4. Facebook's Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth

Geek Out with Matt Navarra is sponsored by Pinterest. Inspire your audience and grow your company on Pinterest with a free business account. Learn more at business.pinterest.com. It's time to geek out. Hello and welcome to Geek Out with Matt Navarra, sponsored by Pinterest. I am Matt Navarra.

And I'm Martin SFP Bryant. Now we talk a lot about Facebook on this show, so it makes sense that maybe we should talk to somebody from Facebook.

Yes, and we're privileged this week because we'll be joined by Andrew Boz, Bosworth, Facebook's VP responsible for AR and VR. As we record this, actually, Facebook's Oculus Connect event is taking place in San Jose, and he'll be speaking to us just after he comes off stage in a bit.

Yeah, very exciting. But before that, a special hello to everyone who's shared our podcast over the past few weeks. All the tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn posts, Pinterest pins, and blog posts really do help. Someone told me this week he listens to us in the gym, so I'd love to know where where else people listen to us. The ultimate goal will be to be the first podcast Elon Musk listens to on Mars, but I think we'll have to keep going for quite a while to get to that.

So yours are much more interesting. Mine, I'm getting tweets from people who are generally listening to it in the car, which is a typical place to listen to it. So I'm hoping I'm going to get some more quirky ones, but we'll see later on this week, maybe. But if you want to get in touch with me on Twitter, use the hashtag #GeekOutQuestions, and you can find me on Twitter as @MattNavarra.

And I'm @martinsfp. So Matt, what have you been up to this week?

I have been trying to learn more about TikTok and only because my 9, well, 10-year-old nearly now daughter is getting more and more obsessed by it. So I obviously, as part of my job, use it in a different way to what she might use it, but she wants me to do all of the bloody shoe shuffles and all sorts of other ridiculous things that make me look way like I'm trying desperately to be younger than I really am. So that has been an experience, a bit of a learning curve, but it's actually been pretty good and I'm really getting to love TikTok more than I ever did. So that's a positive. For me. And also she had a birthday this, a couple of weeks ago, and she wanted one of those DJI Osmo Mobile gyro things to play around with and film with, because they're actually not that expensive, you know. So we've been playing with that, which has been pretty good fun. And I've also been playing with Byte, which is kind of Vine 2.0. It's got its latest version, its beta out, and it's got a lot more functionality, more features in there. A lot more people are in the beta now, and I think it's going to do really well. You know, Vine was always a great place to hang out and to view content in that sort of short content. So I'm hoping it, uh, it takes off for them. So we'll soon see.

Does it have a chance against TikTok?

Well, this is the question. At the moment it's, uh, hard to tell because there's so much of the app which is yet to be sort of set up and the features to be unraveled and used in full because they're still testing a bit at a time. But I think certainly from the fact that there was so much love for Vine, um, I think that's got a lot of nostalgia value, even though it wasn't that long ago. Um, but we'll have to wait and see, I think, because it's still not quite available for everybody.

I've been using TikTok a lot too this week, uh, and just trying to become more familiar with it as well. Because, you know, I've looked at it in the past, but I thought, yeah, let's try and use it a bit more and get like a proper feel for what it's like to actually use it as a creator. And so I've been playing around with that. But what I find is that you can— yeah, there's an age thing, isn't there? When everyone on there who goes viral on there is late teens, early 20s, and you're there a bit older than that, you can kind of feel a little out of place. So I'm trying to break through that and, uh, and just try it out because it is a lot of fun to create on there.

Okay, well, I'm getting to that stage now where Livi is teaching me, my daughter, um, about social media and what I should be doing and how I should be doing it. And then when I tell her what I do and talk about the podcast, she just cringes and just kind of nods her head in shame at what I'm doing. So no respect at all from the 9-year-old at the moment, but there we go.

Okay, so Boz will be joining us shortly, as we said, but first of all, let's take a look at the news. And our first story we're going to discuss this week is, uh, the verification fiasco, I suppose is the best way to describe it, at YouTube. I didn't even realize I was verified on YouTube until I received this email the other day saying, oh, by the way, you're going to lose your verification. They were changing the way verification works, and it didn't take long until they completely rode back the whole idea. What did you make of this, Matt?

Well, it's the same as every other social network when it comes to verification. They don't really know what to do with it and how to do it in the right way. And I think everyone— well, not everyone, a lot of people have different opinions on this. And there's an argument of people suggesting that, you know, you give people, uh, all— everybody verification and send in your passport or your ID, and that's the verification level. Other people, me, I think, will feel it needs to be a hybrid between that as a, as a sort of base level, and then also to give people who have certain levels of prominence or interest to people, to help people find that best content, great content, or content creators as well, by some sort of mark. That still leaves its disposition of somebody selecting who is the right people to be verified and who is not, and it becomes that kind of back to being in school again and who's got the shiny prefect badge and who hasn't or whatever status symbol. So I think on this one, I think everything about it was a bit of a mess in terms of how they wanted verification to look in terms of the badges was strange in terms of who they were sort of suggesting should or shouldn't be potentially. But yeah, it was a complete, for want of a better word, shit show really. And I don't think Twitter or anyone else has done it much better. And we're still waiting for Twitter, in fact, aren't we? So Yeah, we'll see if they come up with a better idea for solving their problems there.

Yeah, I think they totally overthink this. Not just YouTube, this is all social media companies totally overthink verification. Verification should simply say, are you who you say you are? And that could mean a simple, you know, you take a photo of an ID, you hold up an ID in a little video, and they outsource to some people to just make sure that that works fine. That's how it works with— in the UK, there are these neo banks, these challenger banks like Starling and Monzo and and the like. And a lot of those, when you sign up for an account, you have to do like a little video selfie and submit a photo of an official document. And very quickly they authorize your account. And so if that can be done for a bank account, I don't see why it can't be done for a blue checkmark on a, on a Twitter account or a checkmark on a YouTube account or whatever. It just seems like they're totally overthinking it. And there could be another way to highlight the kind of professional creators and verification should just be you are who you say you are.

Yeah, no, I think, I think it's definitely not working as it is, but it hasn't been working for a long time. Time, but I do like the idea of something that signifies for the big names, the people that are really well known, that could be imitated or could be used and abused in terms of people making fake imposter accounts. There needs to be something for that as well as steering people to those best content creators. But I do think there is a solution out there, but no one seems to have hit it yet. So maybe that's going to come in 2020. Who knows?

And next up, Voldemort, or indeed Project Voldemort, which is apparently Snap's dossier of all the ways that Facebook has been anti-competitive in Snap's eyes to Snapchat. So some of the ways they talk about in this is some of the obvious things. Obviously they copied stories and things, but there's things like blocking searches for Snapchat-related content in Instagram, including the Snapchat hashtag and filters. And, you know, so you couldn't find on Explore, you wouldn't find Snapchat-related content. So what do you make of this, Matt?

Well, part of me thinks this is no surprise, or we shouldn't be surprised. Not to say that what they've done is right or good, or that it's not bad or wrong what they've done in some ways, but it doesn't surprise me that this sort of stuff has gone on and probably is going on in many other big tech companies around the world. And in terms of kind of the sorts of things that they're doing, some of the items that were in that list of things, which, you know, like you were discussing there around blocking sort of content and kind of placing pressure on influencers to kind of move some platforms or not to use certain platforms and a few others. Some of them felt, uh, like, you know, just very cutthroat, ruthless kind of business tactics which were kind of on the cusp, if you like, of, you know, acceptability in a business world. Others are slightly moving into territory which, you know, I think couldn't be seen in any other way other than, yeah, downright dodgy sort of scheming tactics which maybe they'll want to deal with. Um, but, but yeah, it makes for another great movie, maybe The Social Network 2. And I think this could be a great another plotline that is brought out into the later years of Mark Zuckerberg and his company. But, uh, I think this is going to be part of the bigger picture of many of those court cases and, uh, that we've heard in the last few weeks and that we were discussing last week with, with Damian Collins as well. So yeah, a little bit of surprise, a little bit of, well, you know, it's Facebook, it's tech, it's big business, what do we expect?

Yeah, so a Facebook spokeswoman defended the company's practices, arguing that the decision to build and iterate on rivals' features helped competition. And they also said that the Unavo tech, which this a company they acquired, an Israeli company they acquired, which allowed them to see what people were using in terms of apps on their phones. They said that was just similar to other market research tools. So yeah, we'll just have to see how the antitrust investigation into Facebook goes in that regard. Next up for you, if you're listening on the day we release this, the 26th of September, Facebook has just shut down its Group Stories feature. This is similar to Snapchat. We obviously were talking about that there, but in that it was a stories feature but shared within a group on Facebook, and I admin a group with a few thousand members, and I think I've only seen 2 people use the Stories feature in the whole time it's been live. Matt, is this gonna be a great loss?

Well, I was about to say the same thing, you know, in the Social Media Geek Out group on Facebook, you know, and we've had Stories like a lot of other people for some time, and I think I've seen less than a dozen people or dozen story entries in there in the time it's been around. So I'm guessing that's possibly a pattern that's been seen by Facebook and everyone else in groups for, for a little while now. And so therefore it doesn't seem to make sense for them to continue doing development work on it or for them to kind of bloat out groups with all the other features, including something that people are not using. So, uh, they're not really giving any details from what I can see around the amount of usage it's got. Um, but the thing I've always found with Facebook, particularly if you use it on iOS or Android, you get so many options now and features you can do for a different post type, whether it's a GIF or a 3D photo or any number of them.

And it just is such a long list and it's a bit the same with groups.

There's so many things you can do now in a group that if there's something that's not working or something that people are not really using, you kind of want to kind of condense down the options to make it simpler and focus on the best stuff that people do want and develop them further. So it's sort of not really surprised, but I don't think it makes a huge dent in Facebook's big domination plans for stories. And they're going to continue marching forwards with stories in every, every other angle and area of the platform that, that we're looking at in particular newsfeed. So which which will probably disappear next year, we think. So yeah, no surprises, but today is the day it's going. So if you loved it, say goodbye.

I don't think many people will be mourning it. And our final story for this week, and one I find a bit baffling, Facebook has confirmed it won't fact-check politicians' speech or block their content if it's newsworthy, even if it validates the site's hate speech rules or other policies. So this is a story from TechCrunch, Josh Constine reporting on Facebook's global policy and communications head, Nick Clegg, who gave a speech this week about Facebook's plans to prevent interference in the 2020 presidential election. So basically what this means is obviously if there are other groups promoting political ideas and it's factually incorrect, then the fact-checkers might step in and flag that up. But if it's, say, Donald Trump or his presidential rival or Boris Johnson or whoever else, they will not be fact-checked. So they can say something that is incorrect and Facebook will say, okay, and it won't be a problem. Nick Clegg says this is because they want users to judge what politicians say themselves. I think it's actually more a case that they don't want to be accused of bias. They don't want to be seen as picking sides. Even if one side of a political debate between two politicians is totally wrong, factually wrong, and the other one is using facts to argue back, if they say, "Oh, this one's incorrect," then it may look to some people that they're picking sides. And then if that person then wins, then Facebook is potentially at a political disadvantage. What do you think, Matt?

Yeah, this is such a nightmare. I would so not want to be in Facebook's shoes, as they would say, in this scenario, because I can see both sides here. So we've got this situation where we, or a lot of people, I'm not necessarily saying everybody, doesn't want and doesn't think it's right that Facebook should be that famous arbiter of truth and the judge and jury on what people should or should not particularly when it comes to important things to do with politics and freedom of speech and all those sorts of areas. And so I get that. I also get that this change that Facebook's made, or it's the way it wants to deal with it, is a neat way of sidestepping those kind of discussions about bias and its fault or blame in any things that go on that they could get put against by someone like Trump, who loves to accuse all these social networks of bias and things. But then at the same time, Facebook has a responsibility. We've said this before. It's got billions of users around the world. It's got an amazing amount of reach to do— to get all of this content that can spread so fast, so quickly. And it could be inaccurate, it could be false, it could be inflammatory, and all these sorts of problems that we've seen many, many times before. And so it's kind of like, where is the balancing point? What is the happy medium? And I don't know whether we're ever going to get there. It just doesn't feel like we are. Do we end up having like a board of independent people, which is what Facebook is already doing for some other things, to kind of make some of these decisions so there a little bit of control over some of this content? Do we make Facebook deal with it because it's, you know, their platform and they're their responsibility? They're profiting on this platform in many ways. Or do we have people like, uh, from like me and you are involved in these processes? Or do we have what Facebook said, you know, let them do what they want, say what they want because it's freedom of speech and it's who are they to intervene? It's absolute minefield. I wouldn't want to be involved in this in, in the senior positions at Facebook at all. Um, I think this decision is, uh, Again, not unexpected, but it does seem like it's gone slightly too far the other way. And it may be some skeptics like me and others would say that this is a handy way of Facebook kind of sort of stepping back and say, well, you know, you don't want us involved and we don't want to get in trouble with this stuff. So you guys carry on and we'll just, you know, give you a platform. And I think Nick Clegg actually says he uses an analogy of tennis in his speech that he gave about kind of they set up the courts and the lines and the basic rules. And then everyone else plays on that court. But as much as that's a lovely little story to tell, I don't think it really gives the true complexities of the issues that they and we are facing.

He really loves mentioning tennis in speeches. I was reading another Nick Clegg speech last week when we were preparing to speak to Damian Collins, and he was talking about Roger Federer in that. So it's obviously his source of anecdotes. So that feels a little strange. But yeah, there we go. So there are no easy answers to this stuff. And like you say, Matt, I am glad I don't have to be the one in charge of this. I'm sure the person in charge of it is thinking, I wish I wasn't the person in charge of this, but, uh, there we go.

Yes. So we're going to be speaking with Boz in just a moment, but first Geek Out with Matt Navarra is sponsored by Pinterest. Each week we share tips to help you make the most of the platform.

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So update your Pinterest app to the latest version for access to group board reactions and sort features board notes to come. Learn more at business.pinterest.com. So welcome, Boz. Thanks for joining us. Um, what's been a crazy day for you, I believe, because you've just literally stepped off stage at Oculus Connect and revealed a ton of stuff, which made us make some quick edits to some of the questions actually that we were going to ask you. But it just so we knew more information than we thought we were going to find out. So, um, but for those that don't know, um, what your background is and what you're doing now, because, uh, I know I am because I'm a geek, but not everybody's like me. And just tell everyone a bit about what you've been doing before and what you're doing now, really.

Yeah, I've been at Facebook for, for a long time now, kind of coming up on 14 years, and I've worked across a huge range of the products. I've really tended to focus on communication products, information sharing, news feed, Messenger, groups, and then I spent a long time working on our ads business. Then the last 2 years, I've been working on a division we call AR/VR, focusing on what we think are the new and upcoming platforms that we really want to make sure have have kind of human connection at the center.

First things first, Boz, what is your top score on Beat Saber on Oculus? Because I'm convinced you're the sort of person that'd be thrashing out on a Saturday with the kids or something.

You know, I love Beat Saber, but I'm not great at it. I do enjoy it. There's a few tracks that I'm pretty reliable on an A. I know this is so basic of me, because $100 Bills is one of the most basic tracks. I really like that track, and I think I do pretty well on it, even on hard. But most of them, even on just normal difficulty, I'm rocking like a B, plus average, probably, across the—

Well, I should say that for the people that haven't actually got Beat Saber or played it, this is one of the VR games that I've been playing on Oculus Quest. And you're essentially in a VR world. You're kind of— things coming towards you at speed in time with the music. And you've got to use kind of your lightsabers to hit objects in time with the beat and follow other kind of rules. It gets quite tricky. But they've added Imagine Dragons now. Is there more of those coming, more of those tracks or other kind of bands? Or is that it for now?

No, just today we announced Panic! at the Disco tracks coming out next week for Beat Saber, which we're really excited about. Actually, I want to tell you a funny story about how good people can get at Beat Saber. You know, the people who are really amazing at the game, they're so good that when we were developing Oculus Quest, we would have it train on these professional Beat Saber players, and we could tell if our controller tracking was good enough because they were so good that if they missed a cut, if they missed one of the blocks, it was probably our tracking's fault and not their fault. So we actually used Beat Saber as part of our development process for Oculus Quest.

That's insane because there's some of the levels on there. I tried to go up one or two levels and it just, it was ridiculous. I don't know how any human being can move that fast, but somebody out there can clearly do it.

But, um, no, just incredible.

It's just mad, isn't it?

Martin? Yeah. So one of the most interesting announcements from Oculus Connect, from my perspective anyway, is Facebook Horizon, which sounds a bit like Second Life, the next generation. There's a world builder. You can play games, hang out, explore. It's this, you know, obviously Second Life was a big thing a decade ago or whatever. Is this that kind of idea now reaching its time?

Yeah, the idea of people finding a way to be together that has that sense of physical presence, but isn't really bound by actual physics is one that's been around for a bit. I think really, before virtual reality came along, it was just tough, because yeah, you could create a representation of a space on a computer monitor, but it would just come across as very flat. And so with VR, it does feel like the time has come for this kind of a space to exist and ideally to evolve to be for everyone, to have, you know, parts of it that are maybe more game-like or more creative or more just hanging out and social or meeting new people or only staying with people that you already know. It feels like the opportunity is upon us now.

And is this truly a mainstream thing? Is this something we'll all be using in a few years?

That's the ambition is to get there. But of course, this is, you know, very early, you know, Horizon, we're gonna get a beta out next year. To see how people react to it, just like we always do with Facebook, to see how people react and kind of iterate and build something that is universally appealing.

And I don't want to get too dark and Black Mirror on us, but if you were to take this kind of the next stage forward and several stages forward from then, is this kind of creeping slowly into Elon Musk territory then, where we all can download our brains and live in these virtual worlds, and these are the beginnings of those new worlds that are being built now? Or is this just something a little bit more small and simple at this stage?

Well, there's two different parts to that question, Reid. So first of all, when it comes to just spending time together, Look, nothing's ever going to beat the real thing. Being with someone face-to-face is just a tremendous and rich experience. We all have scenarios where we can't be together. Look at us. I don't know even— It must be late where you guys are. It's early morning here, and I've just come off the stage. In those situations where you can't be together, it's good to have an alternative. This is the best that I can imagine. The second part of the question as it relates to how people interact with technology, we announced this week that our intention to acquire CTRL-Labs, which works on neural interface technology. Mark talked about it a little bit on stage today at OC6. And, that whole premise is about making it even easier to get machines to do what you want them to do by just expressing your intentions. Right now, we express our intentions through muscle movements. We literally physically move our hands to keyboards or to controllers or into different shapes. What if instead you just had to think about moving your hands, and you could skip all the extra hardware required. And so that is the ambition. It's worth noting, this is very different from— this is all happening after you intend to take an action. So it's nothing about downloading your brain or reading minds. It's not capable of any of those things. It's on the other side of the intention boundary.

Got you. Got you. And one of the things I think people will throw up with all of these things— well, two things that come to mind for me is, why is Facebook the company that is best placed or is the right one to take us forward in in this area, because it's clearly quite a big thing, and it's something that has been brewing for a while because of these technologies that have started to come around. But then there's also the concerns, second part to that, around trolling and harassment and the issues that we experience in social media already now. This is taking something to the next level. What sort of considerations are there for that sort of risk?

Yeah. I mean, our involvement in all these technologies is just— our fundamental premise is that the most important thing that we use these technologies for is to connect to other people. Most of the other players in this space, they want these technologies to exist so that you can interact with the technology. It's about the human interacting with the technology, whereas for us, it's about the human interacting with other humans and technology being the medium. And I really strongly believe that if we aren't participating at the very founding layer of this new technology development, then that use case of people connecting with each other will be overlooked, um, because it's not the center focus of any of the other players in the space, and it is very much the center focus for us. Um, but of course, you're right, the, the tremendous obligation that comes with technologies like And for us, we're very lucky to be attached to Facebook as we develop these new technologies because Facebook is really building the best tools in the world for giving people control over their experience and safety. And you've heard Mark this January talk about a privacy-focused vision for the company. I've been at Facebook for so long, I have seen us go through these major transformations internally. It's arguably one of the things that I think I'm most proud of the company is that we're able to adapt as the landscape around us changes. We're doing that right now. This is a very different company than it was 1 year ago, very different than it was 2 years ago. It reminds me a lot of the shift to mobile, the shift towards being privacy-focused that we're experiencing internally right now. But, of course, the proof is in the pudding, and people need to hold us to a high standard, and we expect that. That's proper and just. We have to deliver and meet those expectations. We have to do it constantly. It's never going to stop. We're constantly going to have to set expectations and then exceed those expectations for people people to have the trust that we need them to have to feel comfortable sharing their lives together on these platforms.

Going back to the announcements today, you've launched Oculus for Business, and you shared a video, lots of training use cases in business. Is this mainly for training?

You know, that's what we found purchase with so far, but obviously, we believe it's got an ability to work far beyond training. Now, I don't want to minimize the training case. Johnson Johnson shared, I think, a very compelling story of training surgeons, where you had a dramatically improved success rate with surgeons who trained in VR before having performed a procedure rather than having just trained with a resident, for example. So training can be quite a big deal. But it's not just that. One of the things that is, I think, very exciting is this idea of collaboration. So today, in many, many jobs, especially high-wage jobs, your physical geography controls what access you have to great jobs. If you don't live in a major center of technology or information work, like London, for example, if you don't live there, it can be hard to get access to those jobs. And the main reason for that is because collaboration is so important in that kind of work. And the information bandwidth you get when you're face-to-face with someone is so high. And so what's, I think, very exciting about the potential that we have here, where we focus on human connection and bringing that emotional bandwidth, that information bandwidth of two people connecting, that means that VR could be a huge opportunity to unlock a much bigger workforce and allow people a great deal more flexibility and increase not just people's access to jobs, but their economic mobility overall.

So Facebook obviously already has Workplace, and that's it as a workplace collaboration tool. Is this going to replace that in the future?

Workplace is one of our closest partners, actually. No, we're building on top of the very same kind of technology and network that Workplace has been pioneering for the last several years. And it's worth noting, a lot of our collaboration AR/VR technology is being developed by the Workplace team in London.

Oh yeah, 'cause I've been to the offices there actually recently and they've got some amazing different things going on, but obviously with Oculus as well as Workplace and things. So yeah, it's becoming an epicenter of Facebook when I'm tripping into London these days. It's great.

I'll give you, actually, one thing to share, which is not on the official agenda, but I think it's quite fun. Just this week, we did a big meeting with 100 of my staff with me. Those staff, of course, are all over the world. Certainly, even the United States, they're all over the country. We did it in virtual reality with the technology that's being pioneered in the Workplace AR/VR team in London. I was fully motion-captured, but it was easy. I was just wearing a Quest, and I was just standing in front of a wall, a regular wall in my own conference room, and everyone else just put on an Oculus Go and joined the event. And it was really an amazing experience for everybody. We're gathering all this kind of feedback. That's an early, very, very early kind of dogfooding, internal dogfooding example, but it is the kind of thing that you can start to glimpse a future that's very exciting.

And the hand tracking thing that you announced today as well was pretty cool.— and I can see, you know, all the different ways that that could help in different gaming environments, as well as obviously in even the workplace kind of stuff as well. But all of these things on their own are great. But is this the moment now that VR actually does kind of show significant uptake? Because I think, is it 5 years now that Oculus has been part of Facebook? Would that be right? And then we're all kind of waiting to see where VR goes, and it's always been a bit stop-start. So where are we with that?— there's been questions that are asked about it, I think.

Yeah, just past 5 years. You're spot on there. Yeah, listen, Oculus Quest and Rift S feel like a real watershed for the industry. You're certainly right. It's taken longer than I think people expected. And there's an old kind of adage in technology that we accomplish a lot more in 10 years than we think we will, and we accomplish a lot less in 1 year than we think we will. And that's been the case for VR. However, I have to say, this looks like an inflection point where we've got 100 $100 million now of investment that's gone from consumers into the store for Oculus, 20% of that on Quest, which is just in the last few months since it launched. So that's a dramatically growing segment. And honestly, it just feels like we are reaching that form factor of virtual reality that we've been chasing for a long time. It is hard to get mass market when the device requires not just a headset and controllers, but also external sensors, wires, and a $1,000 gaming PC. Now, a thing that a couple of years ago, total cost of ownership was well over $1,000 and it required a lot of space in your house that was dedicated to a thing that you can literally just— I have one with me. You could just toss in your bag. With Hands coming later this year, and maybe even just have a headset, it fits in a box the size of half a shoebox. That starts— it's so different.

Do you think this is going to be the future for people who are into console gaming now who would typically have PlayStation or they would have Xbox or whatever? Do you see this as not on the same level, but this is the next level? This is 5, 10, 15 years down the line, that would be the dominant force for in-home entertainment gaming, or is this something different, you think?

Well, I hope it's— gaming is obviously the anchor for it today. There's no question about it. And we're having tremendous success with great games. We've talked about Beat Saber, and also great interactive media, like Vader Immortal. But I think we obviously have ambitions that's not just around gaming. I think if it was just a gaming thing, Obviously, that'd be good for parts of the community, but not the whole community. Think about the collaboration use cases we just talked about, or think about the social use cases that, for me, are such an important anchor for this technology being important to Facebook, as like people spending time together. Those are things that we hope to continue to see much, much more growth in, especially over like a 5-year timeframe.

I got you. Martin, what do you think about all of this stuff? It's kind of, I've got the Quest and I'm enjoying using it, but I don't know, have you had a chance to play with it at all?

I haven't, to be honest. I've tended to avoid VR just because I feel very detached. When I have used it, I feel so detached from the world around me that if I'm— I feel kind of vulnerable, I suppose. But seeing where the technology is going now, it feels like it's mature enough that you almost have to dive in a bit more. If you look at the Gartner hype cycle, obviously we had the peak of heightened expectations and maybe the trough of disillusionment, maybe, it doesn't feel like there's been quite as much hyper on VR and AR lately. Are we coming up to that plateau of productivity where it's just a great technology we should all be using?

So Martin, I love that you referenced that because we talk about that all the time inside the company and try to think about where we are in that. I think if you knew where you were in that document, you'd be doing quite well indeed. But yeah, the plateau of productivity is certainly the target and the technology The technology is there now. All the major limitations are lifted. Martin, you just raised, I think, a really important one that, yeah, again, inhibits people from even trying the experience in the first place. And so you think about today, we announced Passthrough Plus, the ability to very quickly see the world around you so you don't feel so vulnerable, as you put it. And also, I think important pieces like continuing to improve the form factor are huge aspects of the opportunity that we have to continue to make VR more accessible to more people. People. Meanwhile, on stage today at OC6, I talked about there are always going to be some limitations on how you connect in virtual reality. For example, if you and I are sitting right next to each other, it'd be pretty unusual for us to go have to put headsets on instead of just being physically together. And that's one of the reasons that we're investing in augmented reality and building augmented reality glasses.

And this is great because it leads into what we were going to ask you about next. So we saw the announcement today about the AR glasses, which has been rumored for a little while. So can you just tell us, first of all, tell us a little bit about, you know, the main points you've told a few people today at the show, but also, you know, where do you see AR fitting into the kind of relationship? I think you did talk about that on stage to a degree, but there's always been this concept that AR is the precursor to VR's mainstream success and that people still haven't got used to some of the basic AR apps, let alone kind of like a virtual world. For some people, that's a leap too far. Can you tell us a bit about that journey and how those two kind of interact? Interact with each other?

Yeah, I mean, they should— augmented reality and virtual reality share an immense amount of technology around computer vision and machine perception and 3D graphics and rendering and displays and optics. They really touch on a lot of the same disciplines. And so from that perspective, it makes a lot of sense to work on the both of them together. But they do serve very, very different needs for the consumers. You know, obviously virtual reality is about completely teleporting yourself into some other experience where you can suspend suspend physics. In augmented reality, you can't suspend physics. You can still see the world around you, so physics are very much still applicable. But, you can do things like have somebody teleport in to join a conversation. So, you've got 2 people physically in one place, they want to add a third person who's not there. Instead of all 3 of us going into VR, which feels odd for the 2 of us who are physically sitting together, we could be in augmented reality and that could allow us that same richness of everyone being together and connected without having to split our attention between our phone phone and our devices and the person who we're physically with. And that bridging of the physical-digital divide is really the beauty of augmented reality.

Well, the other thing I wanted to ask you is like, how far do you, you know, does this, can this be taken? So, you know, I was listening again for the millionth time, the Elon Musk and Joe Rogan podcast where he famously talks about all those sorts of things. And we haven't got any weed here, so unfortunately we can't pass that to you.

You can't smoke a joint on the show.

But what we would say is, you know, taking this to its next level, you know, it's quite fascinating to think of what it would be like 20, 30, or 50 years maybe from now. Do you have any kind of brainstorming ideas about how that might look and what kind of the impossible things that could somewhat have a chance of happening?

Oh, this is such a fun blue sky question. Yeah, I'm so enthusiastic. I think right now, a lot of the challenges that we face are our smart devices aren't yet really that smart. They don't really understand the context of our lives, so they don't know when it's rude to interrupt us. When I went on stage at OC6, I promise you, I left my phone backstage. On stage because it doesn't know that I'm giving a speech and it's not the appropriate time to buzz me for a calendar update. So our smart devices aren't really that smart yet because they don't understand the context of our lives. Silly basic things like, "Hey, where'd I leave my keys?" are weirdly intractable questions for technology. These aren't actually hard problems if you get some understanding of context, but that's going to require sensors. It's going to require cameras, and it's going to require microphones, and machine perception, and artificial intelligence. It's going to require really strong privacy controls so people feel comfortable that they're in control of what those things do, that those devices are working on their behalf and not on someone else's behalf. That's very, very important to get people to be comfortable with those things. And if you had displays that were seamless otherwise, but integrated into glasses or contacts—

I was just going to say AR contacts seemed the obvious kind of futuristic version of how this could end up looking on an episode. Black Mirror or something.

What do you reckon?

Is that kind of where we're headed? Because I think that was talked about, wasn't it? Wasn't it in the last 5 years?

They'd have to rename it, I think. I mean—

They would, they would indeed.

And then likewise, one of the most important pieces for the future is how we interact with these machines. And right now, we take our— I have an idea that I want to express an intent with, so I want to type an email. So I express that through my motor cortex. I use my hand to move my mouse, and then I open the email, and then I use my fingers to type that thing out. If instead, I could take the physical hardware out of that and just instead think about, "Oh, I want to send an email," and I just think about that, and then the device reacts, and I can, instead of actually typing, I just think about typing, and the device reacts. Now, you're talking about not just having how you would interact with, let's say, your glasses, your AR glasses, or AR contacts, you're also talking about how would you interact with everything in your life? How would you interact with your toaster, or your microwave, or your TV? Far in the future. That one, I think, is actually something that we can do in 5 or 10 years.

Wow.

And the thing is, on the worrying side, though, that people barely take a walk these days and go upstairs manually without being carried by machines up an escalator. If we start stopping people from doing things with their hands and their fingers and things because they can think it instead, it is just— well, they're not just being sedentary kind of people just sitting in chairs that our mind does everything for us. Exercise at all.

You know, it's funny, I, I just don't think that's where humans go with it. And this is obviously an opinion. We're talking about 20, 30 years in the future, so it's hard to say. But yeah, of course, what if you give me 20 minutes back in my day, Matt? I spend it with my kids, and I promise you they're not letting me sit on my butt, you know. And I think about this all the time with virtual reality, because if we're able to get this collaboration off the ground, what if people aren't spending their lives commuting anymore? Do you know where that time goes that they're they're not commuting, it goes to their families. It goes to spending more real-life face-to-face time with the ones that they love. So the real irony is, it might be the case that time you spend in VR actually buys you more face-to-face time with the people that you care the most about. So for me, I'm all about giving people the time back, giving them more options, giving them more ability to be in the present world around them. And I know it's ironic because you think, well, aren't these things doing the opposite? No, no. These are getting rid of barriers, getting rid of things that consume time and attention today so that what you have left is really time to be present in that physical world. That's how I think things are going to go.

And when I think about these things now, at the moment, I look at what you've just revealed today with regards to the future or the ideas for the AR glasses. I then look at Snap's Spectacles, and they look quite amateur in respect of the things that you're talking about here. Have you had to play with the Snap Spectacles? Did you ever have a pair of Google Glass or anything? What did you think of those two pieces of hardware?

Yeah, look, I'm a technologist, so I get excited when people are trying new things. I think the Google Glass was ahead of its time. It wasn't useful enough for what the device was trying to present itself as. But it's worth noting, it's often billed as a failure, and it really hasn't been. It's just found its niche in industry. I had surgery on a torn Achilles a few months ago, and the doctor that I work with had Google Glass on, and he told me it saved him hours every week of having to chart. Uh, now he asked my permission before he came in the room with it, and so it was all on the up and up. But, you know, good for him. He's using technology to save himself time, and he spends that time either with more patients or with his family. Um, you know, I think Spectacles is a cool idea, something completely new, and a new way of doing cameras. Um, it's certainly worth exploring, certainly worth thinking about. Um, so I don't know that we, we kind of ask so much of first generation or second generation technology. It takes time to find the use case. Uh, and that's been the approach that Facebook has always taken too, is we get new ideas out there. We see how people react to them. We see what's working. We see what's not working and we iterate. Um, and so the things that we kind of make fun of, like, I remember when everyone used to make fun of how big cell phones were and like, who could possibly need a cell phone? And like, who are these people who like need to make a call so badly? That was a joke we all made in our lifetimes. And look at us now.

Yeah.

And it's a good thing.

So yes, you recently announced Portal devices, updated Portal devices, including the Portal TV, which brings video calling into the living room on the biggest screen in the house. Video calling devices have never really taken off in the consumer market. Why will Portal change that, especially since the media narrative is all Facebook wants a camera in your living room?

You know, any Portal actually has a lot in common with virtual reality in that sense, which is anyone who's really experienced the Portal gets it. You know, and when you see not just the volume that we're doing, but also the retention, people who buy these, they love them, they use them them all the time. When they get them, they start making more and more video calls and they stay retained in the product because it's such a great experience. For me, and I've said this last week, but it's just so important, look, I'm very lucky. My parents and my wife's parents actually all live within half an hour of where we live. So they come see us and their grandkids all the time. So I thought, "Hey, I'm not sure if I need Portal or not, but let's find out." We use it all the damn time. It's great. My parents are just having breakfast. My kids just want to see their grandparents.

How cool is that?

This is a little slice of the future. So it's one of those things, Martin, where we've got to show, we can't just tell people. They've got to see the value and we've got to earn their trust. We're putting a camera and microphone inside their homes. That's something they've got to get comfortable with. It's not going to happen in one year, but we are seeing it happen. And the people who've bought the products are really engaged and really loving them and recommending them. So, you know, obviously the proof is in the pudding. We're back with our second generation now. Portal TV is a great form factor that's going to fit in a a lot of people's homes 'cause they've already got a space for the TV, so it turns that into a really immersive way to connect with your family. And, of course, we've also got a new redesigned Portal 10-inch and an 8-inch, and those look like picture frames, and they're great picture frames. You know, they've got your Facebook photos. You can put photos on from your cell phone. They're great picture frames, and then suddenly they're magical devices that connect you to somebody that you love. I mean, the value proposition here is very clear, but we've got to get people comfortable with the broad concepts. And that's what we're working on.

Got you. And one of the things we wanted to ask, which we didn't— which tie in with a lot of the things you've mentioned today, but more forward-thinking as well, is about the CTRL, the CTRL Labs acquisition fit. How does that fit within the future plans that you've announced today and other things that are going on at Facebook? What's that part of the jigsaw to accomplish?

Yeah, we've been really focused for a little while on these new platforms, virtual reality and augmented reality. And one of the things that defines new platforms, we tend to focus on displays. And that's an important part of it, virtual reality, is a binocular display on your face. Augmented reality are these kind of see-through displays on your eyes. But that's only half of what defines a technology platform. The other half is what is the way the human interacts with the machine. And this goes all the way back to Xerox PARC, to Stanford Research Institute, and even earlier to MIT, where, when the current computing paradigm, which really has been pretty consistent from the Alto, Xerox PARC, all the way up to the modern smartphone, was developed, it was inputs and user interface together. It was literally both those pieces in parallel. So for a company that's focused on augmented reality and virtual reality, it's not just about the displays, it's also about the interaction paradigm. And we have been focused for a long time on how to make it really seamless to get your intentions, the things that your brain is trying to accomplish, into these devices so they can do the right thing. And what better way to do that than with a neural interface? And CTRL-labs is simply the best team out there building neural interfaces. It's a, it's non-invasive. It goes in your wrist. It doesn't go anywhere near your head. It doesn't go anywhere near your brain. It just goes on your wrist. And with a little bit of training, it can start to interpret what you intend without you actually having to move the muscles to do that thing. And it co-evolves kind of with you. And so it's very, very exciting technology. Now, it's also new. It's novel. And this team is really breaking ground. But it's the kind of thing I think we could start to see results from even just in a few years.

Does it frustrate you or upset you that you're working on all this really cutting-edge stuff, but the media narrative about Facebook is always about data and about surveillance and all of that? Can you break through that, or is it always going to be a challenge for you?

Look, that's the work. I think it's a good thing. This is— what a perfect time, in fact, at the birth of the next generation of technology platforms to be having a global conversation about data, use and privacy and what people feel comfortable with and what they don't. And regulators need to be involved in that conversation, and companies need to be involved in that conversation, and advocates and the press are there, and consumers are kind of waking up and finding their voice as well. So for me, I think it is really good to be at the very birth of a new technology, exposed to what are the expectations that consumers are going to have in the future. I'm not saying I love—, you know, all the challenges and the criticality, but it's, it is going to make us better as a company, uh, as an industry. And, and it's hard, you know, I have to embrace that.

Growing pains for the industry, I suppose. Yes, I think so.

And good and healthy ones.

Well, I'm noticing we're coming to the end of the time we've got with you. We've got a couple more minutes. And so, um, the show is really based around the premise of the social media manager and social media as a platform and using Facebook, probably not quite like I do where I dig into your public code and find random features and spoil the fun of things, but certainly for for everyone here. One of the last questions is really around the future of social media, because at the moment we've got all this impending regulation, concerns about all the things you've just been discussing around data privacy. And also there's this rapid change of, you know, of technology. We're already discussing the problems of social media and, and the, the challenge that people face using it. Um, but now we're— today we've been talking about things, uh, the next stage on from that further. We haven't kind of solved the problems here. I just wanted to, again, a bit blue sky thinking about the future of social media for people. How is that going to look for people? How's it going to feel? What's the reality going to be like to be using Facebook.com or the app in however many years from now, say 10, 20 years from now?

What do you think? Well, we're seeing, I think, the trends emerge now that probably will govern how things play out for the next several years. And Mark talked about it in January. You're seeing a much more privacy-focused stance from us, not just in response to press or regulators, but in response to what we see are the major trends for consumers. You see the growth of stories, which is much more oriented towards sharing, and people can choose to participate or not, if they want to get that content or not. You see a big shift, obviously a continuing trend around private messaging, whether it be WhatsApp or Messenger. I do think those are important trends that are interesting. Groups are tremendously important. Groups, I think, are probably one of the undervalued things about Facebook. It's a tremendously important— They can be quite large, but they still feel intimate and meaningful communities for people. That strikes me as probably the most important thing from a social media standpoint to pay attention to is people aren't spending less time. They're sharing more, and they're sharing more often, and they're sharing with more people, but they're doing it in different contexts. It's not all going into feeds anymore. It's going to different channels that feel like a better fit for what that content is. As a consequence, you see the products and the industries adapting to those.

I'm guessing we're not going to be necessarily using an iOS app in 10 or 15 years' time to experience the majority of our time on Facebook. From the things you were saying earlier, it almost sounds like whether it be contact lenses or AR glasses, that maybe most of that interaction and that kind of delivery of all experience of Facebook as we know it now through the app, for most people, it would be done through one of these newer products. Would that be how you see the vision of people using social?

Well, I certainly hope so. Otherwise, what am I doing here, right? It is.

Well, exactly, exactly. And Martin, I don't think there's any any parting thoughts from you, but otherwise I think we've probably reached our limit with time with them, Boz.

Yeah. Well, thanks for joining us.

Thanks a lot. Yeah, I really appreciate it. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Martin. No worries.

Cheers out, Boz.

Time now for Quick Hits. Here's Matt with tests, experiments, and updates you need to know about from social media companies this week.

Yes, there's quite a few this week, so let's get rattling on with them. So the first one is from Instagram. It was spotted on the alpha version of the app on Android. Android, there is an Instagram dark mode or dark theme of sorts. Now, dark mode has been one of those things that's just suddenly appeared in the last 12 to 18 months as a big thing for everybody. So lots of people love them. Uh, and so now everybody's jumping on the bandwagon. Uh, this one's not a full dark mode from what I can tell though. I think this is kind of making the app, um, work with, um, devices kind of settings. So when you switch your device into a dark mode to give some elements of the UI, uh, a dark theme, I believe, but it's only just coming out and it's still only in the alpha stage. So we're probably not going to see it in, uh, all platforms for some time, but, uh, it'll be good to know what it'll look like because I haven't got it yet myself, which is a shame. Next one is Twitter and multi-timelines features rolling out. So this is something that they talked about a little while back and was showcased to a few users in test. This allows you to go on to your home page on the Twitter app and you'll be able to kind of use lists that you're interested in and make them another timeline which you can swipe left or into so you can have an alternative timeline. So if you're interested in just tweets about Arsenal Football Club or tweets about politics or tweets about whatever it is, and you've got a list that you're in for that, that you're subscribed to, you're interested in, you can plug that in as one of your lists and you can have more than one and you can swipe left or right to sort of use that as your home timeline. So that's something that's starting to roll out, something that I quite like. I still haven't got it yet. So it's again, really frustrating. But everyone that's been using it that I do know has it have said it's pretty nifty. So if that's That's great. Facebook Pages. And there's a simple update there for Facebook Pages. If you've got an Instagram account that's linked to Facebook as well, you are, and you have a business Facebook page. If someone tags you in a story on Instagram and that story gets shared into Facebook Stories by someone, not necessarily yourself, you can choose in your option settings for your Facebook page to carry across that tag from the Instagram story of your Instagram business account to convert it into a link and tag of your equivalent Facebook page, if that makes sense. So it's kind of joining the bits up together. So it carries across some of the elements of a story on Instagram for your business account into the Facebook world as well. Uh, quite useful, I think, for, for brands. Um, it's starting to appear on lots of people's accounts and it's one of the settings you can change in the main settings page of your Facebook page if you're an admin. Uh, IGTV. So lots of people have been saying IGTV is rubbish, is lame. It doesn't have many options for monetization. It hasn't got all sorts of things it should have. And it's a bit of a, I think favorite quote I had was, it's the recycle bin for YouTube. Um, but, um, there has been some spotting by people of IGTV monetization features potentially coming a bit sooner than maybe we first thought. Uh, there was a VidCon conference in Australia in the last couple of days when this was recorded, and there was some slides from the partnerships managers there from Instagram in Australia showing details of the monetization features that are coming soon. So I'm guessing they're starting to ramp up information out there for, for brands and marketers marketers and publishers to make them aware that it is coming. There wasn't any details given about when it was coming and any more specifics, but it was flagged. So I would suggest that that means it's, it's not far away. And that's one of the big criticisms, I think, from, from creators and publishers of the reasons why they don't use it, or it's not, uh, as good in terms of stacking it up against YouTube or, or other video platforms. So we'll wait on that one and see if that arrives soon. And then finally, Twitter has a hide replies test that's, um, was launched as a test in Canada, not so long ago, and now they've expanded that test to the US and Japan. So this is an option that if you put something out, tweet something out, and you want to hide specific replies on that thread, you can do so as the person who tweeted the item out. And then people who are viewing the tweet themselves can— won't see those tweets unless they go to the bottom of the thread. And there's an option to reveal or uncover those hidden replies as well. So it's yet again, another one of those features that giving the people on the platform more control over some of the content that they see or don't want to see. Uh, and I think we'll see a lot more of these sorts of control mechanisms on all sorts of platforms, uh, over the next few years as the regulation builds up and people want to have more ownership and, and control. And so it's a positive step, I think, there by Twitter expanding that to the US and Japan.

Yeah, I've seen some real positive response certainly from American users to the hybrid replies feature. So, uh, that seems to be a particular hit for Twitter there. Uh, and you mentioned dark mode as well. Uh, everything's got dark mode these days. And I think that it's one of those things like nouvelle cuisine and Tamagotchi that in a few years' time we'll look back and go, remember when dark mode was really popular? What was that all about? Uh, I think it's going to be a bit of a fad.

I think, well, I know that Kerry Flynn, who was on this podcast not so long ago, is a massive fan of dark mode in general. So whenever, whenever there's one that comes out, I make sure she's aware of it, she gets rather excited about it. And I get it, particularly, you know, if you're using your device a lot and at night and stuff, it is a nice feature to have. But I don't quite understand the mega excitement that there is about it and that the people just get so, you know, interested in it. As soon as I put something out about dark mode, I just know that it's going to get a lot of people talking about it. So anyway, I think it'll make a lot of people very happy.

It's quite depressing, actually, when everything on your phone or your laptop is dark. I use a Windows laptop and I've got the dark mode theme on there and lots of dark mode apps and things and it's fine and it's good, but it's actually the practicalities of reading text on a dark background. It's not as quick and easy to read. You have to strain your eyes a little bit more than if it's black text on a white background for most people. So practicalities of that. And also it is actually a little bit depressing to see black screens everywhere, but maybe that's just me. But yeah, I think dark mode, Tamagotchi of the late 2010s.

That's my, that's my thing. Quote of the day.

So that's just about it from us for this week. Next week we'll be speaking to Colleen Stauffer, Director of Global Business Marketing at Pinterest. Yes, we have our sponsor on as a guest, but don't worry, this isn't going to be like when you go to a conference and the sponsor gets up and gives a sales pitch for 30 minutes.

Yeah, it's going to be a really interesting chat about a misunderstood an underestimated platform in my opinion. So do make sure you give it a listen.

Geek Out with Matt Navarra is a Big Revolution production. Find out more at bigrevolution.net. You can find me on Twitter as @martinsfp.

And I'm @mattnavarra on Twitter. And don't forget to tell everybody about the podcast and leave us a voice message. We keep on reminding you, and we have had a few more in. If you do want to contribute, and maybe on the last one, we'll play some of them out, then you need to go to anchor.fm/geekoutmattnavarra, and you'll find an option to record a message, and we'll play some of the best ones out possibly. Also, if you want to geek out a bit more, like kind of geek out plus, then go to the Facebook group, which is matching of the podcast, which is the Social Media Geek Out on Facebook. And you can find that at facebook.com/groups/socialmediageekout.

Geek Out Plus should be our subscription service. Everyone seems to call their subscription service Disney Plus.

I like how you're thinking. Yeah. That's monetization.

Goodbye. Oh yes. Right. Well, we'll see you next week. Thanks Thanks to both for joining us. Goodbye, geeks.