What the Taliban’s Rise Means for Big Tech, Facebook’s Plans for a Virtual (Reality) Work Space, and Fox News' Vaccine Database

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Kara Swisher: Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. Scott Galloway is still gallivanting somewhere around the world. So today I'm joined by my favorite tenant, Casey Newton. He's also the Verge contributing editor and the founder of Platformer, a daily newsletter about big tech and democracy. It's a wonderful newsletter. He also wants me to replace his oven, which I have done beautifully. Is that correct? Do you have a nice oven now?

Casey Newton: It's coming on Monday and I'm very excited.

Kara Swisher: How exciting. Good, good, good. Well, I'll be there soon so you can cook me up some food.

Casey Newton: I'd love to. I think I have a nicer oven in the main house.

Kara Swisher: Yes, imagine that. Giving yourself nicer things than your tenants. Who could have predicted? I'm a good landlord. Give me a break. I never say no. Anyway, there's so much to talk about, Casey. By the way, your newsletter has been, you were away for a little bit, which I missed it. So I was reading Matt Bellany in your stead. One of my favorites today, Fox News will require employees to log their vaccine status. In a central database, employees must also mask in confined spaces. It still doesn't require employees to be vaccinated, which is kind of bizarre that they make them do these other things. But some hosts have spoken favorably about vaccines. The network has also aired vaccine skepticism. It turns out that the COVID vaccines, the drugs you were not allowed to question in any way, don't actually work in the way they told us they did. So this is really interesting, that this particular workplace. Well, it's like, you know, the product is a culture war, but the workplace still has to be a workplace. So they'll say all sorts of nonsense on the air, but when it comes to actually having an HR department, there are rules and they have to obey the laws of nature and physics and everything else.

Casey Newton: Yeah. Do you think one of the things that's interesting is these workplaces, people go back, everyone's been moved back. I know Vox has been moved back to October or something like that, unspecified, actually. But many of the tech workplaces have been moved back. What do you make of what's happened? They were bringing people back and I think wanting to bring people back.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I mean, it has been an absolute seesaw. I think employees are really frustrated. And so are the employers. I think the employers are desperate to bring everyone back or at least make it available to the people who want it. But now the Delta variant is on the rise and nobody feels like they can safely do it. I saw a great tweet from a Facebook product manager today who said that they need to analyze the effects of the fact that for the past year and a half, everyone's work life has had to be things that they're comfortable with their families overhearing because it's all been on Zoom. But like, think about that. That is so strange.

Kara Swisher: It's true. It's absolutely true. So one of the things that's interesting is that tech companies have sort of leaned into no workplace kind of attitudes, especially Facebook, right? And others. What impact do you think that's going to have? How do companies like that have benefited from this, like Zoom, and then there's lots of virtual meeting companies like Hopin and all those? There's a whole gang of them that have been funded. What happens to that idea of what a workplace is for, at least for tech companies or social media companies?

Casey Newton: I think it's hard to say from the middle of it. If you want to look at whether these companies are suffering and falling apart, no. Their profits are all up. They're continuing to grow. I don't think we've seen a credible story about a big or even a medium-sized tech company that has really, really struggled with the move. Which isn't to say that it hasn't been super hard. It's just that they've mostly been able to muddle through. I think the lasting lesson is that tech workers and people who have options for where they can work want more flexibility than they've been given. This does feel like a one-way door where after they've been told, you don't have to come in two days a week.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I agree. They're never going to go in two days a week ever again. Indeed. You know, that very cottage you're sitting in is where I did most of all things D and everything else. I never went into the office for a long, long, long, long time.

Casey Newton: Well, I have often said that there is a kind of osmosis that happened. I used to be a rank and file worker. You were, you love offices. And I sat in here for long enough and then I became a founder and an entrepreneur. So there may be some interesting magic going on here.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, 100%. So one of the things that, speaking of, I don't know what it is, magic, but Facebook disclosed some revealing numbers for the first time ever, including its most viewed domains. And you and Kevin Roos had quite a time yesterday discussing it as links, post pages from the second quarter. And those were the animal and sports content did well. Facebook frames the disclosure as part of its transparency efforts, but I thought it was kind of a circus. It seemed to counter narratives about political misinformation.

Casey Newton: Yeah, I mean, look, I don't want to dunk too hard. I appreciate when Facebook makes data available, but this is not the data that anyone is looking for.

Kara Swisher: Oh, thank you, sir. Can I have some more? But go ahead.

Casey Newton: Yeah, well, what we want to know is what stories are popular on Facebook right now. You can measure popularity in a bunch of different ways. They bought a tool called CrowdTangle that lets you see the posts that are getting the most engagement. But they hate it because they say that the posts that are getting the most engagement are not the most popular. And what you really want to know is what posts were viewed the most. So that was the point of yesterday's report. But whereas CrowdTangle is a real-time tool, this is going to be a once-every-four-months report. How much can we really learn by knowing that the most shared domain on Facebook over the past four months was YouTube.com? They're not telling us individual YouTube videos. It's just sharing that YouTube is popular on Facebook, which any of us could have guessed.

Kara Swisher: Right.

Casey Newton: You look at some of the other most popular links. They're basically spam, like people who are sharing popular memes and then attaching a URL to, in one case, a speakers bureau of former Green Bay Packers players. This is not helping me understand what is on Facebook.

Kara Swisher: Well, I think it's done very clearly to show, look, we're not that. We're just silly. We're just cat videos. It's sort of the cat video move, essentially.

Casey Newton: Yeah, and this sort of goes hand in hand with the other big tech company move, which is to only talk in terms of percentages. Facebook and YouTube love to do this. "Well, only 3% of views were of fascism." And you're like, okay, 3% of views is tens of millions of clicks. So, again, glad to see a little bit more data, but we need to keep pushing for the data that would actually be useful.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I think it's a feint. Although, you guys had a good time talking about it. It was odd. It was odd. They do need to, it would be really interesting for people to actually see it. Of course, they always caveat everything and they've cut off some of these researchers. I know you've written about it quite a bit, cutting off some of these researchers under the guise that they were under a consent degree. I think that was their excuse in that case. This is NYU.

Casey Newton: Yes. But think about it. Every publisher in the world has a list of the most read stories on their website. They're proud of it. Nothing like that exists on Facebook, even though it would be super interesting. Just tell us what people are reading and clicking on. What do you have to hide?

Kara Swisher: But they're not a publisher, Casey. Don't you know that? A benign platform of sports content and animal videos. I don't know if you know that.

Casey Newton: Yeah, it is an interesting—I don't think they ever win. And then what they do is they tell you, "You don't understand. It's much more complicated." And thus and such. So it's a lot of hand-waving, it seemed to me.

Kara Swisher: It's an enormous hand. Also, it's just a case where two things are true at the same time. My experience on Facebook is not seeing a bunch of crazy right-wing fascist content. And I'm sure that's true of most people. And I'm sure it's true of most people who work at Facebook. But there are huge groups of other people who are not having that experience, and those are who we need to know about.

Casey Newton: Right, right, which is interesting. I wonder if they would do the top 10. Well, they do do the top 10. What are they going to do with CrowdTangle, by the way?

Kara Swisher: Oh, man, it is grim over there. A lot of this comes from Kevin Roos' report in the New York Times, but I've sort of followed up and done some of my own. They had a team that worked like any other team together. And now the members of that team have been scattered throughout the organization. And the leader of CrowdTangle, this guy named Brandon Silverman, who's awesome, has effectively been sidelined. No one I have talked to seems to know what his role is anymore. He's still at Facebook. Nobody knows what he's doing. So it really feels like the beginning of the end for that product, although Facebook will say that it's not.

Kara Swisher: It's not. But it's being run by Adam, is that correct?

Casey Newton: I believe it's under what they call their Integrity Organization, which is under Guy Rosen.

Kara Swisher: Oh, Guy Rosen. Okay. All right. So we don't know what they're going to do with that. But why did they buy it in the first place?

Casey Newton: Well, this was in the days when, as part of their efforts to collaborate with publishers, they thought it would be useful to help publishers understand what to share on Facebook. There were days when you could post a link on Facebook if you were Vox.com or the New York Times and get a million shares and 10 million views. BuzzFeed grew on the backs of this crazy phenomenon. And then they got to a certain point and they talked to their users and users were like, "Yeah, we don't like seeing all the links." So they turned the volume all the way down on the links. And all of a sudden CrowdTangle was a lot less useful to those publishers. But at the same time, it became much more useful to the researchers because this was the only source of valid real-time data about what was being shared on Facebook. So it's a funny thing where Facebook essentially bought their own problem here.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, they did. And they would like it to go away now. They'd like to put it in a drawer and close it. Lastly, Amazon, speaking of large companies, Amazon is the world's largest retailer outside of China, surpassing Walmart. Big deal, big deal. Walmart is still the largest private employer. I don't think that's going to be the same. They're going to hold that crown for very long either. Alibaba still reigns in China. So one of the things that's really interesting is that it's a moment. It's a moment that Amazon does this, even though they try very hard to say they're only part of a small retail market. And obviously, the questions remain if Amazon would get into the Chinese market. Probably not. And vice versa, Alibaba has some business here, but not the enormous business they have in China.

Casey Newton: Yeah, I mean, to me, this is a huge milestone, but it sort of made me laugh because heading into the whole antitrust fight, Amazon was another one of these companies that love to talk in terms of percentages rather than actual numbers. So it was always like, "Hey, look, we might look big, but we're really only 1% of all economic activity on earth."

Kara Swisher: You've gotten that call from the PR people?

Casey Newton: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Kara Swisher: "Kara, we're just 1% of all the economic activity on earth and you think we're big? Come on."

Casey Newton: But now it's like, okay, well, you're bigger than Walmart and you're the biggest retailer in the United States. So maybe we can agree that you're really freaking big now.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm very pleased with that. But I think it's going to be an Amazon world and an Alibaba world, essentially, around the world. One dominating in the US and Europe and the other in other parts, and they will compete in the rest of the world. I don't think Alibaba would be a big player here or Amazon a big player there at all.

Casey Newton: The thing that always trips me up about Amazon is that company really has been Teflon. You look at all of the scandals and the controversy that have attached themselves to all of the biggest companies over the past five years, even Apple. Amazon, trust in that company is the highest among any of those companies. People would sell their children before they give up their Prime subscription.

Kara Swisher: It's a really interesting thing. He did have his sex. He is having a fight with Elon Musk over Moonbase. And people were excited for him. And Moonbase. And then he goes up and does like a flyby, like as if he's Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

Casey Newton: That's true.

Kara Swisher: The hat, the hat, the hat.

Casey Newton: What? I don't even remember the hat.

Kara Swisher: The cowboy hat when he came back down.

Casey Newton: Oh, yeah. Well, look, the Twitter socialists had a lot of fun with Jeff and space, but it didn't affect Amazon one bit. One iota.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Yeah. I think they are struggling with their government contracts. They really want to get back in there. They got some big ones. It's obviously a big area of growth for them. There are areas which Jason Del Rey has written a lot about around diversity and other issues and harassment. I think they have your basic issues that every one of these companies has, but you're right. They've largely escaped. I think this number is going to call attention to what you just said. It's not just a small little retail, which they try to push a lot on reporters.

Casey Newton: Oh, yeah. If you're Lena Khan or Tim Wu over in the Biden administration, you were very excited to see that story and put it in your slide deck.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, absolutely. Does she have a slide deck?

Casey Newton: Yeah. Everyone's always working on a slide deck, Kara.

Kara Swisher: Are they? I don't have a slide deck. This is what I've learned about people. I'm interested in notes. I texted Casey late last night about notes apps. It's like, which one do you like? One of my obsessions.

Casey Newton: Yes, I don't like any of them.

Kara Swisher: I went back to Evernote, of all things. I was an Evernote person 10 years ago. I'll be curious to hear what you say.

Casey Newton: I haven't used Evernote in several years.

Kara Swisher: It's good. It's simple. It really invented the modern note-taking app.

Casey Newton: Yeah, I got to tell you the others. I just have to have a PhD in note-taking to use, so I'm not sure you like that part of it.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, let's get to our first big story. The Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan could have implications for big tech as companies and users scramble to protect their data and services. The Taliban is in likely possession of biometric databases compiled by the previous Afghan government that may include fingerprints, facial recognition, and scans, according to Human Rights First. There are concerns that the Taliban could use the data to track down previous government employees, international workers, women's rights activists, or educators. They also are trying very hard to stay on these platforms, which are essentially doing stasis. Facebook has kept the Taliban off of Facebook. Twitter has let them stay on as long as they don't break the rules. YouTube has kept them off of it based on U.S. government sanctions laws. You've written quite a bit about this. So it'll matter if when they take over what happens with these tech communities, whether they turn over the Afghani president's account like we did in this country with Biden and Trump, for example. So what do you think about what's happening here? Again, it's these social media companies smack in the middle of an international crisis, as always.

Casey Newton: Yeah, I mean, the first thing to say is what an absolutely heartbreaking situation. Hard not to see the stories over the past few days and not just feel constantly in pain over all the human suffering that we're watching unfold. For the platforms, this is such a no-win question because up until now, most of them have said, based on our interpretation of U.S. law, we're not going to keep the Taliban and their posts up.

Kara Swisher: Well, not Twitter. Not Twitter.

Casey Newton: So Twitter is a weird one, and I have reported that out a little bit. Basically, I think the reason that the Taliban has not been on Twitter is that they are not on this list that the State Department maintains called the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list.

Kara Swisher: Right. But they are on other lists.

Casey Newton: But Twitter, for whatever reason, says, well, we're going to allow them to be on. But I actually think that six months from now, most platforms' positions will look a lot more like Twitter, and it's going to be the other platforms that are going to have to backtrack. Because even in the recent Biden interview, you sort of get the impression that the Taliban is going to get some kind of recognition from the international community, at which point they probably are going to have a Facebook page and a Twitter account and all of that. But yeah, this goes right to the question of, is this a town square where no matter who is the mayor, you get to have an account? Or do the platforms say, "You have committed war crimes and atrocities and human rights abuses and you're not welcome on the platform"?

Kara Swisher: Well, that'll be an interesting—again them making—they're the State Department. Each of the—the State Department of Social Media is what I call them. I think one of the things that's interesting is it begs the question of what happens if President Trump returns to office? What does Twitter do? What do they do?

Casey Newton: I will go into hiding and I'm going to catch the next Jeff Bezos rocket to space, I think, if that happens. And then humans will be on their own.

Kara Swisher: Yes. OK, Casey. But in any case, what is Twitter and what are they going to do? That's the thing.

Casey Newton: Well, here's what they've said. So Facebook banned him. They said permanent.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, permanent.

Casey Newton: Yeah, Facebook suspended him for two years. If Trump becomes president again, I do believe that Facebook would reinstate him.

Kara Swisher: Unless he misbehaved, right? Unless he—

Casey Newton: Yes. If he broke the rules again, they would get rid of him.

Kara Swisher: And the thing is, he would break the rules again. He's incapable of not breaking the rules. I actually think at this point, if they had to make the decision today and Trump became president tomorrow, if one of these demented QAnon fantasies came true, Twitter would still keep him off the platform. Everyone I've talked to at Twitter has said he's permanently suspended. There is no avenue for appeal.

Casey Newton: That's right. So it still will be an interesting question if he rises back to power. But getting back to the Taliban here, one of the most ironic things is that one of the spokespersons for the Taliban was sort of calling out Mark Zuckerberg. It's like, "He believes in free speech and yet he censors us." He sounded very much like the Trump administration and Republicans or Ted Cruz.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I mean, it got a lot of pickup, but I thought it was kind of a dumb deflection because the question that he got asked was, "Are you going to permit free speech in Afghanistan?" which is a very good and important question. He's like, "Free speech? Why don't you go ask Facebook about free speech?" Which is like a very Don Trump Jr. level burn.

Casey Newton: Yes, it was. It was strange.

Kara Swisher: And Don Trump Jr. did approvingly quote tweet it, by the way.

Casey Newton: Yes, that's right. Of course he did. But in any case, the more serious issue is that they're getting all this data because the U.S. government pushed and foreign funded programs to capture Afghans' biometric data during the occupation. And then they have all their social media and they can do lots of things with that. What is going to happen here with this ability to use all this data? And you know this group of people will.

Casey Newton: Yeah. And I mean, look, I don't know exactly what data is on which devices. My understanding is that they have collected a lot of biometric data about citizens. There are stories that in the past, the Taliban has gotten access to similar data and used it in essentially terror campaigns against Afghani citizens. So we do have to assume that is going to happen again. I hope it doesn't happen. I also hope that people who make this kind of hardware and these kind of services take this as a lesson that they need to build in fail-saves for when their products fall into the wrong hands, because they will fall into the wrong hands. There's this company Clearview AI out there right now. They're scraping every face they can find on the Internet and putting it in a database and selling it to governments. It is not hard to figure out that this is all going to be used against us. To your point, what happens when a Trump-like figure comes back into power? I think they're going to use a database like that to harass us all and to punish dissidents and journalists and God knows what else.

Kara Swisher: Well, they did do that with immigrants.

Casey Newton: Yeah, absolutely. If you're coming into this country as an immigrant, all of a sudden you have to show your social media handles. This is a climate change-like problem because the creep is slow and no one thing makes it feel like a crisis. And then you turn around five or 10 years later and you realize that your freedoms have been dramatically reduced. So I do hope people pay attention to this one.

Kara Swisher: There are two movies I was thinking about. I watched one last night. Did you ever see Enemy of the State with Will Smith?

Casey Newton: Yes, Gene Hackman.

Kara Swisher: And Gene Hackman. Yeah. It was like my mom was watching. I'm like, oh, my God, I love this movie. And it was like a long time ago. And it had all those things. And John Voight, who has become a lunatic since then, who looks great in this role, by the way. It plays a CIA person. And Jack Black is in it. If you look at the minor characters, they're all really well-known. There's a ton of well-known actors who are in the minor character roles, which is kind of funny. Such a great movie.

Casey Newton: It is.

Kara Swisher: And it was all about that, like the idea. And everyone was like, "Ha, ha, ha," at the time, but it's certainly true. I remember thinking, "Oh, this is probably the way it's going to go" at the time. And the other, of course, is my favorite, Barb Wire with Pamela Anderson.

Casey Newton: Pam Anderson, yeah.

Kara Swisher: Which you like only for the story, yeah.

Casey Newton: I did. No, I'm telling you, I did.

Kara Swisher: It was about eye recognition. You had that Minority Report of eye recognition and she gives away her ability to get away to someone because they have all their personal biometric data. It was early and very prescient. I think if you said to anybody, "Hey, you ever see Barb Wire?" People say, "Oh, yeah, the eye recognition movie." Go watch. We're going to watch it together when I come to San Francisco.

Casey Newton: I would love to.

Kara Swisher: We'll have a Barb Wire night. It is such a great film. I have to say I recommend it to everyone. But what's going to happen here? So you think that they're going to recognize this government and Facebook and YouTube is just going to let this Taliban video stuff fly? They're getting millions of views that people are racking up. I mean, right now, they've got to be over there just drawing up the scenarios for, "How do we do this?" And one element of this is, okay, you and I agree that the Taliban are bad people and should not be running Afghanistan, but they are. Do they have a water and sewer department? Do they need to communicate with their constituents about really minor stuff? Should their citizens not have access to that sort of thing?

Casey Newton: Right. So, yeah, these are some of the questions that you get into. And these are the questions that you raise when you decide that you want to be available everywhere on Earth.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, this is true. They are public squares without being actual public squares. And therefore, they must sit there like, "Can we get back to Marjorie Taylor Greene? She's easy." And of course, she will use it and has. A lot of the right wing are saying, "Look, they're keeping the Taliban on, but not us," which is kind of an interesting juxtaposition. "I still want them off. They can't get on because the Taliban's on. Look, you're letting the Taliban." It's like sort of stack-ranking murderers or something. Like, "That murderer was more murdery than I am." I'm not saying they're murderers, but you know what I'm saying.

Casey Newton: Well, yeah. But think of how absurd it is that a company has to make a moral evaluation of every person on Earth to decide whether they get to use the service. This is not how companies are supposed to work. We have built ourselves into such an absurd world where all of the most important discussions that are taking place are taking place inside giant digital shopping malls. And before recently, we didn't have most of our big political debates inside shopping malls. You couldn't find the Taliban store down at the Westfield in San Francisco.

Kara Swisher: The positive flip of that is why don't we just have more public websites, public spaces?

Casey Newton: Yes.

Kara Swisher: Not everything has to be owned by a massive corporation.

Casey Newton: Yes, that is fair. That's me playing Twitter socialist. More innovation. There needs to be more innovation where people can talk.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, Casey, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about Facebook's high tech plan for the future of work and a listener mail question.

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Kara Swisher: Okay, Casey, we're back. Facebook wants users to work in a virtual reality. The social networking giant and Oculus parent company recently unveiled a new app called Horizon Workrooms.

[Audio clip of Mark Zuckerberg]: So today we're announcing a new service called Workrooms. It's basically a virtual reality service for collaborating together and doing work. But it basically gives you the opportunity to sit around a table with people and work and brainstorm and whiteboard ideas.

Kara Swisher: The app puts users in a virtual conference room complete with whiteboards and avatars whose mouths move when they speak. Mark Zuckerberg told reporters that Facebook has been using the tool internally for six months. The program is currently an invite-only beta. Facebook is not giving a timeline when it might be released to the public. This one's interesting because I actually had a discussion with Mark Zuckerberg 150 years ago saying, "Why isn't there Facebook Work?" And they didn't want to do it. They were busy doing regular Facebook. And I'm like, "Well, AOL did the same thing. AOL at Work that fell apart because they had a big outage the day, like the week they unveiled it." But I was like, "Shouldn't you have a work version of it?"

Kara Swisher: And then there were a lot of companies that were like Facebook. There were tons, I can't remember all their names that were, and you could say Slack is that too.

Casey Newton: Oh, yeah. Yammer. Yammer was another one.

Kara Swisher: So what do you think about these? And of course, there's the Michael Douglas movie where the software. Disclosure. And it was about that. They had a workplace kind of thing, and that was the big software around it. So one reporter who tried this said he felt more present in Horizon Workrooms than Zoom. What do you think about this? And why have they moved into this space?

Casey Newton: Well, there's a lot of money in the enterprise. But it's also like the enterprise could be the killer app for VR. So right now, Facebook is actually selling more Oculus headsets than most people understand. I think they've sold about 8 million of the things, which is not bad for a product that I think if you stop most people on the street, they've never heard of it. So that's actually going pretty well for them. But right now the main use cases are like games.

Kara Swisher: It's a little business, right?

Casey Newton: It's a little business, right? It's nothing.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, it's a little, but it's like the fastest growing business they have maybe. I mean, I don't know, probably one of their ad businesses is growing faster, but Oculus is growing really fast. So they're investing a lot in it. But what is another reason why people would buy a headset? Well, if it helped you get your work done, and maybe your work buys you a headset, and now you're having all your meetings in it. You could see why they would want to do it. I've talked to Zuckerberg about this, and he believes that in the future, more people are going to host their meetings this way. He has said Facebook is going to be a remote first company. And that means designing better experiences than the ones we have today. Like Zoom is fine, but Zoom is limited and he wants to push against those limits.

Casey Newton: Why doesn't he just buy Zoom?

Kara Swisher: He can't buy anything, can he? He tried to buy a dying GIF search engine and the UK investigated it for like eight months and was like, you're destroying the market. How do you expect anyone to compete in a world where Facebook owns a GIF search?

Casey Newton: I would agree.

Kara Swisher: I agree. It's cuckoo.

Casey Newton: It isn't cuckoo.

Kara Swisher: They can't buy anything. No, he's not buying Zoom anytime soon.

Casey Newton: Yeah, right, right. So, and obviously Microsoft has its work areas and stuff like that, but they do have Oculus, which is the idea of, this is how workplace stuff. It's not going to be Zoom where you're staring at like a Brady Bunch level of little squares. You're going to be as if you're in the workplace and you'll be wearing some sort of glasses. That makes perfect sense. And it's been talked about in sci-fi for decades, more than decades. And so are they the ones to do it?

Kara Swisher: I remember him very resistant to the idea of it. He's like, that's not what we do. We're a consumer product. I'm like, I know, but you could do like AOL tried it and it was actually a great idea. They just had a bad execution. Owen Van Natta was the one that laughed at me and laughed at me. And so did Mark. So it was interesting.

Casey Newton: Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I would be interested to know like what year was this? Because he probably did have 400 things he needed to build before he built an enterprise social network. But then he built all those things. And so now it's like, what's next?

Kara Swisher: In the 2000s. In the early 2000s. Whenever I met him.

Casey Newton: One thing that Zuckerberg brings up a lot in these interviews is that before he started having his meetings in VR, he just couldn't remember anything that happened in a meeting because he was always physically in the same place. And he's just always staring at a Zoom screen. But you get into this VR world. All of a sudden you have spatial audio. So somebody was sitting to your left. You hear more in your left ear. If somebody's sitting on your right, you hear more in your right ear. And all of a sudden he felt like he was in a real meeting.

Kara Swisher: Have you tried it?

Casey Newton: I have. So I have a Quest and I have played around with it a bunch, but they literally nested it while I was asleep. So I've not tried it yet.

Kara Swisher: When are you trying it? They're not going to let me try it. That's why I need to only talk to you, Casey. Do they know you live in my house? Do they know that?

Casey Newton: I can't remember. Some of them do. I mean, I tell a lot of people because it's a great conversation starter. And then people are like, what is she really like? And I say, oh, she's much meaner in person. You're lucky she only says what she says about you in print.

Kara Swisher: But here's the deal. I think this is a big deal. Who else should be in this? I mean, obviously, you have Microsoft. I think Microsoft, they had Holodeck. They had the whole...

Casey Newton: HoloLens.

Kara Swisher: HoloLens, whatever the heck. They should have a HoloLens, though, from Star Trek The Next Generation. They do have one. They have one at the office. They do. They have ones like that. But they have HoloLens. There's, Apple's got to be in here with, they're more interested in AR and things like that. But a lot of these companies, the key companies, and Amazon, I can't imagine they wouldn't dabble around in this stuff. Or is it just Facebook because they have Oculus?

Casey Newton: I mean, the smartest, richest companies believe that this is the next hardware platform, right? It was desktop PCs, mobile phones, and then it's going to be mixed reality. So some combination of a headset that goes over your eyes and glasses. Everyone's building all of these things. Some companies like Facebook and Snap are kind of working in public. They're releasing these iterative things that are not very functional now, but at least you can hope to build some early momentum and get developers excited. So that's kind of how Snap and Facebook are playing it. And then you have Apple running its traditional playbook of we've built a layer 400 feet underground and we bring in rotating groups of employees who don't know what they're working on. And somehow together they will build the headset of the future. So, we'll see what happens. But yeah, this is the hardware thing to watch.

Kara Swisher: Snap and Apple are more in the AR side of it, I think, where you see things. And also, Facebook just did this in Facebook Labs or whatever with the weird eye thing, the see-through. What's it called? It was called see-through or?

Casey Newton: So they're working on pass-through on the Oculus headset. So one of the cool things about the Oculus is it has this mode where you can see out of the headset, but they can layer AR elements on top of it. So yeah, they're working on some stuff there.

Kara Swisher: So that's if you look outside the space. I mean, some of the issues still remain. Look, you have to be in a space, and a lot of times with Oculus, you don't. I have two Oculuses. They just are really heavy, and I never use them, right?

Casey Newton: They're not. I use Oculi.

Kara Swisher: Oculi. I have Oculi. I don't find them easy to use. I've tried all kinds of, there's some interesting gaming aspects of it. I've been in some of these rooms and malls that they've turned into green rooms, and then you go in and you, I was fighting pirates with my sons, which was fun, for sure. But I wouldn't do it again, like that kind of stuff. So it was always sort of like, where's the thing that's going to happen? I always thought AR was the way where you go to Paris, you're wearing some glasses that are very nondescript. And then you look up at the Eiffel Tower and get all kinds of, or a mapping thing go this way. If anyone wants to see something really cool, Microsoft under the guy that was running Nokia, I'm blanking on his name, did a video of the future of tomorrow or something like that with Microsoft. And that was an idea thing where what would happen. And a lot of it was someone wearing a pair of very nondescript glasses with go this way in an airport or go, this is the direction you want to go in. And it seemed useful. Some of this stuff, not so much. I got to say.

Casey Newton: I don't know. I think that that's true now. But it's like if in 1982, somebody showed you an Atari and said, do you think this is the future of the enterprise? You'd say, well, probably not. But then give it 10 years.

Kara Swisher: Yes, I did. Oh, you did. Of course. Yeah, you played Donkey Kong and you said people will make billions. I am working on my memoir and I indeed wrote a story for the Wall Street Journal saying mobile is it in the early 90s.

Casey Newton: Oh, I believe that. Yes.

Kara Swisher: No one will be together. No one will have workplace phones. No one will have workplace things. Everything will be mobile. It is true. It is true. But this one I'm still trying to figure out where it is. I think you will not have to go to the office. That is for sure. And that links with some of these office things we were talking about. In any case, you and I will be together in an Oculus-like setting at some point. And I never have to actually physically see you again. All right, Casey, let's pivot to a listener question. You've got mail. This one came in via email from Sean Downey in Ireland. I would like you to read it without an Irish accent. Thank you.

Casey Newton: Aha. OK, here we go. "Great show. What are your thoughts on China's tech crackdown? Is it hypocritical to criticize the CCP for cracking down on big tech when it's constantly called for in the US? Also, the recent push in China to redistribute wealth. Is it possible that they move faster nowadays? Also, do you think Western media write everything off as oppression, like the Ant IPO, considering it's come to light there are regulatory concerns about payments and reserve requirements?" Hmm. Thank you, Sean Downey from Ireland.

Kara Swisher: Listen, Sean, China is not like the US. I'm sorry. I agree with you that there are a lot of abuses probably among these Chinese zillionaires and these giant tech companies. But the fact of the matter is you have to use systems to get to these companies. What Senator Klobuchar or any number of politicians are trying to do, Lena Khan, you have to use the system to get to them. You can't just decide by fiat that this is what we're going to do. I mean, they can, and I think that's the issue. It's okay to be constantly called for in the US if they go through things. But imagine if Elizabeth Warren had unlimited power and got to do what she wanted. Do we think that's a good thing? I mean, we may agree with her, but I just feel like what they're doing is oppression, even if it's directionally correct. Casey?

Casey Newton: Yeah, they're sort of ripping up all the rules of their economy in the middle of the game without warning. So I'm glad I don't invest in Chinese tech companies. I'm interested to see what the transformed Chinese tech landscape looks like. Does their antitrust push result in a lot more competition? Does it become a kind of global model? I'm curious to see, but to Kara's point, this doesn't feel like any way to run an economy.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. I would like to make things happen with Facebook or Amazon or anyone else. I would like it to happen, but I do it by talking about it and trying to influence people and going through actual legal democratic means of doing so. And if I lose, I lose. And that may be terrible. And it's happened dozens and dozens of times in our history. I just feel like what's happening, I think they may be correct on a lot of things, regulatory concerns, power. What they're concerned about is a concentration of power among billionaires who are going to overwhelm the government. And that they can't have. And they're putting themselves on boards. They went on the board of ByteDance, which is going to be a problem for TikTok. There's a Chinese government person on the three-person board of TikTok right now. Excuse me, ByteDance, the TikTok owner.

Casey Newton: Really not.

Kara Swisher: Can you imagine? Wait till Tom Cotton hears about this. It's going to be so bad for them. You know what? I hate to agree with Tom Cotton, but I do. I don't agree on anything except that directionally he's correct. Often what's really interesting about some of the people on the right is they're directionally correct. And Trump was directionally correct about TikTok, but he was doing it for his own friends at Oracle or whoever he was working with. He never was doing it for the right reason, but directionally he was right. Let me just ask you then what is going to happen with TikTok then? Because TikTok is pretty much the only Chinese-backed company that's made so many inroads into the US and across the world. This is a company that none of them have. This one has. It's super hard to predict. One, because we don't know what is going to happen in China, right? ByteDance has already gotten in a bunch of trouble. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw another set of punishments come down against ByteDance for something. And then how does that wind up changing? The kids are watching video too much. They're playing games too much. But go ahead.

Casey Newton: Totally. So there's what happens on the China side and there's what happens on the US side. Obviously, things are much cooler now that Trump is gone. But Biden hasn't shown any particular love for TikTok either. I do think that there is still some sort of case proceeding with CFIUS in the United States with respect to the acquisition.

Kara Swisher: Ann Neuberger was working on it. And she's, of course, working on all the hacking stuff now, which she's moved over. And so I don't know what's going to happen. I mean, I think the people at TikTok are few, but I think this is problematic. I think this is hugely problematic.

Casey Newton: Yeah, it's a big problem. Also, they have a lot of competition. One of the most interesting stories of the past year is that after India banned TikTok, Facebook and YouTube raced in there, launched their own TikTok clone, and basically used that to kickstart their own short-form video products. And they're doing pretty well. As you noted in a recent Platformer, which I read word for word.

Kara Swisher: Thank you, I appreciate it. There's so many of them. What was the other one you just mentioned? Another one just started.

Casey Newton: Well, so there's, YouTube has Shorts, Facebook has Reels, and there are a couple, there's one called Moj, which is a sort of homegrown Indian alternative to TikTok that has been doing really well. So yeah, there's a lot going on there.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, it should be interesting, but TikTok is going to face challenges and this is one they don't need on top of this, I think. Anyway, that was a great question. We want more. If you want to hear your question featured on the show, go to nymag.com slash pivot and ask away. All right, Casey, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions.

Casey Newton: Yes.

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Kara Swisher: Okay, Casey, I would like a prediction and I would like it to come true.

Casey Newton: Great. And this is my favorite part of the show because Scott, of course, got famous by making predictions.

Kara Swisher: Yes. And so I want to see if I can make an even wilder prediction than he's ever made. So what if Peloton bought Arby's? Think about it. You finish your workout. What do you want? You want a roast beef sandwich. All of a sudden, you have vertical integration. Okay? Think about all the physical storefronts Arby's have. Think about how many bikes they could put in the back of that thing. I think there's a slam dunk, and I would expect this to close by Q4.

Casey Newton: Oh, my God. That's really terrible.

Kara Swisher: You know, a lot of people said that about Amazon buying Whole Foods, and look at where we are now.

Casey Newton: No, they didn't. They didn't. It was smart.

Kara Swisher: You're kidding me, right? Okay. I want a real prediction. Here's the real one. Apple buying Peloton. Why not Apple buying Peloton? We keep talking about it. How is their fitness thing doing? I wonder. They don't really care, right?

Casey Newton: I think it's doing okay. Well, I mean, I've looked at it. I'm not a fan of Apple's big push into services because I think that most of their services just aren't very good, but also ads for all their services are taking over their computers. I got a pop-up notification on my desktop today because Apple's like, hey, subscribe to Apple Arcade. Apple has hated that BS throughout its entire history. I hate that it's taking over their products now. That said, I do think it makes sense for them to buy Peloton. So we'll see.

Kara Swisher: I think that's where they should move. I think it's an interesting time. Peloton has some issues around one of its treads and things like that. But in general, it's an excellent product. I keep pushing that deal. I don't see anybody else being able to buy them, maybe Amazon and others. And then it can be delivered to your house. But it's one of those products that I think has a real stickiness. And will continue post-pandemic, I think.

Casey Newton: Yeah, it's sort of like everything they like. It's a premium product. It has a service attached to it. They could probably help it out with their supply chain and logistics and help them make more bikes and treads.

Kara Swisher: Not on Beats, not on like this, nothing like that. And it's got Allie Love, which is my favorite thing about Peloton. Apparently, she just got married. Congratulations, Allie Love.

Casey Newton: Congratulations, Allie Love. She did a whole series of workouts wearing wedding garb, exercise garb. How do we feel about that?

Kara Swisher: I felt good. Is that classy? I was fine. I was fine. I like it. She's kooky. I like it. I like it. I know it was sort of retro, but I'm down with it. I'm down because I'm a simple gal. I like it whenever you get sentimental. So I like that you like that. All right, Casey. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you getting up early in California. And I appreciate all your insights. What are you working on right now on Platformer? What was yesterday?

Casey Newton: It was a Taliban, right? Apple safety. Speaking of Apple. So super quick. One of my pet issues is I think that anyone should be able to verify their profile on any service. So Twitter, Facebook, even if you're not a famous person, I think you should be able to verify yourself. I wrote about the fact that Tinder has actually started to do this and it's going great for them. And they keep inventing new ways for you to verify yourself in case you don't like one of the other ways they've already invented. So they're super far ahead on that.

Kara Swisher: So how can you verify yourself? Explain that.

Casey Newton: Two ways. Just so people know, let's give them the background. In the old days, you used to get a blue check mark on Twitter. It was very hard to do. You'd have to send your license in, I think. And it made for a real problem because they one time, I remember, verified the wrong Wendi Deng, who's the wife of Rupert Murdoch.

Kara Swisher: I was right in the middle of that.

Casey Newton: And things like that.

Kara Swisher: You were in the middle of the Wendi Deng-Rupert relationship? No, she called me when she was mis- someone else got Wendi Deng rather than Wendi underscore Deng. She'd get her on the show. No. Jack Dorsey was involved too. I mean, it was just ridiculous in terms of getting people verified. But it was difficult nonetheless.

Casey Newton: Yes, yeah. So Twitter has had this disastrous history of verification. They actually verified six bot accounts falsely last week or the week before. So they had to pause their whole verification program after they had taken a three-year pause on their verification program while they tried to figure it out. But how it works on Tinder is Tinder just says, take a picture of yourself making a gesture and then if the gesture matches what they told you then they will verify. And all they're really verifying is that you look like your photos, essentially. So that's the first kind. But then now they're also coming out with a method that will let you submit a driver's license, some other form of identification. So if you don't want to put your face on your profile, maybe you're LGBTQ+, maybe you're a woman in a country where it's frowned upon to date, you'll be okay.

Kara Swisher: Okay. All right. So they have other ways to verify on these platforms.

Casey Newton: Yeah, but the important thing is that anyone can do it. And my whole point is that if you want these networks to build trust, then you should actually let more people verify each other rather than reserving it for the coastal elites. And therefore, it gives you more trust that you don't get catfished or whatever.

Kara Swisher: Exactly. Do you remember earlier this year during the Amazon union election when Amazon had this ridiculous army of ambassadors that was like, I'm voting against the union because I love my 15 minute breaks. Right. And then everyone else started to create these accounts that were satirizing those accounts. And then Twitter had to sort through, well, which are the real ambassadors and which ones are the fake ambassador? My point is, if you created ways for people to verify each other, you wouldn't have this problem, and you'd have more trust in the network. Because I might know, like, okay, if your profile says you work at Amazon, you've authenticated through an Amazon email. So I just want people to think about this. Which was the origins of Facebook, if you think about it, that you had to have a college email and stuff like that.

Casey Newton: It is an interesting issue. This is something Walt Mossberg had been railing on 20 years ago, this idea of anonymousness. There are some arguments for being anonymous, for sure, but much smaller than the arguments for being who you are, saying who you are.

Kara Swisher: Then again, speaking of facial recognition in Afghanistan, they have a lot of information about you, of course, like a government does.

Casey Newton: Yes. And so that's why this should always be an optional thing. But what's so great about Tinder is Tinder is not saying that you're either verified or not. They're saying, well, we can verify different aspects of your life and maybe give you certain features based on what you're willing to contribute. So the overall trust in the network will rise. But if you want to remain totally anonymous, if you don't want to turn anything over, you don't have to, you can still use the service. So I think we just need to get smarter and more sophisticated about this, like create a balance.

Kara Swisher: So it gets you more dates.

Casey Newton: And yes, and that is the real goal. Verify Casey on Tinder right now. That's why I came on this podcast, actually. If you're a gay man, 30 to 40, living in a major American city. It is actually Casey Newton you're talking to.

Kara Swisher: All right, Casey, I'm so glad I could help you with your dating life. It's great.

Casey Newton: Oh, me too. And I'm so glad I could help you with Scott's mysterious disappearance. And let's hope we find him.

Kara Swisher: Let's hope we find him. Okay, Casey, thank you so much. Don't forget, if there's a story in the news that you're curious about and want to hear about our opinion on, go to nymag.com slash pivot. Thank you, Casey, for coming on the show. Subscribe to Platformer on Substack, which is a fantastic newsletter that Casey does. Casey, please read us out and try not to mispronounce everybody's name.

Casey Newton: Today's show was produced by Lara Neyman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Endrodot engineered this episode. Make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcasts, or if you're an Android user, check us out on Spotify, or frankly, wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.