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

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

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

This week on the Vergecast, Russell Brandem and Alex Trans joined the show. We talk about Facebook's horrible week. What's going up in Android 12, some iPhone battery testing, and a little gadget lightning around. Let's come up on the Vergecast now. 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 me. 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, and welcome the first cast, the flagship podcast of the Border Gateway Protocol.

Settle in for 90 minutes of router discussion. Russell, how does a router work at a technical level? I didn't expect to, I'm not the router. I'm on a higher level. Do you mean like a router to cut wood or like... Yeah, it spins really fast and you just... Yeah, and you can make complex cuts with it. I'm Nila, I'm your friend.

That's Russell Brandem. Alex Cranz is here. I am here. I'm really fascinated to learn how these routers work. I didn't know Russell is so deep into woodworking. Dieter Bone is here. I am the smart fridge standing on the precipice of a long, steep stairwell. Watch out for the Amazon robot.

right behind you. You are threatening. I don't know if we talked about this on the show, but Deeter and I have definitely had a conversation where you have been threatening to purchase a smart fridge. I have been threatened. I'm not currently threatening.

We have a need for a screen in our kitchen that is large and can display recipes from the paprika app. This turns out to be a remarkably difficult thing to accomplish. And so you're going with full Android tablet and the fridge. God damn it.

You just like get some tape. Just tape it on? an iPad and a roll a duct tape gets you home. I mean, that's where we live right now. We're trying to improve on that. I see. All right. Well, if you have thoughts on how to get a large screen in Deeter's kitchen, it's at Backlon.

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

Like, they were like legitimately free. Disclosure, I do not know what my partner did with her free time. Because she works at Oculus, the division of Facebook. Yes. That's correct. There's a disclosure. We did it. We got it out of the way early in this one.

Amazing. Facebook also, there was the whistleblower, Francis Hogan. She testified in murder of Congress. We got to talk about all of that. This was one of the worst weeks for Facebook ever. There's Google stuff. There's Apple stuff to talk about later. I want to start actually by putting this all into context.

So every year we do a survey, which, flatly is an idea we got during the election. We're like, we should do political surveys for tech companies. So every year we do a survey about attitudes about tech companies. This was our third one ever we published it this week. We did not know that Facebook would have one of its worst weeks ever. We ran the survey in August. We ran it in partnership with the insights team in our revenue organization.

They do surveys like this. They do market intelligence. The methodology is rigorous as you would expect from that organization. It is they went and found a nationally representative sample of 1,200 or 1,600 people. They matched it using census data. So it represents the population of the United States. We asked about a bunch of companies. We made sure to only ask people at companies they told us they were familiar with.

Just there's methodology. It is remarkable coming out of the pandemic when we are more dependent on tech companies than ever to see which companies are just rock solid and which companies have had their perceptions change radically. So, and this surprises me every time. Apple last year, 81% of people said they had a favorable opinion of Apple, 19%. This year, 79. So it went down two points. Compare that to Amazon. It was 91% favorable last year. This year, it's 87. The big hit on Amazon is like fascinating because more people are depending on Amazon than ever because of the pandemic. I think that's it. But right, like if more stuff got delivered more slowly or you heard more about how they treat workers,

Like your exposure to Amazon got higher, but the utility stayed high. So it's still higher than Apple. But that's weird because you're like, is it because they were leaning on the workers too hard? Or is it because the stuff wasn't getting delivered? And people are like, where is my Amazon package? Yeah. Or like AWS went down and people were like, ah, the whole internet doesn't work, right? Like, yeah.

It's hard to know. Like we can't unpack it. But it's interesting to see. What is always interesting to me is we talk about on the show, like Apple is the most beloved, powerful brand in the world. I think many people in the media and in tech just assume that. And then three years in a row, the data tells us that is not true. Right. They're pretty midpack. And it's Amazon and Google who are at the top. And Google is just like unmovable. Yeah, 90% for all eternity. I really think it's because people think of Google as a search engine that

helps them all the time for free. Right. Like we split up Google in YouTube. YouTube went down a point that's like, you know, there's a three point margin of error on this. So like basically the same. We talk about social networks and disinformation and all this stuff. All this stuff. Google's going to build a testing website, y'all. Nothing changes your attitude about Google and YouTube. That's all context for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, which we're bad and are getting worse, right? So TikTok is it 54% favorable, 46% unfavorable? Not great. Not really, not great. For an app that people love. Well, young people love it.

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

Yeah. The youth. There's a TikTok where it's like a guy being like, have you heard the teens are calling the 80s and 90s, the late 19th cent, 1900s? And it's like, oh, I'm going to kill you. I'm so old. It's the old guy yells at cloud meme, but like he's yelling at TikTok. Yeah. And also, you know, Donald Trump tried to ban it instead of everyone with Chinese misinformation.

Like a lot to unpack in these. But so TikTok out the gate, you know, just above 50%. Twitter, last year, 61% favorable, this year down to 58. Facebook, big drop. Last year, 71% favorable, this year down to 66. Instagram holding steady at 72, but check this at when you ask people how the brands impact society. Only 36% of people say Instagram is positive for society. There's a big chunk of neutrals in there.

It's 46% of people say it's neutral. But like, that's bad, right? In the context of this week, especially when we're hearing about how Instagram might impact how teen girls feel about themselves, how other teenagers might feel about themselves, the spirals you can go into on Instagram, they're starting from a baseline of only 36% of the population thinks are any good. And so I just want to, like, we can talk about this survey. A lot of people have asked me why Sonos is on this survey.

Because we really wanted to know that it went down 1%. That 1% of the population this year was like, you know what, Sonos, we hate you. Yeah, there's 3% of the population thinks Senos is bad. for society. Like, I don't know, man. But the reason it's there is three years ago when we started doing a survey, we realized we were asking about very polarizing companies. And so we wanted to pick, we wanted to have effectively a control, right?

Like a premium tech brand that's been around for a long time, you know, Jay Z is like name check and Sonos and songs. Like people know what Sonos is, but that doesn't have any political baggage. Like Sonos isn't doing culture war stuff. they don't have a content moderation policy. It's hard to be mad at Sonos. Like it used to be everyone had to gather around the radio to listen to music and be in the same room.

And now they can just go from room to room and listen to the same song. And they no longer have to really interact with each other and we become alienated from our neighbors. That's the 3%. Can I give you a preview of Decoder? So I interviewed Dave Limp, Amazon's SVP of Devices and Services for DeCode.

Decoder, it's coming out soon. And he's just very confident he told me. He was like, look, here's what the phone did to music. It made it individual. And smart speakers have made music a communal activity again. And I was like, really? Like, people weren't listening to music together before. Like, it was a strange moment.

But yes, you're right. Sonos. How does he feel about like cars, like cars that play music? You got to listen to Decoder, man. It's coming out in a week, all right? Bring back the Victrola. That's where I'm landing. It's a media executive.

I'm trying to window you into my higher value channel. Higher value. But Sonos is on here as a control, but because it's the one we picked three years ago, it's like our forever control. Like, it's just a proxy for like, how do you feel about tech company? Like, we could have picked anything.

But now we have Sonos. So I apologize to the good people at Sonos and to the audience is past, present, and future that we will deeply confuse by their inclusion in this survey. Yeah. We'll make it more clear that they're control in the future.

So two more questions here that I think are really interesting. YouTube and Google should be split into two companies. 2020, 51% people said yes. 2021, 55% of people said yes. Facebook has too much power. Holding steady. 72% of people said yes. It's okay that Instagram WhatsApp are owned by Facebook.

2020, 66% of people said yes. 2021-63. Like, these are tiny shifts. some of them are yes they're in the margin of error but i look at it is man all this bad news about one company in particular is really start it's starting to break through in a small but significant way right like you can just see the dial moving but oh man these companies might be a little too big and i don't like them a lot and that ladders into this last one which is why don't you use facebook there's a long list and people could rank them do you know what the number one was

43% of people told us this. We don't like how Facebook does business. That is the number one reason people don't want to use Facebook. And it's not like because the CPMs are too high. Like these are not probably people who have like done business directly with Facebook. It's just that like they read the headlines. They see what's happening. Right.

They read the headlines. They see the power that again, I think because in the pandemic, it goes back to that Amazon one. You are more and more exposed to these companies. So it's not just, you know, small, positive interactions you're having. It's like endless interactions with these companies. Endless package deliveries, food deliveries, everything happens through a screen or a social platform in your social life. We're just really aware of these companies now.

And in some cases, if you're Google, it just doesn't matter. And in some cases, I think, if you're Facebook, you're hearing the headlines and you're using new product, like Facebook, the blue app is not like a beautifully designed app. It's not like a pleasant consumer experience. You're using it all the time and it sucks and you're hearing the headlines that it makes people bad about themselves or can be true to be in disinformation or whatever. And you can just see it's starting to crack a little bit. Not a lot. Like it's not going to fall apart tomorrow.

It fell apart Monday. Yeah. That's true. I just like Mark Zuckerberg isn't like fire himself tomorrow. Right. He's the only person that the only person can fire Mark Zuckerberg is Mark Zuckerberg. I don't think he's reading our survey and being like, screw it. it. But I'm saying the pressure on Facebook was already this, again, we did this survey in August.

We're publishing it now after we did the data analysis. Already in August, the pressure was high. And then this week happened. So I just want to put it in context. We can talk about the survey for the whole hour. But I think that little through line to me is really starting to come through. Also, 3% of people really don't like some of us. I love those 3%. Talk to us. Reach out. Why do you? So knows. How did you? What happened to you? They work at like Google or Amazon on the on their.

Yeah. It's like the Spotify product managers got the survey. He's like, this was sucked for me. Anyhow. So that's the baseline, right? The winds are already starting to shift with Facebook. But not as dramatically as like maybe we would have you believe or like you would read on Twitter.

By the way, people hate Twitter. But the wins are, you know, across a survey like this, they're starting to change. That leads us to a whole. horrible week for Facebook. Alex, do you want to walk, let's do, let's, I want you to talk about Facebook files. Russell, I want you to talk about the adage, but the Facebook files started last week. Yeah, they started earlier than last week, right? They started two or three weeks ago. And I think the big thing that happened in what we've heard the most about until this week was the teens and how there was research that Facebook had that this whistleblower acquired and

leaked to the Wall Street Journal that said that teen. girls, like, feel terrible when they use Instagram. Like, it makes them their lives measurably worse when they use this product. It makes them more depressed. It leads them to be more prone to eating disorders and stuff. And Facebook kind of, like, reacted to it. They had their little reaction, I think, last week. Yeah, last week they put out one of the slide decks, and they had annotated the slide deck.

And then the journal responded by publishing the other four slide decks that they had. proving this point. Yeah, and it kind of built up. And then Sunday, it really started, this Sunday, past Sunday, it really started to pop off because we first had Facebook themselves kind of pre-leaking this 60-minute interview. They seem to have an idea of what was going to be in the interview. And they sent out a big memo to the staff saying, hey, this is coming up. We love and respect you. Facebook is a great place. This cannot tarnish us. And it was, really focused on the January 6th riots, right? Like a lot of this original initial response was focused on that and saying 60 Minutes is going to talk about it and say Facebook is responsible.

We know we're not. Let's go ahead on. Yeah. And can I just do like the tiny bit of media inside baseball for your audience here? There's something devious about that, right? Like 60 Minix is a good news organization with like standard standards of news gathering. They did their interview and then they went and asked Facebook for a comment on a bunch of claims. Right. So Facebook knew what the claims were, and they sent a memo. They were trying to front on the interview, which is like, that's a little shady. That's a little shady.

But like, it's shady and it's like, it's interesting only if you're in a bar with other reporters shady. Right. It's like, who cares? Right. Like this room right here, we're all like, hmm, but a lot of people, a lot of people weren't. And it was great, though, because it actually ended up building hype, I think, for the 60 Minutes interview. I was already excited because, as Russell knows, I'm a huge 60 Minutes fan. Yes.

Watch it every week. Amazing. This is shocking for me to discover. This was the real, like, bombshell of the week. By the way, how would you say, as a connoisseur of 60 minutes, how would you say the segment, like, stacked up with, like, how would you rate it? Wait, can I just, can I preface this by underlying the word connoisseur there? When Alex was like, I was like, who's going to do? do this 60 minutes. Like, who's going to watch it in the news? And I was like, first, she

volunteered. This thing is happening on Sunday night. Alex volunteered. And she goes, I'm excited for it. And then she goes, it depends on who's producing it. And I was like, do you know the difference between? Do you have a ranking and favorites? I do. But go ahead. Evaluate. No, 60 minutes sometimes can have not really well produced stories when it comes to technology stuff. Like, it can be, it can be really wishy-washy. And this one was great. They understood everything. And I think it was really helped by the whistleblower herself. And I think that's something that we saw in her appearance before Congress as well is that Hagen is just super well prepared.

She's super well trained to talk about these matters and to also be very clear when she doesn't know something, right? Which I think is really, really important. She's not going to just pop off. She's going to stop and say, hey, I don't understand the issue. I don't have enough context to speak authoritatively. about it. And she appeared on 60 Minutes. She revealed who she was. She had formerly worked at Google. She had worked at Pinterest. She's a data scientist. And she had worked at Facebook. And then after the January 6 riots, and then after they shuttered the group she was working with, she said, oh, wait, I can no

longer trust this company. I don't feel comfortable with what they're doing. I think it's time to start collecting some data so that when I leave and I present this data to the SEC and to the press, there will be no way out. It'll be very, very clear that Facebook has a problem that needs to be addressed. Yeah. By the way, she is very well spoken. We'll get to the hearing. Yeah. But she's a Harvard MBA. She was a coder at Google. Like, she has the experience. Like one of Facebook's pushbacks. She worked here for lessons. And it's like, yeah, but look at all the up. Like, she's, she has the credentials. Right. And she's prepared.

Nielai, she was never at a decision point meeting. I want to get to, I want to spend a lot of time on Facebook's weirdo response to her in front of Congress. So that was the 60 Minutes interview. She said Facebook is picking profits over censoring hate speech. Yeah. What was interesting about it was she didn't spend a lot of time talking about the previous stuff we'd already seen, the Instagram story. She didn't spend a lot of time actually talking about the January 6 riots and whether or not Facebook. book was culpable for that. She spent a lot of time just saying the core business of Facebook

is bad for the general public and has to be stopped, which was like, oh. And this is engagement-based ranking of content, like the news feed. Right. She was very focused on these algorithms and how the algorithms are making the world a worse place. And I thought she had some like really compelling little quotes that she gave 60 minutes. And I thought she gave like some of the evidence that 60 minutes aired was really, really compelling and felt big to me in a way that some of the previous stuff hadn't. But I'm also not a Facebook reporter. So I was also like, oh, wow, this is huge. And I'm sure like, Alex Heath was like, yeah, we've heard this before. No, I definitely had a moment with Alex Heath and with Casey and with myself where I was like, oh, another Facebook scandal. And I had to

stop and remind myself and then remind everyone. Like, this one feels. Very different. Yeah. So How again said on 60 minutes, there was a conflict between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. Facebook chose over and over again to optimize for its own interests. And she pinned a lot of this to an algorithm shift or Facebook deprioritized news in the feed and prioritize sharing from friends and family and then used engagement to rank that stuff. And it is easier to get people to hate, share something, then love, share it. It's easier to inspire negative notions and push.

positive emotions. We've all, everybody who's ever been on the internet knows this information. Yeah. And so you get what you get, you get what happened with Facebook. So that's 60 minutes. That's Sunday. And we're like, oh, man, what a bad week. We're expecting her to show up in front of Congress because, and have more documents. We're like, oh, what a bad week. And then Facebook, like it got substantially worse for Facebook. Russell, what happened with this outage? Yeah. I mean, Facebook just disappeared from the internet for six hours, right? I mean, I mean, that's immediately people were like, this must have been in response to something. People thought it was a false flag.

I think all of that kind of shows you how paranoid people have become about Facebook. But so, the technical side of it was they had disappeared from a bunch of internet architecture stuff. Like we know where the Facebook servers were, but the ways that computers find Facebook when you type in Facebook. dot com, all of that, all of those cables had kind of been torn out. Specifically, so DNS is sort of the phone book and BGP is kind of the Google Maps, I guess, like the directions that help you find things like go to this hop and then this hop. And both of those, it just kind of disappeared. Facebook's explanation was that their internal network that sort of their servers used to

talk to each other, they deployed some bad code and it just went down. And then that had the cascading effect, which because one of the computers on their network is responsible for running all of the DNS and BGP architecture, they just disappeared from all of that. And there was no way to know when, like, you would type in Facebook.com and it just wouldn't know where to point you. I mean, so DNS and BGP are both very technical and they're very close. parts of the internet that like the spec of how the internet works. This is like core internet engineering. And because of that, there are like bad things about it and there are complaints people have about it. And they're like legitimate security problems with BGP where like they can

tell you, people can point you in the wrong direction and then spy on you or mug you or something. Like this is a real spy thing that people are concerned about. But Facebook has basically built its own version of that kind of quietly in the background. And so it means presumably with an eye towards, well, if something bad happens

on the regular internet and there's like a really bad DNS attack, it won't affect us because we have our enclosed DNS system that we've built this big wall between us and the rest of the internet and like it really only listens to our internal network.

But then as soon as the internal network goes down, of course, there's no There's none of the resiliency that you would normally get from being actually connected to the internet. And we should say that it wasn't just Facebook.com that went down. It was also Oculus. We disclosed earlier. Instagram. And I think for a lot of countries, most importantly, WhatsApp, because WhatsApp is more popular than I message. You know, I'll just say it that way. And it is an essential communication tool for a lot of people. Yeah. So many countries have this, like, unofficial utility infrastructure over WhatsApp. And like their economy stopped for six hours. That's weird. Not great.

There were other knock on effects. Facebook itself runs on Facebook's network. So their email stopped working. They're building access cards stopped working. If you think about fixing it, a hilarious thread to follow on that day was they had to get the engineers to the building to the servers to fix them. But they couldn't contact the engineers. Like, no one, their phone numbers are on Facebook systems. Like, they couldn't, and the engineers couldn't get into the building.

There was a delightful rumor that turned out to be not true, but all of us deep in our hearts wanted to believe it that they couldn't open the server cages. So they had to use an angle rider to cut in the server cages. That was my favorite one. It was, it's not true. It's not true. I'm only mentioning it because, like, if you're writing a screenplay about this, like, make it true in the screenplay. so then when we talk about that movie, we can talk about it.

Like, just putting that out in the world. Six hours go by. This is a long time for Facebook. Like, the knock-on effects for WhatsApp are super real for people. You know, people whose lives who, like, jobs or, like, buy ads on Facebook are, like, what do we do? They start issuing quotes the press. Like, the small business economy has hurt. Zuckerberg, who has so far said nothing about the whistleblower issues a statement.

It's like, we're very sorry. We'll be back soon. Russell, how did they fix it? I mean, they like rebooted the sort of... They unplugged it and plugged it back. Yeah, like eventually, like, I don't know how do you fix it? I will say, so there hasn't really been a ton of, like, conversation about this, but I do think one of the things that gets...

One of the responses people have is like, well, it sounds like it was kind of dumb to run absolutely everything off the internal network. Like, what if the internal network goes down? Don't you want to have some, like, backup plan? like maybe just don't put the email on the internal network. But I also think like part of the point of putting it, like when something like this happens, you actually want it to be really bad for everyone. Because it just can't ever happen. It's really not supposed to ever happen.

So make it so catastrophic. Yeah. Like you're going to feel like such a jerk that like people couldn't. get into the building because of the update that like Joe in IT sent out. You know what's funny about this is like this is the second time computer stuff has kept Facebook employees out of buildings and from doing that work. Remember when Apple revoked their certificates? Oh yeah. Right. And like all their apps stopped working. It's like Facebook like you shouldn't run into this problem twice in a couple of years. Like redundancy. It's a thing. It's a

thing. It works. Keys. We thought about keys. Keys are great. Do you think Zuckerberg's hydrofoil just like powered down as he was in the ocean? The keys like scooting the lines like, he had to swim back. Yeah. Sunk under the waves. All right. So that is a very bad day for Facebook, right? Like billions of dollars wiped off the market cap. There are revenue implications. Facebook had already issued revenue guidance that was going to be lower than expected because of Apple's add tracking blocks in iOS 14.5 and iOS 15. So the money's bad now that they've gone down for six hours. I think Zuckerberg himself, like his net worth went down $7 billion. He's worth like $120 billion. So like, he's like, ah, no more yachts this year. But like he'll be fun. Just cancel that order.

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

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

But, like, if you know someone under 13 in America across the world, like, it is very likely that they have an Instagram account because it just asks for your birthday. Like, I mean, it's just trivially easy to start an Instagram account if you're under 13. And everyone kind of knows this. And, like, probably they should get on that. I mean, they are on it, but like, are you really trying hard enough if JoJo Siwa can get around it? Jojo Siwa actually was mentioned in the... I believe it was Senator Blumenthal was like, I talked to Jojo Siwa about Instagram, and she was like, I've been on Instagram for years. Like, why is Jojo Siwa on Instagram?

And, you know, there wasn't a good answer for that. But so... So prior... previous week. So much pain could have been avoided if we kept Jocha Siwa off instead. Anyway, sorry, I'll stop. So Antigone Davis, Facebook's head of sort of global safety, had testified in front of this same subcommittee. And I mean, Sender Blumenthal, who heads the subcommittee, had said, like, look, my staffers and I got together and made a fake 13-year-old girl Instagram account and followed a bunch of like dieting accounts and very quickly we were getting

recommended content about like self harm and eating disorders and like it went straight there. And it was this classic case of something we've heard over and over again. And I think people really sense day to day of this kind of flywheel of the algorithm pushing you further and further out. But I mean, it's very real. And suddenly you have this senator asking, you know, a. again, not Mark Zuckerberg, because he doesn't want to be the face of defending Facebook on this. But, okay, the head of trust and safety, the head of global safety is going to go out there and

sort of defend it. Then the 60 Minutes things happen, the outage. Suddenly we have this person who was, she's very smart. She's totally in command of what she's talking about. And several times, they sort of tried to lead her out into some other thing of, well, do you think we need a specific law about this? And she said, no, like, I don't think we should have rules. about specific types of content, you have to go after the algorithms. A bunch of times they asked her to talk about data privacy, and she was like, I don't work on, I don't work on data privacy, I don't know anything about it. I'm here to tell you about this specific thing. And she really was just relentlessly focused on the idea that

ranking stuff, putting the highest engagement, you know, the content that is most likely to be engaged with in front of the most people, like bumping it to the top of the feed, is just this inherently dangerous thing that Facebook does not have a handle on how to sort of counter the dangers of it. And that's a really powerful argument. And I think it's intuitively very convincing. It also, I mean, she has thousands of pages of Facebook documents. Yeah. That are the receipts for this argument, which Facebook is trying to call them stolen documents. It's just like not going to, like, Congress is like, thank you for stealing these documents. You're kind of like, you're out of moves then. Well, the thing about that

focus and the existence of those documents that struck me is it served as a focusing function for the senators. Like, we didn't go off into, let's talk about, you know, la la, shadow batting land. Like, everyone was like focused on the topic at hand for the most part. Ted Cruz remained focus. I mean, you know, it's hard for Teddy. He's got to yell about whatever he's got to yell about usually. I will say there are already people on the right who are like,

she's a false flag. There's a hacker news thread that's like she's a DNC plant, which is very good. Like, this is an incredible long con if she's a DNC plant. Imagine the competence that they are assuming exists at the DNC. like really It's very good

It's not that they're not plotting But like the plots do not get very far Out of that room No the DNC at the same time They were failing to protect their own email servers From Russian attacks Was like you need to go work at Pinterest now So that several years from now

You can work at Facebook I don't I think Occam's razor might be more accurate here But I will say broadly Jokes aside This hearing was very bipartisan partisan. The senators were agreeing with each other, which rarely happens. There was the usual amount of grandstanding, which always happens. But they were focused on her, on the documents,

what they had found in their own research, with some of the centers insisted on starting fake Instagram accounts and telling you what happened to their fake Instagram people. And then they were with pretty unified voicing, we're going to do something about this, especially around teens. And I think there's just a lot of pressure on all of the members of Congress to go back into their districts and say they did something about Facebook. And I would take it all the way back to that survey, right? We do a survey nationally representative of the United States, and we, the data shows people are distrustful of Facebook. They don't like how it does business, and they think it's bad. And so if, you know, for whatever reasons, you think Facebook is censoring you,

you think they're shadow banning Trump, like you think they're promoting disinformation. That whole list of things on both sides of the aisle, do something about Facebook. So now I even hand it a hammer that says Facebook knows it's bad for teenage girls in this specific way. Teenage girls with body issues say Facebook makes them feel worse about themselves. That means it's a hammer. And they're basically saying we're going to swing it. The other thing that I really learn from this, and I think this is fascinating. Facebook is a big company.

They make a lot of money. They pay their people really well. Facebook stock just keeps going up no matter what happens to it. Howings like they struggle to hire. And because they struggle to hire, the understaff projects, which causes scandals, which then makes it harder to hire. And she says, projects were so understaffed that there was discouragement from discovering more problems because we would then be understaffed to fix them.

So she said, I worked on the counter espionage team at any given time. Our team could only handle a third of the cases we knew about. If we built even basic detection systems, we would then have more cases. So this to me, like from inside Facebook, somebody who worked on this stuff who has the data saying Facebook can't even know all the problems it has, and it's incentivized to not know them because then we'll have to staff up to fix them. Well, and also, I mean, the engagement-based ranking is not just the news feed. It's like an internal thing.

I mean, she was saying, like, the metrics are, people are very much based on, sort of judged based on moving the numbers. The entire company is obsessed with tracking engagement numbers and getting people more and more engaged. And, like, people's yearly bonuses and their raises are tied to the question of, you know, could you produce a 5% jump in engagement? And so there is this element of, like, it's easy to talk about algorithms as, like, a scary thing. But at a certain point, it's really a management decision, too, that, like, Facebook has very successfully oriented. the sort of attention of everyone in the company around this metric of how do we keep people on the site for longer? And, you know, I don't think you need to point at like mysterious algorithms to see that that's going to have some negative effect. Well, I think that was a

big part of what she was saying on 60 Minutes. Like, she talked about the algorithm on 60 minutes, but I think she talked about it more before Congress. And on 60 minutes, she was very focused on its leadership. It is the company itself that cannot be trusted because it only incentivizes this stuff. So I think like that's a big part of the conversation, but it would still get kind of derailed with. Let's talk about the algorithms. Okay, let's talk about how we can use Section 230 to legislate the algorithms. It's like, oh, no, we're getting off course. So Hagen brought up 230 and she has, well, it's probably a bad idea in how to change it. But the thing she said in regards that that I think was very resonant.

Facebook frames the debate as though these are the only choices, and this is the natural way that all social networks behave. And that is not true. But their incentives are not constrained. And their incentives are to grow. And this is what they're always going to pick. You have to change that. I thought that was very powerful.

They did keep asking her what to do. Like, if she was like, here's my idea, I'll be the algorithms are. Like, there's a real chance the Senate subcommittee. We were like, good, you're on it, right? Like, that was their basic deference to her. I mean, she sort of said that. She was like, we need, like, a digital sort of product agency that people who used to work at these companies can go, can, like, leave the company and go work at this government agency and help keep an eye on it. I don't know about that.

Yeah, no, it doesn't sound like a good idea to me. So that was that idea, her other idea, and we should talk about them both. Her other idea was amend 230. So 230 is a law. platforms aren't liable for what their users post on them, amend that law so that you are liable for what you choose to amplify, which is sounds great. Like that is, yeah, give me some of that. You know, like, great, that sounds, that sounds smarter than whatever Josh Hawley is saying, like fundamentally unworkable. It runs into the exact same constitutional issues is just

regulating the content directly. So Russell, explain the problem with that and then talk about why, I mean, it feels obvious that having a national internet conference. agency is a bad idea. But let's talk about that for it. Those are the two solutions sort of on the table from her. Yeah. So, okay, the thing with the 231, I think the big other sort of elephant in the room is Google. And specifically Google search, which is itself an algorithm and like is certainly amplifying content. But it's really hard. Like if Google search is liable for what is the first result when you say like what time is the Super Bowl or something. We're going to sue.

Any harm from that becomes potentially the subject of litigation. It just becomes impossible to like have a search engine and really basic functions of the internet start to fall apart. And also, I mean, I think even this like it's a little bit hard to know exactly what the fix is, even if you pull back. Section 230 protections for like Instagram. So anyway, I think that one is a little muddled. I'm not sure that that's the way forward. I think it does seem likely that we will get some form of, I mean, if anything changes, a plausible way that it could change would be to have some kind of digital services regulator, right? Like this is Harold Feld at public knowledge has written on this in a really smart way. I think what you would end up with is something. So we did this 10 years ago.

We had a little problem with the banks. The banks were up to some. I don't want to. I think we can call it malarkey. Yeah, that's fine. They were definitely up to some malarkey. We wanted to end the malarkey. And we created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau,

which was supposed to keep an eye on the banks. And it turns out that when one party, wants, like, if there isn't a really clear vision of what the agency is supposed to do and a ton of bipartisan buy-in on, like, enabling it to do that, it's just really easy to keep it from doing much of anything at all. And, like, maybe we'll get it right this time, and it'll be more effective than, like, any of the other agencies that could plausibly regulate Facebook. But, like, it does kind of feel like that XKCD comic where it's like,

there are too many standards for this. I'm going to write a new one that will be unified all of them. Well, so can I say something and then we can all pause and listen for the thundering herd of crypto people coming to kill me? Money isn't speech,

right? Like, you can create a regulator for the banks without implicating the First Amendment of the United States. Right? Like, you can create a regulator for, cryptocurrencies, without implicating the First Amendment United States. You create a regulator for a company like Facebook

or YouTube or Twitch or whatever. At some point, what you are regulating is speech and the promotion of speech. Right. And that is territory that our government historically, you know, tries to do, gets so old a can't do, and that, like, fundamentally Americans don't accept. I mean, we had a national radio station, right? Not to go all Tim Wu on you. But like, we were just like the government owns radio and we're going to have a single

radio show and like the president can get on whenever he wants to. Right. There's a whole, uh, you did get all Timu on me. I could just, right. But at that time, the airwaves were, are scarce public resource owned by the public. That's why you have an FCC to make sure that public's property is being used in some way. It's still dicey. That authority got challenged a lot.

And now, no one cares, right? As we've learned, Facebook operates its own private network that it can dole access out to any time it wants. Or just fuck right off. Like, it's a choice Facebook. There's just like a, there's a really hard wall between here's how we regulated banks and here's how we're going to regulate speech on the internet. And like all of these ideas come crashing into that wall in a way that for me, it's just like deeply uncomfortable. It feels a lot like movies and TVs and games in that way.

And in all of those cases, the companies all got together and said, we don't want to be regulated. And they've made new, oftentimes terrible boards that did it for them, right? Like the MPAA and whatever, the ESA and stuff. And like it feels like we're kind of at that point. Or could they just give us like a button that turns off algorithms? Twitter did, right? I mean, she suggested, Hogan suggested,

reverse chronological feeds are the answer, which is great. Like, yeah. Sure. Stop showing me that one teacher from high school that has strong opinions. But the one that you're maddest at. Yeah. What have you revealed about yourself, Alex? Yeah, right.

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

and they're like, I think we should sell TikTok to Microsoft. And you're just like, wait, I don't think you should have the power to do that. So anyway. There's a lot of fallout from this. We should wrap this up quickly. Facebook has not done a good job of responding to her. Russell, you mentioned the first response. Would you care to go through it? You know, even at the hearing, there was a lot of like sort of where is Facebook's response to this. And then when we finally got it, they had sort of the immediate crisis PR response,

which is usually very, like, much trying to de-escalate, where you're like, I mean, you've seen hundreds of these things at this point where, I don't know, something terrible will happen at Twitter, and they'll say, well, we're very sorry, we disagree on some points, but, and just, like, really try to put a wet blanket on. So what they said was that they described her as a former product manager at Facebook, who worked with the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision. point meeting with sea level executives and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question. This is, by the way, when she said, like, I don't work on that. Let's talk about this other thing. That's like good. It's not really. But also the whole thing is just very kind of even sea level. Like we report on corporations so we have to know what the C suite is. But the question of whether or not someone is in or outside of the C suite is just such a like, weird status-obsessed middle manager thing to even think about?

Yeah, Facebook has like 100,000 employees. And you're saying like 99,9004 of them don't count. Yeah. Like 99,994 of them don't count. I think there's only six people in Facebook C-Suite. It's an awful lot of people to discount. So this was a bad job. Your friend and mine, Liz Lippon.

reaction strongly to this quote. There's been a lot of comparisons to big tobacco and Facebook throughout this whole thing. Big tobacco famously did a lot of research and out bad cigarettes were for you and then framed that research as being how responsible they were. Yeah. It's a long history there. This is kind of a Facebook. Whatever.

That comparison is tortured and hits on some places, a dozen on others. But she's like, but this is what big tobacco did to its whistleblowers. Yeah. I will say the thing that I think. kind of comes out with it is there has been this dynamic between people sort of in the tech world and outside the tech world. And we sort of get caught up in this sometimes ourselves where like someone has a problem with something that happened. And it's like you don't, the response is you don't really understand what's going on. Like you don't really understand how these things work

and like kind of leave us alone, you know? And I think that's kind of, that's what they're trying to say about her is that, like, there's this core group of people inside Facebook who, like, know how Facebook really works, and she never really hung out with them or talked with them. She wasn't one of the cool kids. Right. But you just can't, like, it just doesn't fly anymore. Like, people know what Facebook is and how, and, like, what the problems are. And it's not actually that complex or mystifying.

Like, none of the stuff she's saying is all that. intricate. I said this that Casey as we were watching the hearing. Usually when you get Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or even Sundar Pachai up there and they yell at them, they tend to reduce everything to like unsolvable

philosophical concerns. Right? You're like Jack Dorsey. Why are there Nazis on Twitter? And he's like, what is a man? And like, right? He's like, off in space. Right? And what Howgan represents is the idea that Facebook is knowable, that it's measurable, and that you can make judgments on those measurements that are

firmly rooted in reality. Does Facebook know that 33% of teen girls feel bad about themselves after using Instagram? It certainly does. Have they done anything about it? Right? Like, that is just very concrete in a way that, you know, Zuckerberg is like, I've given a speech at a local college about the nature of free speech. I encourage you to look upon my works. It's like, no, no, hold on. You're doing a bad thing. And then the second part, and McKenna has written about this in the context of like

the rise of young GOP members of Congress. All of the members of Congress are just like shit posters now. Like they use the apps. They're on the app. I would like them to stop. Right? They're spending millions of dollars on these apps as custom. doing political advertising.

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

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

Yeah. Ooh. He's really like, he's not like straight out saying like Mr. Zuckerberg is a child. predator, but he's really like, he's going for it. I will say, like, when you think of the children, there's a chance we just end up with, like, parental advisory stickers on Facebook. Russell, what do you think happens next year? Well, okay.

I think the best thing Congress, like, Congress is good at deliberating. Is it? I think there are some specific laws around, like, so I mentioned the child, children's online Privacy Protection Act. Like, there are some proposals around strengthening it. I think that's like kind of uncontroversial, at least so far. I could definitely see one of those passing. I think we're probably going to see Mark Zuckerberg like subpoenaed to testify in front of this committee.

Like it really, they seemed really unhappy that he did not come. And like there's a lot of heat on this and no one on the committee's defending Facebook at all. So I would not be at all surprised if we saw an actual like subpoena issued to him. And then I think they can also, they can form an investigative probe that will have subpoena power and can get more documents like this, which I think would also be a really, really interesting thing. Because, I mean, now that we know that these files are within Facebook and we have a whistleblower who is certainly happy to work with Congress to sort of point out more of them, I think it would potentially put the company in a really dicey place. Yeah. It appears that there are more documents. So this week was very bad for Facebook.

It took us an hour to get through all the bad things that happened. And Mark Zuckerberg still hasn't. Right. I mean, to his credit, Mark Zuckerberg did put out to say, man, it was the single best piece of comms. Facebook did this entire week where he was like, I don't believe we're this company. We invest in this research for a reason. We're taking it under advisement. You know, it ends with the same thing that Facebook has been saying for a long time,

which is like, the Congress should just regulate us. And our lobbyists should write the regulations, right? I will say in that blog post, Mark Zuckerberg blog post finally addressing all of this that came out after the hearing, he uses the term industry leading five times. Like our industry leading research effort. And it's like Facebook is the industry. Like they're spending more on research than like YouTube is, I guess. And like YouTube's pretty big. But like Facebook's the largest company like this in the world.

Yeah, okay, like spend more on it. I don't know. It's just very odd to be like, we have an industry leading, like, research teams. They spent, like, when the Instagram story first came out, their whole response to it was how, like, don't pay attention to any of the research. It's all minor and dumb. And, like, it's very, very small potatoes and you should ignore it. So it's, like, really weird to be like, hey, yeah, we absolutely suck at this. and then later be like, actually, we are the best and it's because we care.

Yeah. Like, you're just watching their plan of action for this slowly twist. I think that people inside of Facebook doing this research are in a really tough spot, and they are very unhappy. We'll see if they choose to remain there. They're all looking for data scientist positions right now. They're on LinkedIn, the social network down by Microsoft, also algorithmically ranked. It's a real problem for them.

I don't know. I think next week is going to be even more of this. But I will end where we began, which is nationally representative survey of people in America. A huge percentage of them say they don't use Facebook because of how it does business. And there's a number one reason they told us that they don't use Facebook. This stuff is just going to accelerate that curve. And then TikTok, which everyone also is very unhappy with, is poised to grab all those young users that Facebook wants. This is a spy.

Kevin Roos wrote a great piece. This week, he's like, what we are seeing is a company in decline, and we should treat it like a company decline. It's desperate for relevance. It's fighting back that's trying to claim its turf instead of a company that's confident on the attack. I don't know. You should read that piece. Kevin did a good job writing it. But it's an interesting, it's the frame that I've been thinking about is this horrible week for Facebook has gone.

Okay. We have to take a break. Russell, thank you very much. Totally. Thanks for having me. We'll be back. Talk about some gadgets, actually. We'll be right back.

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You ready? Just a hard transition. Here we go. There's going to be a pixel event on October 19th. They're not announcing it. They announced the event. They've already announced the phone. Have they launched the phone?

Unclear. They're calling it a fall launch. Can I say this? Today we ran a story. about pixel six leaks. And we're not in charge of our ads. Correct. Stuff just happens.

I don't know what's going to happen. They don't bother edit and we don't bother sales. Ethics policy, the whole thing. But we ran a story about pixel six leaks. And on that story, we had ads for the pixel six. Which is very confusing. Which you can't buy. Anyway, continue, Deitor.

It will be somethinged on October 19th. I love that their big announce page for it had a download link for a dot ICS file. It's like prominently placed. That's very good. That's very Google. That's amazing. It's like this little admission that like they could have just said add to Google

calendar, but they, you know, they want to get iPhone users. So they're like, this is what iPhone users get. They get an ICS file. That's amazing. The rumor, by the way, Evan Blass dropped a bunch of stuff. We're looking at a 23 watt fast wireless charger, which is interesting because usually You can get up to the 15s or whatever, and then there's a break,

and then you've got the super fast chargers on like Apo and One Plus phones. This is sort of in the middle. The one leak that was very interesting was that one of the setting screens had a thing for face unlock, which Android has had face unlock for a while, but it was bad and no one used it

and no one talked about it and whatever. So I'm wondering if they're trying again here or what? Because we do not expect this to have the radar stuff built into it. I will also say Evan Blas, Evlis leaked some of the, you know, a bunch of the like marketing materials.

Good job being inclusive with your marketing materials, Google. A lot of just a lot of different kinds of people. I'm really proud of them for that, I guess. That's great. And then Android 12 hit, you know, AOSP. It's official. It's released.

But weirdly, it wasn't immediately available for install on pixels. It's going to be next few weeks. And it's unclear if there's like some more rough edges to polish or if they're waiting for the pixel 6 and 6 Pro because there's some extra features that just aren't official yet or what. But, you know, we got a review. Cameron reviewed Android 12. And yeah, it's mostly what we thought it would be that it's all, all the buttons are really big. I have mixed feelings about the widgets. They're cute, but I don't know if they're going. to wear well, you know? I don't know if they're going to look as like interesting and new and fresh as they do now in a couple of years or even a year. I feel like they'll age really

fast. I feel like it kind of reminds me of the early days of Android. Yeah. And you'd go and you'd like customize everything and make it look super cool. And then six weeks later, you'd be like, this looks old and stupid. Well, there's one in particular that's like the digital clock that is inside this like giant pill-shaped oval that's just like, I see what you're going. for it's cute in a way but I'm not going to like it in a few months you know also there's already a clock up there

it's true welcome to Android the pendulum between we're spacing everything out and we're packing everything tight is swinging back towards we're spacing everything out yeah like across every operating system

like iPad OS15 is like what if we don't use this whole screen I thought about that and like this This is to me, it's just part of that trend. You know, I don't know, design trends come and go. But having giant screens and then I'm not packing them full of information has always just seemed backwards to me.

And every Android phone is giant. You know what design trends still like, I feel like feels really new and fresh, even though I think at this point it's like eight years old, the Windows phone. Like, because nobody used it. It was like. You're just like showing up and doing violence on our show right now. You're like, you know what was great as Windows phone. Like the Windows phone bad.

The UI. though it was like, that was, it just felt like neat. It felt like it was going, your faces. How often did you, right now? Okay, first of all, here's my favorite thing about the Windows phone UI. There you go. So that's one. Second, they wanted to call it Metro, but they forgot to get trademark permission from a German

grocery store and then chose not to pay the grocery store to use the name Metro. This is a real store. We cannot play these hits. We have to keep going for it. They didn't pay the grocery store. It's my favorite thing about that whole interface is that my, Microsoft was like, we don't want to pay the grocery store. Alex, if you want to have emotions about live tiles in the Windows Home Interface,

Tuesday's episode, I'll just give you a preview, is the Microsoft Surface Stravaganza. Yes. That includes our discussion of Windows 11, wherein I admit that I'm the one who misses live tiles on the start menu. I'm the only one. I'm so excited for this. I'm looking forward to listening. So stay tuned for that this coming Tuesday. I would just say, it looked pretty.

If you ever used it, you were like, where's the stuff? It was awful. Yeah, because I got like the launcher for my pixel. Like, you can get a launcher to mimic it. And I was like, this is the best thing ever for a day. And then I immediately went back. I need more buttons.

Yeah, I was like, but it feels like there's still something there. They could like, they just didn't focus enough. So Android 12, the operating system that's relevant to 2021, is pretty good. It's pretty interesting. I love that there's this fight over what the power button does, and they've capitulated and just do what Samsung and Apple have done, and they make it launch the assistant. But then that old power button menu had to go somewhere.

So now it's in quick settings. But then the other thing that was in the power button menu was Google Pay. And so you look at the lock screen, and the two things that were contentious were where smart home controls go, where does Google Pay go? They both get buttons on the lock screen now. I guarantee you that there was some kind of turf war and a bunch of people lost. And then they're like, but wait, there's money here.

And then they got, they clawed their way back onto the lock screen. So you know the dynamic between Android trying new things and then a year later just doing it the way iOS does it? We don't talk about the reverse dynamic enough, which is Apple just ruthlessly stealing the interface ideas from two years ago. Yeah. And that's like absolutely the cycle we're in. Like Google invents a thing and then a year later they back it off to where Apple was. But then the next year, Apple does the thing Google had done the year before. So my prediction is that the smart home controls will end up on Apple's lock screen sooner rather than later.

Oh, interesting. Because they are, you know, they're all in on HomeKit. There are these rumors that they're going to do Car Kit. Yeah. It's just, I'm just marking it now that this looks crazy. And I agree with there was a very contentious design review. Yeah. Where someone was like, I just put it up.

on the lock screen. Yeah. Right. I guarantee you it gets copied. Because I think it's smart. I think having smart home on the lock screen is smart. You know how Android spent years making notification controls wildly complicated? And there were like different levels and priority levels and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then they finally landed on, well, how about there's like high priority and low priority? And then when a notification pops, you can like do something with it. And that they kind of just landed at something relatively simple. And Apple decided, what if we brought profiles from back, you know, like the way that profiles worked on phones in the 90s. Yeah. What if we did that? It's like they took all the lessons that Google learned of the wrong way to make notifications complicated.

This is what I'm saying. And they did it, but Google made it complicated on like a notification by notification basis. Apple just did it for the entire operating system. What if we just made the whole thing, hard to parse? Yeah. Anyway, I'm sure Android 12 will be fine when you get it on your phone a year and a half from now. Well, okay, to be fair, they are going a little bit faster. of beta already for some Samsung devices.

One Plus is out there in the world with some Android 12 stuff. So things are trucking along a little bit faster. But as always with Android, that's like the best we could ever say. Like Android doesn't update it the entire ecosystem right away. I never will. I'm excited about this Pixel 6. I haven't bought a pixel on the verge cast in a year or two. Yeah.

I think this will be the one. Yeah. I'm sure some carrier will like give me one for free or even pay me to take it just the way things are going lately. Like, just like, give me some money to take your phone. You're just going to get one when you go to the supermarket. We'll see what happens after the final underscore final underscore two underscore final underscore finished launch of the pixel.

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

that they just heard this and are like, oh, crap, we've got to like call Verizon right now, make that deal. Man, if that was a cause and effect, they would have done this years ago. Yeah. We'll see. They have said that this is the year they're doing it, so we'll see. But the carriers are pushing iPhones harder than ever, and making them pivot is harder than ever.

That said, they're not so happy with Samsung right now. A couple weeks ago we heard Timo will say, like, Samsung had kind of dropped the ball. Yeah. So there's your hedge, but we'll see. Speaking of Apple and Apple World, Deeter, you updated our reviews with the iPhone 13. mini and 13 Pro Max battery test that you ran? You've got like a, you're hot about battery quote unquote tests. Oh, God.

So the results are the mini is better than I feared, but not as good as everyone hoped. It is not, it is not magic. You cannot get the same kind of battery life you'll get out of a full size iPhone. But you will get more. Just your battery anxiety will kick in a little bit later depending on how you use your phone. And then the 13 Pro Max, I always want to be conservative with making promises about how good battery life is, you know, because like there are people that use their phones differently and,

you know, maybe more intensively than even I do. But man, if you can kill the 13 Pro Max in a day, you're a monster. You're just, you're just shooting 4K ProRes nonstop. That's, that's what you're doing. That seems to be the best way to kill. Yeah, you can't, you're not doing that because you can shoot like 45 seconds of 4K Pro Max. Before that you were out of space. Yeah. Yeah. Because 15.1 came out. That's right. 15.1 beta. Well, you're offloading it. airplay or something, right? Oh, God. No, you're not offloading with Airplay

because Airplay will like auto-detect your computer and be like, no, we've actually flattened this into a 720P file for you. You're uploading it with lightning at USB 2 speeds. Maybe USB 3 if you're lucky. Amazing. 15.1 came out.

They added a toggle from the macro mode that some people were just much more unhappy with than us. Yeah, it's fine. I ran into it switching once when I didn't want it to earlier yesterday. And I was like, okay, yeah, this can be annoying. If you're trying to zoom in on something that, you know,

it can't detect if it's there, not like a pointy thing. But I was not as mad as everybody else because fundamentally, I think if you're getting that close and you're using the main lens and having switched to macro mode, you're going to take a bad photo. And Apple wants to try and prevent you from taking bad photos. That's what it thinks its primary job is with the iPhone, is stopping you from taking crappy photos. I don't know if they've accomplished that goal at scale.

I was just like, that's a, you know, I applaud them for the ambition. I just have seen the photos that my family takes. There's a haylight update. We love this app. It lets you take macro photos using older phones. It's really more of a zoom and sharpened situation, but it's fun. Yeah, did a head-to-head, and you can tell. It's not quite, but you get out of the 13 pro, just going to say.

It's good, but. If you go, if you take a halide microphone and you go into it and look at it, and you switch between JPEG and H-EIC, the H-EIC will show you the zoomed-out photo. It's like very clear what's happening. Yeah. But it's cool. It's fun.

If you have macro jealousy, which who doesn't? This app is cheaper than a new phone. And then this is my favorite thing. Okay. Buttons and links, man. Epic versus Apple trial hits. There's a verdict. The judge says you have to allow buttons and links.

Epic is making some noises about buttons and links. Yep. You know what? regulatory uncertainty gives you startups willing to disrupt for the market because they see an opening. So there's a company called paddle. Love it. Love that it's called paddle. I don't know why.

I don't know what the metaphor is there, but I love it. Very good. They've announced their own payment system that gives you a link. It's like it's a little bit of a flow. You push it. It kicks you to the web and you hit pay and it kicks you back to the app. But their fees are only 5 to 10 percent instead of 15 to 30 to Apple charges. And it's an external link.

Yeah. I love it. Yeah. See what I'm saying? buttons and links, man. When you're in the external link, paying for it in Safari, if you so choose, you can pay with Apple pay. So you can get out of paying the 30%, but still use Apple's payment system. Amazing.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment as to whether apps using paddle would be allowed on the app store. Very good. I, look, I know not everyone's happy. Who knows what one? this little ambiguity is an opportunity for startups. That's all I care about. Also, I'm excited for a court opinion about buttons and links. Finally, our nation's justice system is bending to the demands of the verge cast.

As soon as we get the what is a photo case, we're done here. We're going to shut it down. It's coming. A couple more Apple things. Big report in Business Insider about Apple's health care division, playing a little fast and loose. You should go read that. Yeah. It's kind of a lot of what you might have expected.

Like, they made claims aren't reinventing healthcare with the Apple Watch. And then a bunch of doctors are like, actually, healthcare is quite complicated. Like, there's like an element of that to it, but go read it. Your watch can't fix that. But also a surprising lack of firm direction and long-term planning. They're like, health care. It's a thing. They hired someone and be like, hey, healthcare is a thing.

Make it a thing. And then much angst. So it seems like they don't actually have, you know, a grand. grand 40 chest vision of what they're doing in health care is what it seems like to me. Nor cars. If you want Apple to drive you to a doctor and then take care of you, you have a long weight ahead of you. You are dead. It's not happening for you.

I was just like, I read this thing and I don't know, maybe it's because my entire family except for me is I'm the failure. Everyone else is doctor. Patients are complicated and they often do it, don't do what they're told. Sometimes they read Facebook and snort Iver. Mectin instead of getting vaccinated. Like, people are complicated and trying to, like, optimize their behavior with a watch is, like, there's, like, an element of being naive there that I read this and that's what

I thought about it. It was my parents telling me about, like, growing up, just be a good patient. Like, it was basically their message to me. I can't say any of us are. For example, I've mostly chosen to eat cheeseburgers and drink beer. But. I think that's a good choice. You're fine.

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

Yep. Right? This is great. It's like, oh, man, I'm really happy. You guys are the dictators of all technology. A real push and pull there. All right, we've got to take a break. We got, we're going to do a little lightning around when we come back, all the other news.

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And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Okay, we're back. Dieter, you want to run through this lightning round? We have reviewed the Nintendo Switch OLED. It is as I expected. Great.

It is really nice to have a big OLED screen. The end. I would be hard-pressed to tell anybody to upgrade if they have a regular switch. That would be irresponsible of me. But upgrade if you have a regular switch. So glad I have a switchlight. I played with one. I did our hands-on with it some time ago.

And yeah, it's amazing. I can't wait to play Metroid-Dread on it. Although we also reviewed Metro Dead. Andrew reviewed that as well. And it's kind of dampened my enthusiasm a little bit. But that's okay. I'm still going to play it, mostly because I pre-ordered it and because I'm a Metroid fan. Google did this new Nest stuff?

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

Yeah. You know, we just came off the Amazon event. Like, ring is like a, for all of. of their faults. But like, Ring has Jamie Simmons off as CEO. He really cares about Ring. Yeah. In a way that is often, when you talk to him, it's like often like disconcerting. Yeah. Right. You're like, wow, you are super into doorbells, my man. Like, and I get it. But the products are good and like they reflect his passion for making video cameras for your house and doing safety. Again, I'll, like part and parcel of that is the controversy running. But you can tell that they

really care. I have not been able to tell that Google cares about Nest ever since they bought Nest and then now right with these products. And we know there we know the people in charge of these divisions. We've interviewed them. Like they're all smart and capable. They say the right things. And you see the products and you're like, gosh, these feel half-hearted. Right. There's just something about them that it just always has. And I don't know. I think I have they turn that around because some of the ideas are really good. And like, you know, the fact that I have to run a tiny Linux computer integrate my ring with my Google. Like, come on, guys.

Figure it out. Dieter, smart fridge. Coming for it. There's a rumor that Amazon's working on a smart fridge. Of course they are. They made a microwave. Do you think they're not making a fridge? Samsung has a fridge with a camera inside it.

How could Amazon let them get away with that market? You know, LG, probably, you know, they do stuff. Amazon already makes the thing where they have a camera pointing at you detecting whether or not you pick up food in their stores. Why wouldn't they also put that in your house? I don't know. I'm trying to get angry and worked up about it, but I can't. I'm like, I don't believe that Amazon can make the leap from Alexa that helps you turn on the lights and tells you the weather and tells you funny jokes to Alexa that has an interface that is visual that you want to do stuff with. And something about the smart fridge is like, if you just

slap a speaker and a microphone on a fridge that doesn't count. They're going to put the shopping list. Yeah, but if you're going to have an interface that complicated, do you think they're going to be able to pull that off? I don't know if I believe that Amazon can do visual interfaces. This is fundamentally why I'm like nervous about the Echo Show 15, the wall, the wall picture thing. It's like, I don't know.

I mean, that's kind of like the precursor for this, right? Like this, that's like the test case. All I'm saying to you is the words grocery store lock-in. Yeah. You have a smart fridge. It tracks what you eat and then orders the food from Whole Foods. And then suddenly you're like, I can't go to another grocery store because my fridge has locked me into Whole Foods. Yeah, that sounds great.

It's amazing. I just did This Weekend Lock-in. I wasn't even thinking about it. Oh, we forgot about This Weekend Lock-in to put it in the thing. There it is. This Weekend Lock-in. Amazon Fridge. See, stop sending us angry letters about this weekend Locket.

We did it. Yeah. Okay. We are way over. I'm just going to run through these last few things. There was a huge Twitch hack, Tom Wornis. all over that coverage, literally the entire source code for Twitch, all of its apps, its payment structures, its amount it's paid to people, all that has leaked.

The hacker say it's part one. If you've listened to us for a while, you know, we have very conflicted feelings about reporting on hacks. Like, you don't want to, you don't want to be the hammer for the revenge plot, you know? Yeah. Right. It's bad. So we're being careful, but all that stuff is out there.

It's a big deal. It's going to have longer precautions. Casey and Platformer talked to two former Twitch engineers who are like Twitch's long had poor operational security practices, this was just coming for them. Well, Tom and Ash did as well. They also did a story about talking with some engineers and other people at Twitch that just showed that this was long, long time of, they could have done better and they chose not to. Yeah.

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

Yes. Pointing out that the other guy is a villain. It's a villain to Swifties. It's great. He's like a notorious villain to Swifties. Right, because he bought the Masters. And now Taylor asked to make Taylor's versions. But here's what I posit to you.

if not for the actions of the Carlisle group, would we have Taylor's versions, which are good? Yeah. That's true. Think about it. I feel like we could do this in other ways. Like the candidate for governor hates the last airbender and just engage that fan base.

Very good. And then last couple things, we have smart TV apps out now. We've been working for a long time. Two years in the making because we wanted them to get. They're out for Roku for Android TV and Fire TV. There's one for the Apple TV coming. It is not out yet. I promise not to do an hour on this.

It's not out yet because Apple uses a different closed captions format than everyone else. So we have closed captions for our videos. We think accessibility is important. We have to do them again to support the Apple TV app. So we are doing them again. We're going to do it. We just have to do it. So the Apple TV app is delayed because we don't want to ship it without close captions.

I don't tell you. The apps are great. You can download them. People have asked, like, why are we doing them? A lot of people ask us for our videos on their TVs without all the baggage of YouTube. It's just a thing people want. We're happy to deliver it. We think our videos are great.

It's also good for us to differentiate and not just depend on one platform, which, if you've been listening to our chat, you will know, is dangerous for everyone all the time. So we're excited about them. Our podcast are in them. People want to listen to our podcast on TV is an easy way to do it. Most importantly, though, we're going to premiere Deeter's documentary in this app. Deeter, you want to tell them what the documentaries is? It's called Springboard, the secret history of the first real smartphone.

Symbian fans come at me. We pick this title at Trow People. Yeah, it's a half hour. We're going to premiere it at the party. It will also be on those smart TV apps on October 25th. We have interviews with the founders of Hanspring, a couple of more. And I think it's great. And the trailer is out now. You can go watch it. You can go tell your friends to watch it. And if you want to come see the premiere, you can come to our party, our 10-year

party in New York, October 22nd, 23rd. I am told there is a new promo code, a secret promo code that is dollar sign 9-9 now, which gets you a bunch of money off the cost of a ticket. Was there a URL to enter this promo code in? Yeah, but I don't know it. It's theverge.com slash on The Verge. There it is. It's a verge. com slash on the verge. Enter promo code dollar sign 999.

We would love to see you there. This is, it's just a party. We're going to have cool speakers. We have really cool DJs on the opening night. We have panels. We have arcade. We have like all these cool digital art installations. It's a party.

It's going to be great. We will tell listeners of the Vergecast that might interest you that we are going to have an existential conversation about thread with the CEO of ERO. That's a real thing that's going to happen. It's going to be great. Joanna Stern and David Pierce are going to do a Vergecast episode with us live. It's going to be great. There's a lot going on.

You can go to Theverge.com slash On The Verge. You can find it more. Promo code dollar Sunday, you know. Lastly, I want to thank Derek Rhodes, who did a visual, like a data visualization of every episode of the Vergecast. We'll put it in the show notes. It's bitly.com slash cut through the night, which is great. Yeah. It's just very fun.

Alex, you are well represented in this. Yes. it's good. So I love it when our fans do stuff like that. So check it out. Thank you, Derek. We loved it. All right. That's it. We are way over. There's a lot. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Dieter's at Backlon. Russell is at Russell Brandem. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Decoder this week was from the co-conference. It was to Keejerma al-Kana. Next week, Dave Limp from Amazon. It's a good episode. It was fun talking to him. And then on Tuesday, Deeder, you got a special episode of the Vergecast come up. You hinted at it. What is it? That's right.

It is an episode all about the Microsoft Surface reviews. We're going to have Tom Warren, Monica Chin, Dan Seafrodon. It's the Surface Stravaganza. And we're going to have more topic-specific Tuesday episodes coming up. I've already started doing some interviews for them, which are very exciting. I'm not going to tease what they are too much. I don't want to ruin the surprise. All right.

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

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