TBPN - LIVE from Meta | Zuck, Boz, James Cameron, Alex Wang & more

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

(00:00) - Live from Meta Connect (01:26:51) - Chris Cox, Meta's Chief Product Officer, leads the development of core applications like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, as well as overseeing the company's AI and privacy initiatives. (01:38:16) - Adam Mosseri, the Head of Instagram, discusses the platform's evolution from simple square photos to incorporating videos, stories, and direct messaging, emphasizing the need to adapt to user preferences to remain relevant. (01:45:21) - Connor Hayes discusses Threads' rapid growth, noting it has surpassed 400 million monthly active users, and highlights its global reach. (01:51:31) - Roberto Nickson discusses his enthusiasm for the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, highlighting the natural feel of the electromyography band and its potential as a creator tool for capturing behind-the-scenes and point-of-view content. (01:54:01) - Alexandr Wang discusses the rapid establishment of the AI lab, emphasizing Meta's unparalleled resources and talent density, which he believes position the company to achieve superintelligence. (02:01:31) - Andrew Bosworth, Meta's Chief Technology Officer, discusses the company's advancements in augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI), highlighting the development of Orion AR glasses and the integration of AI into wearable technology. (02:16:26) - Eva Chen, Meta's Vice President of Fashion Partnerships, discusses the integration of stylish design and advanced technology in products like the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, emphasizing their seamless fit into everyday fashion. (02:21:56) - Tiffany Janzen, founder of TiffinTech, discusses her excitement about Meta's product announcements at Meta Connect 2025, particularly the Meta Ray-Ban displays, highlighting their potential to revolutionize content creation by enabling instantaneous capture of organic moments. (02:28:06) - Mark Zuckerberg discusses the future of augmented reality (AR) glasses and their integration with artificial intelligence (AI). (02:39:51) - Alex Himel, Meta's Vice President of Wearables, discusses the company's latest advancements in wearable technology, including the second generation of Ray-Ban Meta glasses with improved battery life, image quality, and an AI mode for the camera. (02:46:51) - Rocco Basilico, Chief Wearables Officer at Luxottica, recounts how his passion for integrating technology with eyewear led him to proposing a collaboration that eventually resulted in the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. (02:52:31) - James Cameron discusses his enthusiasm for virtual reality (VR) as a medium for cinematic experiences. (03:00:46) - Vishal Shah, Vice President of the Metaverse at Meta, discusses the company's progress in developing immersive experiences, emphasizing the role of generative AI in enabling users to create virtual environments. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.ai/Privy - https://privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.ai/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is MetaConnect 2025, and we are live from the fortress of followers. The Villa of Virality. It's Mount Metaverse, baby. We are here in Menlo Park at MetaHQ to break down all the good stuff coming out of MetaConnect 2025. And there's a lot. We have a massive lineup. But first, we wanted to sort of reflect on the past year, which has been remarkable.

And busy. I remember in one of our first episodes, we reviewed the meta-ray bans. I purchased them myself. So did I. This was coming off of Meta-Connect-20204. We hadn't started the show when Meta-Connect-2020 happened. We sat down in a conference room at the Jonathan Club, turned on the microphones and the cameras, recorded and chatted for a while, and I put on the meta-ray bands and filmed you talking about it.

And you said that- Filmed me talking about the Meta-Rabans. Yes, yes. And your prediction was that in the future, you might have multiple sets of glasses for different occasions, some work glasses, some workout glasses, maybe a VR headset, that we're entering this era of spatial computing and augmented reality devices, head-mounted displays, all sorts of different stuff. And so it's just been a remarkable, a remarkable ride. And I think we also, in that episode, if I remember correctly, we're talking about the importance of leveraging existing silhouettes, which they've done. incredibly well. Yeah, with Luxottica. And so, we have a wonderful show. We are, of course, distributing this

across the internet with Restream. Restream.com. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. And we also just wanted to say thank you to the advertisers who have been with us from day one, adquick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Getbezzle.com. You know Mark Zuckerberg loves his watches. Get yourself one at Bezle. Public.com, investing for those who take it seriously.

They have multi-asset investing. They're trusted by millions. 8Sleep.com, exceptional sleep without exception, fall asleep faster, deeper, sleep deeper, and wake up energized. Wander.com, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Yeah, these are the advertisers that have made this show possible from day one, and look at where we are now. We're very happy to be here. But first, let's go through the lineup today.

It's a massive lineup. The offensive lineup. Yeah, so on the meta team, the MetaMates, who will be coming on the show, we have Chris Cox. He's the chief product officer. He joined Facebook in 2005, in the same year the company was founded. He was in the first 15 software engineers and played a role in the development of News Feed. Then we got Adam Masseri coming on. He's the head of Instagram.

He joined Facebook as a product designer in 2008. In 2009, he became the product design manager. And in 2012, he became the design director for the company's mobile apps. Connor Hayes is coming on to, he's the head of threads. Great name. Yes, fantastic name, although he has an E. Yep, added that in there. He did.

He joined Facebook in 2011. He served in various product roles across meta and Instagram over the past 14 years. He was a VP of Gen A.I. Before building threads in 2023. Alexander Wang's coming on. The chief AI officer. Yes. He briefly attended MIT, had a stint as an algorithm developer,

the high frequency trading firm Hudson River Trading, dropped out to co-found scale AI. U.S. physics team? Yeah, U.S. physics team, and I think IMO or I-OI, one of those two he was pretty top-tier at. Smart kid. Smart kid. Built scale into a behemoth and wound up doing a deal to come over here and lead the meta-superintelligence team. And so we're going to go run into everything that he's doing to build the team at MSL and some of his plans, although obviously this event is focused on Meta-Connect.

that's focused on some of the, some of the, a lot of the hardware. So a lot of the hardware that we'll see. We're excited to talk to him about how he's thinking about integrating AI into all these different systems. Yeah. Then we have Andrew Bosworth, Boss, Chief Technology Officer, head of reality labs. Boss began his career working for Microsoft as a developer on Microsoft Visio in 2006. Bosworth received a call from a recruiter looking for a candidate with a background in artificial

intelligence in 2006. 2006. They would be like, who knows AI? Boss gets the call. He joins as one of the first 15 engineers at Facebook. Then we have Eva Chen, VP of Fashion Partnerships. She joined Instagram in 2015. We have Mark Zuckerberg, the man who needs no introduction.

Alex Himmel is the VP of Wearables. He's been at Meta for over 15 years. Alex has played a key role in developing products like Rayband Meta Smart Glasses and Orion, which we got a demo from, we got a demo for recently. I had a lot of fun with that. We've had three significant demos. Yeah. The first one a few months ago, second one last week, and then one today.

One today. And fun fact about Alex Hemel, he met his wife at Meta. And then lastly, closing out the team from Meta, who's coming on the show today, we have Vishal Shah, the VP of the Metaverse. He joined Meta on the Instagram team back in 2015. So he's also been on a decade long run. Product legend. So if you're looking to go on the offense, go to Adio.com.

Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your customers. company to the next level. On the defense, what's going on in the rest of the market? What's going on in the rest of the tech world? Who's paying attention? Who's watching today? Tim Cook, definitely watching. We saw this with the iPhone launch event. The iPhone Pro Max comes out, vapor chamber, very cool, but a lot of people were focused on what was going on with the iPhone air, because the air seemingly, when they showed the cross sections of what's going on internally, It seemed like they had shrunk the entire computer down just to the bump. And the rest was just screen and battery.

And so a lot of people are saying that Apple is going to maybe take that miniaturized phone and put it into another device. Maybe glasses, they've already done the Applevision Pro. Not a huge success there. They're still finding their footing. Licking their wounds. But they're going to be watching today to figure out how they need to react next. Yep. Then you have Open AI.

We know Sam Allman didn't hire Johnny Ive just to film cinematic. coffee chats. He's building something. Spent a couple points of the company. Yes. They're going to launch something. We've heard rumors. What was the rumor that it was something like a wearable? Yeah, telepathy.

So you speak without clearly unclear. Yeah, you speak without actually raising your voice to the point where someone can actually hear you across the room and yet that can go into some sort of device. I think what we do know is that it's positioned as a third device. So it's not your laptop, it's not your

phone, something else. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, Sam's been pretty clear that it's not a phone. What, and then there's a startup that's doing something similar in that telepathy space. We saw their, their launch video that looked very cool. Yeah, blanking on the name, went very viral recently. The other company that's probably watching is waves. Yeah, waves. They went very viral. That's right. Recently, a lot of people were pissed off about the products. Yeah. It was basically ruining, ruining everything. Yes. So they make a live streaming or they're making a device that will offer perpetual live streaming on your, and it's worth noting that the devices today are not focused on live stream.

Yeah, and it seemed like people were excited about the video for waves, and they were excited about the actual technology and the ability of live stream. They just didn't like the fact that you could turn the light off, right? Yeah. The privacy light of knowing when someone's recording seemed to be something the community really wanted. Yep. So we'll see. Maybe he'll change his, maybe the founder will change his tune and switch up the product,

the way the product is built so that you can't turn that off, that might be something that people just demand. But at least until now, I'm sure they'll be watching closely to see what's coming out of metadata today. Then you have Elon. There's big news from semi-analysis. The massive Colossus 2 cluster is coming online. Elon simply refused to be GPU poor.

He's doing a ton of interesting techniques to generate power. We're going to go through some of that. And then, of course, whenever you launch anything on the Internet, you're going up against the timeline. Yep. But we were talking about this. This has been interesting, right? There was leak earlier this week.

Yep. We didn't cover it closely. But people were very excited about the releases. Yeah. It was immediately a good reaction. Yeah. If you're going to have something leak, better to at least get a positive reaction. Yeah.

And I was trying to compare this to previous tech launches from this year. Let me grab my papers. Got a little wind here, a little weather. I need to put my ray bands on here. I was thinking about like why has the response. It's been positive, tech people are fickle and skeptical of everything. And it does feel like wearables are underhyped right now. Totally underhyped.

But it's delivering science fiction today. Yeah. And the devices that we're talking about today are all pretty much immediately going to be available. Yeah. And at least from the previous meta raybans, I feel like the original meta raybans launch kind of took people by surprise. It kind of seemed like this like offshoot. It didn't have the same like, oh, this is going to take over every.

like VR. Like VR, you immediately go into like, are you going to be living in a virtual world? Are you going to be doing everything in VR? And the Meta-Rabans were just like, look, it's something you're already wearing, it's fashionable, and now it just has a little bit more technology on it. It's great camera. Great camera. It works as headphones. Yeah, and then the headphones, and then eventually, oh, you can also talk to Meta-I-I through it, and then people get excited about that and whatnot. But it seems like the timeline is primed to receive this. I think people have been so used to this getting heads-up display demos and then not actually getting to experience it themselves, right?

Not getting to experience something that's at the quality level of the demos provided. Yes. And we've done the demos. Yes. It's real. Yes. You're going to be able to walk around with a heads-up display. Yes.

You're going to be able to. And really, I think we're obviously going to watch the live stream ourselves. We're able to react to it. But I think people are going to be incredibly impressed by a number of the new features and functionality of it. Yeah, totally. Other big tech companies will be watching, of course. You got Google. At I.O., they announced something that looked like glasses with potentially a heads-up display.

Google, of course, launched Google Glass years ago. Couldn't get that project fully off the ground, dipping their toe back into it with a bit of like a vision document, vision presentation. no firm timelines. And sort of unclear from the Google I.O. presentation, whether this would be something that they're merely building software for and then handing off to partners like they do with Android. Like Samsung. Like Samsung. Exactly.

But, you know, obviously some focus there. And then Amazon. They're trying to create devices for their workforce first. So focusing more on effectively being the customer themselves. They have millions of employees globally. and so, but their plan is to leverage the learnings from that, the scale from that, and take it in a consumer direction over time. Yeah.

Well, if you're planning your big next move, you need to meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. And that takes us in to the timeline, the news, what's going on in the tech world. So the huge news today out of the Financial Times is that China has banned import of U.S. This has been going back for a while. We were talking to Bill Bishop about this a few days ago. The quote that D.D. Das shares is Beijing's regulators recently summoned domestic chip makers,

such as Huawei and Kimber Khan, as well as Alibaba and Baidu, to report how their products compare against NVIDIA's Chins chips. They concluded that China's AI processors had reached a level comparable to or exceeding that of NVIDIA's products allowed under export controls. That's currently the age 20s. Now, when we were talking to Bill Bishop, they seemed like in video is already working on a success. A version of the Blackwell. The version of the Blackwell. And so there's obviously been a ton of pressure out of Beijing to reduce the amount of American chips and continue to drive domestic production with Huawei down the learning curve, no matter how painful it is.

Yeah, and the question was, are they going to rip the Band-Aid off and just decide, hey, we're willing to set back our industry slightly in order to gain a long-term, competitive edge on the manufacturing side. Yeah, this feels like, I don't know, yeah, interpreting it in the context of like how hot is the AI race. David Sachs has been saying that like the AI, we're not in Bill Gurley as well was talking about how like we're not in this hot AI war, this fast takeoff, you have to do it. It's much more like just a little bit of additive value to your economy. Yeah, China's internal AI planning docs reflect this, right? It's like we're going to drive efficiency in industry using artificial intelligence.

Yeah. It's not necessarily machine god yet, the machine god of war. I mean, at least that does seem the interpretation. You would think that you would get as many chips as possible if you were like, it's happening this year. Yeah. Like, don't worry about our local manufacturing. Just get the chips, train the model, and then you have it. But clearly, this is a...

And remember, this is all following up a couple weeks ago where they were being... domestic players are being encouraged not to buy U.S. chips. So it was, it was certainly something that they were saying, hey, we don't want you buying U.S. chips, but you can, you know, it wasn't a hard and fast rule. This, you know, is them coming in with the ban hammer. Yeah. Well, let's go through this Financial Times article a little bit more. China's internet regulator has banned the country's biggest technology companies from buying NVIDIA's artificial chips as Beijing steps up efforts to boost its domestic industry and compete with the U.S. The cyberspace administration of China, CIC, told companies, including by Dance and

Alibaba, this week, that to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6,000D, NVIDIA's tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, Nvidia's shares that fell around 3% on Wednesday. Did you see Jim Kramer said he's excited about AMD because they're going to be able to sell video game graphics cards into China? That feels like extremely temporary because I would be super. It feels like the headline is like no NVIDIA, but the broader context here. So this is specifically an NVIDIA ban.

Yeah, that's what the time is reporting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, apparently. But, I mean, we'll have to see how they, how they, how they're, we'll see how long that last. Yeah, this feels like something that's coming out of leaks, coming out of, like, you know, not necessarily like the final law has been written. I got to see what AMD is doing today. Yeah, yeah, look it up.

Several companies had indicated that they would order tens of, you. thousands of the RTX Pro 6,000 D and had started testing and verification work with NVIDIA servers, server suppliers, the people said. After receiving the CIC order, the companies told their suppliers to stop work. The ban goes beyond earlier guidance from regulators that focused on the H20, NVIDIA's other China-only chip, widely used for AI. It comes after Chinese regulators concluded that domestic chips had attained performance comparable to those of NVIDIA's models used in China.

That's, of course, the Wallway ascend. What their process was, regulators deciding, these are actually good enough. Well, it's this weird dynamic because Huawei was saying the same thing. Like, Huawei is incentivized to say, yes, we're as good as Individa. And then the Chinese regulators are saying, well, Huawei says it. So the rest of the companies, everyone who would be buying from Nvidia, Huawei, go read the Wallway press release, right? Do you recall semi-analysis doing any type of, like, direct comparison?

They did. Yeah, they did. And the main result was that you can train, I think, rough, If I'm trying to abstract. It's not as energy efficient. Yeah. Yeah. Just more energy costly, more expensive. China's got energy.

But they do have energy. Exactly. So, Jensen Wong, the chief executive of Envidia, told reporters in London on Wednesday that he expected to discuss the chipmaker's ability to do business with China with Donald Trump during that evening during the president's state visit to the UK. Quote from Jensen Wong, he says, we can only be in service of a market if the country wants us to be. There's not much Trump can do unless he makes this a part of the conversation in Madrid. Yeah. Did you see the other news, Palantir today? Signed a billion dollar contract

with the UK. 750 million. No, 750 million pounds, which I believe translates to exactly just over one billion. USD. Yeah. Let's hear. Beijing is putting pressure on Chinese tech companies to boost the company's homegrown semiconductor industry and break their reliance on NVIDIA so it can compete in an AI race against the U.S. The message is now loud and clear, said an executive at one of the tech companies earlier. People had hopes of renewed NVIDIA supply if the geopolitical situation improves. Now it's all hands on deck to build the domestic system. Invitya started producing chips tailored for the Chinese market after former U.S. President Joe Biden banned the company from exporting those its most powerful chips to China in an effort

to rein in Beijing's progress on air. Beijing's regulators have recently summoned domestic chip makers such as Huawei and CamberCon, as well as Alibaba and search engine Baidu, which also make their own semiconductors to report how their products compare against Nvidia's China chips, according to people familiar with the matter. They concluded that China's AI processes have reached a level comparable or exceeding that of Nvidia products allowed under export controls. And this was sort of the messaging from Jensen and Trump when they were talking about the age 20. They were saying like everyone knows age 20 as the China compliant chip, but it's been

years. And so the like the market has moved on and Nvidia has more advanced product like Blackwell. And so we are we are talking not only about a chip that was nerfed on memory interconnect and a few other, a few other characteristics that make it more more compatible with the trade regime, but it's also just old at this point. Yeah, the immediate thought I have is what is NVIDIA do with their huge R&D center in, uh, they've been building out in China, right? At a certain point, I mean, they still have, there's a lot of talent there. Isn't it more important than ever? Because you've got to be, you know, talking to Beijing and convincing them to buy the next thing, you know, it's an olive branch. So you've got to be,

you got to be pushing it to, right now it's so over, but you think it, we could get to the point I mean, we'll have to talk to, you know, the, the, the regulars on the show. But this entire year has been back and forth with this story. Yeah. Do you think the, The stock's down roughly 3% today. Do you think it would be more if do you think the market's kind of calling China's bluff? There's just so many different dynamics where there's, you know, cloud providers that are outside of China that will still be able to buy. There's, you know, ways to funnel chips through to China, like the Deep Seek story where all those chips come from. There's so many different dynamics.

And then even if you cut off China entirely from Nvidia, like that's not the bulk of their business. they can still sell to American hyperscalers. Yeah, they can sell to clouds based outside of China that people can buy cloud. American clouds. American clouds buy a ton of Nvidia chips and they want to buy more and more and more. You know, so the demand is they're in the United States. And you can't be based in mainland China and still leverage international clouds. To some extent. To some extent. Not, not, you can't just go to AWS.

Yeah. But, you know, there are certainly jumpball countries that are kind of playing both sides. Yeah. The Financial Times reported last month that China's chipmakers were seeking to triple the company, the country's total output of AI processors next year. The top level consensus is there's going to be enough domestic supply to meet demand without having to buy Nvidia chips. And Nvidia introduced the RTX Pro 6,000 D in July during Wang's visit to Beijing,

when the U.S. company also said Washington was easing its previous ban on the H-20 chip. China's regulators, including the CIC, have warned against tech companies, I've warned tech companies against buying Nvidia H20, which you talked about. asking them to justify having purchased them over domestic products, the FT reported last month. The RTX Pro 6,000, D, which the company has said could be used in automated manufacturing, was the last product and video was allowed to sell in China in significant volumes. Alibaba, ByteDance, and the CIC, and nobody basically responded to request for comment, of course. Well, the other news today that we have to cover, the Fed made the first.

rate cut. 25 American Bips. Yes, Polymarket, our sponsor, says breaking the polymarket for today's Fed decision has surpassed $200 million in volume, making it the largest FOMC prediction market in history. That's for then. And Polymarket is projecting two more rate cuts this year. From the Wall Street Journal, Fed lowers rates by a quarter point. Signals, more cuts are likely. Concerns about a job market slowdown are overriding jitters about inflation. in adjusting a pivot towards a shallow sequence of rate reduction. So the Federal Reserve approved a quarter point interest rate cut Wednesday, the first in nine months with officials judging the recent labor market softness,

outweighed setbacks on inflation. A narrow majority of officials penciled in at least two additional cuts this year, implying consecutive moves at the Fed's two remaining meetings in October and December. The projections hint at a broader shift toward concern about cracks forming in the job market in an environment complicated with major policy shifts that have made, the economy harder to read. The recent declines in the growth rate for both a number of people looking for jobs and those gaining employment have, quote, certainly gotten everyone's attention. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at the conference, Powell, who referred to, quote, downside risk

six times at the news conference in July, said on Wednesday that downside risk is now a reality. The fed's carefully drafted post-meeting statement pointed to those concerns when it said the rate cut was justified in light of the shift in the balance of risks. The statement no longer describe the labor markets as solid? Yeah, what's your take on this? I feel like when we look through the Sun Valley transcript from Powell, we were seeing lots of mentions of inflation. That was mostly because they were kind of redefining the definitions and working through some kind of jargony issues. It wasn't really an inflation-focused talk necessarily, but there is this interesting dynamic where there's not a lot to point to, like gold at all time highs,

is Bitcoin at all time highs, stock market at all time highs, NASDAQ. That's data you can trust because you can go to your brokerage and see prices. Yes. The data that now I don't think people have a lot of faith in at all is job market data. Labor market data. Because it just gets revised up or down and back and forth. And of course it's tricky. But that just makes it, you know, again, I mean, the big concern is stagflation, right?

The feds carefully drafted. So 11 of 12 Fed voters back the quarter point cut. Fed Governor Stefan Mirren, who served as a senior White House advisor until his confirmation to the central bank board this week was the loan to center. He favored a larger half-point cut. That makes sense, given the White House connection. The projections underscore how coming decisions could be more contentious. Seven of 19 meeting participants penciled in, no further rate reductions this year.

and two more pencil than only one more cut, and they show that most officials don't expect to make many more reductions next year under their current outlook for solid economic activity. And the, yeah, I mean, the reaction from the timeline has not been fantastic. Have you seen the 10 years surging? Back up. Not what you want to see. I mean, the hope with rate cuts is mortgages get more affordable, right?

And with higher 10-year, higher, longer, at the long end of the yield curve, you're going to see just less home affordability. And so hopefully this does kind of ease markets to the point where you can see more. And the question is right now. Our management teams thinking, how we got a quarter point reduction, let's hire a bunch of people, right? I don't think anybody's. Maybe, right? I don't know.

The stocks go up, the market gets easier. Like, it's easy to raise money. And so you raise more money, you hire more people. Like, that's the, that's certainly the startup world, and, like, rate cuts should work their way through all the way to the venture markets. And every company should be a little bit, breathing a little bit easier with lower rates. And so you should see, it should have an effect on the job market, but just how quickly. Yeah. Yeah.

And there is a lot. President Trump has berated Fed Chair Jerome Powell for months for the central banks reluctant to cut rates. Senate Republicans confirmed Miran to his seat on Monday night, and he was sworn in just before the Fed's two-day meeting began on Tuesday morning. Mirren, who is on unpaid leave from the White House, has said he could go back when his Fed term expires early next year. And it goes into a bit on Lisa Cook. History here. The battle. Between September and December of 2024, the Fed cut rates by one percentage point, lowering them from a two-decade high.

The previous, to prevent unnecessary weakness to the economy after substantial and broad decline in inflation. but officials paused cuts after that amid signs of stronger growth and potentially stickier inflation. Officials are navigating an economy reshaped by sweeping policy experiments. Trump has imposed tariffs that far exceed those of his first term, rising costs from manufacturers and small businesses. The full effect on consumer prices remain unclear as companies adjust supply chains and pricing strategies. Sharper curves on immigration could be contributing to a slower pace of job gains by reducing

labor force growth. So, we'll keep tracking this. We'll have to catch up with Joe Wise and Paul. Hopefully get the update. Our financial brother. Yes, of course. So the other big news is from semi-analysis. X-AIS Colossus 2 is the first gigawatt data center in the world.

And we don't have time. We are going to run into the live keynote commentary in just two minutes. But the interesting takeaway is this. way is this picture. Yes. So Colossus 2 is technically in Memphis, Tennessee, but according to the semi-analysis team, Memphis and Tennessee have been getting a lot of pushback. So XAI's genius move was to develop a gigawatt scale energy hub right across the border in South Avon, Mississippi. And so you can see on this map, we'll have to pull up the photo. They're hacking the world. Yeah, it really is this like crazy arbitrage. I think Delan Patel called it like 4D

that only Elon can do or something. 2D chess. It really is 2D chess. It's like you look at the map and it looks like chess. Just regular chess. Maybe behind enemy lines. I'm not exactly sure

what the correct analogy is. I mean, it's a good bet. You go over to Mississippi. You talk to the governor, mayor of South Haven, and you say, do you want me to hire a bunch of people in your state?

Mississippi says, sounds great. Let's do it. The benefits of the American state-based system. right? Every state can compete for jobs, for business, for energy production, whatever it takes to get it done. Also today, I think Elon said or claimed that Grok 5 will begin training in just a few weeks, and he thinks that Grok 5 will be capable of reaching AGI. And so I'm not even sure how we're benchmarking that or quantifying that. Brock has obviously been doing fantastic

on Arc AGI, our favorite. Everybody has their own definition. Everyone does now. And we have goalposts. We're going to keep moving. We're going to keep moving. We are in the goalpost moving business. What have you done for me lately Foundation Labs? That's what I like to say. Exactly. Anyway, the keynote is starting in just 50 seconds. We are going to be broadcasting it live and giving you commentary on the keynote from MetaConnect. I am impressed that we've gotten this far without leaking anything. We have a list of embargoes, but we pulled it off.

if we did it. And we got through. Capital J. Journalism. Yes, exactly. Well, Amanda Goodall on Axe says, if your interview process takes longer than electing a Pope, you're doing it wrong. Of course, the Pope was elected in two days.

Two days. Your remote hire doesn't need five rounds of interviews. I said what I said. And Gabe says, yeah, well, I bet the Pope can't debug a distributed system. Well, that's up 40% in 2025. That is crazy. Everything is up. Everything is up.

Gold, Bitcoin, the market, everything is ripping. With some friends who predicted this. I remember in our group chat. Our buddies was saying. The golden bull run. There's also somebody put a golden statue of Trump holding a physical Bitcoin right near the White House. Can you just put up statues? We talked about this with the bull, right?

Maybe. I mean, we talked about this with the original Wall Street Bull. right the guy built it in his he built the bull the famous Wall Street bull in his apartment and then just dropped it off but there was a Christmas event at the time so we had to like leave and come back and sneak it in there and put it down

I guess you can just make statues and just put them down in the real world the other news in the venture world artificial intelligence chip startup grok raised $750 million at a post funding valuation of 6.9 billion We got off said

yeah GROC will be a hundred billion dollar company if it doesn't get bought before then. We've debated on the show before. Who would be a potential buyer for GROC? Yeah. A number of players. But we'll see.

This is a fantastic milestone. We'll have to have Jonathan on again soon. Yeah, we've heard a couple of the folks on the show. Alex Cohen had a great post here. Salesforce on Salesforce. So last fall, one of Salesforce technical teams told large Salesforce customers that using Agent Force, the software firm's new. artificial intelligence for automating customer service and other functions would require extensive planning.

The product information, the Salesforce team shared. We're going live, it's time. Three, two, one. Here we go. There he is. There he is. All right. Here we go.

No way. Wow. Throw on some tunes. Live demo. Balzy. It's high risk. High risk, high reward. I love it.

And I will say this. speakers in the new meta ray bands have improved dramatically. Yeah. There you go. Just rip in emojis on the way in. It's going, man. Hey, there's Diplo. Good to see you, West.

So the glasses can support live here. They must. Maybe that's the one more thing. Let's see. There we go. Packed House at MetaConnect 2025. Here we go. We'll talk about these in a minute.

There we go. Welcome to Connect. No chain. AI, glasses, and virtual reality. Our goal is to build great-looking glasses that deliver personal superintelligence and a feeling of presence using realistic holograms. And these ideas combine are what we call the Metaverse.

Now, glasses are the ideal form factor for personal superintelligence, because they let you stay present in the moment while getting access to all of these AI capabilities that make you smarter, help you communicate better, improve your memory, improve your senses, and more. Glasses are the only form factor where you can let an AI see what you see, hear what you hear,

talk to you throughout the day, and very soon, generate whatever UI you need right in your vision in real time. So it is no surprise that AI glasses are taking off. This is now our third year shipping AI glasses with our great partner, Esselaer Luxottica. And the sales trajectory that we've seen is similar to some of the most popular consumer electronics of all time. Now, we are focused on designing glasses

with a few clear values. Number one, they need to be great glasses first. Now, before we get to any of the technology, the glasses need to be well-designed and comfortable. And if you're going to wear glasses on your face all day, every day, then they need to be refined in their aesthetics, and they need to be light. So in addition to working with iconic brands, we have spent years of engineering, obsessing over how to shave every fraction of a millimeter and portion of a gram that we can from every pair of glasses that we ship, and I think that that shows in the work. Number two, the technology needs to get out of the way.

The promise of glasses is to preserve this sense of presence that you have when you're with other people. Now this feeling of presence, it's a profound thing, and I think that we've lost it a little bit with phones, and we have the opportunity to get a very much. it back with glasses. So when we're designing the hardware and software, we focus on giving you access to very powerful tools when you want them, and then just having them fade into the background otherwise. Number three, take superintelligence seriously. This is going to be the most important technology in our lifetimes. AI should serve people, not just be something that sits in a data

center automating large parts of society. So we design our glasses to be able to empower people with new capabilities as soon as they become possible. You know, we think in advance about what kind of sensors are going to be necessary and we make it so you can just update your software and make your glasses and yourself smarter and direct AI towards what matters most in your life. All right. So with all that said, we do have some new glasses to show you today. And the air horns on my side. I want to start with these. The next generation of Rayban meta glasses.

People talk about how smart it is for meta to partner with Rayban. I think that this is actually the most popular glasses design in history. And now with double battery light. That's a great partnership. I wear them all day. They never run out of battery.

It's got 3K VATTS. It's got 3K VATERAL. video recording, double our previous resolution for sharper, smoother, and more vivid videos. This feels very fast-paced for a key-na. Really good pacing. And meta-a-I keeps on getting better. So last year I did this live demo translating live between two people. We're doing that on stage.

Now today, I am excited to introduce a feature that we call conversation focus. It's a new feature coming soon that is going to be able to amplify your friends' voices in your ear. So if you're in a noisy restaurant, you're basically going to be able to turn up the volume on your friends or whoever you're talking to. This feature's crazy. And conversation focus, it's not only going to be on the new Rayban Metas. It's going to be available as a software update on all of the existing Rayban Metas, too.

This feature makes being in a loud restaurant bearable. Now, to show this, or being at, or being at a concert. Yeah, people are into watching. Check out how this works. Into the wearables at concerts. Hi, Johnny. Hello, how are you?

Got the Renaissance vibes going on? It's going off, baby. Jack, I just put my name in. It's going to be a couple minutes. Nice. I need your advice. Okay. Every time I get my picture taken,

I feel like I'm not being normal. I want to feel like just a regular person When I'm one, one sec, Jack. Hey, Meta, start conversation focus. Starting conversation focus. Okay, go on. As soon as the camera comes up, I start to have this, like, serious steering headlock. Yeah.

Yeah. How do I be, like, more normal? Oh, man. How do I be more natural, like, when I'm getting my picture taken? Sometimes I play around with something, like your collar, fix your sleeve a little bit. And, like, just like, sort of action. Like nobody's around, you know what I mean? You got his finger, everybody.

Good demo. All right. of having a camera on the headphones. Conversation focus. All right, we are also improving live AI. As we optimize battery and energy efficiency, meta AI is going to transition from being something that you invoke when you have a question

to a service that is running all the time and helping you out throughout the day. Now, to be clear, we're not there yet on all day live AI use. This is one of the major technology challenges that we're still working through. But today, you can use live AI. for about an hour or two straight. So to get a feeling for what this is like,

let's cut to Chef Jack Mancuso, who's coming to us live from a kitchen on Mehta's campus preparing for the after party. How's it going, chef? All right, so what do you think? Maybe let's make, I don't know what you would make, maybe like a steak sauce, maybe Korean-inspired type thing,

just to show what the live AI is like. Yeah, let's try it. It's not something I've made before, so I can definitely use the help. Hey, Mehta, start live AI. Starting live AI. I love the setup you have here with soy sauce and other ingredients. How can I help?

Hey, can you help me make a Korean-inspired steak sauce for my steak sandwich here? You can make a Korean-inspired steak sauce using soy sauce, sesame oil. What do I do first? What do I do first? You've already combined the base ingredients. So now great a pair to add to the sauce.

sauce. When I first got my pair of meta-ray bands, I'd wear them when I'd walk around. I'd take my dog for a walk. And I would wind up just having, they're showing the most, like, cutting edge. Like, the thing that you can only do with having a camera, looking at the actual ingredients, piecing it all together.

But I would just ask it about the history of the Roman Empire and just be talking to it like it was any other. And I think that I'd love to know this actual break-down. Yeah, I'd love to know the actual. breakdown of like meta-a-I queries that come through the glasses, how much are the uniquely unlocked? Like, when you talk to a lot of folks that use meta-ray bands, a lot of them will use AI, take calls on them.

And it's like, it's not something you can just say at the keynote. But it's important to have function. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you need to have the unique unlocks, like the key features that can only be done when you put this particular set of technologies together. That's the key demo. But a lot of times, you go back to, like, so much technology, we wind up just using it for messaging. I end up just using it for knowledge retrieval, that type of stuff.

Last year at Connect, we also released a limited edition clear frames. I got them right here. And they were pretty popular. They sold out in a few days. We've got a new edition edition. You can see the internales here. With two colors. Do they not have anything in the...

Get them quickly because they're probably going to be sold out in a few days, too. I'll look on the other side. Now, it's been pretty fun to see how designers have taken Rayban Meta in a lot of different directions. You know, some of you probably are familiar with the fashion label Lua, run by Raoul Lopez. Are you? I am not. I'm actually not. And, you know, he's a bold designer who's bringing together sportswear in high fashion.

He recently debuted a look that's centered on Rayban Meta. at New York Fashion Week. Rural's actually here today, along with Christy Baez, modeling the look that he created. Here we go. There is. Awesome. Good to see you.

All right. That's the next generation of Rayban Meta. We're really excited about this. They're available now, starting at 379. All right. That price point. This summer, we launched our first pair of AI glasses with Oakley.

The Oakley Meta Hausen. This next announcement is what I've almost leaked. Like, did he talk about slomo? Oakley is synonymous with sports for 50 years now. They're available in a number of great colors. And by the way, you can, on the screen right now, you can see a massive skateboard ramp to the left of John. And I don't think we want to docks who's going to be skateboarding

in a little bit, but we'll see a good practice earlier. Look at these. The vanguard. Now this is the iconic Oakley aesthetic. These glasses are designed for performance. And on these, weightboarding while holding the battery even further. You can trace the lineage perfectly. Using them the whole time on a single charge.

And then you can turn around and run another marathon on the same charge and still not be out of battery. The camera. These are incredibly light. Yeah. It does not feel like you're old. It's got a wider 122 degree field of view so you can capture all the epicness of your adventure in 3K. And it's got video stabilization. That means that as you're going down a trail, you're going to be able to capture some really great video.

All right. The open-year speakers are the most powerful speakers that we've shipped yet, with 6 decibels louder than Oakley-Meta-Houston. So they're great for running on a noisy road or bite. or biking in 30 mile an hour winds. You know, I actually took a call on a jet ski a few weeks ago. It was great. I could hear the other person fine over the engine. And our advanced wind noise reduction makes it so that you can basically be standing in a wind tunnel

and you'd still come in clear to the person on the other side. It's loud. The person had no idea I was on a jet ski, which is good. All right, we've added slow motion and hyperlapse capture mode, modes so you can capture your adventures in new ways. These modes are also going to be available on all the new glasses that we're announcing here, the new Rayban Meta, the new Oakley Meta Houston's 2. And you can trigger these with Meta AI.

Great footage with any of the video. Yeah, take a slow-mo video. We're partnering with Garmin. Have you ever done hyperlapse? Are you familiar with this? I think they're about to talk about it. Take a bunch of photos, stitch them all together and smooths everything out. video when you reach certain speeds or different distance intervals or

you know like every mile of a marathon and then when you're done we'll just stitch together all the videos for you and you can overlay the stats on top of them and you get a nice video that you can share wherever you want that goes wild and we're also partnering with Strava so you can overlay your stats from Strava 2 and share all the same type of content with your Strava community all right we put an LED in them so that way it can light up in your peripheral vision to help keep you on your pace target or heart rate zone target. So that's going to be really useful if you're...

I didn't catch that on the demo. That's very cool. A Garmin device too. These are also our most water resistant glasses yet. With an IP 67 rating, they can get wet. I've taken them out surfing. It's fine. It's good.

I'm going to put this to the real test. What's that? Surfing? Two wave hold down. You know about? wave hold down. No, what's that? Normally, you can customize the surfing, you'll fall.

Yeah. The wave will, if you fall, the wave will fall over you. Yeah. Then you're going to be, you'll come up. Yeah. Two-wave hold down is when another wave comes in a set. Oh, so you have to wait for the second one to come in. And so you'd be really potentially sitting basically on the, on the surface.

Uh, if you're lucky, kind of waiting for it to roll over and then pop up. Do you wear sunglasses when you surf? No, but I'm going to do now. Doggles or anything? No. Yeah. Nothing. You can see you going surfing and bring a pair of hopefully goggles.

Is that just the nerdiest thing you could possibly do? That would be typically. What's the right style? Yeah, cool. Yeah, I... I would definitely be caught wearing some scuba gear while surfing. A hat? Yeah. You don't wear a hat? It's also very... I feel the hat flies off, right? Immediately.

Yeah, it's hard to keep on, even if you have, like, even if you have it strapped on. Yeah. I haven't seen... What, what are they? those things that go behind? Look at this foot. This is a Red Bull, right? Yeah. The best. Yeah, cameras in the center.

So I think it fits inside a helmet better. Also lighter. Yeah, I do wonder if they'll work with Oakley on a ski goggle. Oh, yeah. That would make a ton of sense. Probably leaking the next thing. No inside knowledge. No.

But it does make sense. like fit. Oakley makes a make ski galls now. Yep. Now for the announcement

we're only waiting for it. Oakley met a Vanguard. All right, we are selling them for $4.99. Pre-orders start now and we're going to ship them

on October 21st. Priced to sell. And shipping fast. Anon's everywhere. Rejoice. All right. Now let's check out those glasses I walked on stage with.

There we go. All right. We have been working on glasses for more than 10 years at META. And this is one of those special moments where we get to show you something that we poured a lot of our lives into and that I just think is different from anything that I've seen anyone else to work on. I am really proud of this and I'm really proud of our team for achieving this. This is meta-rayban display.

Here we go. These are glasses with the classic style that you'd expect from Rayban, but they are the first AI glasses with a high-resolution display. There is. And a whole new way to interact with them. The meta-neural band. That's this. He's had it on since the beginning.

We've got two wrists for a reason. Two wrists for a reason. People were teasing it. This isn't a prototype. This is here. It is ready to go, and you're going to be able to buy that in a couple of weeks. All right. So we've demoed this on two separate occasions.

Yeah. There are two key innovations. Obviously, it pulls a ton of the stuff that we saw in the Orion demo, and people were talking about the last MetaConnect. At the last MetaConnect came out, E. It was an Orion, presented it, but it was a doubt. Now, getting ready to ship. It appears in one eye, it's slightly off center, so it doesn't block your view.

And it disappears after a few seconds when it's not in use so it doesn't distract you. And it's not visible from the outside. I mean like 42 pixels per degree, which is sharper than any major headset that's out there, and up to 5,000 nits of brightness. So it is crisp, whether you're indoors or outdoors on the sunniest. This required a custom light engine and wave guide to deliver this. It's a lot of awesome technology that we're really proud of. And then there's the neural interface.

Every new computing platform has a new way to interact with it. So for the glasses, we are replacing the keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, buttons, dials with the ability to send signals from your brain with little muscle movements that the neural... I can't wait for people to try this. It's a really wild experience. It is crazy.

They are a company that was doing something like this and then obviously added by the folks to the team to build it up. But yeah, it is a completely different interaction paradigm. We have built a neural interface into a durable, lightweight, comfortable, and good looking wristband with 18 hours of battery. life and is water resistant. Changing the volume when you're listening to music, but just going like this. That was crazy.

That was crazy. It's a crazy experience. I want to get into this in more detail. We've got two options. We've got the slides or we've got the live demo. Slide, slides. Give us slides. We're slide enjoyers here, but we'll take the live demo.

Now, one of the most important and frequent things that we all do on our phones is send messages. So when we were designing these meta raybans, we wanted to make it really easy to send and receive messages. And look, Boz is messaging me right now. All right, now, okay, I could go ahead and I could dictate with my voice, I could send a voice clip,

but I've got this neural bent, and it's silent. And now, and, you know, a lot of the time around other people. So it's good to just be able to type without anyone's seeing. He's doing both at the same time. He's talking while he's trying. That is so aggressive. Yeah, when we tried this, I struggled to remember how to write. We both realized quickly we forgot how to write. Yeah, it is. You pick it up quick. It's like riding a bike.

Something about actually having a pencil or pen in your hand that makes it easier to come back. What do you think? Just to write my face. All right. It's definitely a new skill. It's like learning to type on a key new smartphones, keyboard or actual keyboard. There we go. It's just interesting to be thinking about sitting here.

I get a message from somebody. And I just need to respond like this. Yeah. It is incredibly natural. I don't know what happened. Yeah, I'm interested. I mean, you can see the... Maybe Faz can try calling me again.

See, I'm. He's dictating text as well. And I'm wondering, what do you think the breakdown will be between people writing with the handwriting input versus just whispering to it or talking to it? This is... You remember trying the microphones. It was pretty remarkable how you could just whisper and it would still pick it up because of the location of the microphones on the device. Let's go for a fourth.

Try it again. I keep on messing this up. And if not, then we'll go for the less fun option. Okay. I don't know what to tell you guys. All right. Live demos, man. But we're going to get out here and we're just going to go to the next thing that I wanted to show and hope that will work. All right. Thanks, God. The functionality that he's testing is you basically, I can call somebody and give them a first person view what I'm. view what I'm seeing.

Yeah. So you went out of the room. I called you while I was wearing these. And you saw what I saw. And I saw you. Yep. Which was kind of funny. I mean, it makes maybe more sense for both wearing them.

But, and you can imagine that at some point they just do an avatar. Yeah. And then think about you're at the grocery store and it's like, hey, which one do you want? Yeah. Yeah. From Spotify, here's California Dreaming by the Mamas in the Pappas. Here we go. All right, and if I want to adjust the volume, I act like there's a volume control in front of me and I can just turn it.

That's pretty good. That is a really good interaction there. I mean, it's not that hard. Don't do some of the volume rockers on them? You could slide your finger up. Yeah, you can slide your finger. Even that, yeah, a little bit easier. What do you think the difference between the difference between you can slide your finger? What do you think the difference between the input for handwriting versus talking to will be?

The difference in terms of usage? Yeah. Like if you were one year from now, you have access to meta's internal data. Obviously, there's going to be a bunch of people that buy these, try them. They use them. Some of them are addicted to the handwriting. Some of them never use the handwriting. Some of them use 50-50.

What do you think will be more popular in a year? I just think the ability to communicate in it. text without a device. Yeah. Is, okay. Now, I don't know

is highly useful in certain circumstances, yeah. But not necessarily the way that you're going to have that's my fault.

That's my fault. It is really this case where you need to be. That's how we prove it's life. Yeah. Okay. So now,

like I was saying. Oh, yeah, this is really cool. It centers, the voice gives you subtitles for the person that you're talking to,

obviously. In any language. Yeah. When I watch TV, I pretty much always have the subtitles on. I can hear fine, but I find that it just makes it easier to follow along. But if you have an issue hearing, then I think that this is going to be a game changer.

Yeah, I agree. And it's also cool. It can do translation. So if I'm talking to somebody who speaks a different language than me, I'll get a translation in my native language right on the display, real-life subtitles. I do that a lot with the subtitles and movies, but I feel bad about it every time I turn them on because I'm like, is there's something wrong with me? Why can't I just enjoy it the way the filmmaker intended? Like the filmmaker... Maybe he's a subtitle enjoyer too.

Maybe. Like I made this film to be enjoyed the subtitle. I somehow believe that Tom Cruise would not want that. He doesn't believe in frame interpolation. I was trying to call on you. Were you busy? Yeah. You know, all right.

All right, what should we take it? You got some sick shoes, man. Okay, this is important. I'll take some photos. You know what? Let's go ahead and take a video just because we missed that opportunity before. Thank you. Say hi.

You want to wave? All right, there you go. Just a couple of lads. Yeah, you want to show the case. So the charging case for the glasses. It holds nice and flat. It fits in your pocket, fits in your bag. And then look at that.

Pops open. Oh, wow. Oh, interesting. It sits flat when it doesn't have them in there, but then when you put them in it gets bigger. Simply. And then I can just, you know, go ahead and you can just browse through them and look at them after. It's all you're going to be able to do one day.

I think that's going to be valuable. Very cool decision to put the heads-up display offset. So I can have a conversation with you right here. And if I'm getting a message or a notification about something, it's not like blocking your face. Yeah, I was watching the Google I.O. keynote. And, I mean, it was a little bit more like VFX. It wasn't as much, there obviously wasn't a live demo like this.

And it felt like they were centering the HUD, like, much more in the center of field of vision. and it does feel like the Call of Duty mini-map is maybe the correct paradigm. How the meta displays and the neural band come together to enable some pretty amazing new things. The last thing that I want to show is a glimpse of how this is going to work with agentic AI. And, you know, the basic idea here is that we all have dozens of conversations throughout the day. And if you're anything like me, then in every conversation there are normally like five things that you want to follow up. on, you know, maybe there's something you're supposed to do, maybe there's a conversation that, you know, this reminded you that you need to have. Maybe someone just said something that you

weren't sure about and wanted to confirm or one more context on. But, you know, the thing is, it's tough to follow up while you're in the middle of a conversation. So if you're anything like me, you probably don't, and then you just forget a lot of these things. So the promise of glasses and AI is that they're going to help with this over time. So you just start a live AI session and the glasses are going to be able to see what you see, hear what you hear, and they're going to be able to go off and think about it and then go. Can you tell if the indicator lights on for that? I feel like this is going to be the same discussion as the AI pin. It's always listening to me. There's questions about, you know, can you maybe not have it listening to me right now

or I want to know if it's listening to me? Being really clear on that is pretty important. Hey, Jake. I'm so glad you reached out. Hey, yeah. I was hoping you could help me on this board. I'm building for my brother. Oh, of course. Hey, Meta. Start Live AI. So for the board, my brother needs something with a wide tail, so it's easy to catch waves, but the performance of a narrower tail. What about a swallow tail shape? Oh, that's great. Yeah. But maybe three fins. That makes... Is accurate? Fact check this. You're the surfing expert. Is that what you would recommend? When would you use a swallow tail?

I have no idea what any of this means. Actually, a few weeks ago, the supplier confirmed that the fins will be here in October. That's great news. Squallotail, I usually surf for Swallowtail with a quad setup. What's that mean? Or twin fins. So you have three options. You have a traditional thruster, three fins.

Thruster? What's a thruster? Three fins set up. Okay. Yeah. Then you can surf with that. Does no one surf just the normal one fin, the old spurn? Single fin.

Single fin? Is that not popular anymore? Longboarding. It's Lindy. It's Lindy? People still do it? Yeah. Mostly longboarders.

A meta AI. What's the Lindy as surfboards? All right. So there you have it. This is the next chapter in the exciting story of the future of computing. And so we got meta-rayband display, our first AI glasses with high resolution and the meta neural band, the world's first mainstream neural interface. The glasses are going to come in two colors.

They're going to come in black and sand. And they also all come with transition lenses. So you can wear them indoors, they turn into sunglasses when you go outside. And you are going to be able to buy the set for $7.99 in stores. where you can get demos as well on September 30th. All right. I'm pumped that people can actually go and try it by it immediately. Yeah. In what?

It's going to be big for John Exley. He's going to be able to have the show up running. 13 days, two weeks will be live. Exile, he's going to be able to have the show running perpetually on the heads-up display. I mean, there's a big question about that, right? Like, obviously, meta, starting with first-party apps, WhatsApp. They obviously have a deep integration. Spotify, Instagram.

But, oh, yeah, I mean, we are streaming live on Instagram. We have got the next generation of Rayban Meta, including our special edition. You've got the Oakley Meta Houston's that we released in the summer. You've got the Oakley Meta Vanguard for performance. And now you've got the Meta Rayban display. Those are our fall 2025 classes. If you go to Meta.com slash about right now, the first header now of item is AI glasses.

That's how important they're framing this. Family of apps is like deeper VR is to the right now. It's AI glasses is the category. They're dominating, wanting to dominate. We want to help bring about a future where anyone can just dream up any experience that you can think of and then just create it. So even though obviously the redid may ban or rayband display, you can immediately start thinking

about other apps that you develop. I mean, you're just saying, like, people watching live streams, people watching all sorts of stuff, people using essentially third-party apps. Hot dog, not hot dog. Running perpetually. I mean, truly, like, the Cluelly team, like, they should want to integrate with this, right? There should be a ton of companies that want to... Yeah, it's worth noting that their entire thesis that Cluelly is, like, always-on-a-I-I-I

is undeniably directionally correct. Yes. I think the interesting thing is that, like, if you want to... to be a platform and you want this to be a platform, you need to be open enough that you are willing to let other companies win in the subcategory, right? And so the iPhone came with the whole point of this is that meta wants to be not just a platform, but a hardware platform. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that... That means got to be somewhat open. You've got to be friendly to developers. You've got to let people integrate and build cool experiences on top of it. We haven't gotten a lot of

messaging around that yet, but you have to imagine that it's coming, right? Yeah. Because And even in gaming, right? You think about historical these online, offline games like Pokemon Go. I do wonder what announcements we'll see in the next two weeks.

I feel like gaming is an easy give. It's harder for a tech platform for like when the iPhone says we have a clock app, like the flashlight app, you know? Like people built these different things and then the the beer app. Apple never made a beer app.

They didn't make beer app. Missed opportunity. But they, yeah, I mean, as a platform, you have to be able to, you have to be willing to give up on your first party apps, or at least like allow them to compete in like a somewhat free market on top of your platform. And it'll be interesting to see, like, how aggressive developers get about, you know, plugging in and figuring out where the actual APIs are. How friendly is the ecosystem?

We've spent the last couple of years building from scratch to replace the Unity runtime, which is great, by the way. Think about some of the apps you could build a... Something like Guitar Hero, or like the piano, for example, where it's just like heads-up display, it's flashing, flashing. I think that's one of the better selling apps on both, basically all the VR headsets. Pass through, you see the actual keys, but then there's virtual elements laid over the keys. And I've actually done that with a, I think it's called this.

What this engine can do? I forget. There was some app that I had where you basically just put your laptop on top of the keyboard and then it overlays the keys as they drop down. You can play the piano. Pretty decent. We just got this demo. Yes, yes.

Got to be in the center of the octagon. Whoa. We are rolling out early access to hyperscape. Did you see the brand that was on the floor of that UFC Octagon? In the demo, I don't think it had logos. It didn't, but in there, I believe it did. I need to roll it back, but it looked like there was a Lucy logo there. I don't know what I'm hallucinating them, but I'm pretty sure I just saw that.

I mean, you guys are. We are a sponsor, so, yeah, totally possible. Yeah, this is cool. We got this demo earlier. And it whirled into Horizon and have them all be connected to. All right, this one, this is our new immersive home. rendered entirely in Meta Horizon engine. Visually, it is a big step forward from where we have been.

There is no 8-bit Eiffel Tower here. Oh, good. You can call back. You can pin different apps to the wall. Like this Instagram app, it automatically renders your posts from creators and friends in 3D. We're in such a weird time with this, like, how you actually experience. of virtual world. Earlier this week, we were talking about

Fei-Fei Lee's World Labs. She's doing Gaussian splatting, Gajun splatting. And so you take a bunch of photos, run it through a training run, an algorithm that runs, cooks, and then you can move around in the browser, and it looks extremely

photo-reel until you get, like, outside of the house. It's not too far. And it kind of, like, yeah, it kind of breaks down in this really interesting, like, bizarre way. And so they brought that to the, world, the quest

world, but you can generate spaces in your actual life. But then you can also generate real worlds like using a traditional 3D pipeline. And I feel like these two technologies are on a collision course and they, because they don't play well together right now, but they're starting to see demos where

you can go take a bunch of photos. It builds the Gaussian splat and then from there it generates 3D geometry that can be interacted with because in those Gaussian spots you can move around like a camera that's just flying around. but if you pick up a ball and throw it against the wall, it won't bounce. And like, obviously that's prerequisite for basically everything.

Michael just confirmed Lucy Logo in the UFC ring. Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy. That is a while. Nice work, too. This happened years ago with my first company. Somehow there was a Super Bowl ad, and they needed, it was for Fast and the Furious, and they needed an ad to go on a billboard in Times Square where the cars are

racing through and they couldn't use an actual ad. And so my ad guy knew someone in Hollywood and was like, you can use our brand for free. We'll send you like an image of a billboard that you can Photoshop or VFX into the shot that will go in the Super Bowl ad. We're like, wow, we got our logo in the Super Bowl ad. Also, it's really neat to see how many people are using Quest

to watch video content. You know, it's just a lot more immersive. So we think that this category watching video content is going to be a huge category, both in virtual reality headsets and on glasses too. So we're launching a new entertainment hub that we are calling Horizon TV. And we're working with a bunch of great partners to include a bunch of movies and TV and live sports and music. talking about this. I'm excited to announce that Disney Plus is coming to Horizon TV and bring the long content from Hulu.

It's so, it's such a basic functionality, but when the Applevision Pro launched, I remember seeing you open up the apps and what was the top left app, what was the app that they want, if you read it like a book, left to right, like what was the app that they wanted you to open? It wasn't any of the crazy VR video games, 3D world. It was Apple TV. It was Apple TV. were like, look, the one thing, apparently the Apple team,

one of the folks that they'd hired to work on the Applevision Pro came from Dolby Cinema. And they were like, the one thing that we can know that we can deliver is just like a movie watching experience. And I, and I feel like there's, I don't know, Palmer Lucky has that quote about like, the war fighter will be wearing a VR headset before the average consumer does because you can spend so much money and you can mandate that they wear it and there's all these different reasons. I still feel, I might be wrong on this. talk to folks and debate it, but I still feel like there's a world where the VR headset replaces the TV before it replaces the MacBook Pro, or like the laptop.

And I know you never watch movies at all, and also probably have never watched full film in VR, but I feel like the screen pixel density for the Quest is on a trajectory where it's going to be cinema quality level pretty quickly. but you can't just show up and be like, yeah, of course, you can like log into this app through the browser. Like it needs to just be there natively. For a while...

One important thing, they're not trying to develop some massive content. They're not trying to build a film studio dedicated to... Maybe they should. I don't know. I mean, I honestly think that there's a world where they... Where they... They should buy Terminator 2.

They should buy, and they should give that pre-installed in the quest when you get one. When you get one, you should just get... free copy of Titanic or Avatar because one of the first one of the first movies that I watched in 3D in VR was Avatar because I was like

I want that that's a movie that needs to be experienced in a huge screen in a theater and VR can actually afford you that doesn't quite hit the same when you just watch it on a TV or your phone and so actually having a partnership that allows you to deliver that at least in just a few clicks with just a few logins like

that's better but I'd like to see a movie pre-installed passion for 3D filmmaking. And it goes back a long ways, two decades, really. Talk to me about where that comes from, why you believe so strong in this. I've spent my filmmaking career trying to really engage people, draw them in, get them involved, get them involved in the story and the characters. I was first exposed to 3D filmmaking in 1998, I think, and it was massive film cameras.

It was 3D in 2019. For a ride show. I thought, we've got to be able to do this better. Some sort of demo? I was a super early adopter. I think there was George Lucas and that me. And that was in 99, 2000. And I said, why can't we just slap two of these things

side by side and make 3D? Well, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that. And so 25 years later, I'm pleased to say, I've got a great 3D team, and we've made it all. We've not only made my films, we've made the 3D cameras available to a lot of other filmmakers doing concert films and sports for TV, which didn't last long, and, you know, lots of big movies, Ridley Scott, that sort of thing. I just love 3D personally. I love authoring in it. I love seeing the end

result when it's when it's done properly. And I think it's how we perceive the world. Why would we throw away 50% of our data, you know, and see everything through a single eye? It makes no sense to me. And I just see a future, which I think can be enabled by the new, you know, that you have the Quest series and then some of the new stuff, hopefully is going down the line. We got to talk to him, take them through what's happening in the... And you don't realize SaaS companies are going to release cinematic movies. Before they've released a real product. I mean, if the launch video meta continues, it's going to be like, yeah, like we're excited to launch our product.

Like, go to the nearest IMAX theater to see it. I mean, there's companies better. Buy a ticket. Buy a ticket. Hit the box office. It's a box office. I don't know if people know. James Cameron's like a complete purist

when it comes to 3D, which means he actually films it with two different cameras. Because there's a lot of... Once there was a 3D boom, like theater just realized that you could just charge more money by saying, hey, there's a 3D version.

But then they realized that they could create a 3D film from a 2D production. and so they'd film the whole movie normally. Stolen Valor. Yeah. And then they'd go in and they'd have a whole team of rotoscope artists, which would basically cut out from the image.

Okay, Jordi, you're in front of that background. I'm going to cut you out and put you on a different layer in post, basically, and kind of fill in the background, blur it. He says we're doing it live. Yeah, he does do it live. And with like AI and stuff, that's got to be easier to do. but I would be surprised if James Cameron is putting down the super heavy 3D IMAX camera at the time soon. He was also famous for like operating the camera himself and there's all these pictures.

I don't know if he does it all the time. I think he says that he's not comfortable doing like the full steady cam. Remember we saw that on the New York Stock Exchange floor? But if it's just like a shoulder mounted shot, he will actually be like I want to manage himself. Mount. Soundermode. And that's, O.G. What is the, what is the founder's podcast anecdote about James Cameron?

He taught himself visual effects while he was a truck driver, right? This was scary. This was scary. Oh, yeah. You were asking about this. He was doing, he was reading and driving. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is that he was.

Whatever book, that, whatever book Sanro was reading. Yeah. It was clear that, that I think James was driving trucks while reading books. It did make it sound like that. It seemed like it was, it was, it might have been pulled over. Might have been taken a rest. Yeah, the story was like he was driving. trucks and then in his free time he would study visual effects and study cinematography and get up to

speed on filmmaking. But it's very funny to compress it. Hey, maybe, you know, the next James Cameron is probably using the meta rayband displays. They've got their books right here, their truck driving. They're doing great. That's the future. Let's listen to James Cameron a little bit more. Been able to prove that there's more emotional engagement, there's more sense of presence. You know, if you're going to watch a Blumhouse film, a horror film, your fight, flight, reflex is more engaged, right? Hopefully, if you're watching. One of my first VR experiences was with, which one? It was back when it was Oculus.

It was post-acquisition, but it was the first consumer version. Maybe it was actually developer kit 2, DK2. It was this huge block on your face, and you had to hook it up to a PC. It was not, it would not just run by itself. and I connected it to Half-Life 2. And Half-Life 2 is action game, shooter. Not too scary, but there's this one-level Ravenholm where it's really dark and the zombies start coming out and jump-scaring you.

And I remember turning around seeing a zombie running me and actually, like, jumping out of my seat. And I played this game before. And, like, the reaction to a 2D shooter horror film is just not, it just doesn't, like, scare you that much. It just doesn't hit like that. But in VR, it was something pretty crazy. So I think our task, the reason that we've partnered, and it's under, you know, if I can't say,

can we get a wrist check? Oh, yeah. And Sarah Melton. On who? James Cameron. What's he got? Oh. Wait, is that on here right here?

Is he a left? Is he a left? Because by the way, I think episodic television, short form, long form, I think that's the low-hanging fruit that people have historically ignored because so much 3D content was just made for movies. I'm not talking about avatar. I can't make movies fast enough to feed this pipeline. We do it at Lightstorm Vision, my 3D company.

As we build cameras and systems and networking and tools to give to other films. He looks great, he looks like he's got a few more, at least a few more avatars. Few more founders' podcast episodes. Or a small fee. A small fee. Job's not finished.

Other filmmakers and showrunner, and Broadcast. The BMX bikers are lining up on the ramp. That guy's got like an evil-kneval helmet. So there's two, back there, there are two half pipes that go like this. Do you think it's possible to transfer from one to the other? The transfer, the angle makes that not possible.

Yeah, right, it wouldn't be possible. Because the ramp is actually coming back this way. But there is a section that they have to clear that we're both looking at. look like a death trap. Yeah. It's been pretty crazy. It's not only just bringing down the hardware,

but it's making the hardware smarter. There's a lot of software solutions. And if anybody is tuning into this live for MetaConnect, just know that you can walk up here and say hello to yourself. And it will take care of, you know, the decision making around what makes good stereo. What makes it easy on our eyes, easy on our brains, where we're not getting eye strain and all those things.

It's taken us 25 years to figure out the kind of algorithm for that. It is worth noting that this time last year, we were both having the conversation that technology brothers have had in the past, which is we should start a podcast. This was that we should start a podcast month. Yeah. Going from, like, you know, auto folk. Here we are.

You have the ability to interocular distance can be an automatic. Auto stereo, basically. Auto stereo. So, yeah, this is, one of the things that really, I think, has made this partnership so great, and you've got a sense, I think, of it from the two of us. We're effusive about the partnership is you are somebody who has had... It is crazy. There hasn't been more of a 3D movie push in VR headsets yet.

A story you want to tell and how you want to experience that story. Probably because of the display resolution. Works a little bit more for gaming. Does that matter? I mean, if you have the catalog, why not distribute it widely, right? Like, the avatar's been shown on free TV with commercials. It's also been shown in theaters. It's super expensive prices.

It's free-D, right? But, yeah, I think it goes back to the VR companies, really focusing on, like, the long-term promise of what's possible with VR, immersive worlds, huge video games. But the, yeah, I mean, you have to get the install base up to actually get that. I don't think you need to get the install base up to. make 3D, the catalog of great 3D cinema a fantastic experience on a headset. Good point.

So I would be... Like it's starting to feel like it's picking the momentum, not only in the hardware, but also in the content side. You are willing a future into existence that you saw clearly. And this moment in history feels a lot to me like it did back in the very, in the early 90s, late 80s and early 90s when CG was first manifesting itself and, oh, you're going to replace actors. and it'll never look real.

And, you know, analog is the answer. And that's why I founded a company called Digital Domain. I wanted, you know, it was revolutionary in its moment. Founder. Today and it's ubiquitous today. So I've actually seen historically in my own life experience how you can actually make massive change. And, you know, and then that led to 3D.

Okay. Everybody accepts the fact that we go to digital movie theaters now. Right? obvious, right? Except that when the digital technology existed, it wasn't adopted right away. It took 3D to get the theaters to convert to digital projection. It took you. Well, we were in the middle of that.

We wouldn't release. Yeah, we were right in the middle. And it was actually talking to the team at Texas Instruments that developed the chip that made digital projection possible and saying embed in your servers and in your electronics the ability to carry two image streams. And because they did that, then digital projection just rolled out, and now it's everywhere other than the occasional art house someplace with a 35 millimeter print.

But when you've lived through enough of these revolutions, you start to see them coming as a wave, like a good surfer. I know you surf. That's right. I watch it from the beach. You watch it from underwater. I watch it from underwater. Listen, we have, we've got something, one more exciting piece coming.

I want to thank you again for coming to connect. really our honor to have you. I can't wait to check out Avatar Fire and Ash, as I'm sure everyone here will agree when it hits the theaters in December 19th. Love Avatar. We have our first guest on the way over. As a special surprise, we have an exclusive, never-before-seen, stunning 3D clip from Avatar Fire and Ash for everyone to check out in demo stations here for attendees and available on all MetaQuest devices in Horizon TV. For a limited viewing window. So thank you all. Thank you, James, and trust the process. This is all going to be very exciting. There you go. Take this out. So we have our first hands-on live with the

meta-rayband displays. You can't even tell. It is remarkable. It's so close to the original Rabin. You couldn't tell at all, right? You walked in to get the first demo. But you assume that they were smart glasses. I assume that they were smart glasses, but I didn't know they were the display model. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable. They've really shrunk it down so much. And I mean, we try to Ryan, and Ryan is blocky. It doesn't look like a full consumer product. And obviously, when they announced it, they were messaging, hey, we're going to shrink this down.

And the narrow band is really light. Yeah, I mean, people are already wearing bands like this all the time. I see more and more people wearing two devices on their wrist. People are very comfortable with this. I don't learn. All right. We've got an after party over at Meta's platform. There we go.

Diplo is going to play. There you go. Please join me in welcoming Diplo. Well, we are moving over to our first guest of the stream. Chris Cox, the chief product officer at Meta. People are also starting to learn that you're a big runner, and you've got the whole Diplow Run Club. Exactly.

So what do you think? Should we run over to Classic Madness and take these things for a spin? Absolutely. All right, let's do it. Meta, play B right there. From side of that. Go for a run. And I think that I believe they're going to run right past us.

So we will say we will wave to them when they run over here. Going for a light jog before hopping on the show. Love to see it. Fantastic. A warm up. Great. And we are ready for our first guest of the show. Welcome to the stream.

Chris Cox. Let's do it. Thanks so much for hopping on. How you doing? Welcome. This is Jordy. Here, grab a headset. There you go.

Shades or not. Yeah, please. Throw them on. It's a little hard to wear under the headset, but you can make it work. Nice. Yeah.

Which ones are you grabbing? I brought my own. I got these Navy ones. What are you daily driving? I like the Navy. Great. And they're a transition. Pull up the mic a little bit

so we can hear you. There you go. Great. Can you hear me? Loud and cool. Sweet. Welcome to the show. What does your organization look like

right now? I mean, you've been a meta for 20 years, right? Almost 20 years. Congratulations. It's a massive company. How do you fit into today? So I'm the CPO, chief product officer. I lead the family of apps.

So that's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, threads, edits. Working very closely with Alex and that, building out all the AI stuff that we're doing. Also lead our privacy team, the team that thinks about protecting user data. Yep. How has your frame of mind changed in the age of AI? around the trade-off, the decisions around how you build the products. It's a new era for product guys.

Yeah, it is. I mean, it's changing these days. It's changing like one week at a time. That's how much is changing. How people engineer prototypes can now be done. Stuff can be done in hours that used to take weeks. And part of what we're trying to do for the company is just encourage everybody, even if they know what they're doing, to take risks on trying to do things differently

and to learn as quickly as they can. All the way down to the way infrastructure is built, the way bugs are detected, the way optimizations are made to ranking, for example. We've been ranking newsfeeds since 2006. We're now starting to deploy agents to think about how to do that themselves and already seeing pretty interesting wins

in terms of just making the experience better for people. So I would say it's changing very rapidly, and it requires a huge amount of constant attention to make sure that we're staying on the edge. And what about at the product level for consumers and how you think about like product quality? Historically it was easier to be like, does a button work or not?

Yep. And now we're in an era where AI is probabilistic. You don't have the same ability to have consistency. How has that kind of shifted your thinking? A lot of it is, I mean, AI can be used to detect edge cases a lot more easily, which is really important. AI can be used to scale a judgment to lots more types of people and lots more languages, for example.

One of my favorite features on the glasses is live translations. And then one of my favorite features we've started to roll out on Instagram is captioning and lip syncing. So that you can take any video creator's language and translate it into the native language of the viewer along with lip syncing. This to me is like very, very fundamental if you think about what it unlocks. It's kind of like Tower of Babel level phenomenal to take any voice and translate it into the voice of the listener. So it scales the kind of thing that's just pure human connection, but it does it in a way that's instantaneous and could let somebody who speaks a relatively small language family experience the rest of the internet or experience the speaker of anybody out there. Yeah, it'll be interesting to think about news superstars, internet superstars starting out default global just because they're able to just be instantly translated across the entire world. Exactly.

I mean, you said something about, you said you could scale a, what was that, a resolution or something? You had some word for it, but I'm interested to know how you think about the tradeoffs between like rethinking products entirely from the ground up in AI native ways versus like there are so many amazing like unlocks with like captioning and just translation just like we take them for ground. But you got to go chop the wood and actually get them out into the products. How are you thinking about balancing those? There's like two different teams where you're kind of thinking about a greenfield project that could be like an entirely V2 or do you see yourself as like iterating towards whatever that next version of the product looks like? We do a lot of both.

We basically ask every team to have a portfolio to make sure they have something that's going to deliver in the next year. And then something that's going to come three years from now. That's much riskier. That's in the prototype phase where you're playing right. with ideas. You're literally prototyping something that doesn't quite work. And if it does work, you're not thinking far enough in advance. We do this for every single part of the business. So WhatsApp does that. Instagram does that. Our ads team does that. And that way you're sort of

constantly having a product pipeline of things that require a lot more risk-taking. What you're starting to see now is that the farther out stuff, you can code up a lot more quickly. You can you can play around with a lot more quickly. And then the near-term stuff, you're able to scale what I was saying before, is you can take something that works for one set of users and just scale it out a lot more quickly. Yeah. How are you thinking about talent internally? We've seen a couple highly entrepreneurial folks join to build MSL.

What does that look like on the product side? Meta has like a really rich history of acquiring and bringing, you know, some of the greatest founders into the organization, turning them loose, growing them into huge products. Is that something you want to continue on the product side? Is that something that's more important in the age of AI? How are you thinking about that? Yeah, we've had going back to the very earliest days of the company.

Like, one of my earlier jobs was building out the product management team and the way we did it. And this is before product management was really a thing. It wasn't a major discipline in software. So I couldn't go out there and find a lot of experience product managers, aside from Google, was the only company that was like still standing from the dot com. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's crazy to think that only a little while ago there wasn't young people that were like, I want to be a product made. It just didn't exist. It wasn't a past. So this is 2007-ish, 2008. And so the way we did it was like, let's go find the best small startups and like see if they'd want to work with us. This was Brett Taylor, who is leading friend feed. This was Gokul Rajaram, one of the sort of founders of Google AdSense, who is leading a team called Chilabs.

This is Blake Ross. who built Firefox. It was just like legendary. For me, it was like, these are legendary people. We were all like 25. They were too.

But part of the reason that was such an interesting looking back is like we had a lot of founders at the company. And we loved that the energy that a founder brings, the entrepreneurial energy is really powerful, especially at a company that is in white space. Like social media was brand new. Smartphones were kind of brand new. So you want as much.

many people as you can, frankly, that can operate or like comfortable being at a company and dealing with like, okay, I need to like actually check a bunch of boxes to deliver something to billions of people. I can't just do that in a weekend. But you want the sort of aspirational, just like energy of a founder. So we do acquisitions. We also are frequently seeing people leave and go found a company and then often come back. And sort of understanding sort of all the goodness of big companies and all the goodness of the outside world and trying to get the balance right between the two. What are the buckets? Like, how are you thinking about the value?

You know, we talk about super intelligence. We talk about AI. It's extremely broad. It means things for different people. How do you think about sort of the categories that AI can deliver value in? I can think of pure utility, like summarizing a message and WhatsApp. I think I can think of entertainment. I can think of connection.

but what's your framework in terms of like making AI, you know, integrating it through meta platforms and just making it valuable for end users versus this abstract kind of concept. Yeah. So, I mean, just thinking about the displays and the wearables we lock today, a lot of this is going to be about something that is with you all day long. When we talk about personal superintelligence, it's basically this idea that your computer should understand what you care about. It should understand what you're thinking about today.

It should understand your life. Your values, yeah. What you're trying to get done, what you're interested in, the people you care about. Like, that's what a super intelligent assistant that you could design for yourself would know. And then when you open Instagram or you open Facebook, everything you see there should be responsive to like your interest and values. And like, if you think about things from that perspective, like we're a pretty long way away. I'm still seeing things that may not be interesting to me today or were interesting to me weeks ago.

It's not like up to date to the second with like the way that people are. Like if you have a really close friend who knows what you're reading today, like they'll talk about today. You'll talk about the news today. And so for me, it's just taking the idea of what our apps do today. They connect you with people. They connect you with your interests.

They help you create content and just bring the barrier of all of those things down. So that to me is like how you extend the product forwards. And then with these glasses, I mean, you really, once you start wearing them, you do start to have a sense that this could replace a lot of the like pulling your phone out of your pocket. Handwriting. Yeah. And that type of thing just feels like, here we go. We got Mark. We got a dip-load.

Running around. There we go. Look at that. There we go. They did it. Credit for Mark for going on a run before showing. Yeah, for showing on his show. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Have a good to meet you guys. Cheers. Really quickly, let me tell you about fall. FAL.a.I is the website. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

Our next guest is Adam Seri, the head of Instagram. We will bring him down. It's an app you've probably used before. Yes. You're probably watching TVPN live on Instagram right now. We are streaming live on Instagram for the first time ever today. We have to make this a regular thing now. Yes, very excited.

For our vertical layout. Well, we will bring on Adam. It's incredibly sharp. You're swapping things out. And the run has concluded. They're taking photos. And we are bringing on new products. Here is the...

Here's that case that you have... I can't believe it's so cool that it holds a flat. Yeah. Here we go. Yeah, we're ready. Let's bring them on. Adam, how you doing? Here, we're going to have you put on this headset.

There you go. Can't hear me, can't hear you? Barely. We're watching. It's noisy. I like the idea of talking to you before you can hear me. I'm Adam. Hi, I'm John.

Nice to meet you guys. Welcome to the show. What's happening? There's people running by. Yes, the run club, I believe, is complete, it concluded. Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg's right over there now. It barely broke a sweat.

Yeah, it was, and Diplo. Yeah, that guy. Diplo's here, yeah. I was like, okay. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Another day at the office.

Take us through, take us through how the glasses play with Instagram over the long term. We saw a demo where Mark Zuckerberg was, it seemed like he was live streaming. Is that something that's going to come to the glasses, you think? Yeah, I think so. In general, I mean, Instagram is about trying to inspire creativity and having people connect over that creativity. We started as fun square photos with big filters and ridiculous borders that were kind of fun as in a way to help people create things that they wanted to share. And I think in a world where you can take pictures with things like these or live stream,

what's going on, and when something special is happening in your life, we love the idea of bringing that to Instagram. The platform feels like remarkably stable, super feature complete. There aren't a lot of feature requests that people are, like, angry about, and, oh, why don't you have this feature? It's got a lot. The critical feedback comes in other form. Oh, yeah, you still get that, I'm sure. But. Do you ever check my comments?

My question is, like, there's two things going on in AI. I put on a hazmat suit before I go in there. Yeah, no, I mean, I go into the requests once a week. I feel like it's important. I usually feel feeling pretty poor about myself, try to refresh, get a good night's sleep, shake it off. But there's a ton of stuff going on in generative AI. What about in core AI?

You feel like there's still room to get gains out of core AI models just on better recommendation feeds with bigger models, bigger training runs? What is the gap to just getting people better recommendations? Absolutely. There's a number of different ways if you want to go into the tech side of things about how these frontier models can change how we do recommend, how we recommend content, how we understand people's interests. One big pillar of that is content understanding. these Omni models, these models that can work across text, video, and photos, they can understand things in much more nuanced and complicated ways before. If we wanted to build a classifier that understood what something was about,

we'd build a different classifier for every topic. If we only come up with so many topics, now we can look at these, that used to be these pieces of technology that we couldn't actually read directly as people, and we can use LLMs to make sense of them, and we can say, like, oh, these two videos are in the same place on a map. now we know that is vintage Arsenal 90s highlights. We never could have done before. So that empowers things on finding content to help people connect to,

that it's going to empower things on giving people more control over their recommendations and their experience on Instagram and these other apps. There's all sorts of really compelling opportunities that I think are going to come to fruition over the next couple years. On the Gen. AI side, do you have a view on how much AI content we're going to be seeing? people like to complain about AI slot, but I've seen some incredible AI generated videos. I'm sure we've all seen Harry Potter, Balenciaga. It clearly still had a human element in it.

It wasn't just make me something that gets lights. Yeah. There was a human touch to that. It was enabled by AI technology, right? Well, I think you're going to see, like, with all other technology that there's going to be good and there's going to be bad. And the most interesting content that I've seen that has been generated with, or AI has been part of creating it,

have had a point of view that has come from a person. Sure. I do think what you're going to see is, you're going to see yes, more purely generated AI content grow over time. And some of that is going to have real risks, things like deep fakes, trying to misrepresent what's happening. Some of it's going to be really inspiring and trying to help you, you know, you can imagine things like creating tutorials to learn how to do things that you couldn't

do before, and a creator might not have been able to do that. Yeah. Now that can you see tools that do just that. I also think you're going to see a lot of content that is sort of hybrid. Yeah. We don't talk about this a lot because we're more focused. on the extremes, but AI can help people just clean up photos, clean up videos, make every clip in a reel, the same lighting. There's a lot of basic stuff that is actually, I think,

super important opportunity for creators. My view, it's like, if you have a, if you've built an audience that cares about you and cares about your content today, you're going to do really well over the next 10 years, you're going to be able to make more content, you're going to be able to make better content. And then the exciting thing is the entirely new categories of people that never thought to make something because it was really harder. They never thought to learn, right? I mean, the beauty of Instagram early on. And even Facebook was like Facebook,

you could just type out a message and hit return, post it. Instagram, you could take a picture, post it. Maybe you have a filter, maybe you don't. And it's just about reducing that friction. Question I have is like, how do you think about the push and pull between keeping Instagram, you know, I feel like in your comments, keeping Instagram, Instagram, right?

Yeah. We think about, you know, we think about, you know, people have an idea of what an app is, and then there's constantly pressure to add new things and do new things. But how do you think about that push and pull internally? So I think about our reason to be is about inspiring creativity and helping people connect over that creativity. I see an amazing piece of standout that I know is going to really hit hard with my brother, and I send it to him, and then we talk about it.

Yeah, you're seeing the shares are higher than likes in a lot of real. Yeah. So it's about sharing reels. It's about responding to stories. It's about connecting over your interests. Now, how people do that on Instagram is going to have to change. As how people communicate with their friends and how people entertain themselves inevitably changes. Often people think of Instagram as a feed of square photos, but if we didn't evolve, if we didn't add video, we didn't add stories, if we didn't add DMs, if you didn't add reels, we wouldn't be here today. You wouldn't be asking me any questions. And so we have to figure out how do we evolve forward but stay true to our core identity, to our reason to exist in the first place. That's a balance. Sometimes we get it right.

Sometimes we get it wrong. We've pushed too hard sometimes. I've been on a fair amount of that feedback and I appreciate it. But like I said, if we didn't evolve, we would just slowly become irrelevant. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Yeah. Good to meet you guys. I got to get you guys a little bit less on X and a little bit more on...

Oh, we're coming over. We're live streaming on IT right now. We are growing. I know, but we're going to be in your comments section. Yes, we're working on it. I want the real feedback. I want to know what we're doing well and what we're not. For sure.

For sure. We'll talk soon. Thanks so much. Thanks for coming on. Don't forget to take the headset off before you walk away. I just, you know, take this. Yeah, yeah. Pull the whole set down.

I think it's a good look. All right. Fantastic Aquanaut too. Yeah, so it is beautiful. Excellent taste. Good eye. Let's tell you about graphite. Dot dev.

Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality. software faster. And our next guest is Connor Hayes. Not H-A-Y-S. He's got an E, H-A-Y-E-S. He is the head of threads. Welcome to the show.

How you doing? Throw this headset on. Great to meet you. Good to meet you. Throw this on so we can hear you. This is crazy out of it. This is a crazy event. Thank you for having us.

The BMX riders are in the air. Everyone's going. You guys are in headset. You're not like. Oh, yeah, yeah. When you're out of this headset, we're locked in. We're locked in. environment here. So yeah, I mean, everyone knows threads. Take us through like what is the scale of

the platform? It feels like it's massive. Where is the biggest success of threads? Because, you know, we've heard about other platforms, you know, Instagram famously started with runners. Where's doing a run club? Yeah. Where's in, where's threads really found its footing? Yeah, we recently announced that we crossed the 400 million. So hit the screaming eagle maybe. I don't know. That's great. And we've done really well, actually, globally. So one of the main ways that people find out about threads. Through promotions that we do in Instagram and Facebook, we take the content that's most popular in threads and show people there.

So basically anywhere where those platforms are big, we've been able to attract people to threads back and forth. Sorry, Adam, we're going to end up on Instagram now. I appreciate it. This is threads time. Japan, Korea, the U.S., India, Brazil. It's pretty much a global platform at this point. Alex Heath is taking a 50K on the thread.

He's here. We're going to hang out with him. Yeah, sorry. We ran into him earlier today. Congrats, Alex. He went independent today. Yeah, he did yesterday, but yeah. Yeah, that's great.

Yeah, talk about kind of the different kind of inflection points because obviously there's the big launch, right? But it's like building any new products, it's a roller coaster. Yeah. And it feels like you guys are really figuring things out. I find myself in that I certainly am a DAU now because I'm just constantly, even if it's not necessarily like muscle memory to open threads, I'm getting, I'm finding. I see it on Instagram.

I'm getting flush over. Yeah. I mean, yeah, one of my kind of philosophies as a product person is anytime you can launch something with a bootstrap, do it. Yeah. I think bootchopping off of Instagram was like 100% the right thing to do in the beginning. We had this really big pop. I think it kind of established the platform, got a lot of people in there. But I think what you quickly find out if you were using threads at that time versus now is that not all the people that are best at Instagram are going to be best at threats.

So the format is so different. So we had to spend a lot of time kind of. of getting the threads native people onto the platform and then also helping users build a thread specific graph. So that has been kind of the last year and it feels like we're starting to break through and have some power users that really love the product now. It's so fascinating because I feel like meta has done a few of these Greenfield projects before Facebook camera. There's been other apps that eventually got rolled into Instagram. Was this always the plan? Is this surprising internally? Am I just out of the loop here? Like it?

It is a unique story, right? I was on the team that, like, helped build threads in the beginning. Took a little detour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we actually debated really, really heavily in the beginning. Should it just go on Instagram? Right. That was actually my original pitch, I'll admit. Like, that's the ultimate bootstraff.

Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. It's like you've added stories, you added reels. Like, there's been so many times when Instagram was a fertile ground for that. Like, what is fundamental about you need a separate app? To his credit, I mean, Mark was the person that pushed us the hardest on this. I think his point of view is that the use case, and I think over time, it ends up being distinct enough that you kind of want it to feel like a separate space. Sure. If Threads is going to be the place where it's like fresh perspectives on what's happening now in the world, that's a little bit different than like what's the most entertaining and visually appealing content.

Yeah. It's a reading network. When something happens in the world, you want to go to where things are that news is breaking and being discussed, right? the discussion is key. Yes. And I do think it's a just, you know, wildly different thing. You open Instagram and you might be seeing what Instagram thinks is what you're going to be most interested in that moment, not the story that just broke.

And so I think that it's like a distinctly different ecosystem. We actually got criticized for this. There was like, you know, Casey was making fun of us a bunch in the beginning because it's like the threads feed would be showing him things that were like a week old or six days old. That was a lot of because we built on top of Instagram tech. Oh, interesting. Instagram pushes for timeliness with the content, but if there's something that's awesome that you

missed six days ago, and it's not about some breaking news thing, you are fine seeing a funny video that was posted six days ago. So actually a lot of our thread-specific relevance investment over the last couple of years has been training for timeliness, trying to get it to feel really fresh. And you actually create a constraint for yourself because the pool of content that you can pull from is then inherently smaller. How big is the threads team? I don't know if I'm able to share that. Well, Adam was... Relative to the rest of the company, it seems like you're clean and scrappy. Adam was pitching us on live streaming on Instagram.

We're live streaming on Instagram right now. Is live streaming going to come to threads? Talk to me about where the product goes because pretty soon you could build all the Instagram features. You know, you're not careful. Sometimes you go into an interview and you know that there is going to be a question. This was the one. Okay. I mean, listen, we just talked about you want threads to be the place where it feels live.

It's what people are saying about what's happening right now. we just have such a long list of basic stuff that has to get done. I've been like this catchphrase that I've been giving to the team is like be the app that ships. Yep. You can come up with, we could sit here for like two minutes and come up with a dozen features that are missing, making replies better,

making notifications work really well, like getting the profile to feel really good, getting search better, trending. So those are the things that we're going to be focused on in the near term. But I do think it'll probably, there will come a day. Well,

if you launch it, call us first will be the first one on. I'd love to. I promise you and, and commit to you that that is what I'm going on this show. We appreciate you. Yeah, great to be you.

Thank you guys so much. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. Have a good one. See on threads. If you want AI to handle your customer support threads, head over to fin. com. The number one AI agent for customer service.

Our next guest is Roberto Nixon, a fantastic Instagram creator. A friend of mine, we've been DMing for years now talking about tech. he does these incredibly polished Instagram reels. Please. Hell, he's firing out the Meta Raybans. There we go. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, man?

Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Throw the headset on so we can hear you. There you go. Oh, beautiful. My mind made it. I'm on TBPN.

Yeah, let's go. Long overdue. Great to have you. Take us through your reaction to the event today. Look, the one thing I'll say is you guys know in tech. Every couple of years, there's like a... Can you curse on the show? We don't, but you can.

There's a holy crap moment. Every few years in 10, right? Like, you know, iPhone 4, retina screen. Yeah. The EMG band, the autobiography band, the metanurban that comes with the new meta-ray band display, feels like magic. It's so natural.

So we've demoed it a couple times. I was shocked that I picked it up. It just felt like it feels like using a phone with no phone. Yeah. It's like a crazy thing. Yeah, and so I tried to lash it with Orion. But Orion has eye tracking. This one doesn't, so it's a little bit more precise.

And the new pinch and... Yeah, the volume. That's when I was like... That's great. So that was my favorite part of the keynote, but I'm also a sucker for those new Oakleys. Yeah, so... I know, I know.

Well, talk to me about just Meta Raybans as a creator tool. We saw after the iPhone keynote, Mr. B said, I'm going all in. All my camera's going to be iPhone and 17 pros or something. Do you think this will be a daily tool that you use in creating content? Obviously, you're still going to use cinematic footage for a lot of the stuff you do, but how does this fit into actually creating content? I'll say for everybody's different.

Yeah. Here's my thing a lot of times when it comes to Instagram. Some people get frustrated by this. I think personally it's kind of cool. But sometimes the process gets more love than the art, than the final result. So me, when I rock these, it's always BTS, it's always POV. Sure. So I put out like a piece of art, let's call it, like a video.

And then I'm showing the process behind it, the piece. from the glasses. That combination is killer. So you get two pieces of content for one idea. So personally, that's how I use them. I think live streaming is another great use case. But I think every creator is using them for different things. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. We've got to have you back and hang out more. We can talk so much more about the credit economy and whatnot. All right. Have a good one. Have fun out there. We have our next guest, Alex Lang.

Coming on to the stream, let me tell you about profound. Try Profound.com. get your brand mentioned in LLM searches, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Alex, good to see you. What up? Congratulations on the new gig. My man, how are you?

How are you? Good to see you guys. Dwight, do anything? No, no, you're good. We can hear you. Talk to us about the first day on the job. How are you settling in? How's it going?

Honestly, it's being incredible. It's like a lot of fun. I think, you know, building an AI lab in 60 days flat is kind of an incredible activity, but, you know, it's a good way. It's awesome. Give me your pitch if you were trying to hire me if I'm some hot shot AI scientist. I think meta has everything necessary to achieve super intelligence.

There are no obstacles. We have the business models of sport building literally hundreds of billions of dollars of compute to be able to actually produce the technology. We have an incredibly talented team. Our team is smaller and more talent-dense than any of the other labs. The other labs are like 10 times bigger and our team is about a hundred people of cracked AI scientists. That's how we're going to get there and we're going to be incredibly bold and we have the scale of products and business to be able to deploy super intelligence to every person on the planet. Yeah, what are you looking for in that 100 people? Are you doing two pizza teams? Like who's fitting in really well right now?

I think that the AI researchers are all pretty are incredibly kind and lovely people and so. I I think we've been able to just build a team of great people. Everybody's trying to build superintelligence. Everybody is excited to be able to build, you know, potentially the most important technology of all time. And my job is like ensuring that we have the conditions to be able to do that. Yeah. Talk to me about the pillars, how you're thinking about research, safety, product, how all that comes together.

In the position of MSL as opposed to other labs where you have pretty much every human in the world that you can actually distribute these products to. Yeah, I think so we kind of split the team into three pieces, infrastructure, research, and product. Research obviously has this job of building these models, which will ultimately, you know, be super intelligent over time. Product is responsible for ensuring that, you know, over time they do get distributed and used in novel and interesting ways by the world. And then infrastructure has this very difficult challenge of building, you know, literally the large. largest data centers in the world and continue to scale those over time. I think that the,

over time, like, you know, not only having the distribution of all meta's products, but also truly, like, having this incredibly talent-ense team is going to be, is going to prove to be a huge differentiator. I think that, like, you know, one of our guidelines for building the team is that people have to be in the, in the very top handful from one of the other labs. And if you just do that, if you just build a team of the very best, people from the industry, like you're going to be very successful. Talk about the advantage of having a hardware team that's been at it for a decade versus maybe

starting in the last year. How closely are you in touch with them in terms of kind of showing what capabilities will be coming down the pipeline from the MSL side? I mean, the amount of engineering that has gone into this thing is absolutely incredible. They have like the transparent versions. We can see all the fucking shit. thing. People have like painstakingly engineered over the course of the decade. Yeah. I mean, and it's not a, it's, you know, we've, we've done a couple of demos over the last month or so, but this is a product that people are going to be able to have their hands on in two weeks. A hundred percent. And like, and fundamental, like, I think, you know, glasses are

the natural delivery mechanism for super intelligence. Like, it is, you need something that will see what you see, here where you hear, and they can easily deliver information to you. Yeah. It's literally right next to the human sensors. The human sensors and the human brain. The human sensors next to the digital sensors. Digital sensors. Yeah, exactly. Merge.

Yeah. The merge. Slap together. Yeah. It's happening. And I think it like, I mean, like my, my view is like it will literally just feel like cognitive enhancement. You will just, you'll gain 100 IQ points by having your superintelligence right next to all.

Yeah. Are you like, talk about chatbots? It feels like the chat bot meta is here, but it doesn't feel like what's going to be the most important thing in a decade from now. Yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally, if you look at like the AI industry, there's been relatively low innovation on the product side. Like chat GPT was one of the first products that we had in chat was one of the first products and it still is the dominant product for AI delivery. And then on code, you've seen innovation with like, you know, cursor and all these other products. But, yeah, we're just still in the, like, from a product innovation standpoint, we're still very much in some local maxima. And any, like, this is true of any consumer product, there are going to be many innings of innovation that come along the way.

And so our bet is that we're going to be able to be pretty bold and iterate and build some very innovative new product experiences. Do you buy into that idea of AI writing 90% of your code? Is that just you're writing 10 times as much code, or you can write the same amount as a 1,000-person team with 100 people? What does that actually mean when people throw around that 90% of code will be written by AI? Yeah, I think it's impossible to understate the degree to which I've been radicalized by AI coding. I think that fundamentally the role of an engineer is just very different now than it was before. and, you know, I think it, like, feels obviously true that for any engineer, including me,

like, I've written a bunch of code in my life, like, literally all the code I've written my life will be replaced by, will be able to have been produced by an AI model within the next five years. Yeah, what's your advice for young people then? I think you just have to figure out how to use the tools maximally. I think, like, it's actually in some ways, like, this incredible moment of discontinuity where if you just happen to spend, like, 10,000 hours, playing with the tools and figuring out how to use them better than other people, that's like a huge advantage. And adults all have jobs. So we're not, like, you guys are on,

on freaking TBDB, you're not vibe coding. Like, where's your clock code? Yeah, it is, it is interesting. We were at YC Demo Day last week and talking and, and looking at the areas of the sneaker flippers, the people doing Minecraft servers, and it feels like the people today are going to be leveraging the tools, not just to learn them, but actually making money from them while they're in middle school, high school, et cetera. I think it's exactly that kind of situation. It's almost like, you know, when personal computers first came about, like, the people, or just computing in general, the people who spent the most time with that and grew up with it had this immense advantage in the future economy, like the Bill Gates to the world, even the,

even the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world. So I think that that moment is happening right now. And like, if you are like 13 years old, you should spend all of your time vibe coding and just, you know, that's how you should live your life. It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll have to have you back for a longer conversation. Good again, soon. This is fantastic.

Congrats on the new pig. We'll talk to you soon. In the meantime, let me tell you about Turbo puffer. TurboPuffer.com, serverless vector and full-tech storage built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Shoes by the best. We have Andrew Bosworth, Baz.

How you doing? Welcome. You see, what shoes are you wearing? We saw them. saw them photographed in the, in the keynote. Let's go ahead and do this. Let us know. Hold on a lot.

We got the shoes. There we go. And they say pause on them. Yeah, Alex Alpert. It is on Instagram, Alex Alpert. Okay. Brooklyn-based artist. Fantastic.

Honestly, he was solving a problem for us. We were like, how can Mark use the Zoom feature when he's one foot away from me? Yeah. Like he was right next to my face. I don't want it to be my face. Yeah, yeah. And so we needed some detailed shoes for it. That's great.

That's great. On the Oakley's, no less, we're being brand-law. Yep. Oh, that's great. That's great. In the future, do you think I'll be able to just point the, point the glasses at the shoes and say, hey, go pull these up for me, order them, deliver them to me? 100%. Ideally, in the future, you'll even have to later on. You're just like, oh, I wanted those shoes. It knew that I wanted them. I love that. It's great. I got a budget. I got a shoe budget. I'm going to authorize your credit card with META. It's like, yeah. This is my budget. This is great. This is great. So here's the thing. Here's the thing. I don't think this can be, like, the thing that feels incredible. incredible here is that you walk on the screen onto the show and you're wearing the new displays and you're not thinking oh this guy's wearing a computer on his face it's crazy you're saying this

guy's wearing a pair of glasses we do have this problem i think in the tech industry where we look at a set of features and we're like oh this is the same these two things are the same it's not the same you look at what's come before and you look at this like i'm sorry this is a different thing and i think that's what we've done from day one mark said it if they're not great glasses first we're just not doing them yeah you told ben thompson you ship the v1 but the v3 is what you want to be your V1. Is there been a secret V2? Because I feel like Orion,

and then here, this is the actual V3, but it seems polished. We've got, so Orion is a, different tech tree. It's like a whole tech tree of augmented reality, which is very much following the V1, V2, V3 kind of model. This is, I will say, this is an uncommonly good V1.

It's good. I'm not going to lie to you. It's good. A lot of that is because I think the neural interface is V2. Yeah. And that's really you can feel it. The neural interface feeling as smooth as it does as natural does. What's funny to me,

is if I'll wear the Rayband Metas, and I'll just walk around and I'll be pissed. I'll be using the interface. I'm like, I'm not using the display glass. I can't use the interface. It's crazy. It's crazy how natural it is. We picked it up. I mean, we've done a couple demos now and it's just you pick it up and it's just immediate translation from using a regular mobile device. So a year ago, Jordi made the prediction that in the future you might have multiple pairs of glasses, a work pair, a sports pair. Is that going to hold for a long time? Yeah. People already have a lot of glasses. You've got different styles.

You've got different things. I think that's appropriate. In the future, yeah, you want to have the full functionality of augmented reality. That's one zone. Sometimes you're just, yeah, I'm just going to my kid's soccer game. I'm going to take videos. That's all I need. I do think you're going to end up with a strata, the entire line where you're getting

the full AR, these AI smart glasses with displays, AI glasses that don't have displays, and maybe even some stuff at the lower end. There's a whole range there, and people should be able to die what they want out of that. If you were a young founder excited about AR, how would you be planning the next five Well, there's two really important things. The first one is you have to embrace AI, and these are really tightly connected. People didn't see that five, six years ago. Now it's so clear.

It's very unlikely to me that in the AR. You gotta give you some credit for that, by the way. I don't think broadly tech didn't see the intersection in the same way. Now it feels natural because you guys are up there pitching live AI. Yeah. Real-time AI and it's like, oh, it makes total sense. But they felt like different tech trees at one point. And in the future, you're not gonna have an app store.

I don't want to go figure out what the app for my toaster was called and, like, make a toast, man. Like, I just have to talk to the AI and let it handle the back end. So it's a lot about what's the functionality you're producing? How is that going to integrate with AI? And then I would be thinking a lot about dynamic UI. That's the thing that no one's cracked yet, including us, is how do you get it so that the UI that I need is available when I need it? Generates in real time. As opposed to just like this fixed set of things that I got to go learn every time I have a new appliance in my life.

Totally. Talk about the tech tree. VR. It feels like James, James Cameron was on stage. I've said for a long time that this is, I don't know if you agree with me, but I feel like people will be watching movies in VR before they're playing fully immersive, 100-hour AAA games because you've got to get the install base up and Avatar in 3D already exists. It's a great experience. You know, he's such a passionate guy and he cares so much about the quality of the product. He really was not a fan of headsets until Quest 3. Yeah. And it finally got high resin up, an AVP, and all the different things.

And then he was like, oh, I mean, he went from like not that interested to all the way in. You saw him on this, just hyped. Fired up. He's totally fired up. And that's because we finally crossed. So up until then, you know, listen, watching on your TV was better. It was like, why would you watch it in the headset? It was better.

That's not true anymore. It won't be true in the future. Like, we're going to be the tech. He's seen the future. He ruined all my secrets on stage. I didn't keep raining them back. And so that just does keep getting better. The future isn't just the tech, though.

and people underestimate this, a big part of what is premium in the headset space is lightness. Yeah. It's weight, is comfort. Those are premium features. And that's kind of different than the previous generation. That's not how it was with phones or laptops where you wanted it to feel solid and sturdy.

You want it to feel plastic-y and light. Totally. Yep. But when you're a wearable, that is one of most premium things you can deliver. So we're looking at not just the technology, but how do you package it into the smallest amount of space and weight? Yeah.

Talk about the decisions to around the heads-up display, specifically in the display lenses, right? They allow you to interact with the real world. It's not meant to, like, cut you off, but what went into those decisions? Yeah, so from day one, Mark, you heard him on stage. We wanted this not to be interruptive. If this is a thing that's constantly flashing notifications

up on your face, that's a pretty annoying piece of technology. That's not a technology that you're going to be delighted by. So the really way we did this was we thought, what are the top 10 things that you take your phone out of your pocket for? Taking a picture. changing the song, listening to music, get a playlist, you're going to send messages, you're going to get a navigation,

you're going to get directions. And we just started working down that list and making sure that we could do those things on the headset. We're doing it in partnership with the phone. It's all part of the same ecosystem. But that's one last thing you have to take your phone out of your pocket for. That's one more minute that you're engaged in, whatever it is that you're actually doing.

Everything, I mean, the handwriting stuff. Did you guys try that demo? That was a 2027 maybe thing. No way. And then in the last year, we just blitzed at the team did incredible work. to blitz that. And that's another thing. Now you can respond to messages without having to take your phone out. Who's the fastest handwriting at Meta now? I'm not exaggerating. This will sound like I'm blowing smoke, but it's not who I am because I'm very competitive. It is Mark now. He was not good to start.

He got his glasses. He had the handwriting like two weeks ago, but he knew he was doing it on stage. So he has been, he runs this company on WhatsApp. And so he has been doing every single message of any of us to have gotten for two weeks. I literally think he went from like the 10th percentile to the 99 percentile words per minute. We have a we have a touch. We have a touch typing demo that we do with no keyboard, nothing, just from cameras. And I was number one until Susan Lee, our CFO being an Excel jockey is always just Excel jockey is a crush number one. I'm number two at that.

But yeah, no, I'm not exaggerating to say, Mark, we're like, we watched them on stage, like, oh, damn, he's a keyboard demo too. You're just, you're leaking that, but that seems, that seems incredible. I mean, the name of the company's meta platforms, it feels like this is a hardware platform. There weren't that many things where I was like, I want an independent. independent developer to play around with this, but for those, I want the, I want the innovation to flourish. I want, I want the kid in the, in the college dorm room to build something that runs on that. What is that going to look? I want the beer. I want the beer app. Come on,

on us. The pressure has been immense on us. Ever since the radio maddenance kind of really became a hit last year to produce there. We have some exciting announcements tomorrow on API development for some people. It's too tough on the glasses. We worked with Spotify to do the Spotify. And we really had to rebuild it with them, help them design it to make sure it met their specs. Even Instagram on the glasses. We had to redesign it with Adam's dream. So it's so tight.

The thermal and space is so tight. And it's so expensive to run the radio. You lose your battery and thermal so fast. So it's the worst it's ever going to be. It's the worst it's ever going to be, right? That's right. Everything is exquisite right now. Over time, obviously, we want to buy that space back and open it up to developers.

But again, I think, a lot of it is going to go through the AI. A lot of it is going to be you invoke the AI to accomplish the task. That's not just on us, whether it's MCP or something else. That's on our industry. We've got to continue to build what is the web of interaction design for AI apps. Because we all know that is where things are headed. What about on the other side of like the big tech partners that could potentially vend messaging into this? We were talking, we were at YC Demo Day a few weeks ago. We were talking to a team that like, well, this AI agent will run on your last. And it'll suck in all your messages.

And we're like, that's probably not going to last for that long. But is there any hope that other platforms will play ball and say, yes, there's enough demand. What's it take to get iMessage showed in here or Gmail or anything like that in there? Yeah. So we would love to work with these partners, as you can imagine. And I get it. We're so early on the technology for Google or for Apple. At first, they're just thinking, can we do it at all?

Can we do our own version? What's that looking like? But we have an opportunity here, I think, as a meta, to not only establish a consumer category that nobody's in, I think the more people play in that category, the more attractive it is for us to work together to make sure all of our use cases are supported there. You never want the platform to get in the way of a great consumer experience. And that's true for us, and that's true for them. So it's too early to stay. We're literally, you know, day zero. Actually, probably day minus 30 on these things.

But we are getting there rapidly. Yeah. The actual, like, it looks like there's cuts on the glasses. Those are, is that a design touch, or is that actually a wave guide? Is that a functional feature? Yeah, these are called the input gratings. Okay. You've got a little liquid crystal and silicon display right.

The plane here, it's piping light in. Yeah. Total internal reflection of light. It spreads that light out across a bunch of different pipes and channels that then shoot into my eye through what we call a geometric wave guide. And so I have a display on night right now, so you can't. You do, and we can't see it. You can't see it.

That's crazy. So that is... Wait, did you just turn it off then? Yeah, I just turned it right. Wow. Oh, got you. It's remarkable. I can't wait for people to go and just demo these

because it literally is a science. It's a science fiction we've been promised. At 29 years old. It's up to fly. It's in every video. I've told my team, like, it's yesterday's future today. It's like the things that we were promised are finally arriving. Thank you guys for doing a demo and letting people buy it this year.

Yeah. Not that doesn't happen that much. It's a bold statement. It's a bold statement. We appreciate that. Yeah. What's next for you at Meta? What do you focus on what do you want to deliver this year?

Look, the really big, big arcs, obviously are continued towards full AR. So we're really excited that we're supporting the entire strata we talked about before. Full AR, display glasses, regular glasses, and even other exciting fun factors that I can't yet tease. On the VR side, we're advancing the hardware. We have multiple fronts that we're advancing the hardware on. And also on the software side, supporting creators. Gen AI, don't sleep on it. That is the real unlock.

You've got Roblox. You've got Minecraft. They're awesome tools. You've got tremendous communities there of creators, but there is a ceiling on how good the rendering can be in those platforms, which I know. And it's also you have to be a certain level of creator to be able to produce good content in those platforms. And with Gen. I, you can lower the floor.

It's so much to do it. We just played around with the basically prompt to game functionality. It's crazy. And I was talking with the team that gave us the demo. And I was like, it was like not that long ago that I was like coding. little iPhone apps, Pong. Yeah. It would take me two days to, like, get a functioning app,

and you're able to just prompt it and be like, hey, change this character completely, change the entire world. And getting a decent 3-D texture used to be, like, you needed an artist, and you need a whole bunch of things. And then also with the new Horizon Engine, like, making it so it looks better. And we think that's going to be something that appeals to people, not just in headset, but on mobile. Yeah.

Well, I remember, I believe it was a couple years ago, you shared a photo of your home setup, and you had the teleprompter, and you have the VR headset. What does that look like today? A lot of the focus has been about getting the glasses into the real world with the Run Club. But are you using these in front of your computer as well? Yeah, I use these.

At this point, I'm pretty much using these all the time. Me and Mark kind of like just been on nonstop. Once you get these on, you start using them and you're in the thing of messaging, like it's pretty next level. Like even earlier, I was just coming up a stage. Mark is messaging me about, you know, the things. We, I will say,

futures here. As a CTO, you feel a certain responsibility to your setup. You've got to really go over the top. Yeah. I'm now shooting hilarious, like, like a cinema lenses. Yeah. The ones that Inare 2 shot Birdman out. No way.

It's like, my VC setup. I've gone, I've gone too far, and there's no turning back. Well, we've got to have you on the show. Call in with those lenses. I'd love to have you remotely. That's amazing. We're excited to get the glasses because John and I will be on the show. Yeah.

And we want to not be on our screens, right? I usually have a computer open when we're at our students. because the team might text me, hey, this guest running late, whatever, being in a world where we can just be live and get a notification, hey, we've got a guest running two minutes behind. And it is underrated.

I mean, obviously, like, we're all hoping for, like, App Store super open development, but I was just talking to some of our team, and I was like, wait, we could actually like pipe tons of crazy stuff just through the WhatsApp API. That's not that crazy to do. And WhatsApp has a bunch of primitives that you can build around. So there's going to be some cool stuff. And there's already WhatsApp apps and the whole ecosystem

developers there. Yeah, awesome. You know, Alex Himmel, who runs the Railway division. A year ago, when he had the first prototypes, he gave a whole speech, and nobody knew he was doing the teleprompter. Oh, no way. And he was just, and he was swiping the slides. There you go. His gestures. So there's a lot of potential here for these kinds of integrations. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is fantastic. By the way, I love the show. Thank you.

This thing rocks. We have a lot of fun. And I want to get out shotgun shooting with you after all your practice and robot recall. Yeah. Yeah. It really, it really did like completely change the game. I'd never shot a gun in my life. I just can't believe. That's a true story. It is a true story. It is a true story. And I don't remember. That's a spectacular story.

Yeah. But it was remarkable. Yeah, it was great. Anyway, thanks so much for having a little shot. This is great. We will talk to him later. Up next, we have Eva Chen. Next time we do this.

Yes. 12-hour stream, 30 minutes of guests. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Not nearly enough time. But we have Eva Chen, the VP of Fashion Partnerships. Welcome to the stream. Thank you so much.

Well, I'm learning. I'm learning. John's learning. Let's throw this on. I'm more of an enthusiast. Yes, Jordy's the enthusiast right there. Okay. Yeah. I'm John. This is Jordy. John and Jordy.

Jordan and Jordy. And Jordy. Jordy. George. Georgie Hayes. Here we go. Something like that. Like finding Dory and I was like, something like that.

Call us whatever you want. We're just happy to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Now you can hear us. I can hear you perfectly. It's quite a vibe here. I mean, it's insane. Guys, it's like a music festival.

Wait, what frames are you? wearing? I'm wearing the sky. Are we live? Yeah, we're live. Oh my goodness. Here we go. We're live. We're live. Welcome. All right. I'm wearing the Skyler, which is like a subtle cat-out. Looks good. And their transitions. And you can put prescriptions in them. And it's like a great everyday class. Yeah. I wear them all the time. Using them for headphones and live streaming. Yeah. There's been tons of fashion partnerships, Mark, uh, reference some online. Is this a Labubu? Is this the first Labubu? Is this the first live on, live on the first on Michelle, we sent one to a guest, Bill Bishop.

We sent him a Lubbubu. That is a wild one. It is a meta-branded Labubu. It is a meta-branded Labubu, a little meta-bucket hat. Fantastic. The Jorts. That of one-of-1? One of 20.

One of 20. Mark actually just got the last one. There is. Sorry, guys. At the market is going to be crazy. Talk about actually how to get these products accepted in the fashion community. Fashion community, I don't know that much about it, but, you know, very exclusive, limited release, only 20 of those.

This product's available for everyone. How do you actually think about the steps of what activations, what partnerships you want to do, in what order to actually get traction within the fashion community? Totally. Well, the first thing is that to make a stylish glass, period,

something that, like, people on campus here are wearing them, they look like regular glasses, and they blend right into everyone's style. When you partner with a company like Essela or Exotica and you're working with Rayvan, which has like the number one glass. Most iconic hair glasses.

Here, it's iconic. Think about it. James Dean. Oh, yeah. You know, like, um, silhouette. Like, Bruce Springs, like everyone, Bob Dylan. Well, I remember Casey Nystatt. That's what I think.

Yeah. I think about James Dean a little bit more. But, you know, they're an iconic glass and it like, it just blends into everyone's style. We're here on the meta campus. You can see hundreds of people wearing these glasses. Yeah. Looks good on everyone. That's great.

That's the first foundational thing. Yeah. And then in terms of the technical. technology, once people try these on, I've worn these the fashion shows, front row, Milan, Paris, London. Everyone who tries them on is like blown away because not only do they look good, they're just like the capabilities are next level. What's coming next?

Unbelievable. Yeah, what is the future of the meta-rayband's display look like in fashion? Am I going to be able to put these on in a physical changing room and have it AI generate me in a different outfit? I was already trying glasses on earlier using like an AR try-on mechanism. I remember where I was looking in one of the setups that they had over there. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah.

What does that look like? I mean, that's the dream, right? That's something that, like, as someone who works in the fashion industry, that is, like, kind of the holy grail. Be able to try on glasses and then see yourself and style yourself in different outfits. I don't know if you've seen the movie Clueless. It is a seminal movie for me in terms of fashion. Oh, yeah.

Fantastic movie. Jordy has never seen a movie in his life. But I've seen all of them. Okay, start with Clueless is great. Start with the Clueless. Okay, but like there's a scene where Sherer Horowitz is going through kind of like virtual try-on. Sure. Yeah, I remember that.

But that's like... It's another one of those things that's been sci-fi, right? Yeah. Like, this play feels like science fiction today. We need to get there. But for now, like with these new glasses, the ability to be able to kind of have that experience of seeing something asking Meta-I-I-I-Hey-Madow, how would you describe this dress? And they would say, oh, this is like a 1950s, fit-and-free.

layer dress style. That's going to be so helpful for people as they're learning and stretching in the fashion industry. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing, I mean, we were talking with, was it Baws or Chris with this, but just like seeing things in the real world and being like, I want that and being able to like basically decrease the friction between, oh, I don't have to like Google it or do a reverse image search. It's just like instant. Yeah, there's a lot of friction right now just in general with fashion, right? Like I'm on Instagram. I'm scrolling. I see a friend's really cute outfit. I had to tap. If she didn't tag it, then I have to like screen grab it, WhatsApp it to her and be like, hey, Ami, where are these shoes from? And then

she has to write back, then I Google it. And it's just so many steps from inspiration to actual purchase. And I mean, listen, that's my dream, like in terms of reality labs to get there, to make commerce easier. But for now, I think in terms of the everyday consumer, just being able to see the world around you in 3D to be able to like ask questions and feel like you're being interactive, it's amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on this show. This is fantastic. Congratulations.

I look forward to more fashion segments. Yes, absolutely. We'd love that. We got that. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Bye. Let me tell you about numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per

month on sales tax compliance. Our next guest is Tiffany Jansen. Welcome to the story. stream, Tiff, how you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to stream. What's your day been like? How have you been enjoying MetacConnect 2025?

You know, the day's flown by. Let's get the mic up a little bit. Perfect. The day's been great. It's flown by. I mean, the product announcements were phenomenal. I got a demo the Meta Rayban displays yesterday. So I was really excited to see, though, the announcements around it.

It blew me away. Do you think that these products are ready to be integrated into creative workflow, your workflow. How do you think they fit in? Obviously, there's so many creative tools. When would you pull a meta-rayband product off the shelf? Oh, absolutely. I mean, well, for one, while you're on the go, creating content, it's huge, you know, organic content, being able to capture those moments instantaneously, I think is going to be a game changer. Even thinking about the meta-rayband displays, using meta-a-I-I while I'm walking around and ideating, that's huge for a creator to stand out.

Sure, sure, sure. What advice do you have for people who are maybe getting started on creating content on meta platforms? Utilize AI, really treated as almost a coworker. You can feel it as it's one of my favorite ways to, if I have an idea, but I maybe can't fully piece it together. And I want someone to bounce it off with you know, I work by myself. I work from home. I need that collaboration. You really don't have a, how big is your team?

My team? I mean, my team is about five people. But you're saying when you're in that creative workflow. Yeah, when you're in that creative workflow, I mean, for scripting, for coming up with ideas, that's my role. That's my job. So, you know, I have some people I can ideate with, but I find, honestly, the more I do that with something like meta-a-I, and it can keep on keeping track of what I'm thinking and really wanting to put together, it's almost better sometimes. Any advice for content creators that want to interview the Mag7 CEOs? Yeah.

You've been doing that. Oh, you know what? Who have you interviewed so far? So so far, last year was Mark, and I know you guys have them up next. And then last year was Mark, Jensen, I did Satya. Yeah, I did. There's, you know, the list goes on. And it was been great.

You know what? I think the key or the secret is just be yourself, be authentic, be knowledgeable with what they're building. And, yeah, they're also down to earth. It was great. Yeah, we asked a couple other folks this. How much content do you think on Instagram is going to be AI generated in five years? That's a really great question. Well, I mean, okay, five years.

Let's say what right now I would say we're already probably at 40 to 50 percent, honestly, I think. Certainly like AI enhanced, AI enabled, AI in the loop, but there's still a human somewhere involved. Yeah, it's kind of the question of like what companies is an internet company. Yeah. So it kind of just based on the background, right? product, but they distribute it. Yeah, you kind of just forget about it. I know.

Yeah, I don't know what it will be. Maybe it will be closer to, you know, 80 to 90% in to some way AI touches it. But yeah. Still human taste and point of view. I like the human touch. Yeah, I mean, if you go back to the original Instagram, it's like what percentage, it's almost like asking what percentage of photos were not filtered, hashtag no filter. Like that was a trend, but most people filtered them.

And like in the future, most people would be like, yeah, check the box to also like. hashtags might come back. Fix the lighting or add subtitles automatically. Like there's a lot of things that AI can do that still keep the core human element, but then add a bunch of stuff on top. Collaboration. Yeah. Yeah, there's also, have you seen those videos on Instagram of like where people take some very technical concept and then they turn into a song. I saw one around steel coils. Have you seen this one? I have. Yeah. And that's one where it came from the human. Clearly that came from the brain of a human and then AI was just used to make the song and the voiceover and stuff. Anyway, it's been fantastic having you. the show. Thank you so much for helping on. Great to hang. Thanks, guys. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. And up next, we have Vanta.com. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously.

Vanta's trust management platform helps you get compliant fast. We have Mark Zuckerberg joining in just a few minutes. Founder, no. What has your reaction been to the overall MetaConnect 2025, Jordy? How are you doing? I think it's impressive to see, like, you know, the immediate reaction I have is how important it is to keep the band together, right? People like- It is crazy how long some of these folks have been there.

Like, Bob, Chris Cox, Adam Aseri, right? It's like you need to keep talent focused. And, yeah, I think talking with boss and, like, understanding, I do feel like five, you know, only five years ago, it was not, people were not seeing the connection between. between, I just weren't seeing the connection between classes and ARVR and AI. And the intersection is just beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, the original meta-ray bands, it felt like such an add-on little side project almost. And now it's like the center of their annual keynote.

And they're really building a lot of different stuff on top of it. That's been fascinating. We got to read a post here from, from Atlas, Creatine Cycle. You thought we weren't going to print out posts and read them. Here we are. Here you are, Atlas, live at Metacnect. My prompt. Let's get you some ice cream.

GF. Agent. Okay, yay. Will you have some? My prompt. Probably not. I'm kind of full. GF. Agent. Okay, fine.

Thought for 46 seconds. I'm not hungry. I honestly don't understand that. It's a classic interaction. If it recreates human interaction perfectly, it will behave exactly like a. We got a real post here. He says, bro, last night was a testament to our culture and civilization. It was, it was.

We are ready. We are an absolute party action. We are bringing Mark Zuckerberg on before he hops on. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. These are new corporate cards, bill payments accounting in a whole lot more all in one place. Here we go.

Let's bring him on. Mark Zuckerberg, live on TBPN. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Mark? Good to see you. Very to see you. Congratulations. It's a massive day.

You got a bunch of fans here. Love to see it. Yeah, it's a fun one. You still winded from the run or? No, that was a pretty conversational pace. That's a conversational pace. Love it. Yeah.

React to the Connect announcements. How do you envision the next phase of this with developers? I mean, there's so many cool ideas that I could imagine happening on ray-band display, but there's an immense amount of constraints operating in such a small format. What does this look like over the next couple of years? Yeah, well, I mean, I think that there are two platforms here that are interesting. One is the display glasses, and the other is the neural band. Sure.

And I actually think both of them could evolve into important platforms by themselves. So the glasses, I actually think there it's pretty clear, right? I mean, you saw there's the nav where there's a bunch of different apps. We're going to try to start off with partnerships and start off getting some of the most used use cases and really nailing those and getting them in there. And then over time, hopefully we'll be able to open it up in some way, but I think we need to figure that out. The neural band, I think, is going to be an interesting platform by itself, because right now we're basically, we designed it to be able to power glasses. I mean, that was the purpose, but there's no rule that says that it can only be used to power glasses. So I think that's an interesting thing to explore over time, too.

I mean, you can imagine, you know, something like this when you're sitting at home and watching TV being pretty cool, too. So I think we need to figure out what direction this goes in over time, but this is a pretty good start. We've been having this for many years. The display is going to get all the attention, but the neural band is insane. I can't wait for people to try it. I mean, the fact that you can buy this in a couple weeks is just insane.

Talk about the team's foresight around the intersection of glasses and AI, because now it seems incredibly obvious, right? It's like always on, this live AI. But it wasn't that long ago that people thought these were like two different sort of like tech trees and they didn't see the convergence. Yeah, I mean, look, every new important technology needs a new class of devices in order to make it first class. And I think glasses have three main advantages that I think are going to be,

just make them the ideal candidate to be the next major computing platform. One is that they help preserve this sense of presence when you're there. with another person. I mean, you take out your phone, you're gone from the moment. Glasses have the ability to bring that back. Two is that glasses, I think, are the ideal form factor for AI. It's the only device type where you can let AI see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day. Soon it's going to be able to just generate a UI visually for you in your vision in real time. And then the third thing that glasses can do, it's really the only form factor that can bring together, you know, the physical world that you have around you with realistic holograms and

blend those together. And, you know, I think it's one of the crazier things about living in the modern world is that we have this incredibly rich online world and you access it through this like five-inch screen most of the time. So I just think that it's like only a matter of time before these two things are basically fully merged and glasses enable all of that. So that's kind of been the plan all along. I mean, we, when we started reality labs or the kind of precursor to it. I think it was back in 2014. It was basically like we went public and became profitable. And then that's when we started working on these longer term bets. That's when I started fair for our AI research. And we started the precursor to reality labs. But yeah, no, I think

that these two tech paths really kind of go together. I noticed you took a picture of Boz's shoes on stage. Yeah, they were nice shoes. They're fantastic shoes we saw them on the stream. Talk about what personal super intelligence means longer term? Is there a world where I'd be able to take a picture, look at your watch, say that looks like a good gift for my business partner, find it, order it, send it to him. Yeah, well, I mean, look, I think where we're really going with personal super intelligence and the glasses, it's more the live AI vision that I talked about. So right now, with the glasses, you basically can invoke that AI, you can say, hey, meta, you can do the gesture with the neural band, bring it up. And you can ask,

a question, but I think where this is going over time is basically you're going to have, it's just going to be on all the time. You'll be able to turn it off and you'll obviously be able to have control over it and all that, but you'll be able to think about AI as more something that is just running all the time that has context on your conversations. If there's something that comes up in a conversation that it thinks that you should know as you're having the conversation, it'll be able to go off and think and find the answer to that and then just show it in the corner of your vision.

if it thinks of something that it thinks that maybe you should, you know, be reminded of after you're done with the conversation, I'll be able to go off and process that and come back. So I actually think that this kind of agentic AI vision of it having context to what's going on in your life and then being able to go off and do work for you and then bring that into your view when it makes sense, I think it's going to be really powerful. That's the thing I'm really excited about. It can sense that you're forgetting a word and it just popped up. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, or I mean, my version of this, I mean, I just, ever since I've been thinking about this, I've just been running this thought experiment where every time I'm having a conversation during the day, I'm like, wow, like there's information that I wish I had during this conversation. I mean, the most annoying thing to me is like you're having a conversation. It's like you need to go check in with someone else about something and then go back to the person you're talking to. Here it's like, all right, you can just like send a quick message with the neural band, get the information that you need.

It's kind of like multitasking. You're like the best power user for this. I've run a couple brands. I've advertised on Facebook a bunch. I've advertised on meta platforms. What does the role of a brand look like? Is it shifting in the age of super intelligence? If all my customers have personal superintelligence,

is my experience running a brand going to be different? Well, I think the brands are going to become more important. I mean, I basically think that all kind of economic theory assumes that people have access to perfect information. And I think the internet took us a step closer to that. And AI is going to take us another step closer to that. But in a world of perfect information, what matters? It's like that people trust you and that you have a good reputation

and that they know that you're, they know what your work is. So, yeah, I think that the evolution of how people think about brands, I mean, that will obviously shift with every new technology. But I think it's only going to get more important. Yeah, I feel like there's already a little problem. where people find a product. They see it on Instagram, but then they might search the comments or go to their favorite creator. What's my creator friend think about this? And super intelligence being able to go around and do some of that for you, surface at all. That makes a ton of sense. Totally. Talk about the work with James Cameron and the future for virtual reality. How many pairs of glasses do you think people will have in the longer term?

Yeah, that is a good question. There's an interesting tension between condensing everything into a single pair of glasses. yet at the same time, humans love to have diversity. You don't want to wear the same watch every day. Yeah. Yeah. I think that you're clearly going to be able to have a lot of interactive and immersive experiences on glasses, AR glasses. But I think the right analogy is kind of like augmented reality is the future of phones. It's the mobile thing that you're going to take out with you. And I think virtual reality is the future of TVs.

And the reality is that the average Americans, spends, I actually think it's still, they spend about as much time on a TV on a daily basis as they spend on their phone. Yeah. But they're different use cases, right? One is more immersive and interactive. I think they're both going to be important. And the experiences are going to be limited by how much compute you are just going to have less compute in augmented reality glasses. I mean, you only have so much space to fit a battery and compute and like the connectivity to whatever device it's running is not tethered, right, because you don't want to have a wire.

Whereas with VR, you just have more real estate. So it's kind of like the difference today between you have mobile games on your phone, and then you have much more advanced games on a gaming console or a PC, which can have a lot more processing. I think the same is going to be true here. You're going to be able to have great experiences on the glasses kind of akin to your phone. You can do pretty much anything. You can watch videos on your phone, do whatever.

But if you want the kind of most immersive version of it, I think that there's going to be a dedicated thing for that. Yeah, you're using the Meta-Raband display on the way to the office, reading some emails. You might sit down at the desk, walk in, right? Yeah. I think it's time for a size gong. You have some big announcements today. We'd love for you to hit this gone for us.

There we go. Congratulations on Meta-Connect 2025. Fantastic. We would love for you to sign this as big as you can. We want the gong game signed. We're going to retire this. We're going to hang it in the rafters. All right, there you go.

Thank you so much. Congratulations. Thank you. Good to you guys. How a great rest of you guys. SIFI into the present. All right. See you guys. Fantastic watch, by the way. We will bring on our next guest, but let's first tell you about Figma. Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams

build great products together. We have Alex Hibble. It is crazy. Waving at Sucks. This is our biggest live show ever, for sure. Lots of people here. We have Alex Hymel joining. next couple minutes okay we're gonna hang out um Alex

Timble's the VP of wearables we will show the gong we want to show off the gong careful here game hit game hit the game hit gong this will be retired to this right here this camera over here there we go look at that game hit there we go Mike Zuckerberg signature on it love to see it we are building the museum of of technology business back home. Yes. And that will be a staple. I like that.

I think the agenetic commerce thing is going to be a big discussion over the next year. We saw Open AI teasing it. There was that leaked screenshot or like say it was a kind of intentionally leaked screenshot of like chat GPT having an orders tab. Google's obviously thinking about that. Some of analysis had that breakdown. What Doug was saying about having perfect information, right? today the internet to the consumers could easily research a product, right? You could be at a store, look up reviews, what does the creator think about it?

Now it's like even less friction and that you can just be looking at something and you can be pulling up like, hey, Andrew Huberman actually doesn't like, not a big fan of it. Yeah, it was funny when you were saying like, I'll have my credit card saved with meta and I'm pretty sure they probably have like hundreds of millions of people that already have credit cards. I already have one saved from the meta AI app because I put one down to buy stuff in the Oculus Quest store, long time ago. We have Alex Himmel coming on the stream next. Award winning. Looks like you won an award. Let's bring him on the stream whenever he's ready. Thank you for tuning in to TBPN live from MetaConnect 2025. We appreciate you. Here we go. Let's bring on Alex Himmel. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Fresh off a run. Fresh off a run. Throw this on. There you go.

Yeah. Having fun. Congratulations on the day. Absolutely massive. And let's get that mic down. There you go. Perfect. All right.

We in position. Yeah. Okay. Take us through your role. Oh, yes. By the way, we were bummed. I wanted to open the show with the vanguard, but they were still in a barga. But those will be, those will be Jordy's daily driver.

What time did you open up? We started 430. We had to try it before. You couldn't wait in like one more hour. I know, I know. You wouldn't link it. Walk me through your role, how you fit into the organization, what you need to do specifically to get all the products out today.

Well, today's a big day for us. I lead the wearables group of meta, and we announced a whole bunch of wearables today. A few things. We had a few things. Yeah, usually we announce one device, but today was a real stack-up. We had, if you like the Rayban Metaglasses, we had software updates for them, and we had brand new Rayband Meta Glasses Generation 2 with tech improvements for the battery life, the image quality, you got an AI mode for the camera.

Talked by the Oakley Meta Houston's, the Oakley Meta Vanguards, which I'm wearing, which are designed for sport, which is pretty exciting. And then, of course, our first pair of display glasses. Don't forget the neural band, which I'm wearing. I've been wearing it all day. What lessons are you pulling from from previous meta projects around wearables, hardware, supply chain? Like, there's new challenges, but I feel like you've done a lot of this stuff

before. Those are my kids over there. Oh, hello. They got they got Raybett MacGla. They're looking great. Wow. Yeah, we've got to get a small pair

for the kids in home. I know, I know. Well, so we've been working at the Esloil Exotica for a few years now. And our first generation was the Rayban stories. And those didn't do as well as we had hoped. Then Rayban Meta,

Gen 2 really exceeded our expectations. What was the metric? Was it just overall sales or churn? Because I feel like whenever we're talking wearables, Yeah. Like, you know, Christmas comes, top of the app store. And then we got to get the retention up. And it feels like the latest products are finally passing that retention.

And we're not seeing that turn. People are using them. Is that how you measure success these days? Yeah, I mean, there's the metric. So we're pretty metrics driven as a company. We do look retention. We like J curves is what we do. So the X axis is, you know, the days after you've purchased.

Yeah. And the Y axis is the percent still are retained. So we're looking for that. be high and be flat. So if you look at the advantage between the original meta stories and then the meta raybans, was there a jump in the 12-month retention? Yeah, just picture two lines and one was way higher. And I think it's just the image quality was good enough to be able to share on Instagram

and WhatsApp and elsewhere on your phone. The audio quality was good enough to answer calls, listen to music. And then the form factor is subtle improvements, but we grind away at millimeters. and milligrams, and they were, you know, just a little bit more comfortable, a little bit lighter, and it was the small things that added up. And we built on that for the new generation we're launching. We're pretty excited about the full lineup. I think these Oakley Meta Vanguard's, I think they're going to be a hit.

I've been using them for a few months now. They're waterproof. This feels like something that, I don't know, I was like every guy in my friend group is going to want one of these, right? They look great on women, too. Yeah. Yeah, no, but specifically, I mean, like, for me, when I think about, like, as a kid, I was like, I want to buy a pair of Oakley's that just have that iconic shape, right?

And I can just remember doing them in all the activities where there was running or hiking or skiing or snowboarding, right? It's like, this is going to be something that you're going to be seeing everywhere out the real world. Who's faster you or Mark? Well, we came in around the same time today. You did. No, we were. They both metal. We both metal.

Yes, I'm still dressed from the run club this way. And we had 30 people wearing the vanguard and taking a video. So we're going to have some good footage. Mark's pretty fast. Don't bet against him. Yeah, he's got a serious, serious workout routine right now. I knew he was going to set the page. I wasn't sure what pace he was going to set.

Well, we know he's the fastest handwriting at meta, but I don't know if he's also the fastest runner. Oh, man. I mean, not only is he doing 30 words per minute there. I don't even notice. He was saying something and writing. It's a lot going on. Like, that's a lot going on at top, which is pretty impressed.

Talk about some of the partnerships on the sort of like active side with wearables. I know you have the Garmin partnership, Strava. of what else, like, how did those come together and what else are you thinking on that front? No, Garmin makes the best smart watch in the world. I've been wearing garments for over 15 years. I do marathons. I've done an Iron Man. Like, I've been a heavy Garmin user.

And, you know, they sell a lot of watches a year. So they're, you know, good penetration in the market. And we're thinking, hey, if we're building a pair of glasses designed for sport, who better to partner with than Garmin? And it opens up auto capture, which is going to be a really big thing that's really fun. So if you go for a long bike ride or if you go for a run, we had it set up for this run. So we were taking a short video every quarter mile automatically from the glasses. And then it stitches together in a reel at the end of it.

And my like hero scenario is you run a marathon, you set it up to take a short video at every mile marker. So it's 26, 27 videos. You want one at the finish line too. And then it stitches them together. And then you've got like a fun, shareable reel at the end of it. And to do that, you know, we're using the location. triggers from the Garmin watch to make that possible. I think we can do a lot more with Garmin. There's a lot of scenarios that are enabled, but we're very excited about the initial.

How important is it to actually distribute compute across your body? Because you could potentially stuff all this in there, but then you get some big heavy headset. Do you want to be leaning on other parts of the body to have sensor data and whatnot? So our strategy is, you know, I believe in familiar form factors. I think that over the course of hundreds of, and thousands of years, people have gotten used to wearing different devices, and, like, the ergonomics are dialed, and it's taken a lot to get there, and so we're trying to lead in that. People wear watches, but in order.

Just about every, I can only think of, like, two people in the world who don't wear glasses. Sunglasses are optical. Yeah. All right. Hey, thanks for having me, guys. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds.

Julius.com. Very smart to figure out where to innovate. We don't want to innovate on form factor. Yep. We don't even really want to innovate on design, right? Yeah. And welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

Welcome to the show. Get that headset on. Welcome to the stream. This is Rocco, the chief wearables officer. Here you go. Edluxedica. Hi. There you go.

Big day. Congratulations. Very big day. Would you mind taking us through, take us back in history, tell us the story of that original cold email to Mark Zuckerberg. How did that happen? What inspired it? Walk me through that.

And you know, the company obviously is like the market leader in Iowa. And I always had a passion for technology. and so like one day you know like I decided you know I decided you know really to pitch you know like a bunch of technology company and the way that I was doing it is actually

Google you know their email and of executives so like you know like one of them was actually Mark and the email at the time was Zach at Facebook so you know like I wrote

this email, which at the end of the day, actually became what is Reban Meta now. But the idea was simple, you know, like having an amazing, recognized design of, and that's the way of fair, and the most recognizable brand in the world, which is Raban, per the at the time, I think my collaboration was only on Instagram, and then Mark of It was like, you know, like, we had to do something bigger with all the different platform. And, yeah, like, you know, after the call email, Mark replied to me after three days. Pretty fast. Pretty fast.

You know, and then we met, and then, you know, like, you know, like, before we launched something, it took probably a couple of years. Yeah. You know, pretty fast. Yeah, it was pretty fast, you know, like. But it's nice when you don't have to innovate on the design, right? That's so key to just be able to focus. on like what is the value, what is, you know, getting the technology right?

Yeah, I think that was honestly the key of the success and it's still the key of success today. Mark today even on the presentation said glasses needs to come, it needs to be like beautiful glasses before anything. And then you almost find the technology as an added value. So yes, we started, you know, with the most recognizable frame, the Weifer, Rabin, and the technology the magic that we baked in the product. How do you think about scaling production, the way that these are priced? I think they're going to be selling fast. Yeah.

I mean, you know, there are like three obviously, let's say now. Today we really we launch free architecture. You know, like you have the eyeglasses, the new generation, Raban Metagen 2. Then you have avant-garde, which, you know, it's a sport architecture. And then you have the display glasses. And I do think it's already scaling AI glasses. Camera plus audio and is doing really well. So we are very proud of the already the success

we have in the market. We're going to build on that. You know, Oakley is the second brand that we introduced to the family. That really defines the category with ribbon. And then we're going to probably introduce more brands. brands after that and you know and you saw I guess you probably tried Orion your more advanced technology that's you know was always marked dream and you know like and

we started to do at the time Reban store in our Reband meta and you know which is a much simpler product but the vision is still there the dream is still there so that's we're going to get you know to hopefully the glasses will be the next computing platform. And that's, you know, that's the kind of in between, you know. Yeah. So do you think there's room or products in your portfolio that still have the Rayband or a classic silhouette, a classic style, but they just give the technologists more

space to work with? It feels like until we can miniaturize everything, there's value in having more space to work with. No, you're absolutely right. That's, you know, like the most critical thing, you know, the miniaturization of the technology. Thank God in Iowa is happening something interesting that, you know, actually glasses, chunker glasses are now a trend. Yep, that's helpful.

I think we are right on the trend. Good timing. Good timing. So, and yes, but, you know, the goal is obviously to reduce the phone factor to a smaller form factor even with display. And you saw even, you know, Vanguard. beautiful glass is grateful factor

but everything needs to be smaller I think we did very well and we proved that is doing really well on the product of RABAN meta and we will get there even with the other generation

and other platform one step at a time well thank you so much for coming on the show thank you guys this is great we'll talk to you soon have a great rest of your day

we are ready And we have Privy. Privy.com. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails. Surely securely spin up white label wallets, signed transactions, integrate on the official wallet. Infrastructure all through one simple API. We'll be telling you more about Privy. And we have a surprise guest. James Cameron.

Good to meet you. I'm John. Welcome to the show. Pleasure. We're going to have you throw this headset on. They are. I think once you put them on, you'll be able to hear us. Ah, there we go.

There we go. Peace. Perfect. Thanks so much for taking the time. No problem. Really excited. I am a, VR is overhyped one year, underhyped one year. I remain extremely bullish about the idea that I will be watching cinema in virtual reality. Am I crazy?

No, not at all. No, I think you're right on the money. I had kind of a piffinel experience when I saw the Quest 3 with my. With my own content on it, I mentioned it in my remarks. It's like, okay, I know what that's supposed to look like, and it's this. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

And, you know, theaters are hit or miss in quality. Yeah. But with the quality control on the device, you're always going to get that brightness level. Yeah. That brightness level can be an order of magnitude greater than a movie theater. Wow. You know, think about it. I had no idea.

So movie theaters are supposed to run 16-foot lamberts, which is a metric like nits, right? I don't know how many nits it's the equivalent of. And that's based on the empty kind of engineering standard for the movie industry. But very few of them do, and they're mostly down around 10 or 9 or 3. So at 3,

you know, you're literally at a 10th of what the Quest series displays do. And so to me that's phenomenal. So brightness is obviously not the only metric. You've got spatial resolution, right? Field of view, all that. How close can you be to the

screen and I just think it hits a sweet spot. Yeah, people talk about like you need to watch it as the filmmaker intended. And like this stuff didn't exist when you created the film. So it can't satisfy that perfectly. But at the same time, we're getting to a point where you can recreate the theater experience, right? Yeah. And look, hopefully if this becomes a pivot for people to see, to take their entertainment media, you know, on VR, MR, MR, whatever you want to call it, devices, not the glasses.

The glasses are obviously a separate thing, and they're cool, they're very cool in their own right. And I saw the newest ones demonstrated today. Unfortunately, not at the demo on the stage, but, you know, I mean, I can vouch for that. And stuff's amazing. You've probably seen it already, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think? I mean, yeah, we've been blown away by the demos broadly.

My question is, how should the film industry respond to progress in VR? Because clearly you're paying attention, but probably to a level that the rest of the industry isn't. Yeah, I think VR is a broad term and it's constantly getting redefined. And I think when you hear VR, the average person thinks, okay, gaming, okay, immersive. I can look all around sometimes. But even just thinking of it as like the next television platform. Okay, right. So let's narrow that down to it being a...

essentially a media player in stereo. Because the gorgeous thing, the elegance of this is that a good VR headset is a stereo display. Yeah. Right. And it may be the best stereo display. And what did we have previously? We had TVs that didn't work, right? Where you had to find a sweet spot.

You couldn't watch with other people. All that crap. And then you've got cinemas that are hit or miss. Some are dark. Some are fine. Right? People love the cinema experience. I pray.

I hope and pray that never goes away. But I want people to see what I created. And so, yeah, so I think that if you think of VR as an innately stereoscopic display device, then that's a differentiator from the best big 80, 90-inch flat panel screens. And most people consume their media smaller devices anyway. And the thing is this gives you the feeling of a large screen. And you can you can spatially adjust it. You can move it in close or you can just keep moving it out and expanding it

until it spatially feels like you're in a bigger display space, right? Yeah. And so if filmmaker today, they need to assume. I didn't answer your question. And this is a cool thing is like, you know, maybe when you were starting your career, you couldn't assume that the Quest 3 was going to ever come, even though it was sci-fi.

but filmmakers today should assume that in 30 years everybody's going to be able to watching in that type of experience I think filmmakers and I'm less honestly this is going to sound a little weird coming from me I'm a little less interested in movie makers because they can't generate the content quickly enough what I'm interested in is live feed of sports any form of live entertainment you know concerts and so on and short post episodic Because we can get that out there quickly. By next year or the year after, we can get that stuff out there en masse. Right.

So I'm interested in showrunners that are doing hit shows. I don't want to, I can't, I said this in my remarks. I can't create enough content to move the needle individually. But I can act as a catalyst by providing the tool set to any production anywhere that wants to just say, okay, well, we're already here, we got a crew, we got some actors, we got some lights, We can do it in 3D. The only reason they don't is because there's no defined distribution model. But that's coming.

That's what the Disney Plus agreement with Meta Horizon TV, Horizon TV itself. You know, everything's going to change in the next 18 months. What are you most excited about in AI at this very moment? Which type of AI are we talking about? Specifically in a filmmaking context. Okay. So for filmmaking, we're talking about generative. AI. We're talking probably about, you know, text to video and other video to video and that sort of thing.

I'm guarded because I think it's an answer to how we bring down costs and become more efficient. I was going to ask, do you think there'll be more like $10 million films made relative to $100 million film? Does it change the shape of what's getting funded? I think what you'll get, I think it's going to affect the middle to the high end of the curve in the following way. Most films involve VFX now. Yeah. Right? And it's going to affect the toe with the curve.

Yep. Makes sense. But the lower part of the slope is not going to change that much. And I say that because if you're not using VFX, you're not going to enjoy a great reduction in your overall cost. Cater's cost. Go to have actors. GRIPS. You know, I mean, grips, dolly is the normal stuff that a small production uses if they're not doing VFX.

You know, how are you going to make catering cheaper with AI? You're not. But I say the toe of the curve because where filmmakers used to come in through, I don't know, music videos or low budget horror films and things like that. That entry portal has shrunk so much in recent years. It's so difficult for filmmakers to get a toll hold, but now you can basically make a movie by yourself. Yeah, we have a friend who, for a very small budget, made a full sci-fi film. Yeah. Which would not be, which would have been single location, one-house horror film a couple years ago.

Exactly. So now. We got to go. What does that guy do next? He takes that to a studio and he says, now give me a budget, right? I don't think anybody that wants to be a filmmaker wants to replace actors and replace the process of filmmaking, but it gives you a new entry point into that business. Well, thank you so much.

Last question. How do you work? What makes your approach to your work unique? I don't know. I just ask myself, what will the 14-year-old version of me want to see? That's great. And then I do it. I love that.

That's amazing. That's a great mantra. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We really enjoyed this. Cheers. Have a great rest of your day. We have the Shaw coming on the show next. He is the VP of the Metaverse. VP of Metaverse at Meta. The mayor of the Metaverse. Welcome to the show. How you doing? Good to meet you. How's going? It's good. You had some amazing predictions four years ago.

You said that in the future you'll just be able to prompt and generate an impact. entire world and it feels like today we're getting very close to being able to do that. Did you, were you just following all the research really closely? Was this just a broad sci-fi thing that you just knew was going to happen? Probably a bit of both. I think, you know, if you look at the entire metaverse vision, it's rooted in where we think the future of immersive entertainment. You know, you just talk to the legend, James Cameron, about where he thinks that's going. But also, we just know generally with technology advances, lowering the floor to help more people create things. That's just, we did that with video and our

phones. We think there's an opportunity on that for immersive experiences in VR. So we both predicted where that was going, but also help drive it. That's the work we've been doing on Internet of AI for years. There's the new engine we build on Horizon. All this is in service of a prediction, but also a roadmap that we set out, you know, four years ago when we re-banded the company. We said it was a 10-year bet. We're four years in on that journey, and I think we're making a bunch of the progress. I feel like there's sort of like a fracturing of the technologies that are happening right now. We got a demo of a gossian splat where you could take images and then walk around a virtual world.

Didn't generate physics, didn't generate geometry. And then simultaneously, in a different demo, we were going from text to prompt to physical 3D objects in something in Horizon engine. In a game engine. And so are these two things going to come together at some point? How do these things actually merge and on what timeline? Yeah. I mean, in general, with things like this, with research, we both push the research. search forward on its independent path.

We then find the way to productize that research. So hyperscape, which is the sort of Gaussian splat representation. That's been research for some time. We productize that as an environment. This is for the first time we're bringing capturing, so anyone can put on a headset and capture a space. Yeah, the immediate reaction that I have is I never want to like if I'm looking at a house on Zillow,

I want to be able to experience it this second. Totally. And I feel like that's like right around the corner. And it's so magical, obviously for things like that, but imagine a place that you know. know that you can't physically go to anymore. And then imagine bringing someone that you care about that also knows that place to that place. There are recreating memories.

When I was getting the demo, I was thinking if I have a good enough video of like, you know, my one-year-old playing around 10 years from now, I'm going to be able to just generate a world of that space, right, and just almost relive it. And so this is kind of back to your question. You have to push the technology boundaries, but then the vision is very much to bring these things closer together. So it's not just an environment. It becomes interactive.

It has geometry. You have collisions as you're moving around the space. If you bring other people into this space, so we're laying out all the pieces. Son have made more progress, frankly, than we thought, even four years ago. But the idea is that they all fit into one general vision for how we bring people together when they can't physically be together, and that's the general thing we set out to do.

Yeah. How do you think about the different windows into the metaverse? We've seen, we saw a demo today where there was, you know, with traditional game engine world developed. We were able to interact with it on a phone. I'm not sure if it was streaming from the cloud, but you can clearly see that mobile is a path into a space that you could also explore on a quest.

But is there a world where you could bring that through to the other family of apps? Short answer is yes. Part of the reason we brought Horizon to Mobile, by the way, what you played today, that is not just streaming, that's a live game that's being edited, and then you're playing it long.

Yeah, yeah. But the idea is that most people today don't have access to a headset. Sure. And so how do we give them a taste of what some of these experiences are like? Not as immersive, not as great as being in, but you can start to play with these experiences

see what they feel like. That's, you know, in the Horizon app today. We've started to see, well, okay, how else do people discover these experiences across the devices that they have and the experiences that they're in? You're in Instagram, you're on Facebook, someone messaging something on WhatsApp,

and can you just jump in really quickly? Again, not as good at, an experience as jumping straight into an immersive headset, but this doesn't require you to make that leap on day zero. You get to kind of build a taste of what that looks like. Yeah. How are you? Sorry. James said he was extremely bullish on live entertainment in virtual reality. Walk us through what that looks like over the next few years. A big part of what, and it's, you know, so weird, like follow James Cameron. I'm putting it up there. Tough back to fall. He's your friend. My friend, Jim. Part of what we are working on,

together is not just building content, it's updating the entire workflow and tool chain for how content gets made so that it can be stereo by default. So how do you shoot in the field? How do you edit in a truck that's parked outside of stadium? How do you then broadcast that up to the cloud? How do you get that distributed? It's the entire tool chain. You need that to exist if you want to do something immersive. You need more content so the products have better retention, right? So every time you throw on a headset, you have something that's right there that you haven't necessarily seen before. That's the key point. Something you can't do anywhere else. I can watch a game on TV, and it's fantastic.

I can't feel like I'm sitting courtside. I can't fly around a Formula One track as if I was a drone floating on the track. I can't actually even experience a race like that. You bring a Formula One, eventually you're going to be able to drive on the real race. And there's some sports that you can't actually see the whole arena track. That one's a great example. And so you can't actually experience that in the physical world, the same way you could in headset, where you can kind of move around the space, et cetera.

So the point is, we have to update the tool chain. We have to bring experiences that you can't get anywhere else. But in use cases that people are familiar with, gaming is amazing. This device is the best gaming device on the market, but not everyone's a gamer. So how do we expand the things that people can do and see the differentiation that a fully immersive 3D native device can accomplish,

and that's a lot of the work we're doing together? How are you talking to brands about the Metaverse these days? I remember there was, I mean, Metaverse was like very hype, Now it's kind of under-hyped. I think there's actually really solid progress being made. We heard a story about IKEA selling a ton of product in the Metaverse and Roblox and stuff. And Meta is known for, you know, any brand, as small as possible, can go and participate. Are we, how far away are we, what are your conversation with brands like?

Yeah, I mean, look, four years ago, if you didn't have some Metaverse chief something or another in your company, you were failing. Two years later, if you had a Chief of Metaverse something or another in your company, you were failing. And so I think the hype is dead. To your point, we've been making a bunch of... Good time to be able. We've been making a bunch of progress kind of in the background. Today, a brand can come on.

They can create the space in Horizon. It's fully open, UGC. But they have to have a reason. Is it the case that your physical footprint should just live in the virtual world one to one, maybe? Can you do things that you can't do in the physical world? Yeah, that's interesting.

But in these things generally, then we follow the same pattern everywhere. Build something great for consumers. Make sure it's got some scale, retention. it's growing. I think brands will find an opportunity to reach people where they are,

but we need people first for them to actually care. And then is there opportunities for them to build a business and to entirely new sets of businesses that can't even exist in the physical world? That's absolutely the vision. But we just, you know, 10-year vision, and I think we're making of us. Yeah.

Well, what about the flappy bird of VR Metaverse? How long until, I mean, the demo we started today felt like somebody who's non-technical who could get there, when are we going to see this kind of rolled out, and we're going to see this explosion of like the early app store, where things that you guys could never come up with, no matter how many people you are,

no matter how much we spend, you need the creativity of a billion people. No, this is exactly where we see the generative AI stuff going. It isn't, you know, the prompt doesn't make something great. You have to have a good idea. You have to have something that is unique and novel, but the speed of iteration can be dramatically faster. Yeah.

And you as an individual can do a thing that maybe you need an entire kind of skill set that you don't have today to go and build, that's the idea. The other really interesting thing, if you look at Reels and you look at other video content, ideas are all just remixes of one another. Yep. And so it isn't just going to go in scratch. Yeah, it's just like what is four different ingredients put together, and so we have some ideas on what we're going to be doing there that we'll talk about more next year.

But the idea is that it isn't all from scratch. It is somehow taking best ideas, putting them together, put your own spin on it, but then give you the tools to do that really easily versus having to build it all from scratch. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a fantastic conversation. We'd love to have you back. Thanks. Thank you.

We'll talk to talk. Cheers. We will talk to you soon. John, think about the opportunity, the Metaverse opportunity. It was overhyped for a while. Yes. As the tech improves, a fashion brand, being able to set up a retail store, you put on, meta understands your avatar.

You can just walk around the store, trying stuff on, looking at a mirror like you're in a retail store, seeing yourself wearing the items. Like, the whole virtual try-ons have been overhyped forever. But having the demos, you remember reading the demos earlier with Quest? It's like you could look around and it's not that difficult to swap out. I could be swapping out your clothing, reacting to it. It is. The competition is going to heat up.

I feel like people, all of the tech firms are going to be taking wearables. I mean, they already are taking it incredibly seriously, but there will be a redoubling of the efforts as these products roll out and actually get in people's hands. and then developers start building on them. Like this is the, this is the, like you can see with the Rayband displays, like, it's going to be hard to ship an app on here. But once you start doing that, then you're really in that platform era. And you have the beginnings of the ability to, I mean, going back to the building.

It's like how much will it matter to be the first product in market with a incredible, you know, display built in. Right. Can they get to that App Store moment first? Yeah. It'll be a knockout, drag out, fight. As always. It would be a lot of fun. Anyway, this has been insane.

This has been insane. It's a party out there. There are tons of people here. Thank you so much for tuning in to TVPN at MetaConnect 2025. Hope you enjoy it. It has been an honor. We will be back in the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capitol of Capital tomorrow, Hollywood, California.

We will see you at 11 a.m. Pacific. And before we go, I need to say, we should say thank you to the whole meta team. They have absolutely crushed. They're putting a little bit of heat on our production team back at home. Obviously, Michael, Scott, Ben, and the whole team have been here helping out. But the meta team has been absolutely incredible and has totally set the bar on what TPPN production. Never would have imagined this when we first set up the microphones. and cameras. We were like, the whole, the whole shtick is that it's just two people, no guess, not,

paper. Yeah, an hour, yeah, and then it's this. And, you know, these things work in mysterious ways. But tomorrow morning will be back to just two people talking. Talking shop. Hang it out. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you tomorrow.

We'll see you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Cheers.