week. We've got I.O., so Deider and I'll both be there. 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.

Yeah. Facebook had a developer conference this week. Boy, did they. And they did a lot. You want to lock me through what happened? 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 Face Book Messenger to the desktop, both Mac and Windows. And that sort of thing. They're making Messenger radically smaller. So the entire app is going to be 28 megabytes.

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

and the news feed 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 news feed kind of starts to weather away. So just to step back for a second. You were at F8. A lot of the second quarters are at F8. Mark Zuckerberg stands on stage and he says, the future is private. This huge slide behind him and says the future is private.

This is like a radical change. in general for Facebook? 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 misunderstood. You might share something you didn't intend to with the wrong person.

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. We might want to talk about what Facebook means by privacy and kind of how limited its definition is of privacy. Yeah. Well, Facebook's definition of privacy is just do everything in our box

so we can track you relentlessly, right? I mean... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and like that, and, you know, it means end-to-end encryption. Like, that is part of privacy to them, which is meaningful. But there are other elements of privacy, right? like, you know, Facebook, if you have location turned on, it's still going to know where you are

at all times, right? Like, that's one definition of privacy that might matter to you. It's still collecting all sorts of data about you that advertisers then used to target you. That's another kind of privacy that you still don't really have in Facebook in any meaningful sense of the word. So even as the company pivots toward privacy, I think it's probably, you know, more accurate to say they're pivoting toward encrypted messaging and like small group sharing and leave it at that. Is this just a function of us basically using Facebook wrong? Like basically when Facebook came out, we were like, oh, it says friends. Like you are supposed to only add to your friends. But then everyone went crazy and was like, I'm going to add every human have ever met my entire life.

When in actuality, you could have had this private experience if you literally just added your friend. had like all kinds of ways to say which kinds of friends you are. Instagram has close friends. And no one does that. 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, 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, try to do this all this education. That seems like that should have been like the first, flag that maybe this was going in the wrong direction. Yeah, I mean, I have to say Facebook work 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

just 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. 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. Yeah, I mean, they just announced their quarterly numbers. they still manage to grow, like really impressively. They're still finding large numbers of people who have not used Facebook, and it continues to surprise me. 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 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. Yeah. So, I mean, something that you're getting at is, and I wrote about this 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 news feed 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 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 presenting it as their vision when in reality they're almost always chasing. 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? Am I missing anything? Those are the big ones. Something else that's interesting to me is they're 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 a one of their top executives yesterday. 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. Or just a part of Facebook, which is a social network?

Yes. It's just funny to me. 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 times and we should just poke out 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, we'll 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. 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. Yeah. Racing against time, and I believe the European Court of Justice, which is if you're going to be in a race, being 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? Are they shipping those features? So the good news for regulators is that Facebook is saying it's going to take like a long time, like basically the rest of this year they think it's going to take. maybe longer. Maybe they're sandbagging and they're actually going to figure out how to do it by the fall. But everything they've said publicly is it's going to take a long time. And then in like Germany or whatever, they're already barred from sharing data between some of these

apps? 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. 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 they were just like dead silence. Chuckle? Yeah.

He did like a chuckle emoji out loud from now. On the stream that read very badly. What was that like in the room? It was very awkward. And yet, would it not be weirder if, like, tech CEOs had great comic timing? You know?

Like, I don't know why any of these speech writers writes any jokes at all for these poor folks. They're good at a lot of things, but delivering Zingers is just never going to be one of them. Yeah. The only Texie O's ever been good at delivering Zingers was Steve Jobs when he talked shit about other products. Yeah. Steve Jobs had a wonderfully clarifying honesty about him. No, but it was, but only in that zone, right?

Yeah. He also did jokes like he made Phil Schiller, like, jump out of a tree to demonstrate that the MacBook air had Wi-Fi. He had that sensibility. Wait, is that true? Yeah, he made, like, Phil Schiller, like, jump onto a mat. It was, like, ridiculous. 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. Perhaps. I mean, it's all, there's layers, Casey. Yeah, when, like, the first MacBook air came out and had, like, Wi-Fi. Or no, the I-book came out and had Wi-Fi. There was, like, a moment where they were, like, see, no wires. And, like, Schiller had to, like, do something, like, But then Steve Jobs to be like, do you know what, do you know why these products suck?

Because look at these fucking buttons. And like that always hit home. Yes. Facebook. Well, I just, that is the context for all of this is Facebook has had this like enormous series of scandals. And then this is, and most of scandals are rooted in the developers in the platform are acting badly. This is their developer conference. They're saying it's going to be more private now.

We're not focused on sharing stuff. We're not focused on the news feed. We're focused on integrating our existing apps. What were the developers at this developer conference supposed to do? 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 over the past year. And so the developers that Facebook really wants are people who are essentially advertisers. So if you want to use Facebook to conduct a growth marketing 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? 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. Is the business Oculus conference called Biznaculous?

It actually is. Because it absolutely should be. Welcome to Biznaculous 2019. They also had the Instagram face filter. creators there. They spent a solid two minutes on one woman who we wrote about actually at the verge, Joanna. 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. Yeah. Which is like, okay. And they don't pay them. They're just there. And then they feel special because Facebook's like, look at them. Yeah, we have some AR stuff too. Yeah. Look at this. Yeah. And they did it. That's great.

It's okay. I want to actually get to Instagram, but I want to just wrap up on sort of 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. FATE.

It stands for fate. Well, sure, but that's extremely existential. We will all die, Nelai, soon. Oh my gosh. 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 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's happening on the FTC side? So there has been these ongoing negotiations toward a settlement. Facebook signed a consent decree in 2011. that said, basically, 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, maybe we should look into this. And so what has been reported so far is that they're considering a $3 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 trumpets. changed to Facebook, which earned more than that in profits last quarter, right? 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. Yeah. And then they might 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 that you have to hire someone who reports to you that complies with us. Like, it makes no sense to me. 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 feels like it's in that universe.

Yeah. Are people happy with this FCC? It seems like Facebook announced it during its earnings report to say the biggest fine and ever is coming $3 billion. And then that strategy backfired. because everyone is like, that's not enough. Yeah, I would say that it's important that we see what this agreement actually looks like and 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 breaking up, you know, requiring the spinoff of Instagram and WhatsApp is really 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 of pressure from lawmakers who are saying this is a toothless agency that isn't, you know, living up to its job responsibilities. and so they're motivated to show that they're taking really strong action. And Facebook, I think, is actually going to be very happy to pay this fine

because they want to be able to say, look, we know we had a really 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 going to be up to us, you know, journalists to try to put these things in a perspective. Yeah. And also the revolting Facebook users who are like, I can't WhatsApp my Instagram.

I can't wait for those tweets. It's going to be great. Okay. And then today they banned a bunch of people. Yes. So, 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, sometimes because Facebook's recommendation algorithms have helped people find them.

So this is people like Alex Jones, Laura Lumer, Paul Neelan, Lewis Farrakhan, and a handful of others. And they have now been banned from Facebook and Instagram basically for violating what Facebook calls its dangerous individuals' policies. And that has a lot to do with using the platform to spread hate speech against. religious or ethnic minorities or like associating with people who have been identified members of other like, you know, white nationalists or right-wing extremist groups. So, yeah, so they brought the bandhammer down pretty hard today. And is that going to 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 going to keep going?

Yeah, I mean, this is always a game of whackamol, 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 channel.

and Instagrams, and sort of one leads to the next, leads to the next. 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. So you, I mean, you write the interface about social networks and democracy literally every day. You can get it if you're listening. It's the case you will email you every day if you want.

I will. 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? Yeah. I mean, 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 set a problematic thing for the first time last week, right? Facebook has typically been loath 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, sort of a very American value. But the world has changed over the past couple of years, 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 actually enforce them. And, you know, it's, it's been a really long time coming. 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. And Facebook ultimately didn't act until Apple took his podcast down. And that was, what, like nine months ago or something like that. So these things have been taken a really long time.

Yeah. I mean, 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? 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 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. And so that's where I hope Facebook is really focusing, is looking 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 Lumer did where they had hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers across a Facebook who they might never have reached otherwise.

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. They're great, but what we've learned is that the best way to grow an audience on any social platform is to make people outraged and terrified. 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 it in the bud. Yeah.

I feel like my next generation Vergecast plan has to change because I was planning a games from these viral mechanics. I'm going to have a big rethink. Okay. We're going to take, thank you very much, Casey. We're going to take a little break. Then we're going to talk about Instagram. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere.

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Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. 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. Instagram's going to be ruined, y'all. It's happening. I mean, there's plenty of reporting about it.

But they think it's a happy one. For me, it's the happy one. Yeah, yeah. That's because we didn't friend everybody we know from high school on Facebook. That is true. We got out. We got out. We met new people.

Stock them on a different app. So would they announce a F8? 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. It's just the 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.

Are they taking them away or just hiding them? They're hiding them from the public. So if you're a creator-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. You want to see that you sell stuff, which is another feature they just announced, is that creators can now tap. their posts with things that they're selling and sell directly from the post.

Yeah. So basically like, the catalog. J-Degs. J-Dags, FitT's. So Insta-Goop. Yep. Wow. 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 going to be more of an authentic platform now. I don't know. I don't really buy that. see your likes. It's not like you don't know that you're gacketing likes. Like, I know what's performing. Just you don't know. Do you really care how many likes like it? I don't know.

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 going to 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 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. 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. I mean, this comes back to why did you push that button's impetus. Yeah. The Emerita butt pick. That's right.

That's literally why did you like? That dude's gone. Paul was there for this whole discussion. I was. I remember. Is that a dude? Emerada? No, your dude.

Oh, my boyfriend? No, he's gone. He's gone. Okay. So they announced hiding likes. Hiding likes. The biggest visual change is the 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. 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 a photo sharing app anymore. Not that it has been for a while, but like it's really not. It's Microsoft Paint with a social network. It's a WordPress blog. That's amazing.

Instagram just becomes the future of blogging. I mean, yeah, there's a world in which. So is that, and then the shopping thing? Right. The creative. This has been rumored for a long time that they're just going to take your credit card and let you shop directly from the app. 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 post. And the influencers get a cut? No, they don't. If they're using affiliate links, right, they could. 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. Oh, yeah. No, Facebook, yeah, when we interview them for why did 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. Yeah,

of course. And Facebook also wants to know everything that you buy. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. 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. 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. Yeah. Let me help you out here. I don't know. This seems like a big deal. I'm just thinking back to like my childhood and receiving 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?

Walmart brochures. Everyone's aspirational catalog, the Walmart catalog. I definitely had a friend in high school and it was revealed that he was a child model in a Coles ad and he never, ever lived that To this day, I'm like, remember when you were a baby model for Coles? 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. Yeah. It's so crazy. 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 Instagram has been half fashion models, but. Not enough ads. And now, you can buy them too.

Yeah. I mean, call to action, it's a whole new world. So Adam is like, you know what the problem with these print magazines is? People are clicking on these ads.

Nothing's working. I mean, the problem with Pinterest, this is coming for Pinterest lunch money. I think people use Pinterest way differently. 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? That's just like, you're right. And that's true. I will be putting your apartment in my shopping cart soon. I just think people use Pinterest to build out these big ideas. The boards. But now you can do collections. Yeah, you can do collections.

Oh man. Instagram's coming from. Pinterest is, I don't know, Pinterest. My favorite Pinterest story recently was they just IPOed. Yes, they did. And so we work just down the street for the New York Stock Exchange. And they, whenever new company's IPOing, they put up the big banner, right? So Pinterest hug up the big banner 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 going to go well for them. Oh no, missed opportunity. Yeah. It was very entertaining to walk through that intersection. Okay. Secret crushes. Facebook dating. So last year I've made they announced Facebook dating.

I can't believe it. Is it real? Are people dating on Facebook? 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. Really? I mean, it's, I've reached out to like younger women. And they're like, yeah, it's creepy old guys. So Ashley, it's so interesting that you say that. So I was. at F8 and this journalist from Columbia came up to introduce herself. Turn out she was a newsletter fan. I'm sorry to brag. But she told me that she had used Facebook dating because I'd asked her, you know, because I knew that Columbia 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 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 20s and 30s, she was hearing constantly from men in their 50s who she did not want to be hearing from. And so she felt, she sort of thought of it as like being pestered. Yeah, I just, I, again, it's not in the U.S. 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 anger I get. So secret crushes

is this feature where you can select, is it nine Facebook friends? Yes, nine Facebook friends. Yeah, nine Facebook friends who are your secret crushes? Caitlin wrote a really good piece for this for the kids about, like who has nine crushes? I literally don't know nine

single men. Like, I don't understand. 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 a connection here. That to me is so messed up. Yeah.

That is like, that push notification to me feels so unethical. Like someone has a crush on you? It just feels wrong. Like 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.

Yeah. 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. Yeah, I agree with you. It's totally a growth hack. 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, a friend on Tinder, you'd swipe right and you'd message them just, ha ha, 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's a whole thing. But I'm just wondering, 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 plane? No, because they're still getting a push certification.

It's 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 money. But he obviously has. You make a good point. You make a good point. I mean, it'll be interesting to see, like, Facebook diversifying its revenue stream and how it's moving away from the news feed, how dating could play into that. Tinder, the top paid app in the app store.

Tinder is match groups' freaking golden cow. It makes them so much cash. It is the interactive corporation. Yeah. It's huge. Kenra's on by a company called IAC. That was really lame, extremely lame media joke. I was going to just let you just.

I wasn't going to 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. 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 going to 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've

signed themselves up for a very ambitious software development job that I don't know if they're actually capable of. 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 in the same event as you. And Tinder's starting to do that now. Bumble has places it designates Bumble spots. It's like in real life meetups is how the dating industry is moving. What will 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 going to be the next area for dating that's like important to winning the war. Is this a big play to capture younger users?

I mean, this is like the thing with Facebook, right? Like the teens have moved on to TikTok. I mean, I think if they did this on Instagram, white young people are on Facebook. Yeah, I think it's like a way to retain old. older users, honestly. Like, I really think that the main thing that's going to come out of Facebook dating is a lot of extremely adorable stories about, like, couples in the heartland of America meeting later in life. Yeah, that's why you held on to your high school Facebook friends for so long.

Oh, that's how you monetize that graph. Post-post-divorce. 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 divorce days being like, I loved you in middle school. That's great. I actually support that.

That's very hardwaring. I'm there for it. Okay. We're going to take another quick break. We're going to come back. We'll wrap up with Portal, which is hilarious, some Oculus stuff. Then we've got to talk a little bit of an Apple. Earlier back.

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clod. a.ai slash verge cast. 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. Right. It's a call to respond to that you always say no. That hilarious bit that we do. I remember now. We just did it last.

So the Nubia Red Magic 3, industry first, cooling fan and a gaming smartphone. They've done it. And what Nubia reminded me of is the fact that once upon a time I built my own 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. And so that's what happened to what I built. my computer. And now Nubia put a fan in a smartphone. What's the fan there to cool, exactly? Gaming. Just generally gaming.

Have you ever played a video game on a phone, Neelai? The phone gets hot. That's true. It's true. And as something, 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 mean, this is a total gimmick, but it actually could raise the performance seal. I mean, they've got a Snapdragon an A55. You might actually get more Fortnite frames. Or this could just be a gimmick. I mean, I think we have to obviously get one and then see if hitting it makes it work better. All right, speaking of Snap Dragon Shapes, Oculus,

finally announced the Oculus Quest, which we've been hearing about forever. Adi wrote a great review of it. She says it's a little compromised, which is true. I actually got to try one a couple weeks ago 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 next adjutant I'm going to buy for sure. It's self-contained VR. Like it does the thing. You put it on. You don't need any wires or cables or a gaming PC. It has inside out tracking, so it has cameras.

And it does this really cool thing where 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 lights up and works. And I was at a busy conference, and it was, like, complicated, and it figured out the inside outtracking 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. The getting rid of heavy cables attached to your head is a notable improvement in the user experience of things. I own an Oculus Go, and it's not just the cable. I mean, you know, because they're also launching the Rift. Is the S? 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 no cable and don't have to worry about how you are spaced in relation to cameras. I mean, it's great. 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 Adi is getting at is like, it is not as powerful as 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 fun. 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 had so much fun just playing around with this app that I got to use at this conference. But 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. I wonder if Oculus made single-use VR headsets if they could sell them for cheaper. Incredible.

Something to think about. Yeah. We should get right on that. We'll call Oculus today. We'll go to the Bizn Oculus conference. It's going to be the keynote at Biznaculous. So I think Oculus is doing great. The question is out.

You can go play with it at Best Buy. You should go play with it. It's worth it. Then they also announced that, like, the portal is a success. If you recall, the portal is the camera that Facebook wants to put in your home, which on its face seems confusing. 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? Well, so I talked to an executive there who told me that it is that, like, sales are very good. I have no reason.

I can't believe it. I can't believe it. We'll believe it when they announce a number of units sold or they start breaking it out as an individual category on their earnings report, right? Like that's what we'll take it from I've heard that it's maybe doing better than you think to like it's actually doing well. 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 Amazon and Apple and Google all gunning for that space. True. And I buy that. I just, there is, just that when they're at moment, like, people love their Facebook portals. I was like, I don't, who?

I know a lot of nerds. 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. We've all FaceTimed with our parents. Like, I don't know, my, I love my parents, but they are not very good at finding a way to prop up an iPhone or iPad. They own both. Oh, no. They're not great. at setting it up in such a way.

Like, 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, you know, but yes, I don't want a Facebook camera. I'm, like, fairly sure my daughter thinks that my mother's head stops at her nose. Like, because we only ever see, like, that part of her. And we FaceTime every day.

So, like, I don't know what's going on there. But, yeah, I just don't want Facebook to have a camera in my house. Maybe FaceTime every day. I mean, I think it could make some sense. It's weird. Like, I mostly talk to my parents on the phone, even though, you know, we're all at home on Wi-Fi 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 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, they'd be such a great story for me personally. That it would almost be worth it. I'm not going to get it.

Katie, not Apollosite BuzzFeed wrote a story. She's like, she bought two for the BuzzFeed offices. And she's like, I love them. So go read that. I will say we only started FaceTiming when we had the base. because the baby gains new capabilities in like a way that I don't. So I'm like, look, she's walking. Everyone thinks that's incredible.

Whereas I'd be like, look, I'm home drinking again. I learned a new word this week. I finally beat that level in Spider-Man. You want to watch this? Like, nobody gives a shit. All right, hard pivot off of Facebook. There's one big story I definitely want to talk about, which is it was, this happened over the weekend and it kind of led in the earnings.

So Apple had its earnings. They are doing fine. Their iPhone sales went down, but their stock went up because their services business is going up real fast. If you look at their total mix, iPhone sales down two quarters in a row. They are leveling out, though, which I think is important. They appear 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. A little supply and demand action there from Tim Cook.

And they are just some huge number of people now active Apple services people. 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 iPhones. That is important. It appears to be working for them. So you can go read about Apple learnings. 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. They'll start to. Yeah, right. Or they already have, and they'll become even more aggressive. The thing I always say is they've already started in Bits and Bob's to affect the user interface of the phone, to upsell their services. A lot of people tweeted me about this.

When you buy any iPhone, if you don't buy AppleCare, that phone just terrifies you for a month. It's like you have 2,000 hours left to buy AppleCare or you have 2,000 hours left to buy AppleCare you die. And it's like in the interface of the settings. You get pushed to Apple Music constantly. You know, like 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. And the TV app sent me notification. It's like, Game of Thrones is starting. Like, I don't know. You just said nothing paid off in an episode in which the Night King died? Yeah, nothing paid off. Is that a spoiler?

Casey. It's not a spoiler. If you care, you've already seen this episode. I don't watch the show. I have no idea what that even meant. The Night King is like this dude, he sells tamales. I'm just trying to unspoil it. In Chicago, there's a dude. Yeah, I know the Tamali guy. This is the dumbest. This is like a private joke that I have, which has everyone should call the Tamali guy, the Night King. Wow. Because he's the king of the night. It's true. He shows up. He's always the MVP. It's true. Chicago has a weird. nightlife. Anyway. I can't believe I said that out loud.

I've been thinking it for like two years. 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

And all of these parental control apps got kicked out of the app store. It was 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 New York Times directly are being interviewed, like a customer emailed Tim Cook. And then Phil Schiller sent a long email that got leaked to Mac rumors.

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, it'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 to your phone. So 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 JAMP manages Apple devices,

Apple pitches people on JAMP. Adder told me that when he talks about iPads and 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 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 one of them, our pact, literally their app was approved in the store 39 times, 11 times before iOS 12 came out, and then Apple put out screen time and kicked them all out 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 their own platform. And I can't quite figure out the parental control story.

Like, Haim has been working on a story. Hopefully it goes up by the time this podcast is out. He's talking 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 gotten 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 all the time. It's massively important for them the iPads and the 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 to consumers, which is hard because the free version of JAMP is free. So you can get a version of MDM-TOP. where 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. I mean, do we think these apps were making that much money? I do have a hard time believing that this move is motivated primarily out of greed on Apple's part, even though I think Apple is a profoundly greedy company. I mean, to me, this just seems like two things happen. One is they built it into the operating system, therefore obviating the need for third-party software, and they're betting their whole ban on privacy, and so wherever they can lock down the platform to make it more private,

they can do that and spare themselves the reputation risk of the inevitable breach. Could it just be that simple? It could. 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? I don't know about that. Yeah, it seems like it's a crowded market and something else has to be happening. There was a case that went to the FCC where the FTC levied a fine 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. And 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 white listing 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, then 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 that care for you. 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 earnings, 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 going to be seen disadvantaging everybody else? And I think the sensitivity is way higher than Apple expects, because these stories are just going to keep happening. 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 freaking phones. It's like, you know, it's like even the 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. Desperately trying to make a cent on

the side. Actually, a long. 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 was an instant. So ages and age ago, I was talking 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. in Microsoft's a trillion-dollar company, but 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, Ashley just made a video about this. Everything is a subscription.

You should go watch that video. Okay. I'm going to wrap it up. I do want to say one thing. Well, two things. One, Samsung made a vertical TV from millennials. It's called the Sero. It's just the best thing.

So you can watch all your IGTV. Yeah. It's amazing. I really hope it comes here and we're going to get one. So just look at that. Paul, I was really hoping that was going to 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. That's like...

No, no, no, no. A.K. 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 upsample that 2.8K. Yeah. That is my stance on the 5G AI 8K. Okay, so that is the transitions. 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 Foxxon's buildings in Wisconsin are empty. The day after which Foxxon's Alan Young, who's head of the project there, said he would issue a correction and that the buildings were not empty. The day you're listening to this Friday, it will be three weeks since he had a correction, forthcoming. The buildings are still on. The Wall Street Journal actually reported that the buildings are empty. We just need to get you like a landing page. How many days since Foxcon?

This would be a good gift for you. They should put out a statement just so I can stop counting the days. It's like basic PR strategy. They won't until you get the landing page. All right. And put out a press release. All right. Next week is Google I.O.

Live Vergecast, Hiroshi Lockheimer, Steph Cuthbertson. It's going to be super exciting. If you can make it, please come. If not, it'll be out. Dieter and I would do 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.