Zachary Mack | The Verge

Mark Cuban says Facebook’s Libra is ‘dangerous’

2019-07-30T15:39:53-04:00

Billionaire businessman Mark Cuban called Facebook’s launch of Libra and its foray into cryptocurrency a “big mistake” in a recent interview with CNBC. This week, he joined Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel to further discuss his views on Libra and why he regards the new venture as “dangerous.”

Patel and Cuban also discuss artificial intelligence, net neutrality, breaking up Big Tech, investment opportunities that Cuban’s excited about right now, and more in the latest episode of The Vergecast. Below is a lightly edited excerpt of the conversation.

Nilay Patel: So let’s start with Libra because you literally were on CNBC recently and said, “It’s a big mistake, and it’s dangerous.” I actually agree with you, but go ahead and explain why.

Mark Cuban: I’m not against cryptocurrency at all. I’m not against the distributed nature of cryptocurrency. I think the idea that there’s no central control is kind of overblown because there are so many forks and there are so many changes and administrational issues that you know there’s always some external factor forcing control. But the problem I have with Facebook is that Facebook is in a unique position with over 2.2 billion worldwide users.

By having those tentacles everywhere globally, they have the opportunity to be more impactful in countries where there is less stability. And when you get a company like Facebook, with the power and leverage and the financial resources that they have, putting their tentacles into — not to pick on Africa, but African countries that have less stable currencies and governments — that can create issues that can lead to people dying. And so if Facebook were to say, “We’re going to start off the United States with Libra” or “We’re going to start off in the United States and Canada and Western Europe.” Fine, go for it. Let’s see what happens. But when you look to extend that into 2.2 billion users globally, the law of unintended consequences is inevitable, and most likely, it’s going to be a negative output.

And as I said in the CNBC interview, I think people will die as a result because when you start impacting a despot’s currency manipulation opportunities and their ability to tax and control what they can in their countries, that’s when despots tend to take matters into their own hands and people die.

Do you think this would be a different kind of conversation if it wasn’t Facebook proposing such a thing?

You could pick Company X that had 2.2 billion users globally, and I’d say the same thing.

So why do you think they’re pushing it so hard?

If you question Facebook’s ability to monetize personal data, and you think that there’s a risk that it could go away, what other ways can they leverage 2.2 billion users?

By taking a cut of transaction fees.

And creating your own worldwide global currency. What could be better than that? They’re thinking big, and I understand why they’re doing it. They’re in a unique position to literally create a global currency, and I can see why they want to do it. Whether you’re taking just a smidgen per transaction or you get to be effectively the fiat currency outside the biggest countries in the world. Why wouldn’t you try that? And the reason why you wouldn’t, particularly in the types of countries I mentioned, is the risk of people dying.

So how do you think this kind of intersects with other types of crypto, such as bitcoin and Ethereum?

It doesn’t. It’s two different things. I think it’s a platform that they’re using as an excuse to go become a global currency. Think of it this way: what is the biggest play that you could ever possibly conceive of? Creating your own global currency. What does not exist right now? A global currency. The United States dollar is kind of a fiat global currency that’s accepted everywhere, but it’s not digital. It’s not like they use bitcoin and said, “You know what? There’s already a base here. We’re going to support it, and we’re going to extend it by allowing it to be used with transactions on Facebook globally.”

No. The biggest part of their user base is on lower-powered phones with minimal connectivity and in places around the globe that use their phones as the bank. Global currency domination is the way I see it. And I’m not necessarily against that, per se. More power to them for putting themselves in a position to be able to at least try it. But you have to consider what happens in the most remote elements of that currency chain if you will. And that’s where problems occur.

What Republicans are getting wrong about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

2019-07-22T14:20:30-04:00

congress

We finally put Vox Media’s The Vergecast and The Weeds into one show — and, of course, it’s about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Vox senior correspondent and host of The Weeds Matt Yglesias talks to Verge editor-in-chief and host of The Vergecast Nilay Patel to explain what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act really means and how members of Congress may be misinterpreting it.

Below is a lightly edited excerpt of Patel and Yglesias getting into — you guessed it — the weeds on Section 230. You can hear this and more in the latest episode of The Vergecast.

Matt Yglesias: I have been hearing more and more from Republican members of Congress about something called Section 230, which they think is a big problem with technology companies, and that there’s an anti-conservative bias on the tech platforms.

Nilay Patel: But not according to any of the data.

MY: But according to them, and Section 230 has something to do with it.

NP: Yes. So Section 230 is a section of the Communications Decency Act. It’s the law that allows platform companies to moderate their platforms. And the thing about Section 230, in particular, that I think this audience will find interesting is it is really easy to read, like if you have just a passing familiarity with how legislation is written. It is super easy to read. It’s plain on its face. And then the people who wrote it are still around. Ron Wyden, who’s the co-author, is still in Congress. So he is very happy to tell you what he meant when he wrote these very easy-to-read words.

So the history of it and what it was meant to do was allow platform companies to moderate their platforms, to take down things that they didn’t want there or to promote things they wanted to see promoted. That freedom is the heart of how every platform works.

MY: And this Communications Decency Act was established back in the ‘90s, right?

NP: Yeah, the instigating event behind Section 230 is a case called Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy. You might remember Stratton Oakmont is the firm from The Wolf of Wall Street. So Prodigy ran these message boards, and the users on the message boards said Stratton Oakmont is a sham. This is a bad company you shouldn’t do business with. It’s all fraud all the way up and down. The movie hadn’t come out yet, so I don’t think other people knew about it. So Stratton Oakmont sued prodigy and said that because Prodigy moderates these boards and removes some content that violates the rules while promoting other content, that they are exerting editorial control over this information, and thus, you’re liable for it the same way a newspaper would be.

MY: So that’s not like a libel context, right? So like if we at Vox write an article that accuses Stratton Oakmont of being fraudulent, we are potentially legally vulnerable. They can sue us. Now, as it turns out, they actually were fraudulent.

NP: Turns out, this was true.

MY: So this is one of many reasons that we try not to publish inaccurate smears: you could get sued for it. We are liable for the content on our site. And so their position was because Prodigy is maintaining editorial control over these message boards, the company itself (which, presumably, has deeper pockets then random message board guys) is legally responsible for libel that occurs.

NP: Yep. And the court agreed with him, which was not an entirely expected result. There is a lot of legal wrangling. This phrase is going to come back to haunt us and maybe bury me personally, but there’s a lot of legal wrangling over a “platform” versus a “publisher,” and if you exert this much control, are you a publisher? So the court agreed and says, “You are liable.”

Here’s the important part to the conservative side, and what I think everyone is intentionally missing: Section 230 was written to overrule that case. Platforms should not be treated as publishers. If you allow users to publish content on your platform, you are not liable for that content at all. It’s just a flat rule.

MY: So only the person who actually writes the thing?

NP: Yep. So, for example, Vox has a great YouTube channel. YouTube and Google are not responsible for videos that Vox publishes.

MY: Right. So if I go on Twitter and I libel people, the people who I have libeled can sue me, but they can’t sue Twitter. But the rhetoric is sometimes that I’ll hear Republicans say, “These companies are acting as publishers, not as neutral platforms.”

NP: Yep. Which is the old law. The thing that Section 230 was written to get rid of.

MY: The legal decision, I guess, was that the platform could be held responsible because they were exerting editorial control. So you would need to say, “No, well, we’re not moderating this at all” in order to obtain your immunity. But the new law says it doesn’t matter.

NP: Yep. You can just go read it. I encourage everyone to just read it themselves. It is not a complicated thing. I’m going to read it to you now.

Here’s Section 230 C1: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service, a platform, shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

That’s all. That’s literally all it says. “No provider shall be treated as the publisher.” Everybody’s getting it wrong, but that’s all it says.

MY: That’s actually pretty straightforward. But what are the politics here? What is it that Republicans in Congress are trying to accomplish?

NP: Total control of all information disseminated on the internet, as far as I can tell. But that might be the over-read. That’s just me. I live in a world where I talk about Section 230 literally every day. But what they’re after is there are only a handful of giant information platforms on the internet. We’re rapidly approaching a stage where there might be like six companies in the world. And if you look at Twitter, Google, and Facebook, they control a massive amount of information. They all have rules about how they moderate their platforms. Republicans think they are being over-moderated, and that is a rich argument for their base. Mostly because the hard right base engages in a lot of speech that a lot of these moderation policies ban. So that’s a lot of racism. That’s a lot of sexism and transphobia. Bigotry in general, hate speech, and so on. Then there’s harassment, which every platform wants to ban in one way or another or moderate in some way or another. If you are a Republican, and you’ve got this base where — increasingly, it seems — every day, there’s a new scandal of racism or sexism or bigotry (I might add the president engaged in some overt racism just recently), well then, these moderation decisions are disproportionately impacting you. And so they feel like these policies are biased against their speech and this is a free speech area.

I think one thing everyone will agree universally is that these companies are not necessarily well-run. And even if they were perfectly run, the nature of writing and enforcing speech regulation is such that you’re still going to do a bad job. The United States has been trying to develop a free speech policy in our courts for 220-plus years, and we’re pretty bad at it. Four guys working at Facebook aren’t going to do a good job in 20 years. So there’s that problem, right? Where does a pretty funny joke cross the line to being overtly bigoted? It really depends on context. We all understand. It depends on who you think you are speaking to. Whether it’s a group of your friends or whether, suddenly, Twitter’s algorithm grabs your speech and amplifies you to millions of people. How many little Twitter scandals are just a throwaway comment that somehow went viral, and now someone’s crying? It happens every day.

The other problem that I keep coming back to is that there’s only a tiny handful of companies. These companies are monopolies in their space. So you see Republicans saying that their free speech and rights are being violated. The president is saying they’re violating our free speech rights. But these companies are not the government. They’re private companies that are free to do whatever they want by statute. But there’s nowhere to go. So if you feel like tweeting is important, and the president feels like tweeting is important, and you’re constantly being bombarded with moderation decisions for your base, then it probably does feel like these companies are censoring you. And then you might say that they’ve overstepped their bounds and might as well just be liable for everything the way a newspaper would be, even though the statute doesn’t say at all.

Vergecast: the market for tech support is growing

2019-07-17T11:59:44-04:00

Everything is too complicated. Asurion CEO Tony Detter joins Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel to discuss simplifying our experience with tech products, the problems with closed ecosystems, and why an insurance company like Asurion got involved with tech support.

Below is a lightly edited excerpt where Detter and Patel discuss what we can do about the “everything is too complicated” problem. You can hear this and more in the latest episode of The Vergecast.

Nilay Patel: Every year around the holidays, I write a post about how everything is too complicated. What happens is that I go home and basically spend the entire time driving around the Midwest to parents’ and families’ houses, and I just listen to my family ask me questions about their phones and what they should buy. I’m that guy for them, and it always strikes me that everything is so insanely complicated that no one really knows how anything works.

Every year someone asks me what the difference is between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. And every year I put it in the story. But you actually sell tech support to people. How big of a business is that?

Tony Detter: It’s a pretty big business. We have 300 million customers worldwide who are paying us either on a one-time basis or a monthly basis for some level of support.

But you’re right, everything is too complicated. What we realized was that the technology we carry in our pockets is so powerful. You can do so many things with that mobile device. And when we started, just getting it back in your hands was important. But as its capabilities have increased, there’s now so much more that you need to do with it, like boarding a plane or connecting Bluetooth to home speakers.

All of those things are very complicated and as we talk to people using their phones, we found it was a problem and they had no place to get to conclusions quickly. Our business in that space was really just born out of talking to people the same way you do.

This is more of a philosophical question, but why do you think it’s so complicated? We talk about ecosystem lock-in on The Vergecast every week. We know people don’t like it, but every company architects their ecosystem to lock you in — they all say “if you buy this phone and this watch and this speaker and use this cloud service and we own it all, then everything will work seamlessly,” but the second you step out of it, you create all this friction.

Do you feel as though that is by design or is that just an accident of the industry? A company like yours cannot exist in tech support unless there’s a need for it, and it sounds like that business is growing.

You’ve nailed it exactly, it’s the problem that the average American consumer faces. I don’t think there’s a single answer. There’s a whole bunch of different factors that go into making this happen. One is we’re in a society, particularly for technology, where there’s a reward for prototyping to get something to market to see if there’s a product / market fit.

When you do that, you’re not worried about how that product might interact with the myriad of operating systems it could come into contact with. In your article, one of the things you always talk about is Bluetooth. How many times have you as a customer connected something via Bluetooth and it works? And then you come back a week later and it doesn’t work, but you’ve done all the same things. The reason behind that is so complex: from companies wanting to get products to market fast, to there being so many different operating systems, to making sure customers remain loyal, to having some control over the environment in which this technology device operates.

All of these are factors, and they compound. But you’re right, tech support is a growing space because things are getting more and more complicated. The technology can do so much more. But as it does more, that means there’s more interactions and each of those interactions is a complexity point.

Net neutrality was repealed a year ago — what’s happened since?

2019-07-09T17:32:24-04:00

It’s been a year since net neutrality was repealed. Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy, chats with Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about what’s happened since by explaining the ripple effect of harmful policy decisions and more.

Below is a lightly edited excerpt of Sohn explaining three things that have happened since repealing net neutrality that clearly demonstrate what the Federal Communications Commission did is terrible for consumers, competition, and public safety.

You can hear this and more in the latest episode of The Vergecast.

It’s been a year since net neutrality was repealed, and I‘ve seen a rash of headlines about it. The National Review says the internet apocalypse didn’t happen, which is true. It was not an apocalypse. But I want to talk about what has happened with internet service in America over the past year since net neutrality was repealed. In some ways, it’s been a death by a thousand cuts. There’s a lot of little things that did happen that aren’t great.

I disagree with you to the extent that I don’t think these are little things. I actually think they’re very big things and I think they’re just at the very beginning of worse things to come. So, yes it’s death by a thousand cuts but the cuts are deeper than people think.

What immediately comes to mind? Data caps are back in vogue, there’s this router fee that Frontier is charging people for even if they have one of those routers, there’s the entire FCC. The FCC just doesn’t enforce anything anymore. It gave away its power, and now there’s nowhere to go.

When the Trump FCC repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order, it didn’t just eliminate the prohibitions against blocking and throttling and paid prioritization. So in other words, these were things that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Charter were not allowed to do. They were not allowed to control your internet experience, but it also gave away oversight over the broadband industry. The FCC abdicated its responsibility to protect consumers and competition in the broadband market. That is the most important thing that happened on December 14th, 2017 when the FCC repealed the Open Internet Order.

But let me explain three things that have happened in the last year and a couple of months that clearly demonstrate that what the FCC did is really terrible for consumers terrible for competition and frankly terrible for public safety. I mean it really goes beyond pure consumer issues.

The first thing that happened, and this is not insignificant, is about a year ago during the worst fire in California history, Verizon was throttling the Santa Clara County Fire Department’s broadband. And Verizon and the fire department engaged in a seven month discussion over whether Verizon ought to be throttling the fire department’s broadband in the middle of huge forest fires and eventually what Verizon said was they would stop throttling the broadband if the fire department paid more than double of what they were paying before for broadband and the fire department had no place to go. They can’t go to the FCC because the FCC abdicated their authority over broadband. They wouldn’t go to the FTC because they take forever to adjudicate complaints. So if Verizon throttles your broadband, there’s nothing they can do about it.

And that’s not a trade problem. If you sell the thing you’re advertising, there’s no trade problem.

Exactly. The fire department had absolutely no recourse. And what I found really interesting about this was that while this was happening neither the FCC nor the FTC said anything about it. Neither of them said, “Oh, if the fire department had only filed a complaint with us we would have done something about it.” And I found that very telling. But that was a matter of life and property here. Not just a matter of you paying ten dollars more for a router or whatever have you.

So, the second instance of where the absence of net neutrality really implicated public safety was when a number of mobile carriers, T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T were found to have sold the precise geolocation data of their customers. If they sell them to data brokers who then sold them to bounty hunters. People who try to find estranged girlfriends, kids and so on.

Again, it’s very important to know that the FCC had privacy rules that we adopted in 2016 that would have likely prevented this from happening because you would have had to opt in to the collection of this data. But once again consumers had nowhere to turn. And allegedly the FCC has been investigating this issue for a year and a half and has done nothing about it. So this is both a privacy issue, but also an oversight issue.

The third thing is what happened with Frontier Communications. They’re mostly in rural areas, but also in California. They’re not a beloved company. I’ll be very frank with you. What happened was, a customer bought his own router for two hundred dollars and Frontier kept charging him ten dollars a month to rent it. So this customer complained to the FCC and the FCC told Frontier they had to respond to this complaint and Frontier basically said, “Too bad. This is a charge we make and you have to continue to pay it.” So basically, the FCC is delegating their oversight of the broadband industry to the broadband industry. They answered you so, goodbye, they have more important things to do.

When I say they’ve abdicated their responsibility and the repeal of the 2015 Open Internet order allowed them to do that, those are the deep cuts I’m talking about. And those are no joke.

Why AI can’t fix content moderation

2019-07-02T15:22:18-04:00

Content moderation is a long-standing challenge for big tech companies. Many of the issues surrounding content moderation have been reported on extensively by The Verge, and they’re now the focus of UCLA professor Sarah T. Roberts’ new book Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media.

Below is a lightly edited excerpt of Roberts and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel’s discussion about why artificial intelligence is not the solution to the content moderation problem.

You can hear this and more in the latest episode of The Vergecast.

My colleague and Silicon Valley editor Casey Newton says to me, “If you live in a world where your dream is to replace human beings with math, then of course you’re going to treat the human beings poorly.” AI is designed to take the place of people. That’s why these content moderators are contractors. Have you encountered this sort of AI vision of content moderation? Have you seen attempts to build it? Do you think it works?

First off, it’s a fundamental cultural and political orientation to work. There is an inherent belief that those systems are somehow less biased, that they can scale better, and they’re just somehow preferable. I would argue that there’s a lot that goes unsaid in such an attitude. Here are some things that algorithms don’t do: they don’t form a union, they don’t agitate for better working conditions, they don’t leak stories to journalists and academics. So we have to be very critical about that notion.

But yes, since 2010, as I looked at the work life and the behavior of moderators on the job and what they were being asked to do, it was very clear to me that the processes they undertook were binary decision trees. If then, if this is present, then do this. If this is not present in an adequate amount, then leave and go to line 20. And that’s an algorithm kind of thinking that not only is endemic to the culture but also would go very easily toward building a computational system tool that could replicate.

So one of the things that I’ve been seeing as a trend more recently is the fact that there are entirely new pockets of what I consider to be commercial content moderation work that have opened up that may go by another name. And now what we see is a bunch of humans whose full-time job is, rather than to deal with live content on a system, is to train datasets for machine learning tools so that their decisions on a particular piece of content or a set of prescreened images are then captured and put back into a computational system with the hope of using that to replicate. And then, ultimately, replace the humans.

That said, if you talk to actual industry insiders who will speak candidly and who are actually working directly in this area, they will tell you that there is no time that they can envision taking humans entirely out of this loop. And I believe that to be true. If for no other reason than what I just described, we need human intelligence to train the machines right.

And people are always going to try to defeat the algorithm.

They’re going to try to defeat it. They’re going to try to game it. We can’t possibly imagine all the scenarios that will come online. And of course, those decisions need to be vetted at various points along the decision-making chain. At best, what we’ll have and what we’ll continue to have is a hybrid. But over the past few years, all I’ve seen is an increase in hiring not a decrease.

Big Tech’s problem is its lack of competition

2019-06-25T14:53:19-04:00

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According to Recode editor-at-large Kara Swisher, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest problems right now is its lack of competition. That big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have become too dominant and have thus stifled competition and creativity.

Here is a lightly edited excerpt of Kara Swisher and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel discussing the importance of competition and the possibilities of breaking up the tech giants that rule the land.

You can hear this and more in the latest episode of The Vergecast.

Nilay Patel: One of the major themes at the Code Conference this year was antitrust break-ups. My connection between those two things is pretty simple. It’s that Google has gotten so big we cannot tell it apart from the government right?

Kara Swisher: Right.

It behaves like a government institute. It makes decisions about what you may or may not buy. Decisions about what you may or may not see. It is a gateway to the economy for most. Is the solution to just break them up?

Well, it’s interesting because the people from these large tech companies were onstage at Code Conference and what they were saying is that in order to solve these problems, they need to be big. But that’s what got us into trouble in the first place. So it’s like, you were so big that you made a mess. And now the bigness is going to solve the mess? I just… I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it in any way.

Something that my Pivot co-host Scott Galloway was talking about is that if you break these companies up, you unlock a lot of value. Like if you’re a Facebook investor and they break it up and take off Instagram and WhatsApp, you’re going to be richer because they are allowed to compete. If they took YouTube off of Google, the first meeting of the YouTube board is “let’s do search.” The first meeting of the Google board is “let’s do video.” And so you create a competitive environment. And the fact that we have no new search engine since forever and no new social network since 2011 — which is Snapchat — no substantive social networks, no one’s going to go into those businesses because no one’s going to be able to compete. No one’s going to try to create. No one’s going to say I think I’ll create the safe YouTube. I think I’ll create the safe Facebook. Why do it? It’s easier to do the unsafe one and make a ton of money and or try to sell your content. You can’t beat them. You can’t beat them at their current size.

Do you see this as being solvable in the way that these companies are currently constituted? Or do you think it’s always solved by competition?

I think it’s always solved by competition. That’s the best way to do it. Some regulation is needed. There should be some more around privacy and there should be real teeth around these laws and certain laws already in place that they aren’t enforcing. They’re not acting or investigating enough and there is some value to fearing the government. They should investigate more because when they do, people behave better. There’s a place I drive in Washington and I know to slow down there because I got like 20 tickets. If people have a perception that the government is watching in a fair way, they will behave differently and so I do think there’s some things that need to be solved by some regulation, maybe some of the Apple store pricing, that kind of stuff. Where you don’t want to break them up, but figure out how to smartly apply laws to it. And then there are some things that we should break up and spin off.

I think Google is a good candidate for that. Probably YouTube from Google. That seems obvious. There’s a lot of others. Facebook could lose Instagram and WhatsApp. Amazon… I don’t know, Prime? Could you pull off Prime? Probably not. Apple is tricky, too. There’s other remedies there and so there’s all kinds of things you could do with each of these companies. But the principle ones are Facebook and Google.

Would Facebook be better if we paid for it?

2019-06-18T12:43:52-04:00

Is the advertising model that allows our use of Facebook to be free actually the thing that’s wrong with Facebook? If we all just paid a subscription fee each month, would that solve some of the issues and concerns with privacy, data, and so on?

Here is a lightly edited excerpt of Verge senior editor Casey Newton speaking with Facebook executives Adam Mosseri and Andrew Bosworth onstage at Code Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, about whether a subscription model would solve anything for Facebook users.

You can hear this and more in the latest episode of The Vergecast.

Casey Newton: What do you make of the argument that companies that have advertising-based business models in this space are just, sort of, doomed to create products that have bad incentives, and that Facebook would be better if we paid it a monthly subscription fee?

Andrew Bosworth: I think it’s a bit of a red herring. If there’s issues with advertising business models, then we should deal with those directly. But it has to be done with a total accounting. Not just, hey, what are the benefits and time spent, what are the costs in terms of investment that you’re outlaying? And I haven’t really seen that full-throated analysis done.

Adam Mosseri: The other thing is we obviously believe in the value that we create. Some people don’t, that’s reasonable, we can always argue about that. But assuming that we create some value is something that we should be proud of, that we give that value out for free. Right? Because you can use our service whether or not you use a $1,200 phone here in the states, or you live in Ecuador or you live in Japan. It doesn’t matter.

And we actually can afford to provide that service for everyone that wants to use the service, because it’s an advertising business model, which, by the way, is mostly paid for by people in developed markets who can afford to. It’s easy to make the argument that if there was a subscription fee, that the attendance might be better. But then all of a sudden, you’re cutting off access to a large percentage of the world’s population, which I think we too often forget.

Andrew Bosworth: If you’re charging people money, it’s going to be regressive. We are actually filling a service that people value, for free.

Vergecast: Recapping Code Conference and Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s difficult week

2019-06-14T12:54:37-04:00

Fresh off of Code Conference, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s apology and difficult week, and consider whether there’s any viable alternative to Youtube amid all the backlash the company’s received in recent weeks.

They also discuss the leaked photo of the upcoming Pixel 4 and ponder the strategy behind the leaked photo. And later, a recap of what happened at E3 from Megan Farokhmanesh and some video game and hardware updates from the Vergecast crew. And finally, Paul’s segment.

You can hear all that and more on this week’s Vergecast.

Stories discussed this week:

Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown on how meatless burgers can still improve

2019-06-13T15:33:28-04:00

Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown discusses the evolution of plant-based burgers, the science of protein, why his company avoids GMOs, and its mission to help create a more sustainable food system.

Here is a lightly edited excerpt of Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Brown just days before their product upgrade discussing Beyond Meat’s continued efforts to make their meatless burgers taste more like meat in the latest episode of The Vergecast.

Nilay Patel: So right now your Beyond Burger is out. I saw some at the grocery store a couple of weeks ago. You’ve got you’ve got a burger at Carl’s Junior. Do you have different processes for the grocery store versus Carl’s Junior versus Del Taco?

Ethan Brown: One of the most challenging jobs is Beyond Meat isn’t in production and operations. It’s challenging because we aren’t satisfied with our current products. And so as much as I love to hear and to really do that you know you’ve gone out to buy the product. Part of me cringes because I know that I have a product here that’s so much better than that. And I want you as a consumer to have that. And so we have this program here called it Beyond Meat rapid and relentless innovation program and it’s designed to try to make the product that you just bought obsolete as quick as we can because our rate of understanding this is a wonderful discovery process when you bring bright people together and give them a clear goal. They begin to understand things better and they begin to knock down obstacles. So our current burger that we’re gonna be releasing later in the summer I feel is so much better than the one you just had.

We are on this mission to build a perfect piece of meat and that product is imperfect. There are things about it that aren’t exactly like meat and that really bothers us.

Niley Patel: What are those things?

Ethan Brown: This is crazy for me to be saying this… I don’t like the aroma as much as I should. It’s close to animal protein in certain ways. There’s well over a thousand molecules that make meat taste and have that smell that we’re so accustomed to. And what we’re doing is we’re isolating those molecules literally from meat and then we’re characterizing them we’re trying to match them with molecules and plants that will deliver the same experience to our human century system. We’re getting closer but we’re not yet landing right on the target. I think the one that we have today that’s going to be released in the summer is closer.

Second is the way it transitions in color. It’s still too red when it’s been cooked. And that’s one hand that’s consumers get used to and they’re fine with it. But the reason it bothers me is because people take it home for the first time they might try to cook that color out because that’s what they’re used to doing with animal protein. And so we need to make that color transition better. We’ve worked a lot on that.

Lastly, the distribution of fat. I really want the fat to distribute in a way that doesn’t muscle. And we’re still working on that distribution muscle into pockets and it’s sort of interwoven in a way that’s really really nuanced and gives you that burst of fat when you bite into a piece of meat protein. We need to get better at that. And I think the product we’re releasing is getting closer.

Nilay Patel: So this leads to a bigger philosophical question. You are describing how to replace meat. Making it so that your expectations of cooking and eating a Beyond Meat Burger are exactly the same as your expectations of a hamburger patty. Is that the right goal? Is it that people need hamburgers that are exactly like hamburgers of the past or is it we have to change our food supply?

Ethan Brown: My mother asks me that question a lot. She’s like “Why are you so focused on perfectly replicating animal protein? Why don’t you just build a new source of protein for the front of the plate that people get really excited about?” I think we ought to earn that right. We have to prove that we can do this because the only thing that I know with absolute certainty about the consumer is that the consumer loves meat. You know most of us do. Around 94 percent of the population here in United States. And so that’s a really clear target for me. If I start to try to create a new flavor profile a new consistency, that’s really hard. And what I want to do is prove through science that you don’t need the animal to produce a piece of meat and then I have a ton of freedom after that but I feel like we need to pass through that or or else we just become one of many other choices. You know our hope and our dream is that we’ll continue as a species to go on loving and consuming meat. Maybe that’s plant based meat. And if I just offer an alternative to something that everyone loves I think we’ll miss that opportunity.

Why Beyond Meat uses pea protein

2019-06-11T14:47:51-04:00

Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown discusses the evolution of plant-based burgers, the science of protein, why his company avoids GMOs, and its mission to help create a more sustainable food system.

Here is a lightly edited excerpt of Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Brown discussing Beyond Meat’s decision to use pea protein in the latest episode of The Vergecast.

So I want to get really nerdy about pea protein.

Yeah, we happen to use it today, but we might not necessarily be using it tomorrow. It’s what’s available to us. We really use that because it’s available in significant quantities in a way that some other proteins aren’t. But in my view, from a consumer perspective, the thing that recommends peas most strongly is what it’s not — and it’s not soy.

The consumer told us very early that they wanted to avoid having additional soy in their diet.

Why is that?

People have concerns about different types of ingredients. And there’s different conflicting medical literature about different types of ingredients. So if there’s a controversy or disease or discomfort with a particular ingredient, I don’t want to complicate my product with it. So we looked for another source of protein very early.

Peas are available in this level of supply because they were set up for starch. This particular process of separating protein from fiber was scaled up to sort of the starch market. But there’s nothing magical about peas. You can get protein from any number of resources, and one of the products I’m really excited about is our breakfast sausage that is protein from sunflower seeds and protein from mung beans and protein from brown rice as well as pea protein.

So you’ll see us continue to diversify the number and amount of proteins that we use. Five years from now, you’ll be able to go to a meat counter and get sausage that is not only made from pea protein but from lentil protein, lupin, or your favorite protein source.