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

This week on the Bird Chast, Dan Seeper joins us to talk about the 13th track with 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 to talk about Facebook's Oversight Board, it's a big moderation plan, and then Julia Alexander joins us to talk about the Streaming Wars. That's the Bird Chast, come out now. Hello, and welcome to the Bird Chast, the flagship podcast of small, but struggling phone divisions.

See? Ooh. It's a little preface of what's to come. I'm your friend, Eli.

Deer Bohn is here. I'm your mortal enemy. That's good. See, we won his conflict in the show.

We're going to have three guests today. Dan Seeper's 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 the 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's going to be a website. 45 million Google engineers are building it. The entire population of Europe is working on this website.

Anyhow, the response to your website is for nine weeks since that website was promised. It's still not here. In order to move forward, I assure you what America needs is a robust testing and tracing infrastructure. We do not have such an infrastructure.

It's been nine weeks since the first step was announced. That's that. Here's some other virus coverage on the verge. Zoe Schaefer 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 a video video.

It's like, be prepared. And you press it. It's just waves of scary things with dots on a map that could happen. It's like nuclear capacity.

One of them, by the way, is immigration invasion. It's crazy. It's a crazy company. 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 posts about it, they kind of make a point where they're kicking off sellers all the time. They just want somebody to pursue 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 regulation usually is for a reason. It's usually to help cement the big company's power. That's 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 they can make its own rule.

Because right now, they're making up whatever price schedule means that opens up the system. 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 three people in the car. Also, the driver app, before they accept a ride, they have to take a selfie or show them they're wearing a mask and they're doing a recognition. So that's pretty interesting.

Dijon 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. Valorant drove 334 million hours watched on Twitch in April.

A game called Just Chatting drove 134 million hours in April. That's been going to both League of Legends and Fortnite. Fortnite has been growing since January, which, you know, there's just like me and the 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. But you see what's happening. It's just like the amount of influx into these live streaming platforms is huge.

It is going to be a big story, but Jon's all over it. I've got two Tesla items here. I feel like next week, we're just going to have a list on next week to talk about. And we'll probably have Sean, too, because he's going to write him story after story about what's going on with Tesla and his factories.

Tesla reopened in Scremont factory. They reopened in Giga factory 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 is 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 is our AI reporter. He tweeted a CNBC story about Elon's relationship to the AI community. And pointed out everybody in that story was off the record or on the background.

They didn't want to be named because they don't want to disturb the relationship with Elon. Or they just don't want to be disturbed by Elon. Sometimes you just want your mentions to be chill. Yeah.

So James tweets a story. It says, it's notable that the Elon community, I think we can call them 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 as artificial general intelligence. And then Elon responded to that tweet by, just think Facebook sucks. So it's just been a weird week of Elon stuff for us.

This week, 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, 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 everything work from home forever. That's 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 on the site. But now we've got to talk about soft ones and laptops.

Because honestly, what are we here for? Dan, a lot of reviews going on this. Let's start with laptops. It's been like past week or two of news and reviews.

And I know you guys talked 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 did you 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 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, you've got to start. You've got to rewind and, like, really assess where your decisions are.

I will 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 Air is probably the best option for most people at this point. Unless if you know you need a Pro, or like Deere 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, and the real Pro, what should I do, is off the charts. Like, somehow Apple has completely just duffed the differentiation between these three products, and no one really knows where they should land.

Like, we had to set up a custom Slack room for Casey Newton to work in 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 to buy, and the real Pro is the one that won't overheat the second you try to do more than one thing at once. I think you got that all wrong. 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 super hard on Chrome, you might have problems. You should probably save it 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 half an hour, you know, you need to export some video, you 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. Like, that's the main, 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 of the 10th Gen Intel processors, which actually has, like, modern 20-20 specs? And I'm a little bit, like, they've made a good video saying, like, this is the difference that 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 step back and look at it from, you know, 10,000 feet, because, you know, I can walk on air, walk in the clouds, I am actually a little bit baffled. Actually, if I'm Apple, I discontinue the base of MacBook Pro. I don't get it. Yeah, I kind of assume that Apple has some sort of market research here saying that a lot of people buy that price bracket of, like, $1,300 to $1,600 MacBook Pros, right?

And that's, like, the only reason I can think of for that to exist, in that they, 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 $1,800 plus bucks. But that's the only explanation I could possibly think about. You know what I think it is? I think that Apple knows that there's a huge groundswell of demand for an affordable laptop that has a touch bar.

That's horrible. That was just a troll. Dieter's at backline. You can tweet at him.

But this brings me to the, right, Dell put out a new XPS 17, XPS 15. Super interesting features. 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. Touch bar aside, Apple is just flat. So, Dan, I'm just curious why we picked 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, taking 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 tripod. 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-A stuff in the box. And you can get, like, a really well-specced one for, like, $1,300.

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 3, 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 13. The HPs in that price range, like, have 16x9 screens. They're more trying to get you to do a two-in-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.

And you're still going to 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, and Apple's been using the same designs for four years now. It definitely feels like they're due for a 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 you brought back after 10 years. Like, they are toe-toe-toe in design and hardware capabilities and, like, 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 16-inch. But, like, 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 at all. Yeah, me either.

You know, a couple years ago, there was the transition from dual-core, 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, it nose-dived, like, six, seven hours. And that was, like, everything. The best I could get out of it for a real workload was, like, seven hours.

And then, like, if you read, you know, his most recent review of the MacBook Pro 13, like, in a real workload where he's not babying the battery and he's using applications he wants to use in his workload, he's, like, in about four and a half, five hours. That's bad. Like, I don't know what Apple is doing that's different. But it definitely feels like, like, you remember, like, when MacBook Air switched to, I think it was Haswell processors, and they went for, like, 12 hours of battery life?

Yeah. It was huge. Like, everybody just went for it. And then they just kind of, like, chipped away at that and gone down.

Yeah, I mean, I think the DCR reports, if you run a MacBook, the new MacBook Air in Windows, the display gets 100 nits brighter. What? I didn't see that, yeah. Which is crazy.

It's crazy now, right? So, normally, macOS, it runs at 400 nits, and in Windows, it runs at 500 nits. And it's the same otherwise. It doesn't get, like, more pixels.

It doesn't grow a touchscreen. Yeah. 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 asked Apple about battery life, the first thing they said to me was, do not run the brightness. Do not run the display for this. 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 seeing all over the place now.

I think the Windows side, A, might be doing it more aggressively, but it is just wilding that Windows laptops are suddenly getting better battery life than the Mac. That was not the case two or three years ago, at all. Conspiracy. You ready?

First cast is the 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 optimization effort into ARM. That sort of implies there's one optimization engineer in Apple, and he's making her go into one room instead of another room. That's just how it works.

Tim Cook is like, where do I dole out the optimization dollars? There's a Mac team, so they've got to be working on it. I mean, the remarkable thing is, if you, in the abstract thing, where is Apple better in laptops? It used to be hardware design, and they're like, meh, but their laptops still feel more solid.

But it's been screen quality and battery life, and in both of those cases, and track this, but in screen quality and battery life, they're falling behind a little bit. They're still winning, I think, in overall build quality. Their designs might not look as sexy, but they feel a little bit sturdier, especially now that we have a keyboard you can actually trust. But yeah, this is why I titled my review back the return to baseline.

It's 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 Apple response to Windows stuff. If you haven't been paying attention to 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's super interesting. But that aside, we've got to talk about what's going on with the Pixel.

So, the information has a blockbuster report that came out on May 13th, pointing out that, number one, Mario Karaz, 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 Lavoie, who is 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. Sales are, you know, 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 Osterloh, is talking to his staff reportedly right ahead of the Pixel 4 launch. And here, I'm just going to quote the information. Osterloh informed staff about his own misgivings. He told them he did not agree with some of the decisions made about the phone, according to people who were present at the meeting.

In particular, he was disappointed in its battery power. Weren't we all? Weren't we all? That 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? Rick Osterloh is the head of Google's hardware division.

Yep. Did they just give them a finished phone? It's unclear. I don't know.

It's possible that, like, 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... Not how big 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. Yes. You would think that they would be, like, a couple years ago, they'd say, oh, HTC made that decision. LG made that decision.

Well, 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 and all their engineers and that whole hardware division, and then you're like, keep doing what you do without noting that HTC was a failure that collapsed, meaning that you two buy them.

Like, you don't let them make the same decisions. Like, that's actually the funniest thing about this is they were, HTC made good phones, right? But their decisions about what was important in the phones are historically not rewarded by the market. Right.

So you 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 in front of, 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 a camera hardware and they, like, slap the rest of the 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 story.

I think, Dan, you were in a thread with Walt on Twitter. Walt pointed out our story said this, but most stories didn't notice this. Like, people don't sell it 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 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, major accessories for them? HTC might have paid companies at the launch to like, spec to come out with a handful of cases. But like, you're not getting Samsung or iPhone levels of accessories. 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, buyer's 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 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 say this is supposed to be a real business now. Like, that's why Oslo was put in charge of the hardware business, 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 3 million sold, that's not a profitable smartphone business by any long shot.

So they're still way far away from that. Yeah, well, the 4A is we think it will 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's a leak of like a billboard, but they'll do like three ads for it. My complaint with Pixel is Google never markets it hard enough and so it never has a chance.

And I actually think if Google is 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. Rumors are pointing to the Pixel 5 maybe using the 765 or maybe the 768 instead of the Qualcomm 865 processor and so it's not going to be like a spec 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 a thousand bucks 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. The only thing they need to do is develop a messaging strategy that can piece with iMessage so that they can peel off some of those iPhone SE buyers. Look, you're getting emoji tapbacks in RCS soon, so, all right.

We can't do this. We've got more to cover on this episode of the broadcast. 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 Noon. Hey, I'm Matt Michelle, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your 4U page and I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait, don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like A Lot as in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning you read three headlines and you immediately think oh, that sounds like a lot.

I can't deal with all this but guess what? I can deal with it and I'm going to get into it every Friday. I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying.

Maybe an actor. They go, feminism is gone too far. You go, why? Because it's Sadie Hawkins' dad?

Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show, I'm challenged this turn. I just got to hang out and try to do stuff. Give them all the charm line.

Could be a politician. Basically anyone who responds to my cold DMs. We're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio so yes, you can watch it on YouTube or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is not the place to get the news but it is the place to feel a little better about it.

That Sounds Like A Lot part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Maria Sharapova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey.

Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, thanks for having me, guys. It's been a minute. So I was realizing that Facebook announced a Supreme Court for speech across the world and we like read a headline 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 their 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 Vox 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 a division of Facebook. Why is that the first thing? Because we also saw a story from April Lacer over 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 as a principle of free expression and so they went out and they found people who believe that. You could argue that it is also smart politically to do this in a way where the main effect initially 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 Marsha 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 healthy. Yeah, I mean, they're damn if they do and damn 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 it's just like, I don't know how you, like the Republican response to this, the Josh Hawley, the Marshall Blackburn, Brendan Carr, who is an FCC commissioner very much in the G. He went off on a long tweet story about how all these people are liberals who hate Trump and do you want people who hate Trump controlling Facebook? It's like, what is the other choice?

Well, exactly. And so, you know, I talk 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 saying, we very strongly disagree with what the board said here, but we are honor bound to uphold their judgment and that will shift the entire conversation into the makeup of the Oversight Board. The Oversight Board is too liberal, it's conservative, right?

And so they're going to try to get 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. Yeah, but I mean, it's sort of like, you know, 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 Cersei Lannister 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 seeing 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, they walked that headline back. to announce the board in December and it just took longer than they thought and then there was a 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 and 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 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, will write opinions that will then be published that we can review that then serve as precedents 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, 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 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 precedents 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 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 curfew. 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's 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 protester saying no justice, no peace. So, well, again, 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 onto 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 trade-off here is well, do we want there to be one speech board for the internet? Yeah, that's the dark idea, right? Like, that's literally the globalist conspiracy that there's one standard of speech for the entire world and every platform and because it's cheaper to use Facebooks you just use it instead of making your own. Yes, and again, 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 was great when people could post porn on Tumblr and it's great today that people can post porn on Twitter. People want to exercise their first amendment rights and have some fun on the internet and not have to observe the Facebook community standards. It's a good thing.

We have a freer and more open internet. There are also probably better examples than porn of the things that we could do from having a free and open internet. But there are just 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 want to live in Germany where Taiwan Nazis is illegal you can move to Germany and Taiwan Nazis will be like those are choices citizens somewhat to make. Honest mobility is not quite that easy but on the internet it is, right?

You can say I want to live under the Reddit system of moderation which seems to be doing 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 state level kinds of decisions. Yeah, I mean 100%. You know, like which institutions have held up better in the past three years? 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 that 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 trade-offs involved. than that what do you think that the line between facebook moderation policies and facebook's disinformation policy is right i'm thinking about the pandemic video like it was very easy we were just you and i just interviewed alexander about this stuff it was very easy for the platforms to say there are things that are true about the coronavirus things are false and now we have some clarity there's no murky gray area we're just gonna make decisions in a video like the pandemic conspiracy video they're very quick to just say this goes away is that something that's 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 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 uh interesting to me i'm not sure how all 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 of facebook in great detail facebook actually this week uh a settlement was announcing a 52 million dollars in settlement to moderators who develop ptsd on the job congrats to you i think your reporting was a big part of shedding light on all this facebook also announced it's using ai to fight covid-19 misinformation there's an ai challenge to detect hateful memes that's a lot of different moving parts right you still got human moderators who have to be the kind of final barrier there's a huge cost to those moderators there's an increase in usage of ai which has always seemed like the goal for everyone across every platform to make ai just do it and 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 i mean that is such a great question and you know i should say i'm just in the position of having talked to people who are building this stuff and a lot of them come from backgrounds in like state building and uh 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 um 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 like okay there's a decision now what um they're still working through that i suspect that's one reason why they're not gonna hear their first cases until the end of the year um 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 we're 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 uh like it really seems like the origin of so many problems really truly the scale of them seems like i just i don't know how you would manage this like the 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 i was going to read one decision about when it's a tort if i will never forget this case there's a guy who set up he thought someone was trespassing this barn and he set up a gun to shoot somebody who broke into his barn and like that was just a day of is this guy guilty of murder because he didn't know someone was going to be wrong 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 decisions to guide future actions and now you set up the same thing at master 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 over time to be overwhelmed by the challenge and it just seems like yeah maybe it's better if it was more like reddit and it was just lots of different groups one overarching set of rules but we 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 um like yes on one hand we have organized ourselves into larger and larger groups over history like um uh you've all know harari's book sapiens is all about how like that's like why he thinks human beings are 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 um the way 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 um to the extent that people's norms evolve they're evolving together with a group that 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 uh 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 um 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 then we get to have a huge debate about the defaults and the sliders i can find the drama for you in almost any situation all right so what happens next to the oversight board what happens next on the facebook story so um the oversight board is still has 20 more members to a point they have to start hearing cases and there are a million little details to work out as some of which you've sort of brought up in this conversation i think like a big story to watch facebook right now is um it's uh doing an enormous amount of do-goating uh you know it's uh helping to test people for their covid symptoms with a partnership through carnegie melon it's uh providing heat maps to show the degree in which people are abiding by shelter and place orders it's giving away a lot of money it's releasing new products to help us go closer together um 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 even it could 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 trade-offs that come which is 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 correct 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 let me ask you it's verizon let's go 90 everybody wow what were you saying casey well i mean yeah it's really hard to to feel like you would rather root for just these other giants right i would just rather root for a more competitive uh democracy where companies you know rise and fall and don't just capture the regulatory state and all that 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 the light world also the former prime minister of denmark we gotta get her i'm just obsessed with this idea that she's gonna make facebook speech decisions all right casey thank you so much thanks guys so we are 250 years into this american experiment and i say it's going okay i give us like a c plus there is no perfect past but there is also no exclusively negative past because humans are gonna human that's what we do i think the story of america is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of america to expand those principles to include more people what's going to determine the next 250 years of america and how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve okay so i'm just gonna be a jerk here because i'm a historian so we have to have a prologue explaining you know we the people okay you know i just can't remember from schoolhouse rock we the people i don't know before we're perfect you did i establish justice what is it ensure domestic tranquility so you're talking about a foundational document so i'm building a document that will protect american democracy that's this week on america actually this week on network and shell i'm joined by tank sinatra the meme king with over 15 million followers across tank's good news influencers in the wild and his personal account tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is how much a single sponsor post pays why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes and how meme culture thinks preparation age starter packs and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value get ready for a conversation that'll change the way you scroll make you rethink what's going viral is really worth and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash you're rich vff julia alexander welcome to the rich guest thank you you are you went home for the pandemic yeah i'm canadian and i have canadian health care intern so i i booked it out of new york city which in some ways makes me a villain based on twitter that's fine yeah there's a lot of escape from new york in general i believe okay well you're we can see you you're in canada yeah how's canada canada's been fine yeah i think so i haven't left the house i have no idea uh 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 last time you were on i got i just gotta start with quivi i cannot start with quivi kastenberg this insane interview the new york times where he said everything that's gone wrong with quivi 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 stream service disclosure uh there's a vox show and a polygon show they've talked to us about show but as you know we just listen all the time it doesn't go very good so that's your disclosure julia tell us what's going on it's been really funny to watch quivi 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 um 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 like no one's watching our shows he literally in the interview joked about how no one's watching the daily essentials which are kind of like the daily programming quivi has he just went i guess they're not that essential you paid a lot of money for the amazing shows um i mean quivi so his whole point about the pandemic was that quivi 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 quivi uh and now nobody can go out and so therefore he thinks that's why they're not watching the shows um the reason people are not watching the shows is because quivi is not necessary and it's not interesting like it's not entertaining 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 um 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 uh 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 jeff katzenberg is trying to save face i feel like meg whitman is a i don't know if we're proper but she's a ceo who's been trained to deal with yeah exactly yeah she's savvy and jeff katzenberg uh i mean he's a brilliant man like his time at disney is speaks to that uh but i think he just has always kind of been this eccentric kind of creative uh 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 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 quivi on you can't screenshot it you can't capture it you wrote about this um like the most viral quivi thing was like literally somebody with a phone shooting another phone it makes no sense so you're gonna 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 uh i mean like for me i'm not someone who's like uh who thinks about it so i was confused i thought the only way to do it 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 because they've been working on it since before launch like they kind of were aware people want to watch things on the tv um i think the most striking point is that jeffrey katzenberg straight up was like we didn't know people want to share this content and it's like this is the issue 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 um 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 uh and going like hey man we should be able to like send the screenshot or like share to tiktok where things are going to become where the audience is the cheapest marketing in human history has earned social media and they're like what if we spend 500 million dollars on superbowl as instead and it just doesn't that is very confusing to me i the one thing i will say about that when you're saying it's not necessary it's and you 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 uh so there's this moment with quibi where jeffrey katzenberg and the white man are like we have to have content we're going to do the apple play which is we're going to do original content we won't have any license whatsoever um which is an apple tv plus and they 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 on their in their basements they're like we're never going to make money on this it's not going to make it your pilot season it's not something we can order the series uh it's not going to be playing 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 um so it worked out well for like a bunch of the students involved like they were like cool take this we're going to partner 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 right to 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 like it's just so there's nothing in the kind of conversation that goes makes you go i have to watch this quibi thing like at all is that neat i mean let's grant kassenberg is everything wrong is because of the virus does that need exist if people are still commuting do you think this is all different if everyone's at home so the way i think about it is when i am on 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 uh so i think of tiktok and twitter a lot because in terms of scrolling like you're just kind of constantly active and you're going to distract you for a little bit um 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 uh 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 picture that the idea is when you're commuting to work you'll do this not many people are comm the country are commuting via subway a lot of people are driving uh and they're not watching i hope they're not watching while driving uh when you're on the subway you're like like packed like sardines you can't even hold your phone uh to like watch it a certain way um 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 so like for me the commuting thing is uh is that is that a necessary service uh it is if i've never used a phone before and haven't figured out what I want to do when I'm competing with my phone. If I'm like, oh, out of nowhere, I have no memory of anything.

What is this magical gadget in my hand? What should I do with it? And there's a video service, and then I'm like, okay, this is necessary. Two, and like the quick bites, like fill your between time, the whole concept.

Five minutes is too long. The thing that I keep thinking about, 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's 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, it wants to fill that in-between time. Instagram stops, Twitter stops, GameStop. 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 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 tweeted this the other day. It's like a fundamental misunderstanding of what the major function of this app is. They have an idea of how people use their phones, and the issues 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 figure out a way to do it. For a while, Netflix had really bad originals, and they were just like, oh, we'll figure out a way to fix it. And they have, Quibi doesn't necessarily 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, the least consequential. But it's fascinating.

I'll usually run 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 Kassemer is going to compete with YouTube. He's going to take attention away from YouTube 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.

All like, all right, like all this, that's true. That's a real Quibi show. Wow. It's insane.

Jeffrey Kassemer 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 and makes everybody mad all the time because you have a competition. 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 video at the end.

Oh no, no, no more tricks. I think it's a really fun litmus test to ask people just to name a Quibi show on the top of their head and see what they come up with. Yeah, I was joking around in Slack and I was like, if we did quizzes, we should be like, is this a 30 Rock show? Like fake show on 30 Rock or a Quibi series?

Yeah, they're real close. So let's talk about my other favorite streaming service, HBO Max. I'm not your total offsets on this. It's so funny.

I think it's going to be successful. Because it has friends? They're rolling forward. I mean, they are launching it soon.

We're covering it in detail. You're covering it in detail. They sent out a press kit, which is the most elaborate press swag kit I've ever received in my life. 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 HBO Max? I think that you hit on the core issue that they're facing in July gets the most is like, why did you name it HBO Max?

That's still the number one question he gets. And they've brought in like teams of executives to explain this decision, which is like not a good thought when you're making something. They're like, well, we looked at Warner Brothers, but we thought, do people really care about Warner Brothers? Which is not something you should say.

And then they were like, you know, and then 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? 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 NBCUniversals. I don't know if you want to do yours thing. No, I'll just do them all.

I'll just do them all at once. Do yours work for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. NBCUniversal is an investor in Vox Media, which is a brand company of The Verge. We are producing a Netflix show.

Vox.com and Polygon have a quitty show. And they've 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 Julie writes will have as much Julia copy as disclosure copy.

And that's really, that's my goal for The Verge. Continue. 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, Warner Media is like very invested in like how you can share what they are giving you, which I think is the most forward-thinking that a streaming service could do, which is what Netflix is really good at doing. So I think all these things, one, make it like an appetizing 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 and start to kick off the Disney Plus kind of growth, where it's like, we already are going to have all these people that we're just going to have it from the get-go. And John Stinky 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. 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, all about there. And basically the goal is like just to bring them into HBO Max. Like the goal is just bring them into HBO Max and then Warner Media and AT&T sports divisions and new 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 mean, it's, I know. 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 and 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 telecoms, right? I mean, it did a little for HBO. It hasn't got like all of HBO's 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 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?

My daughter Max likes the live version. That's a clarifying. That's a really upsetting. 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 Crunchyroll 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 an entire extended universe of cartoon-like things, right? You know what it is.

Like even its divisions, they're different brands, but they're just little universes, 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 exists in the same universe.

All right, that's actually, I would read that. I was just going to say, you're going to put that on the site. I'm just saying like, in what universe, and so Netflix does this, but 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 kids 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. I feel actually like the opposite.

They have spoken a lot about the recommendation. I think they are taking, from what I can tell, it's like using the pillars of IP that they have, which is the Disney play, which is like you open it up and you can go, yeah, Warner Brothers, Crunchyroll, whatever you want, it's there. But at the same time, it's going to be like extremely based on what you want. 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 true, 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 shows. But they have this idea where they're like, HBO will be HBO.

It's going to exist here because it's just going to be here. But we're going to have the, eventually the Harry Potter section. We're going to have like this kind of sci-fi section, which we're going to have our classics. We're going to have our anime.

And I think they'll just start recommending things to you. They're also doing the weird groupings. Like they're going to do the, because you like this, here's like an actual grouping. You open it up and there's like a bunch of things.

It's almost 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, WarnerMedia 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 them to like fire the cannon. Like this is the bet that AT&T is making. This is why John Sankey 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 they can say, well, I used to be in charge of WarnerMedia. I understand it. This is a transformational moment for one of the biggest of the 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 launch 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 spanking interview, like what are you saying? Well, I just think like the advantage that specifically HBO Max to an extent Peacock, but I think NBCUniversal has like just so many problems lined up with 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 access to friends really during the 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+, you look at Quibi, like 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 Quibi and Apple bet on was the idea that there's a need for more content that people would just start subscribing to everything and what AT&T and Comcast and to a extent Disney because they own Hulu. Hulu was their big bet, really.

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 up like you open up Netflix TV Guide. Like that's just what will start happening. You've been on Apple TV+, you've been digging into their numbers a little bit.

How's it going over there? No, bueno. Not great, Bob. I think there's like the common business thing, right?

Is like the business rule 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 when Disney said 10 million first day, they were like, oh, they're pretty confident. I figure from now they'll have more than 10 million subscribers and now they're about to their 2024 goals by the end of the year. Apple hasn't said anything.

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 shooting service on third-party kind of data looking into it because 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 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 org shows and have the acclaim and it's pocket chain for them. Like it's whatever. It's crazy 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 free to Apple TV and they have the numbers flat.

It kind of comes down to like that we are oversaturated and we know this and it comes down to the whole social media thing which is like Tiger King which was Netflix with 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 Twitter, I 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 started listening to this TikTok audio which is taken from like BoJack Horseman. I'm going to watch BoJack and it's that earned video where Netflix is like great. Cool and that's just not happening with Apple stuff or 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. That's like 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 these conversations have just turned into what are you watching because there's nothing else to do. It's not like, where have you gone? You can't do that. Would you go to a cool ride?

Nope, that's out. 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's where the shows live. I mean, today I tweeted about I have to restart watching NYPD Blue because I'm like in a really old cop base with TV stuff.

I was like, where can I go watch this? And it was only Hulu and I was like, I guess I'm in Canada so I'm using Weird Weekend but 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 to be more than anything else. You'll find a new show usually on Netflix because you're opening Netflix and that's Outer Banks. Everyone watched Outer Banks because Netflix promoted it and you opened it up and you're 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 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. I wasn't going to the theater anymore. I was just open on Friday and like, what movie are we going to watch tonight? Where are we going to rent?

And then I went to it from Futsu Cuisine. Anyway, it doesn't matter. But that cadence is going down. The studios and the theater owners are all in a big fight.

What's the status there? Is my dream of day and date release for streaming coming? Because I really like that to happen. Oh yeah, I was talking to we have a Facebook group with reporters who talk about who'd report on streaming and we were talking about this and it's kind of like the thing that's going to happen movie theaters are not going to go away fighting the background story 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 the service which is what's happening with Scoob 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, 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. We make more money going premium video on demand. We can grow our streaming services. I mean, Disney's 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 and we can just put it on a streaming service? Like, and then there's no 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. It's like, you are $5 billion in debt and you are absolutely going to carry Jurassic World 3 and the nine fast and carries movies. And it's like, the idea is like, are you going to say that we're not going to carry Warner Brothers movies?

Like, no, the future of this industry is now relying on Christopher Nolan's tenant hitting July 17th. And that's going to basically determine whether or not movie theaters 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 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 Regal gets bought?