The Vergecast - Questions about Facebook's oversight board, Quibi's popularity, and the rumored Pixel 4a

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn welcome Dan Seifert, Casey Newton, and Julia Alexander to talk about gadget news, Facebook's oversight board, and updates in the streaming world. Stories discussed this week: The doomsday bunker market is thriving amid the coronavirus pandemic Amazon asks Congress to pass a law against price gouging during national crisis Uber’s response to COVID-19: face masks, selfies, and fewer people in the car The lockdown live-streaming numbers are out, and they’re huge Elon Musk defies coronavirus order and asks to be arrested  Tesla has already started making cars again at its California factory Twitter introducing new labels for tweets with misleading COVID-19 information Google says that the majority of its employees will work from home until 2021 The mastermind of Google’s Pixel camera quietly left the company in March Google Pixel 4a Performance Review tests the phone's ... Android 11's public beta to launch with June 3rd live stream … TCL wants to be the next big name in budget phones Apple 13-inch MacBook Pro (2020) review: return to baseline Dell launches new XPS 17 and redesigned XPS 15 with 16:10 edge-to-edge displays Alienware’s Area-51m, m15, and m17 laptops are getting new 10th Gen Intel chips and upgraded GPUs Facebook will pay $52 million in settlement with moderators who developed PTSD on the job Half of all Facebook moderators may develop mental health issues How Facebook is using AI to combat COVID-19 misinformation and detect ‘hateful memes’ Facebook’s independent oversight board could be overwhelmed by the challenge Tenet is now Hollywood’s litmus test for what happens next  The Mandalorian’s second season won’t be delayed, says Disney CEO AMC Theaters will no longer play Universal movies after Trolls ... Alamo Drafthouse launches Alamo on Demand VOD service HBO Max will use anime from Crunchyroll to compete with Netflix’s growing empire HBO is teaming up with Scener to give subscribers the ability to watch TV together WarnerMedia expands free HBO Max deal to HBO subscribers ... Quibi will add sharing features as the app struggles to find subscribers Jeffrey Katzenberg Blames Pandemic for Quibi’s Rough Start Major CBS All Access changes coming this summer as company speeds up relaunch Wannabe influencers are being trained to film a believable YouTube apology video Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Verchast, Dan Siefer, joins us to talk about the 13-inch Backbook Pro review, what's going on with the pixel, and a little bit about what's going on with Windows laptops, which are very interesting now. Casey Newton joins us, talk about Facebook's oversight board, its big moderation plan, and then Julia Alexander joins us to talk about the streaming wars. That's the virtual class coming up 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, Big 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 and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of small but struggling phone divisions. See?

It's good. It's a little preface of what's to come. I'm your friend Eli. Deidre Bone is here. I'm your mortal enemy. That's good. See, what you want is conflict in a show. We're going to have three guests today. Dan Sefer is here. Hey, Dan. Hello.

A little bit later, Casey Newton's going to join us to talk about Facebook's oversight board. And then the last segment of show, Julia Alexander is going to be here. We've got to talk about what's going on in the streaming wars and what is up with Quibi. But Dan, you're here. We're going to talk about some phone stuff, some review stuff. I want to give a quick update on the virus before we jump into it. I'm just going to tell you, it's been nine weeks since Trump held up a flow chart. Are you familiar with this tradition, Dan?

Yep, yep. There was going to be a website. 45 million Google engineers are building it. The entire population of Europe is working on this website. Anyhow, there was supposed to be a website. It's been nine weeks since that website was promised. It's still not here. In order to move forward, I assure you what America needs is robust testing and tracing infrastructure.

We do not have such an infrastructure. It has been nine weeks since the first step was announced. That's that. Here's some other virus coverage from The Verge. Zoe Schiffer wrote a great piece about the Doomsday Bunker Market, which is thriving. The piece is centered around a company called Vivo. They run a facility called XPoint in South Dakota. I encourage you to visit the Vivo website and check out the XPoint marketing materials.

There's like a Vimeo video. It's like be prepared and then you press it. It's just like waves of scary things with dots on a map that could happen. It's like nuclear catastrophe. One of them, by the way, is immigration invasion. It's like crazy. It's a crazy company. The business is booming. They're selling these bunkers. Just look at the photos of the bunkers. They're tin cans of dirt on them.

Like, I don't, anyway, read it. It's great. It's super funny and very poignant in terms of what people are afraid of. Amazon has asked Congress to pass a law against price gouging, which is pretty funny. So that's great, except that the real purpose of Amazon's proposed legislation is that the party that sets the price would be held liable, not the quote unquote storefront that hosts. the seller, which, you know? Yeah, so if you read Amazon's blog post about it, they kind of make a point where they're kicking off sellers all the time, and they just want somebody to, like, pursue, like, legal ramifications against these sellers. I think that's what their goal is.

But, yeah, it's kind of funny that they should just also manage their marketplace. I mean, look, the big company asking for the regulation usually is for a reason. It's usually to help cement the big company's power. That's like just a pattern we've seen over and over again. I think in this case, Amazon also just needs the force of a law so that it can make its own rule. Because right now, they're making up whatever price gouging means. And that opens them up for criticism. I thought, here's the law.

Anyway, it's happening. Uber detailed its response to COVID-19. They're going to require face masks for all drivers and everybody else in the car. They're also doing fewer people in a car. Also, the driver app before they accept a ride. They have to take a selfie to show that they're wearing a mask and they're doing image recognition. So that's pretty interesting. Bejohn wrote about the numbers for live streaming platforms.

They're all just up. So this is like Twitch. This is Facebook gaming. This is YouTube gaming. They are just exploding. It's super interesting. Valerant drove 334 million hours watched on Twitch in April. A game called Just Chatting drove 134 million hours in April.

That's bigger than both League of Legends and Fortnite. Fortnite has been growing since January, which, you know, You know, there's just, like, meme that Fortnite is dying, but it just keeps growing. It keeps becoming the biggest thing in the world. And then Facebook gaming is up 72% between March and April, 238% year-over-year. YouTube gaming not growing quite as fast, only 65% year-over year-over year. But you see what's happening. It's just, like, the amount of influx into these live-stream platforms is huge.

It is going to be a big story. Bajon's all over it. I've got two Tesla items here. I feel like next week, we're just going to have Liz on next week to talk about. And we'll probably have Sean, too, because he's been breaking story. after story about what's going on with Tesla and its factories. Tesla reopened its Fremont factory. They reopened the Gigafactory in Nevada. Those are both stories that Sean O'Kane broke on the verge. They were not out. Sean got them. Congratulations to Sean.

Some good work there. Elon tweeted, if you're going to arrest someone, arrest me. Trump is tweeting about Elon. It's just nuts. The whole situation's nuts. Elon, I don't think is acting very responsibly. Elon, by the way, James Vincent tweeted out a CNBC story about AI. today. James Vincent says our AI reporter. He tweeted a CNBC story about Elon's relationship to the AI community and point out everybody in that story was off the record or on background, like didn't want to be named because they don't want to disturb the relationship with Elon. Or they just don't want to like be disturbed by Elon. Yeah. Whatever. So James,

you just want your mentions to be chill. Yeah. So James tweets a story and says it's notable that the Elon community, I think we can call them the Elon community. The Elon community, The Elon community is so vitriolic that people don't want to be named. Facebook's head of AI research replied to that and said, I'll be named. Elon doesn't have good ideas about AI. There's no such thing is artificial general intelligence. And then Elon responded to that tweet by just saying Facebook sucks. So it's just been a weird week of Elon stuff for us.

This week in Elon is back. That's Liz's newsletter. You know, it comes and goes in periods of Elon activity. It's fair to say that we're in a period of high Elon activity. So this week in Elon is back. We'll have Liz and Sean. on next week to check in on all things, Elon. Twitter is introducing new labels for tweets with misleading COVID-19 information.

And Google, following Twitter's lead, is saying the majority of its employees work from home until 2021. Twitter just said everybody can work from home forever. That's just Twitter's policy now. So just a lot of virus stuff in the world, a lot of what I keep calling second order effects of the pandemic. You see them continue to play out. We're all over it.

Check it out on the site. But now we've got to talk about soft phones and laptops because honestly, what are we here for? Dan. Yeah. A lot of reviews going on this week. Let's start with laptops. It's busy, like, past week or two of news and reviews.

And I know you guys talked a bunch about the service stuff last week. Obviously, those reviews are starting to hit. We had the MacBook review hit. Just a really busy couple of weeks on this front, which just came out of nowhere. Yeah. So, Deter Review, the MacBook Pro 13 this week. We put out our best laptop you can buy guide from Monica, which is great. I would note that it was the XPS 13.

that's because people who are trying to decide between laptops are usually deciding between Windows laptops. Yeah. Like if you're deciding between Mac and Windows, when you're like in the market for a laptop, like, you've got to start. You just got to rewind and like really assess where your decisions are. I won't say there is, you know, just below the XPS 13. There's the choice for if you're shopping for a Mac laptop. You know, we think the MacBook error is probably the best option for most people at this point. Unless if you know you need a pro or like Dieter said in the past,

If you think you need a pro, just get the pro because you're probably going to regret not getting the pro. So, Dan, actually, I agree the XPS is probably the right thing for most people that are like comparison shopping stuff. With the pro, like there's the base pro and then there's the real pro on the 13 inch, right? And then there's the air. And the number of people that have come at me saying, I don't know between the air, the base pro, the real pro, what should I do is off the charts. Like somehow Apple has completely just duff. the differentiation between these three products and no one really knows where they should land. We had to set up a custom slack room for Casey Newton to work him emotionally through the process

of which of these MacBooks he should get. It was a lot. And I still think he hasn't actually pulled the trigger yet. Okay, I'm going to throw this out there. You two have done the rigorous work. Here's just some crap I thought of. The MacBook air is a Chromebook. Right?

It's just a fancy, expensive Chromebook. the fake pro is the one that the people who want an air should buy, and the real pro is the one that won't overheat the second you try to do more than one thing it wants. I think you got that all wrong. Okay. Well, I mean, I said it was some crap I just thought of. To be fair to myself, what do you think? So calling the air Chromebook is mean, but not totally wrong,

although if you try and run it is run super hard on Chrome. You might have problems. You should probably stick with Safari if you can. But it is the best Mac for most people. it will not do you wrong, unless you try and do stuff that will push it for an extended period of time. If you need your computer to, like, do a ton of stuff for more than a half an hour, you know, you need to export some video, you need to do extended photo work, you can't bring yourself to close and bring yourself down fewer than 50 chrome tabs, whatever, then you need to go pro because it has a higher thermal ceiling. And it has slightly better graphics. So that's the differentiation there.

The hassle comes from, do you want the base pro, which is like a MacBook Air that isn't thermally throttled? Or do you want the step-up pro with the 10th-gen Intel processors, which actually has like modern 2020 specs? And I'm a little bit, like, Dave Lee did a good video saying, like, this is the difference and it's mostly about graphics and don't be so mad at the base MacBook Pro. And he's not wrong. but like when I like step back and look at it from you know 10,000 feet because you know I can walk

on air walk on the clouds I am actually a little bit baffled I actually if I'm Apple I discontinue the base MacBook Pro I don't get it yeah I got to assume that Apple has some sort of market research here saying that a lot of people buy that price bracket of like 1300 to $1,600 macqua pros right and that's like the only the only reason I can think of for that to exist in that they like like for whatever reason don't want the MacBook Air, whether they feel like they are too pro for it or just need more power. And then that is like they don't want to spend 1800 plus bucks. But that's the only explanation I can possibly think about. You know what I think it is? I think that Apple knows that there is a huge groundswell

of demand for an affordable laptop that has a touchbar. That's horrible. That was just a troll. Dieter's at Backlaw and you can tweet at him. This brings me to the, right, Dell put out new XPS 17 and XPS 15. Super interesting computers. Right. Alienware, which is part of Dell, put out a new Area 51M. Like the Windows laptop spec and design level is just higher than ever. And Apple is just flat.

Touchbar aside, Apple is just flat. So Dan, I just was curious, why do we pick the XPS 13 over every other Windows laptop? And then just sort of like broadly, it seems like Apple's at stasis, even though they've made all these changes recently. And the Windows design side is just like taken off. Yeah, I mean, I think the XPS 13 is a good pick because there's really no compromise with it. Aside from like a really terrible webcam, which frankly, there's no good webcams. This is just like kind of worse than some others.

You get great battery life. You get great performance. You get a good keyboard. You get a reliable track pad. You get a great display. It's really compact and small. It's got enough ports on it to live with. It gives you an adapter to use your USB.

stuff in the box, and you can get like a really well-specked one for like $1,300 bucks. So like if you want the same spec level as that $1,800 Mac Pro in a Windows computer, you're paying $1,300 for it. And like that's not cheap, still expensive, still premium or whatever. But if you look at like the Surface laptop three, which is similarly priced, similarly specs, you give up things like port selections. You lose Thunderbolt and you lose some other things.

It's a little bit bigger of a design. It's not as like compact and portable as the XPS. The HPs in that price range, like have 16 by 9 screens. They're more trying to get you to do a two and one thing when really all you want is a laptop. It's just like Dell did a really good job of like making a laptop that doesn't really make you compromise. You're going to pay premium price for it. You're not going to pay the most for it. Like you will pay more for other options.

But you're still can be confident that this is going to be a good thing that's going to last you, you know, the four or five years that you might want to get out of it. But yeah, like, there's so much happening in Windows laptops that, and Apple's been using the same designs for four years now. There definitely feels like they're due for refresh on the design front. But, and I think Dieter said this as well in the past, that, like, Apple doesn't have, like, that hardware design lead that it used to have. Like, the XPS 13 is sleek AF. And so are the XPS 15 and the new XPS 17, which is a super interesting computer that he brought back after 10 years. they are toe-to-to-to in design and hardware capabilities and looks and fit and finish with Apple.

So Apple still has MacOS. In certain applications, it definitely has performance advantage. If you are a heavy video editor, I'd still probably encourage you to look at a MacBook Pro, certainly the 16-inch. But for day-to-day work, you are compromising less and less on the Windows side of things now. The thing that strikes me is the Windows battery life

on sort of a normal workload, including Chrome, it just seems to be getting better and Apple seems to be getting worse, and I don't understand that split at all. Yeah, me either. You know, a couple of years ago, there was the transition from dual core to quad-core processors in a lot of these

like ultra-book level things. We saw a noticeable battery dive on there. Like, I was testing laptops before that on dual-core processors. We saw 10, 12 hours of use, like more than one laptop could do that. And then all of a sudden, nose dive to like six, seven hours.

And that was like everything was like the best I could get out of it for real workload was like seven hours. And then like if you read Dieter's most recent review of the MacBook Pro 13, like in a real workload where he's not babying the battery and he's using the applications he wants to use and his workflow, he's looking at like four and a half, five hours. Yeah, that's how I felt about the air. That's bad. Like that, like I don't know what Apple is doing.

That's different. But it's definitely feels like like, like you remember like when MacBook Air's switched to, I think it was Haswell processors, and they went to like 12 hours of battery life. Yep. Yeah. It was huge. Like, everybody was stoked for it. And then they just kind of like chipped away at that and gone down.

Yeah. I mean, I think that did you see there are reports if you run the MacBook? The new MacBook air in Windows. The display gets 100 net spriter. What? I did see that. Yeah. Which is crazy town, right?

So in MacOS, it runs at 400 nets. And in Windows, it runs at 500 nets. And it's the same otherwise. It doesn't get like more pixels. It just runs brighter. It doesn't grow a touch screen. Yeah, it's good. A touch bar appears when you're running Windows.

I think half of that is, right, a little differentiation from the pro and the air, sure, whatever. I think another part of that is, that is how you preserve battery life. When I reviewed the air and I asked Apple about battery life, the first thing they said to me was, do not run the brightness, do not run the display at full brightness. Yeah. And I think if you can just, if you're like, we'll just keep this thing from totally max brightness, that's how you preserve battery life.

those are the kinds of tricks that I think we're just seeing all over the place now. I think the Windows side, A, might be doing it more aggressively, but it is just wild to me that Windows laptops are suddenly getting better, battery left than the Mac. That was not the case two or three years ago at all. Conspiracy. Yeah. You ready? Vergecast is a place for conspiracy theories. Apple isn't trying very hard with Intel because they're working on the ARM MacBooks, whereas everybody else who's making Windows laptops has to keep trying with Intel.

So they're doing a better job optimizing than Apple is because Apple is putting all of its online. optimization effort into arm. That sort of like implies like there's one optimization engineered Apple and he's like they're making her go into like one room instead of another room. Like that's just how it works. Tim Cook is like where do I where do I dole out the optimization dollars? Yeah. There's a Mac team. They've got to be working on it. I mean the the remarkable thing is if you in the abstract think where is Apple better in laptops? It used to be like hardware design. And they're like, yeah, but it's still like, their laptops still feel more solid. But it's been like screen quality and battery life.

And in both of those cases. And track paths. And track paths. But like in screen quality and battery life, they're like falling behind a little bit. They're still winning, I think, an overall build quality. You know, their designs might not look as sexy, but they like feel a little bit sturdier, especially now that we have a keyboard you can actually trust. But yeah, like they're a half step behind.

This is why I titled my review back to base or return to baseline is like they haven't actually hit like we're better than everybody levels yet. Yeah. All right. We've talked about Apple laptops so much. I'm glad we got these reviews out. I'm very interested to see if Apple response to the Windows stuff. If you haven't been paying attention to the Windows laptops, go read those reviews. Look at that best laptop guide. Look at that XPS 15. It is super interesting. There's a lot going on there that I think if you're more focused on Apple, you might not be seeing, but it is super interesting. But that aside, we've got to talk about what's going on with the pixel. Deter, walk us through it. So the information, has a blockbuster report that came out on May 13th, pointing out that, number one, Mario Carras, who was previously in charge of Pixel. He quietly left to go, like, work directly for Sundar earlier this year, and now he's just gone. Mark LaVoy, who has the visionary behind the pixel's camera, has also left. Unclear why. He was the best thing about Google's keynote for the Pixel 4, just incredible. By far.

The bells are, you know, not surprisingly not that great. One thing I think Dan has some feelings about this is the Pixel 3A didn't exactly like blow the doors off. And there's this just incredibly damning anecdote where the hardware chief, Rick Austerlo, is talking to his staff reportedly right ahead of the Pixel 4 launch. And here I'm just going to quote the information. Osterlo informs staff about his own misgivings. He told him he did not agree with some of the decisions made about the phone, according to the phone. to people who were president at the meeting. In particular, he was disappointed in its battery power.

We all. Weren't we all? The head quote is amazing. I don't know how big companies work. We've only ever worked in our medium-sized company. One just assumes they ran the specs by the head of the hardware division at some point, right? Like, Rick Oslo is the head of Google's hardware division. Yep.

Yep. Do they just hand him a finished phone? It's unclear. I don't know. It's possible that, like, there's. There's some sort of like miscommunication or misinterpretation happening about this meeting, although it seems pretty dead ahead. But yeah, you're in charge, and this is the most important, most high-profile product that you make.

You'd think that you'd know how big the batteries are? Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the pixel 3A was the first fully in-house developed Google phone, right? Right, they bought HTC. Right. Pixel 4 would have been the first in-house flagship level developed in-house all Google Google Google Soup nuts. You would think that they would be like a couple years ago

they could say oh, HTC made that decision. LG made that decision. But now they bought HTC. So they still get to say HTC made that decision. Yeah. I mean, it's possible. The thing that I've been thinking about the whole time is you bought HTC in all their engineers

in that whole hardware division. And then you're like, keep doing what you do without noting that HGC was a failure that collapsed leading that you to buy them. You don't let them make the same decisions. Like that's actually the funniest thing about this is they were, HGC made good phones, right? But there are decisions about what was important in the phones,

historically not rewarded by the market. Right. So you would buy them because they know how to build a phone, but then you would make all different decisions. Also, I'm just going to say this. Google's camera strength, which is the core benefit of the pixel, in addition to, you know,

getting a clean Google software experience. Comes from their software and from like the pixel sensor, whatever their custom chip is, but mostly their software. And so normally when I assume one is developing a phone, one puts a lot of time into getting the camera right. Samsung does nothing but think about camera hardware and then they like slap the rest of stuff around it. I don't know.

Google can kind of just coast with the Pixel 4. They kind of did. They're just like, hey, the camera is going to use what we've got. It's going to use commodity hardware, which in theory means they have more time to pay attention to the other stuff. Yeah. It's a bizarre, it's a bizarre story. I think, Dan, you were in a thread with Walt on Twitter. Walt pointed out that our story said this, but said most stories didn't notice this. Like, the pixel isn't sell at all. No, nobody buys them. Like, I mean, in the grand

market, like, you know, a few million people buy them. But when you're talking about a smartphone market, that's like, what, one and a half billion phones, like a few million is nothing. And like, we don't think, as product reviewers, we don't really think about sales performance. We think about evaluating a product for its own merits. And like I fully feel that is the way a product should be evaluated. But when you're a person buying a phone, sales performance is like a meaningful thing that affects your experience of owning that phone. It means like how well is this phone going to be supported? Are there going to be stores to go to that when I break and drop this phone, will I be able to get the screen fixed? What cases am I going to have available for it or accessories at

launch or six months from launch? Or I like to keep this phone for three years. Two years from now, I need a new case. Am I going to be able to buy one for this phone that only a handful of people bought and wasn't really a popular phone on the market? Trust me, try and find a case for like an HTC phone now. Good luck with that. Like, right? Like nobody bought them.

Nobody made accessories for them. HTC might have paid companies at the launch to like spec to come out with like a handful of cases. But like you're not getting Samsung or iPhone levels of accessory support. So like these things don't really affect the evaluation of the device in a bubble as itself. but like in a grand scheme of like buyers experience of what it's going to be like to live with this phone for the next two to three years, sales performance does have an effect on those things. And it's like we don't really care whether a phone sells a lot or not. That's not our job or our concern.

But it does mean that it's going to have these knock on effects down the line. And what's funny is a company like Google, it's funny because it's Google. But usually you would say, well, it's Google. So right? Like there's one of the biggest richest companies in the world is behind this product. I would expect some level of ongoing commitment to this idea. But because it's Google, you're like, I don't know if ongoing commitment is really the way this company runs. Yeah, but like they said this is supposed to be a real business now.

Like that's why Osterlo was put in charge of the hardware business. It's to make it profitable, make it a real competitive hardware business. And so far, I mean, like, I don't think they break out the profitability in their reports strategically. But when you look at three million sold, that's not a profit. smartphone business by any long shot. So they're still way far away from that. Yeah. Well, the four A is we think it would be now that it comes out.

Do you think it's going to hit? I mean, no. I think that if Google is smart, what Google is doing is they're going to release this 4A because it's done. They're just going to throw it out there. And then they're going to put up, I mean, there was a leak of like a billboard, but they'll do like three ads for it. My complaint with pixels, Google never markets it hard enough.

so it never has a chance. And I actually think of Google Smart, they're not going to put much weight behind the 4A, and they're going to save the 5 for, like, the grand return of Google into the phone. Like, it, rumors are pointing to the Pixel 5, maybe using the 765 or, I don't know,

maybe the 768 instead of the Qualcomm 865 processor. And so it's not going to be like a spec. We're going to take, we're going to be the spec king. But they need to have a couple of things to, like, really engage, like, the loyal Android, you know, spec monsters. And then they need, like, really good battery life. And, like, they need something that feels like really premium build quality if they want

to charge more than $1,000. And if they don't, then they need to, like, reposition what a pixel is. Because to date, they've been like, oh, yeah, we take on the Galaxy S line head on. And it's like, if you're going to do that, then do it. And if you're not, then don't. But right now they're trying to, like, split the difference. and it's not working. You know what they need to do is develop a messaging strategy that competes with iMessage

so that they can peel off some of those iPhone SD buyers. Look, you're getting, you get emoji tapbacks in RCS soon. All right. We can't, we can't do this. We've got more to cover on this episode of the Vodcast. Dan, it was great to have you. My pleasure. There's more reviews coming.

That team is rocking and rolling. So we'll have you back soon. Always. All right. We're going to take a break. We'll be back with Casey Newton. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade no-code website builder

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Casey Newton, welcome to the Burgecast. Hey, thanks for having me, guys. It's good to have you back. It's been a minute. So, I was realizing that Facebook announced a Supreme Court for speech across the world. And we, like, I read a headline. I was like, oh, this happened. And we, like, moved on very quickly. That's a big deal, even covering it very deeply. I just wanted to get into it with you. Tell us about the Facebook oversight board, what they've announced, who's on it, and sort of the early reaction to it. Yeah, I agree. I think it's a big story. And so a couple of years ago, Mark Zuckerberg went on

the Ezra Klein show, actually another Rocks Media podcast and proposed the idea that Facebook have a Supreme Court for content moderation. And the reason is that because he has total control over the company, any decision that Facebook makes about what should stay up on the platform or what should come down, ultimately rolls up to him. And a lot of people think that Zuckerberg shouldn't have that much power over speech, particularly given how large Facebook is and how much political discourse happens on Facebook. And Zuckerberg agreed with them and wanted to create an institution that could sort of take over that job. So they spent a couple of years designing a system. It's called the Oversight Board. Facebook gave them $130 million and they appointed the first 20 members to it. And it's

about to get up and running. And to start with, they're only going to hear one kind of decision, which is cases in which somebody said something that Facebook removed. If your thing was removed, you will be able to appeal and the board will then hear it. The goal is over time, they will hear other kinds of cases, such as maybe a bad thing is on Facebook and you think it should be taken down and it isn't taken down and then you appeal. But we're a long way away from that. So that's kind of the basic shape of it, and that's how it's going to get started. Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, which is the division of Facebook. Why is that the first thing?

Because we also saw a story from April Laser over at NBC News about how Google seems to be overreacting to conservative criticism and maybe has dialed back its diversity initiatives. And starting with, oh, your stuff got taken down or censored, so we're going to let you appeal it, feels to me like it's in that same zone. Yes. I mean, something that is very true of this whole project is Zuckerberg wants it to support free speech. And he, when they went out looking for board members, the principle that they asked them to commit to was the principle of free expression. And so they went out and they found people who believed that. You could argue that it is also smart politically to do this in a way where the main effect initial. is to permit more speech rather than restrict it. But I'm laughing because today I got an email from some people that were hosting a conservative

roundtable where Senator Marcia Blackburn of Tennessee, a conservative Republican, was going to complain about Facebook setting up a censorship board. So even though literally the only thing that they're going to do now is permit more speech, the Republicans are already saying this is a shadowy censorship board. So to the extent that Facebook was trying to do something politically savvy here, it just shows once again why that doesn't work because all these conversations are held in bad faith. Yeah, I mean, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. Like if it's Mark Zuckerberg alone in his like speech chamber or whatever darkened room that he makes moderation decisions in and he's just throwing darts at a yes, no board. He's still just the all powerful ruler of speech on the platform.

if he spends $130 million to assemble a lineup of notable academics, the ex-prime minister of Denmark is on this board from around the world and try to do it as, there's like a word I'm looking for in as grandiose a way as possible. He's still kind of damned because now he's got the Illuminati working for Facebook. And that is just like, I don't know how you, like the Republican response to this, the Josh Holly, that Marshall Blackburn, Brennan Carr, who is an FCC commissioner very much in the Ajit Pie mold, you went off on a long tweet storm about how all these people are liberals who hate Trump and do you want people who hate Trump controlling Facebook? It's like, like, what is the

other choice? Well, exactly. And so, you know, I've talked with folks at Facebook about how they think this is going to work. And here's what they think is going to happen. The board is going to start making some decisions that Facebook disagrees with. And Facebook will then put out a statement. and saying, we very strongly disagree with what the board said here, but we are honor bound to, you know, uphold their judgment. And that will shift the entire conversation to the makeup of the oversight board. The oversight board is too liberal. It's conservative, right? And so they're going to try to shift that whole conversation onto this other institution. You know, will it work? You know, it's yet to be seen. But that is the idea. Tell me how the oversight board is actually independent,

because they've been saying this a lot. And my first threshold question is, is that true? Like, If the Oversight Board makes a decision that Mark Zuckerberg disagrees with, what actually holds him to complying with it? Nothing. But just to be clear. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it's sort of like, you know, the I will never get over the Game of Thrones scene

where like Ned Stark is like, well, you know, technically I'm supposed to be the king now. And Circey Lanister says, oh, why? Because you have a piece of paper. And then, you know, the guards arrest him and cut his head off. Right. Like a lot of our constitution works the same way. And we're saying how well that holds up, right? There are just a lot of norms that go into any democratic institution building.

And the hope is that, you know, they will be upheld by Facebook the same way that, you know, Congress used to uphold ours. So the goal here is the board is constituted. It's operating. They put up the New York Times op-ed. It's like, who decides what goes on Facebook? We do. Which then they walked that headline back. I don't know if you saw that.

Yeah. And they also probably didn't write it, by the way. Yeah, it's true. But it was still, it was more true before they walked it back because, yeah, theoretically, they're the ones who decided. the rules of Facebook. They're in existence. When are they going to issue their first opinion, do you think? That, we don't know.

What they've said is they plan to get the board up and running later this year. The board has had a couple delays, not like super long delays, but a few months here, a few months there. They were initially planning to announce the board in December, and it just took longer than they thought. And then there was the global pandemic. So everything is running a little bit behind schedule, but the hope is that they'll start hearing cases later this year.

So they'll start hearing cases that make some decisions. if they make a decision that Facebook itself doesn't agree with, the plan is we put out a press release saying, don't blame us, blame this board. Presumably that the ex-prime minister of Denmark is used to public criticism at the scale. It's just like, that's the one that gets me. Like, it's just that's who they got. They went out and got people of that class and caliber to make these decisions at the scale. Do their decisions have precedent?

Yes. So this was controversial. There was a lot of discussion about whether there should be precedents. And the ultimate decision was that, yes, they should. So the hope is that there will be something akin to case law here, where the panels of judges will make to write opinions that will then be published, that we can review that then serve as precedence. And I think that's really important.

Something that I write about a lot, often in the context of YouTube, just as much as with Facebook, is that there is no justice system on these platforms. if you make your livelihood on YouTube or on Facebook or Instagram and your account gets canceled, whether for a good reason or for a bad one, you have no real means of recourse, right? Because the company says, well, you violated our terms of service. Here's an automated notice. You can file an automated appeal. And like that is just the limit of it.

But a world where a judge could theoretically hear your case and will decide one way or another and write an opinion that then sets a precedent, it begins to create something like a justice system. And if we're going to live in a world where these companies are not dismantled or broken up, and they continue to grow in power as we are seeing them do during the pandemic, then you want there to be a justice system. Do you think that the existence of a Facebook justice system and their precedence around speech will just be adopted widely by other platforms? If I'm running a smaller platform, TikTok, right? It's kind of easy for me to say, well, we're just going to do whatever Facebook does. I doubt that TikTok in its way will actually do that.

But any other smaller social platform, you just get to draft off their expense and their work. And you're like, we're just following the Facebook rules. Yes. So the oversight board was explicitly designed so that other companies would eventually be able to join it and to have their own cases heard by it. I think Facebook would love that because it would increase the legitimacy of the board and sort of give it more momentum. I very much believe that Zuckerberg is ahead of the curve here. I don't understand how 10 years from now YouTube doesn't have something similar. And not to get too dark, but think about the number of death threats that YouTube executives face.

Think about the fact that there has already been a shooting inside YouTube headquarters, right? Obviously, that's horrible and completely unjustified. But those death threats are the actions of people who feel like they have no other recourse because there is no system of justice, right? It's the old protesters saying no justice, no peace. So while, again, and I just want to say again that I abhor that, and that is the absolute wrong way to achieve any sort of change in this world. But I also don't know how you're going to see that diminish at any time over the next five

years when YouTube is only going to get more powerful. Do you think YouTube just gloms on to this? I'm leading you to a very dystopian idea, but I'm curious if you think YouTube sets up its own independent board or this board becomes more powerful. Yeah, so the tradeoff here is, well, do we want there to be one speech board for the internet? Yeah, that's the dark idea, right? Like, yeah. That's literally the globalist conspiracy.

Yes. That there is one standard of speech for the entire world in every platform. And because it's cheaper to use Facebooks, you just use it instead of making your own. Yes. And again, like my bias is toward competition, right? I like there to be different systems where people can set different standards. So, for example, I think it's, you know, it was great when people could post porn. on Tumblr, and it's like great today that people can post porn on Twitter.

Like, people want to exercise their First Amendment rights and, you know, have some fun on the internet and not have to observe the Facebook community standards. Like, it's a good thing. Like, we have a freer and more open internet. There are also probably better examples than porn of the things that we benefit from, you know, from having to free and open internet. But, you know, there are, yeah, just sort of a lot of benefits that come from competition. So, you know, maybe the best solution isn't that we all go to the one true oversight board,

but that each of these companies sets up different kinds of justice systems. And if I were working at one of these companies, I would be thinking about it. Doesn't that quickly lead to the notion that these are just states? Right. Yes. If you want to live under the United States' policies around free speech, you can live in the United States. If you want to live in Germany where talking about Nazis is illegal, you can move to Germany and talking about Nazis will be like those are choices citizens somewhat get to make.

Obviously mobility is not quite that easy. but on the internet it is. Right. And you can just, you, you can say, I want to live under the Reddit system of moderation, which seems to be going quite well. Or I want to live under this global speech board at Facebook. Those are big decisions that you can just make, but they are, they are state level kinds of decisions.

Yeah. I mean, 100%, you know, like which institutions have held up better in the past three years, uh, federal agencies or Facebook and YouTube, you know? I think increasingly people are turning to these, in part because we live so much of our lives online, and in part because weirdly these companies are more responsive than our own government is, you know, to our demands for redress. And so we wind up treating them as states, and then they keep growing in size and power until they sort of resemble states.

And that just becomes like a kind of virtuous cycle for them. Does this mean there should be free and fair and open elections for people on the speech board? I think it's a reasonable question to ask, right? Like, once you've set up a foundation for justice, a great question to ask is like, well, what would be more equitable and what would be more just? You know, at the same time, the question of what kind of justice system do you get when judges are elected versus what kind of justice system do you get when they are appointed is very complicated, right? There are a lot of messy tradeoffs involved in that. What do you think that the line between Facebook moderation policies and Facebook's disinformation policy is? I'm thinking about the pandemic video. Like, it was just very easy. We were just, you and I just interviewed Alex Tamos about this stuff. It was very easy for the platforms to say there are things that are true about the coronavirus and there are things that are false.

And now we have some clarity. There's no murky gray area. We're just going to make decisions. In a video like the pandemic conspiracy video, they were very quick to just say, this goes away. Is that something that gets to be appealed to this board? Yeah, I mean, I can definitely see a future in which the whoever initially posted the pandemic video on Facebook will appeal, and then maybe the oversight board will have something to say about it. A very weird and kind of nerdy thing about the oversight board is thinking about on what basis they're going to make

their decisions. If you are a U.S. judge, you're making your decision based on hundreds of years of case law and the Constitution. If you're an oversight board member at Facebook, you have the Facebook community standards, you know, which change almost every day and certainly every week, at least in some way, right? But then it also seems like there's going to be the expectation that they go beyond the community standards. And they sort of apply some layer of like, well, here's what would be right, you know, based on this principle of free expression. So that all gets really interesting to me. And I'm not sure how all of those questions are going to be resolved. So I want to bring up, I mean, obviously you have covered the lives of the actual moderators

at Facebook in great detail. Facebook, actually this week, a settlement was announcing. I pay $52 million in settlement to moderators who develop PTSD on the job. Congrats to you. I think your reporting was a big part of shutting light on all of this. Facebook also announced it's using AI to fight COVID-19 misinformation. They're announced an AI challenge to detect hateful memes. that's a lot of different moving parts right you've still got human moderators you have to be the

kind of the final barrier there's a huge cost to those moderators there's an increase in the usage of AI which has always seemed like the goal for everyone across every platform to make AI just do it and that now this very analog group of judges who are going to issue precedent when they issue their decisions do that does that become part of the community guidelines and then how do you write that into the AI? I have a lot of questions for you, Casey. I mean, that is such a great question. And, you know, I should say,

I'm just in the position of having talked to the people who are building this stuff. And a lot of them come from backgrounds in, like, state building and, you know, free expression. Like, Facebook got these people out of the academic world. This is not just sort of the prototypical bunch of Silicon Valley Bros trying to build a justice system from scratch. So, like, I believe in them.

and in their sincerity. And when I met with them last year, all we talked about was the complexity of doing all of this. I mean, like, exactly that thing that you described of like, okay, there's a decision. Now what? They're still working through that. I suspect that's one reason why they're not going to hear their first cases

until the end of the year. You know, one of the things that I learned during my content moderation reporting was how weird and nuanced these decisions get, how quickly they have to change as human language and norms and behaviors change. And so them, like the oversight board writing an opinion and translating that into policy and then educating 30,000 moderators around the world on how to enforce it, you know,

it's just enormously challenging, which is, of course, why I always go back to, like, why are these companies so big? Like, it really seems like the origin of so many problems for them. It really, truly the scale of them seems like, I don't know how you would manage this. Like, the thing I've taken away from a lot of your moderator reporting is every day there's a new deck with new rules and examples and everybody has to learn them on the fly. And I don't know. Like I went to law school in law school was we're going to read one decision about when it's a tort.

If I will never forget this case. There's a guy he set up, he thought someone was trespassing this barn and he set up a gun to shoot somebody who broke into his barn. And they're like, that was just a day of is this guy guilty of murder? Because he didn't know someone was coming in, but he didn't want that. That's a day of every law student in the country. has long philosophical discussions about this very dumb, very obvious seeming thing that happened. I don't know how moderators do that.

I don't know how a robot does that. All you're doing is interpreting a decision to guide future actions. And now you've set up the same thing at massive scale for moderators who don't make a lot of money across, you know, however many countries Facebook is in. I mean, your headline is Facebook's oversight board can be overwhelmed by the challenge. And it just seems like, yeah, maybe it should be better if it was more like Reddit. And it was just lots of different groups, one overarching set of rules, but they federated it into smaller communities that can aggressively and rigorously police themselves. But that doesn't seem like what anybody wants.

I think some people do want it. And it's also how we have just always solved this problem as human beings, right? Like, yes, on one hand, we have organized ourselves into larger and larger groups over history. Like, Yvall, Noah Harare's book Sapiens is all about how, like, that's like why he thinks human beings were successful is because we're good at organizing into ever larger groups. But at the same time, like, we have always set different norms and rules for the different communities that we're in, right? Even within individuals, we have different norms in the workplace and at home and, you know, on our improv teams or whatever. So the way that that works is we just set different rules and standards for all those groups. And that tends to work better because small groups can actually enforce those

boundaries. And to the extent that people's norms evolve, they're evolving together with a group that you, you're exposed to a lot and have something in common with. So, you know, I've talked to really smart people in Silicon Valley who think that the solution to moderation on Facebook actually just kind of looks like a bunch of sliders of like how much, you know, do you want to see nudity in your feet or not? Do you want to see cursing in your feet or not? Do you want to see politics in your feet or not? And just sort of let people decide. And, you know, I can actually see a world where that manages to satisfy a lot of Republicans and a lot of Democrats. So, you know, we'll see if they move more in that direction over time. Yeah, but then we get to have a huge debate about the defaults of those sliders.

I can find the drama for you in almost any situation. All right, Casey, what happens next with the oversight board? What happens next on sort of the Facebook story? So the oversight board is still has 20 more members to appoint. They have to start hearing cases and there are a million little details to work out, some of which you've sort of brought up in this conversation. I think the big story to watch Facebook right now is it's doing an enormous amount of do-goating. You know, it's helping to test people for their COVID symptoms with a partnership through Carnegie Mellon. It's providing heat maps to show the degree to which people are abiding by a shelter in place orders. It's giving away a lot of money. It's releasing new products to help us feel

closer together. But it's also just being insanely opportunistic, right? Like, this is the once-in-a-generation chance that Mark Zuckerberg has to prove to you that the world is better because Facebook is as big as it is. And the assumption baked in there is it will be it can do even more good if it's even bigger. And so I'm actually really excited by a lot of the things that Facebook is doing, but it's also just undeniable that it is probably going to come out on the other side of this pandemic way more powerful than it was going into it, just as Apple is, just as Amazon is, right, just as Google is. And so to me, that's the real story. It's like, yes, let's keep cheering them on as they do things that are like pro-social and good for the

world, but let's also acknowledge the tradeoffs that come with just having these absolutely giant, very powerful companies. It's funny because, like, the companies that are organized against it, most of all are the telcos. Right. Right. It's like old media companies that are falling apart and then like Verizon. And it's like, well, which side of this debate do I want to be on?

Well, I mean, that's just it, right? And it's, and I'm going to be honest with it's Verizon. Let's go 90, everybody. Wow. What were you saying, Casey? Well, I mean, yeah, it's really hard to feel like you would rather root for just these other giants, right? I would just rather root for a more competitive democracy where companies, you know, rise and fall and don't just capture the regulatory state and all that. But that's a long-term project.

Well, when I build my nation state, Casey, I will have you on as our first advisor. Oh, I would love to live in Eli World. Also, the former prime minister of Denmark, we got to get her. I'm just obsessed with this idea that she's going to make Facebook. speech decisions. All right, Casey, thank you so much. Thanks, guys. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling

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Julia Alexander, welcome to the Vergecast. Thank you. You went home for the pandemic. Yeah, I'm Canadian, and I have Canadian healthcare insurance. So I booked it out of New York City, which in some ways makes me, I think, a villain based on Twitter. I think I'm fine. Yeah. There is a lot of escape from New York in general, I believe.

Okay, well, we can see you. You're in Canada. Yeah. How's Canada? Canada's doing fine? Yeah, I think so. I haven't left the house. I have no idea. Except to go to Best Buy to get a microphone. All right. Well, you're here now. There's been a lot. It's been a minute since you've been on the show. I would say the landscape of the streaming wars has changed dramatically since the last time you were on. We just got to start with Quibi. I can't not start with Quibi. Katsenberg gave this insane interview to the New York Times where he said everything that's gone wrong with Quibi, I, I, I just got to start with Quibi. I can't start with Quibi.

Cassember gave this insane interview to the New York Times where he said everything that's gone wrong with Quibi, I blame on the coronavirus. Which everything. But at the end he goes, but we own it, which is those ideas are very different. Tell me what's going on with our favorite rotating streaming service. By the disclosure, there's a Vox show and a Polygon show. They've talked to us about a show. But as you know, we disclose things all the time. It has no bearing on what happens.

So, to your disclosure, but Julia, tell us what's going on. It's been really funny to watch Quibi because they're clearly doing some kind of press tour, like Meg Whitman, who's the CEO, is out talking to, like, CNN and Deadline about what's going on with the app. And it's so funny because they're such different personalities. So Meg is like, no, our launch was great. Like, we're doing pretty well. And Jeffrey's like, it's chaos. No one watching our shows.

He literally in that interview joked about how no one's watching our shows. the daily essentials, which are kind of like the daily programming Quibi has, he just went, I guess they're not that essential. Wow. You paid a lot of money to make shows. I mean, Quibi, so his whole point about the pandemic was that Quibi is designed to be watched on the go, right? The whole thing is like, you're waiting in line for coffee and then you open up Quibi,

and now nobody can go out. And so therefore, he thinks that's why they're not watching their shows. The reason people are not watching the shows is because Quibi is not necessary. and it's not interesting, like, and it's not entertaining. Yeah, wow. I mean, point blank, you can't offer people what Netflix can, which is like a library of content that people want to tune into anyways. And the originals that you do have are like not super great.

No one's really talking about them other than to say they suck. So it's hard to get people to open up the app and spend time there when they can just open up TikTok or YouTube or Netflix and get the same thing, but they know they're going to be entertained. Do you think the difference between the way that they're talking is that Meg Whitman is trying to save the business and Jeffrey Katzenberg is trying to save face? I feel like Meg Whitman is a, I don't use the word proper, but like she's a CEO who's been trained to deal with. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, she's savvy.

And Jeffrey Katzenberg, I mean, he's a brilliant man. Like, his time at Disney speaks to that. But I think he just has always kind of been this eccentric kind of creative. And so he can go out and be like, oh, the coronavirus pandemic is the reason our app is not doing well because he has Meg Whitman who can go like, no, it's fine. We have a plan in place to make sure that we continue to grow, which is not a good plan. But this interview, if you haven't read it, just go read it. It is bonkers. He said something along the lines of now that hundreds of people are in the app, we see that some decisions we have to rethink.

The two that come to mind are, one, it is impossible to share anything. from Quibi on you can't screenshot it, you can't capture it, you've wrote about this. Like the most viral Quibi thing was like literally somebody with a phone shooting another phone. It makes no sense. So you're going to rethink that. And then you can't get it on TV. And they said, soon you'll be able to send it to TV somehow, although I'm still unclear on exactly how that works.

Those seem like very obvious decisions that they should have thought about at the beginning. How close are they to actually changing that now? So, I mean, on the second point, which is the casting, which to your point entirely, I've read like three different meg interviews this week, and they keep saying you can cast it with your iPhone to your TV, but no one explains how you can do this. I mean, like, for me, I'm not someone who's like, who thinks about it. So I was confused. I thought the only way you could do that was an Apple TV, and that's nowhere in any of these interviews. So it's all very confusing. But they're closer to being able to roll that out.

they've been working on it since before launch. Like, they kind of were aware people want to watch things on their TV. I think the most striking point is that Jeffrey Katzenberg straight up was like, we didn't know people would want to share this content. It's like, this is the issue. It's like the people in charge have absolutely a fundamental misunderstanding of their core concept of what this is, like how people use their phones, how people watch things, and how they interact with kind of that in between.

And no one at the top is thinking about this, or at least listening. to people who might be bringing this up in the rooms and going like, hey, man, we should be able to like send a screenshot or like share to TikTok where things are going to become. Where are the audiences. The cheapest marketing in human history is earned social media. And they were like, what if we spend $500 million on Super Bowl ads instead? And it just doesn't, that is very confusing to me. I, the one thing I will say about the, when you're saying it's not necessary, it's, and you've said this, I want to talk about this more directly, but it is very much cable TV castoffs.

And it is so loud. Every Quibi show is like basic cable personality screaming at you. And that's like not what you want from your phone. But you were saying there's like a business reason for why so much of the content looks like that. Right. So there's this moment with Quibi where Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman are like we have to have content. And we're going to do the Apple play, which is we're going to just do original content. We won't have any licensed whatsoever, which is what Apple did with Apple TV Plus.

And the way they did it was they went to studios and said, we are looking to buy some projects. If you want to partner with us, we're going to figure it out. So what the networks, TV networks and what the film studios did was look through their garbage bin in their basements. They were like, we're never going to make money on this. It's not going to make it through pilot season. It's not something we can order to series. And it's not going to be something we play in movies, movie theaters. And they went, sure, you can have this.

and we're going to oversell it. Because you need, you need content, and we have content to just give away. So it worked out well for like a bunch of the studios involved. Like they were like, cool, take this. We're going to partner to, we're going to invest a little bit in your company, in part because the licensing is so strange.

Like they give the shows and the movies to Quibi and then after two years the rights revert back to the studios. So hypothetically, if a show did take off, they could be like, great, we're going to take it back in two years. And now there's like a fan base and we can roll it out. So it worked out really well for them. The issue really is just that Quibi does not fulfill any need in the market at all. There's no need for it whatsoever.

And if you can't fulfill the need, then you've got to get people at least something interesting that pulls them in a little bit. At least you get their curiosity and their attention. And they don't even manage to do that well. So there's nothing in the kind of conversation that makes you go, I have to watch this Quibi thing. Like at all. Is that neat? I mean, let's grant, Katsenberg has everything wrong as because of the virus. Does that need exist if people are still commuting?

Do you think, do you think this is all different if ever wasn't at home? So the way I think about it is when I am on the subway or if I'm waiting for coffee, I'm not paying attention to what I'm watching. I just want something to do with my time. So I think of TikTok and Twitter a lot and Instagram because you're scrolling. Like you're just kind of constantly active and it distracts you for. a little bit. But it's not like you have to be super engaged with what you're watching. And with Quibi, it's like they're asking you to spend four or five, six minutes actually paying attention

to something. And it's just, I think about myself in New York where it is a commuter heavy city. And that's the other thing about his thing is like the pitch is that the idea is when you're commuting to work, you'll do this. Not many people are commuting on the subway. In the scheme, grand scheme of things of the country are commuting via subway. A lot of people are driving and they're not watching, I hope they're not watching while driving. When you're on the subway, you're like packed like sardines. You can't even hold your phone to like watch it a certain way. And so I think the idea is like, do people want something to distract themselves with when they are in these moments of going from A to B? Totally. Do they have something that does that?

Yes, they have TikTok and they have every other form of social media. Yeah. So like for me, the commuting thing is, is that, does that a necessary service? It is if I've never used a phone before and haven't figured out what I want to do when I'm commuting with my phone. If I'm like the, I'm like, oh, duh, out of nowhere. I have no memory of anything. What is this magical gadget in my hand? What should I do with it? And then there's a video service. Then I'm like, yep, okay, this is necessary. Two, and like the quick bites, like failure in between time, the whole concept, five minutes is too long. The thing that I keep thinking about is like the games that I like to play, sometimes when I'm in a meeting, where like threes and hold down, where it takes literally four seconds. Twitter is kind of the same way, like four seconds. And it pauses. If you look up from it or don't interact with it, it stops. And then you come back and it's still in the same state. With Quibi or anything else that wants to fill that in between time, Instagram stops, Twitter stops, game stop.

Like, you, if you look up and take your attention away from the phone and you come back to your phone, it's the same thing. With Quibi, you actually have to, like, hit pause. And I know that seems dumb because hitting pause is really easy. But it actually matters a lot because it's like 20% more immersive than Instagram. And it requires 20% more effort to break that that immersive concentration. And that is just a killer when you're trying to compete for the Starbucks line when the Starbucks line comes back. That's exactly it. I think it's a fundamental.

I tweeted this the other day. it's like a fundamental misunderstanding of what the major function of this app is. Like, they have an idea of how people use their phones and the issue is that they have a major misunderstanding, a fundamental misunderstanding of how people actually use their phones. And that's harder to solve than just having bad content. Like, that is, it's easy to solve bad content.

You can, like, Netflix kind of figured out a way to do it. For a while, Netflix had really bad originals. And then they were just like, oh, we'll figure out a way to fix it. And they have, Quibi doesn't necessarily just have a content problem. It has like a usage problem and a behavioral problem. And I think that's something that takes a lot of time to figure out. All right. Well, we're overdoing it on Quibi.

It's the least consequential streaming service I can think of it. But it's fascinating. Julie, we weren't here, but we just had Casey on. Casey ended on this note of what this whole industry needs is more competition. There's a part of me that wants Quibi to succeed as like the premium mobile YouTube. Like that's the dream. That was the idea, right? Like, Jeffrey Katzenberger is going to compete with YouTube.

And he's going to take attention away from YouTube by paying, by paying big media companies and whoever else. And I don't know, the Anna Kendrick show, which is insane, where she makes friends with her boyfriend sex doll. Like, all right, like, all of it's, that's true. That's a real Quibi show. Wow. It's insane.

Jeffrey Katzenmert is going to spend that money and he's going to build a competitor to YouTube. Right. And then YouTube won't be this, like, single platform that makes everybody mad all the time because you have a competition. Like, conceptually, that's great. I hope it works out. I would say the execution has been what you're saying. Just a bunch of misunderstandings about how people use phones.

We'll see if they can turn around. Last pitch, Quibi should buy Vimeo, the end. Oh, no. Don't, no, no more marchers. I think it's a really fun litmus test to ask people just to name a Quibi show on their own to see what they come up with. Yeah, just do like, I was joking around in Slack. And I was like, if we did quizzes, we should do like that, is this a 30 Rock show?

Like fake show on 30 Rock or Quibi. series. Yeah, they're real close. So let's talk about my other favorite doom streaming service, HBO Max. You're not your total opposites on this. It's so funny. I think it's going to be successful. Because it has friends. They're, they're rolling forward. I mean, they're, they are launching it soon. We're going to be covering it in detail. You're going to be covering in detail. They sent out a press kit, which is the most elaborate press swag kit I've ever received in my life. Yeah. It weighed like 400 pounds. It came with a Bluetooth speaker. So they're all in. It still seems very confusing.

Who's going to get it for free? Where it's going to go. What platforms it's going to be on appears to be an issue of some dispute? What is going on with the HVMAX? I think that you hit on the core issue that they're facing, which is a branding issue specifically, which is the AT&T story. Jesus. Yeah, the core issue is this branding to the point where they're launching in two weeks.

And the question they, like John Stanky, who is current COO, is about to be the CEO in July, gets the most is like, why did you name it HBO Max? Like, that's still the number one question he gets. And like, they've brought in like teams of executives to explain this decision, which is like not a good sign for when you're naming something. They're like, well, we looked at Warner Brothers, but we thought, ah, do people really care about Warner Brothers, which is not something you should say. And then they, they were like, you know, and then people.

people really associate HBO with what we're doing and then the face of HBO Max is Elmo and it's like is Elmo the face of HBO like I there's just so much confusion happening but I think what HBO Max does have going for it more than anything else is like that they do have originals lined up for launch which is more than you can say for a lot like Peacock had to which is NBC Universal's I don't know if you want to do your disclaimer now I'll just do them all I'll just do them all at once Dieter's wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. NBC Universal is an investor in Vox Media, which is the parent company of The Verge. We are producing a Netflix show.

Vox.com and Polygon have a Quibi show. And they have talked to us about one. There might be more, but that's enough for now. I think that's, I keep joking that every story of Julia writes will have as much Julia copy as disclosure copy. And that's really, that's my goal for the verge. continue. I jokingly, but not so jokingly said that my dream kind of guest appearance on anything would be

Elmo has a late night show now on HBO Max, and I really want to be on Elmo's late night show. So then we can throw that disclaimer in. But I think the thing about HBO Max, what they have is they have an original series, kind of a full slate, which Peacock does not have, because of the coronavirus impacting them a little bit harder than it impacted Warner Media in terms of where they're at in production. So they have originals. They've got a huge slate of movies that they're going to roll out, which is really interesting. They have a social strategy, which is something that the other streamers have not talked about.

HBO Max is like very, WarnerMedia is like very invested in like how you can share what they are giving you, which I think is the most forward-thinking thing of streaming service could do, which is what Netflix is really good at doing. So I think all these things, one, make it like an appetiting kind of streaming service. But two, the fact that they're basically going to roll in everyone who subscribes to HBO and HBO Max gives them that kind of immediate growth from the start to kick off the Disney Plus kind of growth where it's like we already are going to have all these people that they're just going to have it from the get-go. And John Stanky said something really interesting yesterday or might have been today. He said that HBO Max is both the future of kind of like the Warner Media streaming and from a linear perspective. Like he was like there's no difference now like HBO Max is our linear plan. It's our streaming plan. It's like the plan. What? Yeah, I was like thinking about it a lot because it didn't make any sense. But then I was like I kind of get what he's saying, which is they're taking these kind of all these

subscribers to HBO. They're looking at how they're going to cross promote like what they're doing with the original content on their networks like TBS, TNT, although there. And basically the goal is like just to bring them into HBO Max. Like the goal is to just bring them into HBO Max and then Warner Media and AT&T sports divisions and news divisions do their thing, which I get, like I get what he's saying. And I think the investment is there and the thought is there for HBO Max to like succeed. Yeah. I'm very bullish on it.

But that's like we're supposed to be bullish on things that haven't launched yet. Like hopefully they succeed and there's more competition. It's like great. I buy it. you're just describing like a bunch of execs in a beautiful AT&T conference room coming up with like an org chart plan that looks like it should work right like they're just moving boxes but the boxes represent like hundreds if not thousands of employees who all have to like know what is going on communicate with each other and like not hate each other this is not stuff that like typically goes well at a media company this is not stuff that typically goes well at giant telecom right like i mean it didn't go well for hbo it hasn't like all of hbos executives left the first time they did this kind of like box exercise like i get it it seems like what they want is i i keep thinking of the disney plus app which literally the only thing we watch in it is both versions of the

lion king like that's like the live action you what that's upsetting to me my daughter max likes the live version no it's really upsetting because you talk about hbacca max my actual human child mags. So we argue. I argue with my two-year-old every day about which version I'm going to watch. And then I lose because she wants for a lines. Anyway, the point of this is the top-level organization of the Disney Plus app appears to be what AT&T wants for HBO.

You open it and they show you HBO, HBO, the premium HBO stuff, a bunch of Sesame Street stuff, a bunch of Crunch Earl stuff. The problem is Disney is at least somewhat thematically unified, right? Like it's a bunch of cartoons and superhero movies that are cartoons and Star Wars movies that are cartoons and then an entire extended universe of cartoon like things. Right. Like you know what it is. Like even its divisions, they're different brands, but they're just little universes for even Pixar in its way, right? Sesame Street and Westworld and Crunchyroll do not have any thematic unity whatsoever.

Like those are just different things. I can make a strong case that Sesame Street and Westworld exist in the same universe. All right, that's actually, I would read that. I was just about to say, you're going to put that on the side. I'm just saying, like, in what universe, so Netflix does this, but they, it's Netflix. They just have the audience that comes along, and they have an algorithm that serves it to you. They do not try to show you a bunch of kid stuff in one column. They're showing you a very personalized version of Netflix for you.

It doesn't seem like that's what HBO wants to do. I feel actually like the opposites. They have spoken a lot about the recommendation. I think they are taking, from what I can tell, and yeah, we don't know how this is going to go. It could fail. But the way they've been talking about it is like using the pillars of IP that they have, which is the Disney play, which is like you open it up and you could go, yeah, Warner Brothers,

Crunch Your Roll, like whatever you want, it's there. But at the same time, it's going to be like extremely based on what you watch. They're going to figure out their recommendation pretty quickly. And the other thing I think they've taken away from Netflix, which is the most interesting, because it's very, very, like, network television is, like, aim down the middle, just aim for the most and have enough in each pocket. So HBO Max, when they came out, the Warner executives, they were, like, we're investing in a bunch of teen content. We want teen audiences. And you just don't, again, it's like, you hear HBO. And you're like, really? Like, this is, you guys did Oz. It's like one of your first favorite shows. But they had this idea where they're like, HBO will be HBO. It's going to exist here because it is just going to be here. But we're going to have the eventually the Harry Potter section. And we're going to have like this kind of sci-fi section, which Warner Brothers has.

We're going to have our classics. We're going to have our anime. And I think it will just start recommending things to you. They're also doing the weird groupings. Like they're going to do the like, if because you like this, here's like an actual grouping. You open it up and there's like a bunch of things. It almost feels like a different section.

So I think they're trying to figure out how to personalize. owning the amount of stuff they own because they have so, Warner Media has so much content. We'll see. I'm excited for it only because it's, I mean, AT&T is like literally the death star.

Like I'm excited for, for them to like fire the cannon and just like see what happens. Like it's, this is the bet that AT&T is making. This is why John Stanky is going to be the CEO because he has some sort of understanding of this business.

Like they put him in charge of it for 20 minutes. So I think that he can say, well, I used to be in charge of Warner Media. I understand it. This is a transformational moment for one of the biggest and most important companies, like, in the business. And I still kind of don't get it, but I'm very excited to see it. Like, we're at that moment just before they launched the app where all we can do is talk about

what they've talked about. And they can only speak in corporate buzzwords. Like, you read any stanky interview. Like, what are you saying? Well, I just think, like, the advantage that specifically HBO Max, to an extent, Peacock, but I think NBC Universal has, like, just so many problems line ahead of them that they don't know what to do with. I think what they have, which is what Netflix had and Hulu had, is like this library stuff. People are going to sign up for it because they either want HBO and they will just get HBO Max because that's what they're doing.

Or they want, you know, access to friends really during this pandemic. They, like, want friends. So they'll sign up for this thing. and then AT&T and Comcast have these streaming services that have a ton of content on them. When you look at Apple TV Plus, you look at Quibi. Part of the reason that they seem to be struggling is because they don't have this library of content. And no one's looking for new things really. Like you're looking for a new thing on Netflix because you're opening Netflix.

And you're like, oh, there's a new Netflix show. I'm just going to watch it. But you're not like actively going like, oh, I wonder what's coming out this week on this service. And I'm going to start looking for it. that's what could be an Apple bet on was the idea that there was a need for more content that people would just start subscribing to everything and what AT&T and Comcast and to an extent Disney because they own Hulu like Hulu was their big bet really it was Disney Plus and Hulu they were like no we're just going to have as much as we possibly can and people will just

come and they'll find new stuff there and they'll just start opening it up like you open up Netflix like TV Guide like that's just what we'll start happening you brought up Apple TV Plus you've been digging into their numbers a little bit how was it going over there? No, Bueno. Not great, Bob. This is not great. I think there's like the common business thing, right, is like the business school rule is you don't say a number unless you're sure that by this time next year, you'll at least be at that same number, like, hopefully a little higher.

So like when Disney said 10 million first day, they're like, oh, they're pretty confident that a year from now they'll have more than 10 million subscribers. And now they're about to hit their 20, 24 goals by like the end of the year. Apple hasn't said anything, and that's not new for Apple. You guys know Apple better than I do. They don't say numbers for a lot of things. But anytime it comes up, it's just not even like anything beyond. We're really happy with the engagement. And it's like, what does that mean?

So we're relying, as we do with every streaming service on third party kind of data looking into it. So all the data that we are kind of seeing is not promising. But then again, I mean, Apple's like this weird position like Amazon is where they, it almost doesn't matter for them. Like, it's a product they can offer people, people use it, and they're happy to, like, go and be at the award shows

and have the acclaim. And it's pocket change for them. Like, it's whatever. It's crazy to me they're not growing because they literally give it away free for a year if you buy an Apple product. And their sales, they keep selling phones and iPads.

So, like, a lot of people are getting it free of Apple TV and they have the numbers flat. It kind of comes down to, like, that we are oversaturated and we know this. And like it comes down to the quibby, the whole social media thing, which is like Tiger King, which was Netflix, was like a whatever documentary. But that show just became the meme and they saw a huge increase in traffic. And the thing that I do, I have a Twitter, a tweet that column open and I just have certain words that I use to figure out what people are talking about on TikTok. And they'll be like, oh, I've started listening to this

TikTok audio, which is taken from like BoJack Horseman. I'm going to watch BoJack. And it's that earned media where Netflix is like great. Like that like cool and that's just not happening with Apple stuff. Or could be no one's watching it and then no one's finding it. So now you're in this abyss of just an oversaturated level of content. And that's that's like not not great. Yeah. I've definitely noticed the only way to engage your friends now is to call them on the video chat platform.

And all of these conversations have now just turned into what are you watching? Because there's nothing else to do. It's not like where have you. gone on vacation like you can't do that like would you go to a cool route nope that's out like it's down to what are you watching and in every show that my friends and this is a very limited sample it probably doesn't mean anything but it's always Netflix and Hulu that that's where the shows live I mean today I tweeted about like I really I have to restart watching NYPD Blue because I'm like in a really old cop phase of my TV stuff I just so I was like oh where where can I go watch this and

it was only Hulu and I was like I guess I Like, I'm in Canada, so I'm using weird VPNs. Wow. But, like, that's the only place to go watch this thing. And I feel like that's a lot of people where right now you want comfort TV more than anything else. You'll find a new show usually on Netflix because you're opening Netflix. I mean, that's Outer Banks. Everyone watched Outer Banks because Netflix promoted it and you opened it up.

And you were like, I guess I'll watch this teen show. But otherwise, it's like I'm watching 30 Rocker. Oh, here's my HBO Max idea, The Wire for Teens. Think about it. How do I pitch this? Bob? I feel like that's partially euphoria. Fair.

That's actually totally fair. All right. One last thing I want to talk about real quickly. We're way over time. But there's a lot of drama going on with theaters, with release dates around movies. My routine for years was on Friday. I would just open up the iTunes app and see what movies were out. Like, I wasn't going to the theater anymore.

I was just like open on Friday and like, what movie are we going to watch tonight? Like, what are we going to rent? And then I rent it from voodoo because the internet. Anyway, it doesn't matter. But that's not like that cadence has slowed way down. The studios and the theater owners are all on a big fight. What's the status there? Are we, is my dream of day and date release for streaming coming?

Because I really like that to happen. Oh, yeah. I was talking to, uh, we have a Facebook group with like reporters who talk about who report on streaming. And we were talking about this. And it's kind of like the thing that's kind of like the thing that's going to happen. Movie theaters are not going to go away, at least right now. Movie theaters not going to go away. And studios are not going to give up that relationship. Because

when things do return to somewhat normal, they're going to make a lot of money on their big movies. And they want to make a lot of money on their big movies. But the window will disappear. Like that window is basically gone. The really funny thing to me is so they're fighting the background stories that all these studios, which now, most importantly, now have streaming services that they want to promote are going like, oh, we'll just pull movies that we're going to release theatrically and put them on streaming services or they're going to go through premium video on demand for two weeks and then they're going to go to a service, which is what's happening with Scoop, which is a Warner Media Scooby-Doo movie and it'll eventually go to HBO Max.

And the theaters are really upset because they're like, hey, man, like we're already dying. If you could just help us out, that would be super good. That would be super good. We'd appreciate it. And the execs are like, but it doesn't make sense. for us. Like, we lose, we make more money going premium video on demand. We can grow our streaming services. I mean, Disney has talked about this for years where Alan Horn, who's their chairman, was like, why would we make a movie that's going to make $10 million? Why would we put that in

theaters when we can just put it on a streaming service? Like, and then there's new content. Versus like Avengers is going to make $2 billion. Yeah, that will be in theaters for six months. But it's funny to me that the theaters now are threatening to, like, not carry certain movies. like AMC said we're not going to carry universal movies. And it's like you are $5 billion in debt. And you are absolutely going to carry drastic Whirl 3 and the ninth Fast and Furious movie. And it's like the idea is like, are you going to say like we're not going to carry Warner Brothers

movies? Like no, the future of this industry is now relying, reliant on like Christopher Nolan's tenant hitting July 17th. And that's going to basically determine whether or not movie theaters will be open, like will carry on in the summer. So it's like the idea that they're. fighting with them about this, they want to show, they want to stand up for themselves and I respect that. And they want to be like, hey, we are not doing super great. We need support. At the same time,

I think it's ridiculous to, in this day and age with streaming and what's happening in the industry, to just go, expect the studios to not utilize their own tools. Yeah. You think AMC or Eagle gets bought? 100%. I was talking to someone who said it'll just be consolidation again. I mean, so the reason the theaters are upset is because this happened in 19, between 1999 and 2001, the theatrical landscape in the United States just shifted completely. And it was really devastating. AMC got bought. Regal got bought.

And now there's like a few corporations that are buying up a bunch of the movie theater chains. And they're scared. And I get that. And it's like they are there. They know that what's happening right now is an accelerated trend that would have happened five years from now. The pandemic just made it happen right now. And so they're they're putting up this defense where they don't want to be forgotten.

And it's like or go under completely. And that's not going to happen. But I do think they have to acknowledge. like we are in this weird revolutionary moment and it sucks, but you can work with them. And working with them means getting rid of that window. The interesting party in this is Netflix, because for so long,

no one would carry Netflix movies because Netflix was like, we're going to go straight to streaming day one, or we're going to do one, two week release and then go straight. And now that the studios are doing that, Netflix can be like, hey, AMC, carry our movies. Like, there's precedent now for them to argue that. So that will be fun to see if Netflix starts going, like we want our movies in theaters, in like major chains.

But who would, why would I go watch what's, it's extraction? Yeah, like the Chris Hemsworth movie. Like, why on earth would I go watch that movie in a theater? Because Chris Hempthworth deserves to be on a big screen. I haven't, I don't, I can't even bring myself to watch it on my TV right now. It's a bad movie. Right. Like, that's the, Netflix doesn't, their movies are not at that level.

Also, Chris Hemsworth. is getting more than enough of our money right now. His app just charged people $99.9. All right. Now this is officially too long. Now we're just lobbying our individual complaints about Chris Hemsworth. He's too pretty. Four minutes on Chris Hemsworth.

All right, Julia, what happens next? What are the next big dates people should be looking at for? May 27th is HBO Max launches. July 15th is when Peacock launches nationally. It's in a soft launch right now. And then July 17th, going to the last topic, is when Tenet is supposed to be released. And if that movie comes out, you'll have a summer of movies. And if that movie does not come out, you will not have a summer of movies.

Wow. All right. All right. All of America's hopes right on you, buddy. Thank you so much, Julia. We're going to have you back. I mean, things are heating up. So we'll have you back quite often, I think.

Good to talk to you. Thank you. All right, everybody. That's the Veritcast. We went super long. But I think it was worth it. I mean, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.

I did. I did. I need to get off because my USBC, HDMI capture card is here, and I'm dying to go get it. So I got to go and mess with my cameras. But thank you for listening. We'll be back.

Our Tuesday interview episode, big deal. I'm excited about it. I've been hyping it, I think, for a week now, but I think it's been good. We've got a big week of interview episodes coming out. So check out Tuesday. We're going to be teasing it.

I'll be a big deal. Back next week with the chat show, another rotating cast of characters from the verge. very excited about it. You can subscribe to Dieter's newsletter, processor, the verge.com slash newsletter. You can subscribe to Casey's newsletter, the interface, verge.com slash interface. T.C. Sotic, our executive editor does a newsletter of happy things on the internet called Home Screen, which is a nice relief in this time. You can check that out too. Julie, where can I find you? On Twitter at Loudmouth, Julia. Deeter is at Backlon. I'm at Reckless.

It's doing it. Casey's at Casey Newton. Dan is at DC. Seifert. We'll talk to you soon. That's Verchast. Rock and roll. I don't know what to say. Paul. We can just keep saying. Paul. Okay.