The Vergecast - Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 demo / Snap’s first AR Spectacles / Android games come to Windows in 2022

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Heath discuss Epic Games' Matrix experience in Unreal Engine 5, Snap’s first AR Spectacles, streaming news, and more. Stories discussed: Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss on making The Matrix Awakens with Epic Games Snap’s first AR Spectacles are an ambitious, impractical start How Snap is sidestepping the metaverse The Matrix Awakens is an interactive tech demo for PS5 and Xbox Series X / S Google is bringing Android games to Windows in 2022 Meta opens up access to its VR social platform Horizon Worlds Apple’s AR headset reportedly uses 3D sensors for hand tracking Your LG TV can now play Google Stadia if it’s running webOS 5.0 or later Matter could bring universal casting that actually works Roku settles YouTube dispute and locks down apps in ‘multi-year’ deal Spotify removes popular comedians’ content over royalties dispute Apple Music’s voice plan likely to launch with iOS 15.2 Sonos now supports Amazon Music’s Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos tracks Google Pixel’s lock screen Snapchat shortcut is here Google releases first Android 12L beta for large-screen devices Google Pixel mail-in repairs have allegedly twice resulted in leaked pics and a privacy nightmare 5G now means some flights won’t be able to land when pilots can’t see the runway Jessica Rosenworcel confirmed by Senate to lead the FCC Verizon might be collecting your browsing history and here’s how to stop it Sonos announces plans to make its products more efficient and repairable Instagram head says it’s bringing back the chronological feed The vice president should not be using Bluetooth headphones Kickstarter says it’s switching to crowdfunding via the blockchain Epic v. Apple ruling put on hold after appeals court grants a stay Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Alex Heath joins the show. We talk about his interview with Keanu Reeves and Karihan Moss. What else is going on in the Metaverse? A bunch of streaming news and then the lightning round to end all lightning rounds. It's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software.

What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for news. nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of reality.

See? See what it is? And you've got to sit in that for a minute. Yeah. Really, just pull the car over now and just think about what the flagship podcast of reality would be. And it's this. It's why you listen. And then you can keep going.

Hi, I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Deidre Rona's here. I'm the glitch in the Matrix. Ooh, it's good. Alex Heath is here. I'm a cyberpunk mod. Very good. You'll understand why that's funny in a little bit. Heath is going to be with us for the whole show. There's a lot to talk about you. But we'll just start with, you know, one of the more exciting things that has happened at the old verge.com in our 10 years of running around. You hung out with Keanu Reeves and Carrie Ann Moss this week. Yeah, we talked about a lot of things. It was a very, interesting interview. And the reason that we talk to them is because they are doing this new interactive, playable tech demo by Epic Games showing off Unreal Engine 5. And it's a tie-in with kind of teasing the next Matrix movie, which comes out later this month. So we talked about all that,

kind of what is real, what is fake, the kind of blending of the virtual and the real and how that's changing storytelling and a lot of other random things. Kiana was very, very, classic Keanu. I mean, the video's up by the time you're listening to this, it's up. You should go watch it. It is very much like a Keanu Reeves experience. Karyan Moss is great too. Like she's great, but like Keanu like literally you can just see him like he lights up over time.

Yeah. It's just very, the whole thing is very. At one point he's like, we do this so that we can sell things. I mean make art. I mean sell things. And he just starts grinning. Like. It's very good.

The hand gestures are wonderful as well. And yeah, Karyan Moss, not really a fan of technology. At all. Even a little. At all, which was interesting. But yeah, we talked about kind of digital likeness. You know, Keanu was one of the first actors ever I found out in the process of doing this to be, to have, to have himself digitally rendered in the original Matrix trilogy.

And so Warner Bros actually found that footage in like a vault buried in the ground in like Idaho or something like that. and gave it to Epic and Epic re-rendered it with UE5 for this Matrix demo. And it's, it is fairly trippy. There's a couple times where they told me after like when it's real him versus fake him and it actually, it got me like at least once. And yeah, the intro to this is written by Lana Wachowski, the main writer of the Matrix franchise.

And then it's kind of an open world sandbox experience that kind of showcases how UE5 is basically just super scaling the ability to make like actual metaverse stuff. So yeah, it was really interesting. And Keanu was like, I'm almost ready to have a coherent thought about like the nature of reality and unreality and how that interacts with video games and cinema. I'm like, I'm working my way towards it. And Carrie Amos was like, yeah, no, reality is cool. Like, why would you, like, how about reality? How about I'm sitting at a table with my family?

And he's like, but it could be a virtual table. She's like, yeah, but what about the real table? It was great, actually. The most shocking takeaway from this, Keanu Reeves does not play video games. I thought that was really interesting. I can see that. Well, he's a character on cyberpunk. And I did ask him about, you know, in Cyberpunk 27, we covered this when this was happening.

People were modding one of the characters that you have sex with in the game to be Keanu Reeves character. And it got so bad that the game developer actually said, you can't do this. if we find out you're doing this, we will ban your account. And I asked Keanu about it, and he loved it. He was like, you know, that's, he was like, hell yeah. And clearly was not consulted on that decision. Another thing that I think fans of the Matrix will love is that Keanu really wants there to be a modern day Matrix video game.

And basically told me point blank that Warner Bros. Drop the ball 15 years ago and he would do it. So there you go. Well, the Matrix franchise is. I don't know. I think I watched it like my first week of college in 1999. It was like a field trip that like my dorm took. You know, like it was just like one of those eye-opening moments. I hadn't really heard about it.

And then it is like twisted and turned itself into all manner of things and memes. So it's wild that they actually never made the game is like the rest of the tech and gaming industry has done nothing but try to make the matrix. Yep. No, they did make a game. They made two. And there was only one where you could play Neo. It was called Path of Neo. It was on the PS2.

It was actually pretty good. The gameplay was like, I watched some YouTube videos of it. It looks fun for a PS2 game. And they could just remake that. They could just like literally just do like you're fighting as Neo as a game. Like you don't even need to really do a story. No, now they would do it and you would end up, you would end up in that doja with Morpheus. And you would have to either grind for 60 hours to level up two points.

or like pay microtransaction fees to get a loot box that one of them would maybe have kung fu in it. Like you know exactly how that game would be designed now. Yeah, that's fair. Another highlight of this interview, Keanu seems very interested in being the chief creative officer of a VR porn tech company. So if you are listening to this show and that's what you do, you should definitely reach out to his team. It's like you don't want to admit who the audience of your show is and sometimes you just know. It's the Venn diagram. You know, it's like extremely verge-shitted in one corner, Keanu Reeves, VR porn,

and then it all just kind of meets in the middle. Yeah. Did you get to see any of the movie at all? Do they preview the movie for you? No, I just, I've only seen the trailers. They were very cagey about it. Something surprising Carrie Ann said is that it's funny, which I wouldn't expect from a Matrix movie.

But, um, well, the first Matrix movie was kind of funny. I guess it had funny moments. But I think the tone of this is going to be a lot more funny than the, the previous ones. Okay. I could see. I mean, the whole, like,

red pill, like, cultural association is such that I know the Wakaski sisters, like, want to break it. Yeah.

Because it is now associated with the alt-right and all that. Like, I get why they'd want to change the tone about red pill bloop.

We'll see. I'm excited to see this movie, but I'm burnt on the previous two. Like, yeah, we didn't get into that. Anyhow. Is the Unreal stuff

better than Gemini Man, the movie in which Will Smith was famously? Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, as a story, objectively yes, but like literally anything. The tech is, I think the thing that impressed me the most is that so you're in this giant

kind of sandbox city that they built that they're going to give to Unreal developers to build like their own Grand Theft Auto in, for example. And everything is rendered in real time everywhere persistently. So like anywhere you move, it's already there. It's already rendered down to the detail in like a chain. leak fence. So like we flew up and then we shot down into an alley and he was like that didn't render as we moved down there. That was already there in full detail. And I've never seen that at that scale in a game. So it's showing just kind of the power of the world building there. And then also the ability for,

this is a little more geeky, but the lighting is actually pretty cool. You don't need to know really, apparently placing lights in games is a super expensive, tedious process that really hinders the ability for it to look real. And a big breakthrough in UE5 is this kind of automatically AI. powered lighting system that reflects naturally. And like we, you could, you can change the sunlight, you know,

with a dial in the game as you play and watch all the reflections against the skyscrapers change against the cars. And it's pretty cool, honestly. I mean, it's, the idea is that you'll be able to take like, you know,

a car maker will make a car for a, a work, you know, simulation thing in UE5. And that same hyper-realistic looking car could then be used in a racing game. It could then be used in the next fast and furious movie. all is the same asset in UE5, which is something that hasn't existed before.

That's really cool. I've been playing the Grand Theft Auto remasters, which are very fun. And I was reading about them and how they did them. And one of the biggest pieces of that puzzle was lighting. So the original, they were just lit. Like the game designers, like the scenes were just lit. Like it made no sense where the lights were coming from.

We didn't have the technology. We updated the lighting design, and we tried to naturally light the game. and we had to go through and, like, add streetlights to places. Because there wasn't, it made no sense where the light was coming from before. And that was, like, the work of remastering this game was just rejiggering all the lighting. That, all that stuff is, like, the confluence of game engines, movie special effects, and then the Metaverse stuff. It does feel like it will all just kind of be the same software in the end.

Yeah. And it's, this is honestly, like, Epic is the perfect company to, to make all this because, Their CTO Kim, who I also interviewed for the story, worked on the original Matrix trilogy. He has a film background. And he did all the, he was an effects supervisor on kind of bullet time and like all the kind of iconic matrix stuff. And knows the Wachowski's. That's kind of how this whole project came together. And he was talking a lot about how he thinks it's going to change Hollywood.

And Epic is already so like in the Mandalorian in camera visual effects where there's a giant LED wall behind you instead of CGI and post with a green screen. That's being powered by Unreal. And that technology he thinks is going to really just change how Hollywood runs. I think he hopes it will. So, yeah, they're a very interesting company. Unreal's like this really fascinating, powerful thing that touches a lot of things, but consumers don't really see. So it's a little wonky.

But, I mean, if you're talking about like Metaverse, like this is actually like the toolkit, right? This is actually the thing. Like meta, the company does not have anything remotely like this. So I think it's interesting. Do we, I don't know if we talked about this last week. Unity, the other big game studio, just bought Weta Digital, which was Peter Jackson's Special Effects House for $1.6 billion. And like, that's Lord of the Rings and Avatar and

Shang Chi. Like, you can just see where it's going. The game engines are now getting good enough to do the special effects everywhere. And that's why there was a story about Epic hiring a head of film and like scripted entertainment. And I kind of got at this with the CTO that they're going to start doing games that are also movies using Fortnite, using other things, because UE5 allows them to just use these assets across mediums, which it's pretty cool. It's a new thing for sure. Now, I feel like a genius for telling people to watch Red versus Blue when I was like in early 2000s. This is a dumb sitcom that takes place in Halo is the future of entertainment. I said, to no effect at the bar. But I was right. It always comes back around. I'm just excited that

All of this means that within the next, well, let's be realistic. Within the next 10 years, we'll get rid of quick time events that are just, you know, pre-rendered cutscenes where you hit the button at the right time. I didn't know this, but apparently all the Fortnite commercials are shot in Fortnite, like, in real time. And so, like, they're already doing this. He's like, we just stage it in the game and we shoot it. And, like, we may, like, touch up things and make the characters look a little shinier. But, like, they're already doing this.

And, like, part of this Matrix thing is, like, there's a car chase scene where the camera's, like, going under the car and around the car. And, like, that was all done in the engine, right? They didn't, like, have cars out on the street that they then tracked and brought into UE5. like, so it's, we're getting into weird uncharted territory.

So one of the, the reason I asked about Gemini Man, which, by the way, it's a horrible movie. It's not even an airplane movie. It's like, it's not even an air. It's like unwatchably bad.

Yeah. There, there are these, uh, really hilarious, like, YouTube clips where people, I think Gemini Man was actually like shot in,

120 frames per second and like release that way. But there are these YouTube channels that like up res things into higher frame rates. So you can go watch Gemini Man at like 120 frames per second on YouTube. And it looks like it looks like a bad video game. It's like there's no way to describe it. Just go watch it. It's like horrifying. But a big piece of that puzzle that the big piece of that story when that movie came out was

there was now a model of young Will Smith. And like who was going to own the digital character model of young Will Smith? And what could that model be made to do and who owned it? And like if the young Will Smith model acts in a new movie, does Will Smith get paid? Did you get into any of that with Keanu and Kerri-N? Yes, we did. And apparently Keanu saw this coming like decades ago and has forever had in his contract where he has to approve any use or edits to his digital likeness in any format.

And he's like, this is happening. like we're having these conversations in Hollywood about like it's almost like a state planning is like what are you going to do with your digital likeness and he's like in like merlin monroe's in a co-commercial and you know he was talking about how marlin brando is with Superman was talking about this already like decades ago and so yeah i um i do think it's something that's like on celebrities minds is like uh how do i license my likeness and you know like i asked him so the matrix did this nfti thing for the new movie and the site like crashed after the first like hour and there were 300,000 people in the queue for like 100,000 NFTs at 50 bucks a pop and Keanu and Kerriann were not

NFTs for this. So they obviously did not approve the use of their likeness. But yeah, they thought that was interesting and Keanu was like, do we get a cut of that? It's like, oh, probably not. But he was like, it's all capitalism man. You know, like he's, uh, that's all I want. If that's what, If that's what you got out of your time with them, then mission accomplished. One of my favorite copyright cases I ever read in law school was Van der White v. Samsung Electronics. I think that's the case caption. Samsung had an ad for like washing machines where a robot like turned letters, like Wheel of Fortune. Yeah.

And Van der Weiss was like, that robot looks is too much like me. You're using my likeness. That's an unauthorized use of me, Van Nuys. It's like a robot. And she won. That's amazing. And my law professor was like, yeah, it's a California case. Like, the California courts are always inside with Hollywood.

Like, it was like open, in his mind, it was open and shut. Yeah. Like, the corrupt California courts have once again taken the side of big Hollywood. But it's like that was ages ago. And now we're all the way to there's a digital Keanu Reeves that is contractually obligated to only do what Keanu Reeves wants. It's pretty good. You did some other, I mean, your senior Metaverse reporter, Alex C. Oh, God.

That's your title, right? You also, I mean, you had a big week. You also saw SNAP's AR spectacles. You got to try them on. Yeah. They seem very prototypy to me. Oh, very prototypy. I mean, the battery lasts for 30 minutes.

The first pair they gave me overheated after less than 10. They had like four on site that they tried to like seamlessly swap out as I tried different lenses, you know, which are SNAP's AR effects so that I never noticed the battery. Definitely the best software on the air glasses I've used. You can tell they've thought a lot about the interface. There's like this carousel you see through your eyes and it's a touch thing and there's voice. The thing that is the most promising on these that I think probably won't be cool for several more years is a scan button. I did another video thing on our site about a month or two ago about this in the Snapchat app.

It's like visual search, right? Google Lens. They're stab at this and they're working with a lot of other developers right now. But I scanned a plant, you know, with my glasses and it recommended some plant-based lenses. And like you expand that out a few years. and you're walking around and you can just search anything. I mean, it's, it's going to be wild. And they also, like, they're doing, like,

mapping to your clothing where, like, an AR jacket will drape like it would naturally. Imagine putting that on someone, you know, through your glasses or making them your emoji, right? Like, there's just so many ways that this is going to get trippy. But, yeah, definitely a prototype. But they're being, like, oddly humble about it, especially considering, like, the way that the first spectacles were hyped beyond belief. and they ended up sitting on $40 million in unsold inventory that they had to write off.

They're just not selling these. They're giving them to hundreds of AR creators just to try and play with. And it's really a learning thing for them. And I think that's really smart because if these things were sold to the public, they'd probably cost thousands of dollars. And everyone would be like, what the hell this thing dies after 30 minutes. What's the field of view like? It's so narrow.

That's the thing. Like they optimized for brightness and for color. And so, you know, maybe half of the frame is the wave guide is what you can actually see. And so I found that the lenses looked better in post on my phone seeing what I was seeing through the glasses than they did in the glasses because I had that full wide field of view. So once that gets there, once it fills that full kind of, this thing looks like a cyber truck on your face. So like once it feels that wide kind of lens, it's going to be wild. I mean, it's going to take years, though, to get there. This really showed that battery and display are the two things that I don't know are going to be cracked for a while.

Yeah, let's talk about the display for just a couple more minutes. I mean, I know the field of view is narrow, but was it good? I mean, them doing this outdoors is kind of a flex. Like, I've done HoloLen stuff. Disclosure, my wife works for meta. What's the division that is maybe called Oculus, maybe not? I don't know. It's over there.

But, like, was it good? Like, if you were to just take the display that you had and give it a proper field of you, would you have been like, this is it? It's there? Or is it still feel like weird and pixelated and whatever? No, it wasn't pixelated. It was, they have 2,000 nits of brightness in this thing, so it works in the light, which is why the battery dies and it overheats after 10 minutes.

But they're optimizing for visual richness so that people can make compelling. like AR experiences so that when the tech catches up, the software kind of pipeline's already there. Which is another piece of this. They're being, I think, very smart about kind of seeding the developer ecosystem very early. Meta is not doing this, which I think is curious. But yeah, no, the display was probably the most impressive I've used on a standalone device. Again, this thing isn't tethered to anything for complete. And the glasses were light.

Like, I didn't feel like they were heavy on my face or like I wanted to take them off after a few minutes. It's like you could theoretically wear these all day and be fine. You'd look really weird, but you could. So yeah, I think there's a lot of promise there. And, you know, Snap is this kind of silent dark horse in these AR glasses, Metaverse Wars, where they were actually kind of the first to like think about this in a serious way. And they're just kind of quietly iterating now a little bit in public, which I think is interesting because they've been so secretive.

But yeah, I mean, the display apparently is so good that they bought the supplier. That was one of our first scoops that I did. wave optics, their largest deal ever for half a billion dollars just to get the kind of display tech locked for them. So yeah, man, this is all, it's all starting to come together. I mean, it's definitely not compelling for consumers, but this was the first time doing one of these demos where it was like, in a few years, I can see this being really compelling. And it's going to kind of flip how we think about computing, I think. I have a big, I agree with you. Like the part where you can see the software applications are way ahead of the hardware is,

utterly fascinating. That hasn't really happened in many of their places. Like, you just, like, throw a dart at the board and think about some other hyped future hardware. Like, 3D TVs or, like, interactive TVs as a whole, right? Like,

you're going to be shopping on your TV, or you're going to be watching all the live cameras from a flip, like, none of that has come to pass. It's all just streams. Like, the software, even though the hardware and the service ecosystems are there, the software is just, kind of where it always was.

In this case, the hardware is nowhere near close. But everyone already has a pretty clear picture of what it should be. And the basics of like, we're going to point a camera at a thing and then do some computer stuff and then layer some information or experiences over that thing. That picture is really clear. So you can already, like Apple's already doing it. Snap is already doing it. Snap's already doing it on Apple's phones.

Like you can see up, but the hardware is really far away. And these lenses, though, these lenses are getting smart. So you can have links in lenses now for the first time. They kick out to like a store. So if a creator makes like something for their shoe, you can just go buy it in the lens. There's music from all the labels in there. They're bringing in outside apps for the first time. So you can have like FTX crypto trading in a lens or acqueweather.

You can pump in like the temperature into a lens. So they're starting to become interactive in real time where before they were these static kind of more artsy things. Yeah, it's like they were saying someone has spent two years making a lens that can measure anything. Like, and there's another one that can tell you if your surfboard is a good surfboard based on its contours. And so they're just coming up with all these wild things that once we have these glasses, like it's, it's going to be cool. I won't give it too much away because it won't be up by the time to listen to this. But Nyantik CEO, John Hankey, is on Decoder next week. Nyantik makes Pokemon Go.

They have a big partnership with Qualcomm to make smart glasses. They've got a reference design floating around. I fell down an absolute research rabbit hole of how these displays work before I talk to him. They're all kind of the same, right? You get like, there's two tiny LCD displays in the stems of the glasses, and then there's a reflector,

and there's a bunch of mirrors or not mirrors. There's a bunch of coatings or etchings on layers. Wave guides, yeah. Yeah, to bounce that display onto your eyes. And so I, you know, I just pushed him. I was like, is this it? Is, like, can I go, am I going to go from here to here? I see the first ever LCD display on a primitive smartphone.

And I know in my mind, this technology is really important. Soon LCDs will take over every display in the world with some OLEDs on the side. Right. Like, is this the technology bet? Or is it this is the best we got and maybe something else will come up? And he was like, this is it. Like this waveguide technology will get to where we wanted to go. Which I guess if you're like in the partnership with Qualcomm,

shipping waveguide. Maybe that's what you say, but Snap made that big investment and bought that company. It makes wave guides. There are HoloLens is waveguide. Like, it's magically supposed to make something else, and they ended up at waveguides. Yeah. It's what we got. I don't know.

Because, again, HoloLens has been around, and like, it's wacky waveguides. With an LCD, you're like, okay, get better at the manufacturing process. The LCD gets bigger and more responsive. Like there's like a hardware improvement arc there. And I don't, I am not smart enough to know is what the hardware improvement arc for a wave guide is. Is it just like we get better and better at etching until we can finally make them big enough? My understanding is these things are constrained by size and battery and like thermodynamics more than anything. Like these wave guides can power.

There's a reason magically raised $2 billion. It's because they had people look into a thing called the beast that was the size of a closet that had all the computing. to power this thing appropriately. So when they have that, they can do incredible things already. It's just getting it into a form factor. This is what Zuckerberg is talking about with me and Casey. Like getting that form factor is the hard part. Right.

Yeah. But the beast, it's just like the best quote ever. The Sea of Magic Leap was like, we're hacking the GPU of your brain. And what he meant was they're going to send light into your eyes in a way that mimics reality that isn't just an emissive flat plane. Wave guys are just a flat plane of light. Right. It's just all the electronics are in the stems of the glasses and it's bouncing the light through the. So, Deeter, your question, like, if you watch, there's, like, lots of, like, trade industry presentations from waveguide suppliers.

And I'm telling you, I fell deep into a hole. And, like, all their presentations are like, here's our process. Here's where the cost is. Here's where the cost is coming down. And they're trying to convince you, basically, that they're using standard glassmaking, screen making techniques to make this next. generation of waveguide pieces of glass. The actual display is still just like a tiny little LCD in the stems of the glasses. Right.

They're just bouncing it in front of your eyes with these waveguides. That, they're still expensive. So like they're trying to make that cheaper, but they haven't, I don't know. I don't know that it's the bet. Like it feels like it's the resistive touchscreen of the AR world. You know, they can get you there. And then someday Steve Jobs is going to show up with like the capacitive touchscreen iPhone. And everyone's going to be like, oh.

that's what we should have done. This is a good segue to Apple because there is a continuum here where the waveguides and the air glasses are happening on one side of this. That's definitely several years out at minimum until we have that at scale. What's happening in the near term, and I think 2022 will be the year of, is pass through mixed reality, proper LCD, whatever it's going to be. No wave guides, but basically tricking you by piping and video of the outside world and mixing it with the graphics.

And that's what Apple's going to do. It's what Meta's got with Cambria, which is this headset they're working on for next year. And I think that's going to really show people that there is something. There's like a stopgap before we get to air glasses. And it's that mixed reality, pass-through experience. Yeah. And I think that's like the reason Apple's doing pass-through video and a VR headset and potentially what Meta is doing it too is because Apple cannot ship glasses with a teeny tiny field of view that get really hot.

They've got a ship a finit, like their brand is finished consumer. products and that core technology of a piece of a display that you can look through is just like what we got is wave guide. And like I encourage everyone, like if you're a huge nerd, you'll see the shit. Like go look at how waveguides are. It's neat. It's super cool. But at the end of the day, it's like you're wearing the entire HoloLens in your head and

you've got like a posted stamp in the middle of your field of vision. It's like put the spark plug in the ATV. Like this is not that great. I think it's really neat. We're just in a place now. I think it's fascinating that every software developer is, like, ready for this. And the hardware is just like years, like five at least out from what I can tell. The other thing, the other little decoder preview I'll give you, you were talking about how Snap has filters and like everyone can be wearing different clothes.

So I was like, how are you going to govern reality? Like, and John Hakey was like, I don't know, everyone can just pick and choose. Like, what if we all just like, it's like, I don't govern what song you listen to and you walk down the street? Why should I govern what you're looking at? And he was just like, there's going to be a marketplace of realities. This is my new phrase. It's going to be terrifying. Put that on a shirt.

Yeah. This is going to be great. All right, we should take a break and we should come back. There's like a lot of streaming he's talking about. We'll wrap back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like perplexity and Muro to move faster.

With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer,

specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash verge for 30% off a framer pro annual plan that's framer dot com slash verge for 30% off framer dot com slash verge rules and restrictions may apply support for the show comes from grammarly you don't need reminding that the world moves fast but work today requires clear communication and when every message counts sounding rushed or generic can mean getting lost in the shuffle. Gramerly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Gramerly helps you get ideas done faster

and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Gramerly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that, fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Grammarly has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com.

That's Grammarly.com. All right, we're back. There is, like, a lot of, how would you describe this? Low-stakes streaming drama? Low-stakes streaming drama and, like, news that seems unimportant. but actually could be massively important. Yeah. It's like, it's that.

It's like, we're going to have to convince you that a lot of these things are important. So buckle up. Let's start the Keanu Reeves, Cary Ann Moss Video, happened because of the Game Awards, they're announcing the Unreal stuff there, but Google's announcing some stuff at Game Awards too, which is, by the way, we're recording this before the game awards happen, but you're listening to it after they've happened. Right.

So imagine they're, we're just assuming there's like huge game streaming news, and we're reacting to that. to that. It's amazing. It's going to change everything. We don't know. But there's some like Google news coming. Yeah, well, this isn't streaming, but apparently Google Play Games is going to be available on Windows. So it's like Android apps and Windows, here we go. And it's interesting, instead of just bringing the whole of Google Play Android apps, they're bringing Google Play games, which is a fascinating decision. Are they bringing that into Microsoft's

weird Android app universe? Unclear. What do you mean by that? Like, Microsoft's starting to deal with Amazon to use the Amazon App Store to get Android apps on Windows. Right. But then they were also like you can use any apps where you want. So are they building like a special Windows, Google Play Games? Yeah, they're making Google Play Games, a Google Play Game store where you can download and install Android games for Windows. And that's running inside of the Windows Android app compatibility, not some weird new Google layer.

Well, so that is a little bit unclear because it's like Google. Google isn't like partnering with Microsoft to make this happen. They're just doing it. This is going to go great. Yeah. Okay. So that's one thing. We'll see how that goes.

You can see how Google just needs to diversify its revenue base as all the app store drama continues. To go like getting more of its game stuff out in the world is, I think, good for Google. Like Apple would love this to be happening on the Mac. I just don't think they're ever going to convince any game developer to take the Mac seriously. Even the game developers on the iPhone are like, why? Maybe with like, as M1 chips become more widespread, game developers will make the easy jump to games on the Mac, but it just kind of hasn't happened yet. Well, I mean, the whole question with games right now is, like, what is the future of, like, the platforms that you're going to be thinking about, like, what the games run on? Because they keep making Android games.

That seems to like, you know, I now believe that Android gaming phones exist and have a purpose. I've been convinced. By who? Just looking at the world, looking at the market, looking at. looking at the Chinese market. They're not making them for no reason. Yeah. So there's that.

There's, of course, the various streaming platforms. There's Windows. There's Xbox. There's PlayStation. There's, like, the various versions of Xbox and it's streaming. Stadia now runs on LG TVs. Yes. So the thing that's interesting about that to me is, well, of course it does.

It's just a, like, it's just a video stream. Yeah. So when I've, like, it's potentially a big, deal. It's like the rules of how you think about what your screen can do are changing, like, they were changing slowly and now they're changing really quickly. So whether or not you can just play console quality games on your LGTV was just a matter of when did they get around to creating the, you know, casting endpoint app for WebOS.

It's actually not that difficult. And I just, I don't know, like, where that's going to shake out. are you going to care where your game comes from? Are you going to care if it's local or streaming? And the fact that it's just a question of like who's gotten around to building a client for the thing? This even applies to like Google Play games on Windows is really interesting.

So like honestly this kind of leads us up to talking about the Roku YouTube drama a little bit, I think. Yeah, although they did settle it this week. So Roku and Google were about to sue each other. like they had sweet shop. There's hadn't gotten very far. They were who was going to kick YouTube off its platform. Google had done some shady stuff on other platforms.

They'd built YouTube TV into the YouTube app because you can't get rid of the YouTube app. But they were at the kind of the brinksmanship point. They were going to walk. They were going to pull YouTube from Roku, which like. They're going to pull YouTube from Roku. And I got to say, the arguments were dumb. Like if you read, like Roku put all these blog posts and like whatever. Like the arguments they were having were when you.

push the Roku voice search button and the YouTube app is open, what voice search should you go to? Yeah. Okay. Google was like, Google, like ours. And Roku was like, no, the operating systems. Yeah. By the way, they won that from like Samsung, like my Samsung frame TV,

the microphone button. Like, it's a Google button. It's a Google assistant button. But when you're in the YouTube app, it ceases to be a Google assistant button and it becomes a YouTube search button. Yeah. I mean, these arguments are like, they're very, verge cast arguments. Like, what do you think should the native control

supersede the applications control? Right. And like, there were other ones where if you had the YouTube app open and you search for a movie using Roku voice search, the native Roku voice search would pull movies

from the applications that supported its library. Right. And so, like, Google's big complaint was like, this movie is available for free on YouTube. You should be showing users that, which sounds great. But also if you're in the YouTube app, like, you should just use, like, none of it made sense, like, how actual people use their software. But it all just seemed like little corner cases of what the buttons on your remote did if the YouTube app was open.

And yet, like, it just seems like Google believes that people open the YouTube app and live in it 24 hours a day when they watch TV, which maybe people do, but does not seem that likely when you're searching for, like, a Disney movie. I got to say, hearing you guys talk about all this makes me think there should just be some good old fashion consolidation in this industry. Hasn't there been enough? And then there's like ad money in the background, right? Right. Well, and so this is like, there's this like great inversion where you tweet about this, Neal, I'm stealing your idea.

But like, it used to be that like what you could play on your screen, whether it's a game or video or whatever, was like really dependent on who your service provider was. what the screens capabilities was, you know, what platform you picked, et cetera. And now it's completely dependent on have some deals been made. And as someone, like, done some engineering work to make an app or not. Yeah, it is utterly no one knows what the terms of this new deal are. It is a multi-year deal. YouTube and YouTube TV will, like, stay on the Roku platform. It's funny.

Roku is calling Google an unchecked monopolist throughout all this. because when they like threatened to kick YouTube TV off the whole like money dispute is that Roku hardware is extraordinarily cheap right it's like 30 bucks 20 bucks they don't they're not making any money at that hardware

all they make money on is when you sign up just like in any other app store when you sign up for Disney Plus they get a cut right they get a bounty of that of that sign up when Hulu runs an ad on the Roku like either those ads are served by Roku ad services or Roku gets

cut. That's just like the app store itself. When any commerce happens in an app, Apple wants a cut. When any advertising or subscription happens on a Roku, Roku gets a cut. And that's how they subsidize all the hardware. This is the economics of every TV, by the way. The reasons TVs are cheap is because all the money is made through ongoing transactions. Like the story of adding a chip to things and then making them connected is so that they can just like charge you for the rest of your life. that's that's really what's happening but that's totally backwards right you used to pay your cable company and then the cable company would pay ESPN yeah now you're paying Disney and Disney is paying roku right and like I don't know if that's good or bad but it's it's clear what rocue sees

itself is like you're not going to get another TV box or have 50 TV boxes you're going to have one right that one should have all the apps you want and if you want to be on that one you have to meet their terms to show up in the interface in front of other people and the one thing they can't get rid of is YouTube. So when they kick YouTube TV off, they're like, screw it, you're gone. But then Google can add YouTube TV to YouTube because they can't kick YouTube off. Like, aren't they, they're like both monopolists in that way. Like, Roku controls most of the streaming platform business in the country.

I don't know. Anyway, it's over. We have no idea what this deal is. A bunch of people, I don't know, smoke cigars on Zoom and, like, came to terms. It's shady. We'll see. Yeah. But they're back.

But so in theory, a couple of years from now, all this is going to get shaken up again. So Jennifer, Patterson-Tooey, on our site, basically broke the news that there is a part of a standard for matter. So matter is the connected home over IP standard. We're going to have a whole verge cast about this on Tuesday. So buckle up for that. We're going to talk about this. But because Jennifer published this story today, I wanted to talk about it briefly. So there's a part of the spec called Matter TV.

I don't think most people realize was going to be part of the smart home standard. And it's basically just universal casting, either from app to app or apps to TVs once they're there, that all of these big companies have agreed, oh, yeah, if you want to tell your screen to play a video, this standard will be supported. So it can replace Airplay, it can replace Google Cast, it can replace whatever weird stuff Samsung does. Amazon is like written the spec because they really need it because people have echo devices, but they don't necessarily have fire TVs. but it's like part of the spec. And so, like, casting might actually not suck next year or beginning next year? Oh, I don't think that Apple or Google are walking away from their standards. Well, no, but they're not walking away from their standards, but this standard will also be supported.

And they are part, they, like, signed off on the spec. So if you have a TV that supports matter, it will support having this casting standard hit it. I mean, that's fair. I just don't think, I don't think, I don't think, This casting center will not have been iOS for years to come. No, this is going to fail for sure. I mean, it could. Probably.

Why do you think it'll fail? Because, no, like, we, everything you all were just saying. Like, this entire, there's so much infighting right now in this space. Everyone wants to own their layer and their system and their substrate of the TV experience. Yeah. Some startup or whatever, there's, there's no way. There's no way that we're going to get into this next week. But, like, they have walked away from that wild garden fight.

in the smart home. Everyone's like, we have hit the ceiling. We can't make any more money. We can't grow this plot. I'm telling you, the matter shit, just, everything is, like, interoperating. Yeah. And it's going to work locally. It's based on, like, equal parts from all these big tech companies, and they're all, you know, it'll fall.

It's a standard. It'll probably fall apart. But, like, it seems like your doorbell is just going to work, and it's not going to be locked into a walled garden anymore if it supports matter, and you're going to want it to support matter because then, you know, it's easier to buy stuff. And if the Matter TV thing gets like brought in with that spec as like a Trojan horse, that could be interesting. All I want to do is go to a hotel and be able to cast my phone to the TV and not have to worry about is it a Chromecast? Is it an Apple TV?

Usually I can't stream my iPhone because it's like Chromecast. Yeah. Something that fixes all that. Yeah, that's going to be a trillion dollar company for sure. That's the, I mean, that's the matter spec is they, if the thing supports it, and it will see it locally, and it will either cast it locally from your phone, or it'll just tell it the URL that it needs to go grab from the internet. The promise is that it'll all work.

We'll see what it actually turns out to be, but I am very optimistic about the smart home side of it, and the fact that there's, like, a TV side being, like, brought in alongside that is fascinating. Well, you know, it's interesting, so Apple didn't make a TV, which they should instead of a car. Just putting that out there, continue to put that energy out in the world, make a TV, not a car. Seems more in your lane. You get it?

No, that's terrible. That's my line. Come on. I apologize to everyone. But when they put the Apple TV app everywhere, they gave everybody airplay. It came along for the ride. So now every TV has airplane and Chromecast. So now you get a third one.

If they don't get like Samsung and LG, which are like Vizio, right? Like I don't think Vizio is part of matter. But Samsung, TCL, Panasonic, and LG are all in matter. that's a lot of TVs that might support this thing. Yeah, we'll see. I have high hopes. What I didn't see here anywhere was like, we're going to make remote controls better,

which no one seems at all, like, interested in doing. There's only so many problems technology can solve, Eli. That's true. Okay, can I go down my rabbit hole at my streaming revenue rabbit hole? Oh, is this a Spotify comedian thing? Yeah, so there's this group that represents a bunch of comedians, called Spoken Giants, which is a great name. Yeah.

And so they have this new theory that they're arguing with Spotify about that results in Spotify removing a bunch of tracks from comedians, like Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish, Sean Malaney, Jim Gaffkin, all off Spotify. So they've got this idea that the written jokes now constitute one work and the performance of the jokes are another work. Yeah. Right. So it's like songwriters get one royalty stream and performers get another.

often the songwriters and the performers are the same person, they get paid twice. This is like, there's like inventing a new, a new revenue stream because streaming revenue is so low that everyone's like trying to find new money. So comedians have like come up with this new lobbying group, spoken giants to say that they're not only just like telling jokes, but they're writing jokes and then performing the jokes. And so they should get the streaming revenue for the audio recording and the publishing revenue for the jokes themselves, which is just a wild way of thinking about community.

telling jokes. Because, for example, songwriters assume multiple people will perform their songs over time. Comedians do not, like, no one does, like, cover joke albums. Like, it's just, like, not a thing that happens. It's pretty good. Like, can you imagine? Oh, hang on, though. Doing, like, an entire John Mullaney cover album.

Wait. Like, TikTok is full of cover jokes, of just people lip-sinking comedy routines. But they're doing it to the audio. Sure. But, like, it's a performance. Yeah. I don't know. I don't actually have any idea how the TikTok licensing works. Yeah. I've always been fascinated by that. I just think it's the pressure on the people who make the content for Spotify, the revenue pressure on everybody is so high because the payouts are so low that they're inventing this new concept, which would imply that you should be able to like do an album of joke covers. Put it on the blockchain. Put it on the blockchain. I think it's fascinating. Ashley, who writes Hot Pod. She and I are just like staring.

at this being like, is this going to work? Like, Spotify just was like, no, and just, like, kicked him off. Yeah. Because Spotify doesn't need a bunch of joke albums. Like, they're fine. But it's, like, fascinating to me to see, like, all of these ways, because the money has gotten so bad. Yeah.

That artists are creating new. That's NFTs. That's why every artist is doing NFTs. Um, but it's also like, we're going to create a new royalty structure for comedy out of nothing. I think we should do this for the Vergecast. We should get paid once for performing it and paid. Oh, wait, we don't write it.

Never mind. We're writing it. We're writing it now as you go. We're contemporaneously writing this. What is IP but? What is IP? What is IP but what we say? If someone wants to do a full cover of this episode of the Vergecast, you have to call us.

I'll write you a contract. On the blockchain. It'll be cheap. It won't cost a lot of money, but it'll be ironclad that you have to perform this Vergecast word for word. It'd be like 10 bucks. If you want to, we'll figure it out. Like a screenplay of this Vergecast. Last little things, Apple Music is they got that weird voice plan for the home pods.

This is what I mean, that, like, the capabilities of your device are dictated by weird-ass backroom contracts, not by what the capabilities of the device are. This voice plan is dumb and annoying, and I hate it. And it's just because the record labels gave the same plan to Amazon. Yeah. Well, it's like what enables your smart speaker, right? You want to play some music to a smart speaker that can't be, and you don't want to do a deal with Spotify. Right. So you like make your own deal for like cheap streaming just for the smart speaker.

It's like five bucks a month, right? Four bucks a month? Yeah. Yeah, it's super cheap. It's weird. And then Sonos is now supporting Amazon music Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos on the new beam that supports Atmos and the arc. I got, I just want to say I got a piece of physical mail from Amazon asking me if I want to try Amazon music. amazing the other day and I was like that says a lot about Amazon music yeah that's my only thought there

we're quickly getting to a place by the way where the combination of the service you subscribe to and the headphones you have has meaningful implications for what music you listen to like you've got to have an Atmos service and sono speakers to listen to Atmos music from Amazon but your Apple AirPods which supports spatial audio. There's no way to listen to Amos music from Amazon. It's just like, it's nuts. Like, it happened. The bad thing happened.

I don't know what to tell you. It could be a lot worse. We could be paying gas fees every time we listen to a song. I mean, don't put that energy into the world, man. What are you doing? It's going to be happening. There's a New York Times article this week,

like a choice. The New York Times is on it article about how wired headphones are trendy again. Yeah. Do you see it? I was like, I did it. This was me. Like the number of people who are like, you got your wish.

And I was like, there's still lightning headphones. It's not great. All right, we got to take a break. And we got just the lightning round to end all lightning rounds coming up. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in.

But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace. where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses.

And for a limited time, What Not says they'll match your first one. $150 sold in the first month. You can visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. Whatnot.com slash sell. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come

with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow

and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your, your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes.

Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.aI slash vergecast. That's cloud. com. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned and in today's episode. Claude. a.

I. slash verge cast. Okay, we're back. We got, there's like a chunk of Android lightning round news. You just want to go through it, Deere?

Yeah. So, uh, Google has a big update for pixel for Android 12 that is got a bug fix list that is just three miles long. Just super, super. And like,

you know, there's always like the like patch after the release where it's kind of big. But this one in particular is like, oh, the pixel as reviewed is not the one that they were hoping to get out the door. Like, there's so many fixes in this thing. It also includes the launch feature where you're going to be able to tap to snap, where you can double tap the thing and use the snap camera even though you're still on the lock screen. And then immediately on the heels of that, there's an Android 12L beta, L for large screens, I guess.

You can install it on a pixel if you want to for some reason. In a way you can? Yeah, because. But it's meant for emulators. There's like a Lenovo tablet that you can install it on if you want to see what it looks like, but it's clearly designed for folding phones, right? And maybe they'll make another go at tablets because they did the thing they should have done, which is like put a proper dock on it, make rearranging windows via drag and drop part

of the system level thing and not a hack that Microsoft and Samsung have to create. You know, like fix the notification drop-down control. final drop-down thing, so it actually fills a screen instead of being ridiculous like the phone. They've made Android not terrible on big screens, or at least they're taking a couple of steps in that direction, but there's just, there's no big screens to put it on. Like, there's the Kindles, there's like some random Samsung tablets, Huawei makes some stuff, but like, it's not here. And then there's like the one Lenovo tablet that is, I think, really only sell in, like, the UK.

So I think it's interesting. I'm glad they're doing the thing that they should. should have done a while ago to normalize the UI on Microsoft's two-screen thing and Samsung's folding and whatever else is coming. But it's also like a pretty clear sign that yeah, they're still working on a pixel fold. Yeah, I mean, isn't everybody? Yeah. I feel like we talked about like waveguides and AR, but like also in the background, everybody is trying make a folding phone work. Right? I'm sure Apple has like dozens of folding phone prototypes. Why? Literally who wants this? Because it's awesome. I want this. It's great. It's the best.

I've been carrying around an iPad Mini at home lately instead of just my phone. It's like a tiny phone on an iPad Mini. And it's lovely to have a little device with a big screen. And, you know, I bought a Fold, bought a Fold 2. I've been used that for a while. I'm telling you, man, like, big screens are great. Yeah.

Like, big screens are great. No, I get that. And if you can get a big screen in your pocket, that's great. I love the Pro Max. And I guess you're saying folding makes that also compact, right? That's the promise of it. It makes it a little bit smaller. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I also just think everybody knows that new form factors sell. You can deliver an actual folding phone that works without any of the compromises. And, you know, Samsung's already iterated its way through some of the compromises. A lot of the compromises have been iterating on. You just get to, like, make that ad and be like, look, this iPhone folds in half. And, like, people will just instinctively buy it. Yeah. I don't think they're trying to solve a huge problem.

I think they can just see a product that people will instinctively understand. The other pixel news is apparently the mail-in repair warehouse that they were using. Yeah, this is crazy. Was like people were mailing their pixels in to get repaired and then their nudes leaked. So that's horrible. And I want to tell you that like PSA never send your phone in for repair without wiping it first. But like if the thing is broken and you can't like use the screen to wipe it, then like you're kind of have no choice to send it in before you wipe your data in a lot of cases. So, yeah, not cool.

What other advice can there be except to say not cool? Yeah, I mean, this is, I mean, we talk about the pixel. I'm like, what Google needs to do. Like, they need to market it. They need to sell a lot of them. The back half of the story of owning these devices is like service and support. Right. And this is why we always recommended Samsung phones over pixels for many years,

even though we tend to prefer using pixels more ourselves. because for the average person, you can walk to a, you know, Sprint store if you use Sprint and be like, fix my Samsung, and they'll be like, okay. Yeah. Or more likely they'll be like, your contract is up in three months.

Would you like a new Samsung? But like... Also, what is, how sad is it that I still, in my world, Sprint still exists? It just occurred to me. Timo's running those ads for free phones, and they keep mentioning Sprint customers too. I don't know if you've seen these ads.

They're like, everyone gets our free phone, including Sprint customers. I'm like, you own Sprint. Like, you shut it down. Who are you talking to? It's gone. It went away. Did you see this Microsoft bug on?

I can't tell you. I don't know if it's a Microsoft bug or a Google bug, but if you had Teams installed on an Android phone, it would occasionally prevent you from calling 911. Yeah. Well, so the phone app lets other apps plug into it. The iPhone does this too, right? And so there must be something where the Teams app wants to show up in your call log And that messed with that.

But this should never happen. Like that needs to be like the phone app, there should be like an ironclad, you know, secure enclave around that sort of functionality. It's ridiculous. So you, wait, you think that they were trying to call 911 and it was routing it through teams. And so like the 911 dispatcher was like getting a message. It was like, please install Microsoft Teams. All I'm saying is that- It's growth hacking at its finest.

That the Microsoft software could have touched Google software. So like something there went wrong. Yeah. Other phone stuff, this 5G story with the FAA is getting more and more complicated by the day. So now the FAA, the FAA was unhappy with the FCC and with the telecom companies. So AT&T and Verizon agreed to delay some of their 5G rollout on certain bands to solve these FAA problems. And now the FAA is saying some flights in some weather conditions should not land, usually. using instruments alone if the pilots can see the runway because of 5G interference. But AT&T and Verizon also promised, I think, the lower power around airports or something. And these rules only apply to certain equipment that a lot of people want replaced anyway. It's like, ble. I will just say this.

This is, I mean, we usually see this for, like, the FTC and the DOJ, like, fighting over who's going to sue a big company. The FCC and the FAA have, like, clearly not talked. Like the FCC's entire job is to manage Spectrum in this country. Yeah. And yes, like they only just got a chair when Jessica Rosen, Orsel was officially confirmed by the Senate like two days ago. But they're still deadlocked. They don't, there's not the fifth.

But they don't need a vote for this stuff. Like the votes that we care about that we pay attention to are like net net net net like a big policy stuff. Yeah. Like mostly the FCC is full of engineers and lawyers whose job it is to just figure this stuff out. Right. And it's nuts that it's we're this far into the fire. G cycle.

And the FAA is like, oh, there's going to be a problem with planes. So, like, maybe thousands of flights can't land. Look, Nilai, sometimes when you're in a race, some people get left behind. Yeah. Anyway, the telecom lobbyists are out of control mad at it about this. And sort of like, the FCC people are like, why don't you tell us about this earlier? So we'll see what happens. But it's, I don't know, there's something wacky here where like maybe it was just the race.

but in effect what is happening is the big AT&T and Verizon mid-band rollouts are being affected by the FAA. Yeah, and we'll just see where that goes. Did you see this Verizon story? So, yes, and it's like this is my PSA moment. So there's this thing where Verizon has, Verizon already had this program called like Verizon up or something, where it was really obvious that signing up for this to get a deal is definitely going to sign you up to have them collect more data. But they're doing it an even skee easier way now with Verizon Custom Experience and Custom Experience Plus. And it seems really obvious.

Alex is shaking his head. Yeah. It's like, come on. I mean, Verizon, you know, famous inventor of the super cookie, right? Yeah. What I believe is happening here is Verizon and a bunch of other companies are turned. There's a story about the second. I forgot what I was.

Are they turning the knob up on all of their like customer loyalty programs and all of their like, you know, sign up. and give us some piece of information program to as high as they can go right now in case this stuff with app tracking on iPhones and, you know, Chrome decides it's going to finally do something with flock, although my money is on they're going to waffle for an extra two years. You know, if the cookie apocalypse happens or if, you know, something with app tracking gets shut down, there was a weird story where like Apple was maybe letting people collect data on, you know, iPhone apps, blah, blah, blah, blah. all of this stuff is really frothy right now, but like just don't sign up for anything. That's my advice to you. So the specific thing Deere was talking about was, the Verizon Super Cookie ages ago was Verizon at the network level

would just track everything you did on the web using something called the Super Cookie. And you couldn't get rid of it. And if you had a Verizon phone, they were just building this profile of you. Everyone got mad, they turned off. I'm telling you that this is evidence that they're bringing it back. Yeah, no, for sure. Like Verizon's entire media strategy, remember they bought AOL and Yahoo and they merged them into a company called out.

And they spun off. And now Yahoo got spun off again. And they just renamed Verizon Media. The company that was known as Verizon Media is now just known is Yahoo AdTech. Like no hide in the ball. Like the corporate entity that owns like TechCrunch and Engadget, which are great sites and run by great people. but like that corporate entity is now just known as Yahoo Ad Tech, like zero hiding the ball, what they're doing. So now, because apps can't track their data on the phone, Verizon can track your data on the network.

Correct. And you've opted in because it's your carrier. Right. You just signed whatever contract. You got a free phone. So Verizon has all this data about where you are, what your traffic is doing, what your interests are, what websites are going to. and then they can then flip that into ad tracking profiles. Yep.

And bypass all of the Apple stuff. The thing that throws a wrench in this is private relay is, is ICloud's VPN type thing. It's not a VPN, but we'll call it that. And it's almost like Apple saw this coming. This is like fighting at what, how low in the stack of like the ability to block data tracking can you get? Apple's pretty down there. But then there's Verizon that's like, well, actually, we can just sniff all your packets. And then Apple's like, well, hold on.

We're going to put a wall up so you can't. So I have a feeling this won't work is a roundabout way of saying that. Oh, I mean, carry your software ideas. It's a good bet. Yeah. But like both, this is what AT&T wanted to do with Warner Media, like their stated purpose for buying Warner Brothers. Which is just ridiculous to think about.

Ad tracking and advertising. Yeah. There is just a study. Like, there is a bunch of FCC noise lately because of Rosemortell and then Gigi Sown. is up for the other commissioner's spot to break the two-two tie. And I think we talked about this with Russell last week. I don't know. I'll just recapitulate it.

So Gigi Stone is up for the last spot in the FCC. Yep. And Fox News and Wall Street Journal don't want her to be in the FCC, but OANN and Newsmax do because she supports competition, just like as a principal and they're the competitors, which is very funny. But so there are all those noise about the FCC, but if you look at investment in networks themselves,

capital expenditure networks. When they got rid of net neutrality, the actual investment in networks went down because all of the broadband company started buying media. They went and bought Warner Media and they went and bought AOL. And they did all this stuff because they were like,

we're going to monetize what happens on the networks because we can see the networks. And then all those ideas were inevitably bad. So, I don't know, I'd just say like this, you can see what's happening. Like Apple turned off the cookie stuff. They turned off tracking. And now everyone else who has the ability to track is like lit this idea back up.

Alex, you cover like a bunch, you know, like Snap had like bad earnings. Like this is like hitting these companies in serious ways. Yeah. I mean, what's effectively happening is it's a lot of it is Apple in the private sector. A lot of is actually coming from the EU in the public sector. So between Apple and the EU and then Google, whatever the hell they're going to do, you effectively, you could think of the internet today. It is like a big series of interlocking webs.

right, where it was pretty easy for X company to sell data to another or even just tell them, hey, like, we think this person is this and they corroborate. What's happening is Apple and the EU with this Digital Market Service Act that's coming out sometime are just taking scissors and cutting all those webs. And so everything is becoming siloed. And we're in this like kind of adjustment, painful adjustment period, mostly brought on by Apple right now. But like the things that Facebook is doing where it's, you know,

know, getting rid of ad targeting options, you know, where you can't, you no longer can target somebody based on their sexual orientation. That's actually motivated by laws that are coming in the EU that are just clamping down on targeting from a legal perspective. And so, yeah, everyone's building these, um, there's a guy named Eric Sufret, who's like a super smart ad tech guy who calls them content fortresses. But every app, and I wrote this in a 10 year kind of package, like every app is going to become a super app where like instead of you going off app to purchase something. Facebook wants you to do shopping on

Instagram because when you shop on Instagram, they know you bought it. Whereas if they kick you off to a website, there's no more cookie for them to say, oh, they came from our ad, therefore our ad worked. And so this is going to reshape big parts of the internet, for sure. And it already is starting to do that.

Yeah. I'm just going to put an idea out there if you're an Apple engineer. Just want you to pull over in your car. Think about this problem of these super apps and everyone trying to keep people inside their apps, take a deep breath and realize in your heart that allowing in-app browsers was a mistake

and you should turn them off on your platform. In-at browsers are the worst. Give me my tabs, give me my browser, give me my extensions, give me my own space where I'm a controller way I visit on the web, and don't make me bounce from the Twitter browser to Safari. don't make me re-log in to the New York Times so I can read an article 15 times in every single app that happens to link to the New York Times.

Just send them all to Safari. This isn't a problem on Chrome because they share cookies with the in-app browsers. But still, I'm just saying ban in-app browsers and you will go a long way towards solving this super app tracking problem. They will end up back in court tomorrow. It's like the death now. Okay. Other lightning around stuff. Adam Masseri, head of Instagram, was in front of Congress.

Facebook should just set up shop in D.C. at this point, move all their executives there. Or meta. I'm sorry, meta. But it's the first time for Adam in front of Congress. He said they're bringing back the chronological feed. What did you think of this hearing? Oh, my God. I mean, how many more of these are we going to have? It's like, you know, forever.

Casey had a great tweet about how, you know, it's like they just legislate through hearings, right? Like, nothing actually happens. And it's all just a bunch of grandstanding. I think I tuned out of this hearing after like half of it because it was just it's just incomprehensible. And it's like you can just tell that this is all, it's all politically motivated. Like all of a sudden all the senators care about our kids. And it's like, you know, it's all met us fault. And obviously there are problems here.

I'm not trying to absolve them of all responsibility. But I just wish there was actual more. I come back to like the fact that like the honest ads act, which is a response to. 2016, like literally never happened. And it was like the only thing that managed to even like get some kind of interest in Congress. And yeah, I just, I don't know. I don't think the American public really thinks these hearings are interesting or working. Like I would be shocked. I just don't really know who they're for except for donors and the media. And then when most serious says we're bringing chronological feedback, that's the actual news out of the entire whatever two or three hour hearing. It was like Instagram bringing back this thing they killed for no reason. I mean, it wasn't no reason, but that people hated that they killed years ago. But it's next year. I'm sorry, Twitter moved faster that.

Twitter, if you can't move as fast as Twitter, what are you doing? Well, you know, they're going through a lot over there, okay? You know, they got a lot of people in the metaverse. It's funny because like that's Francis Howgan, you know, the Facebook whistleblower. That was her whole thing that her stump speech. when she came out was like ban algorithms. Like the chronological feed will fix integrity on the internet. And we're going to see if that works.

And I would not be shocked if like most people don't even use this when it comes out. I don't think Twitter's chronological feed is heavily used. That's what I use. That's what you use? Wow. Yeah, of course. Man, I used to be a Twitter completionist too. So I mean, my entire thing is that Twitter poisons your brain and we should all quit.

So I intentionally make my Twitter experience. as broken as possible. That's fair. I mean, I remember being a tweet bot stand and, like, having to read every single tweet in my feed because it would show you the counter before you could refresh. And I'm really glad those days are behind me. But, yeah, I don't know. This whole, like, should we all be chronological feeds or should we be algorithms?

And I just, I don't know. They're doing this to appease the angry senators who care about our children. I think that the angry senators, you're correct about donors. But I think it does get them voters. yelling at meta or Facebook or Instagram is like it works for both parties because Republicans need like suburban women or what's what's the yeah I think there's that like I think this next year you know how is testifying there's assuming this next chunk of the Biden plan passes which who knows if it will the next set of attention is going to be back onto 230 in social media regulation like we've heard both parties say they want to do it and there's going to be some meaningful, oh shit, the First Amendment's in our way. It's just coming for them. Don't we say this every year, though, that it's coming? Like, again, I come back to, like, the honest ads act, which was, like, a smart piece of, like, detailed niche focus legislation about, like, political ads.

Like, that went nowhere. So, I mean, you really think we're going to get to, like, meaningful Section 230 reform in a divided Congress? I think what's going to happen is the Florida social media bill will work its way through the courts, right? Got stayed. The Texas social media bill got stayed. Like, as those things move their way through their courts, you're going to, and Congress, like, turns its election year. They're all going to start yelling about it.

Like, it's just easy money for a politician to be like Facebook is bad. Sure. It's just, like, it's easy to be like YouTube is poisoning your kids. We've got to do something about it. If you reelect me to the United States Congress, my bill will make YouTube not censor conservative. It was like, I could probably win a seat in upstate New York right tomorrow if I just like ran around saying that. Like, it's convincing to a lot of people for reasons that make sense.

Like, people do not have great relationships with these platforms. Didn't our survey say that, say that a little differently? They said they like the utility platforms. Yeah. So Google, Facebook, YouTube, which is not Facebook. So Google and Amazon really, really highly rated, right? They provide an ongoing utility. It was like 98% approval in our survey.

YouTube way up there because, look, my refrigerator just broke. I watched a lot of YouTube yesterday trying to fix it. I failed. So now my opinion of YouTube is very low. Did you break it further? My father-in-law is here, and he has spent the entire day just like tearing this thing the shreds. Just because it's something to do.

It's 15 years old. The thing is dead. It's not going to happen. Supply chain crunches, real though. Buying new refrigerator right now, it's a real problem. Anyhow, those are. are all the top. And then you get to Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and they're all way, people like them way less. And I just think that's like easy money for politicians. I think it's

coming. Some conversation is coming. And right at the center of it is a theme park. A theme park. Either a government is going to tell, tell itself that the First Amendment keeps it from regulating social networks, which is what the judicial branch is currently telling legislative branches, or that's going to change. Like, those are the only two options. Or we're going to change the Constitution. Yeah. I think that conversation is coming in a serious way next year.

I do. And not in the, they'll pass a law, but in the two states have now made a run at it and run directly into the First Amendment. And they're going to, those lawsuits are going to wind their way through the courts next year. Last few things. Speaking of lawsuits, Epic v. Apple, the deadline for Apple to allow links. to external payments.

And what about meta buttons? Meta buttons. The deadline for Apple to allow Metaverse buttons to other payments was going to come. But the appeals court, which is unusual, the appeals court granted a stay saying Apple had raised serious issues about the ruling in the district court. That's on hold. What I will remind you is that skipping to the end of a legal process is not correct. Like they issued the stay. That doesn't mean Apple One.

It means I have to appeal. And it means when that's done, you know, there's an Epic v. Google exists too. So then there are going to need two cases that get appealed, which usually means you get another appeal. And that might mean you get a Supreme Court case. Right. And Epic's law firm famously represented Amex against a bunch of retailers lost at every level until they got this room. Supreme Court and won in an antitrust case about merchant payments. So I'm not saying Apple's going to win.

I'm not saying Epic's going to lose. I'm just saying don't skip to the end. One important thing, the stay does not appear to apply to apps being allowed to admit that payment systems outside the App Store exist. So they can't link to it, but like. And Apple, I think Apple's already bent on this, right? They bent on it in Japan. They're not interested in fighting that.

Yeah. Yeah. So like that to me was always one of the most egregious thing. So I hope that goes away with a quickness. Yeah. Samsung, I didn't realize this hadn't already happened. They've merged their mobile and consumer electronics businesses. Yeah, I mean, I see this as a function of the mobile business is a hurting unit.

Like, literally the business unit is hurting. Well, it's just fine. Every Samsung product is like is an Android phone. Like, what's a TV? It's a giant Android phone. But like the TV, people are in charge. Yeah. So, like, this is either just not a big deal or it's like, I don't know, the sonification of the way Samsung makes phones, which is like a scary thought because Sony's not been great at phones. Anyway, I don't think we can read too much into it yet. It might just be crazy Samsung company politics. But I do think that it may mean some, like, changes to the way that, like, they've been cranking out phones. I think that there might be, in theory, maybe, if we're lucky, some more coherency there. But who knows.

Yeah. As a person who's in the market for a refrigerator, I'll say that I played with the Samsung smart fridge at the store yesterday. Man, putting a slow mid-range Android tablet on the front of a refrigerator is not the compelling idea that you thought it was. No. Eli, you need a high-tech refrigerator, so you are going to come to CES. Yeah. I know. I'm pretty sad that I won't be doing the refrigerator tour at CS. Do they make one with like a curved screen with the Android tablet so you can get a curved TV refrigerator in your house?

Do you want to do an hour on refrigerator? Because I'm in it right now. I'm deep in the game. Do you know where the antitrust regulators in this country need to turn their attention? There's like three appliance manufacturers. They all own everything. Samsung and LG. There's Samsung and LG.

And then there's Higher, which owns GE. And there's Whirlpool, which owns everything else. Gotcha. Okay. It's a real mess. Also, appliance forums, just a hotbed of internet activity. There's a whole world here we're not paying attention to. Running on V-Bolton.

Yeah, man, you want to see misinformation at work. You ask people about LG's refrigerator compressors and whether they're reliable or not. All right. Last few things. There was a really dumb story about the vice president and her wired headphones. Corinne, Faf, is our new senior security reporter.

He wrote a post-a-go-spatic. Go read that. But long story short, it's okay if the most powerful people in the government don't have wireless radios. that intrinsically serve as location beacons turned on. But we'll read that. And then Sonos announced a plan to make its products more repairable,

which is interesting that that is becoming a thing. Microsoft announced the plan, Sonos announced a plan. Like Apple just did that big right-to-repair stuff. That movement is regardless of the legislation. There's proposed legislation, Alex. I know it might not ever happen. Regardless of that, the market is demanding repairability, and the companies are starting to realize they can sell it.

Yeah, well, especially if you're Apple and you already made your products unrepairable, why not just give someone an I-fix-it kit and say, go for it, kid? Yeah. So I was spiky about this on Twitter. I said it was the right-to-repair equivalent of greenwashing because they didn't have any details about repair manuals or offering to sell replacement parts or whatever. Sonos has emailed me, and they're not happy with my spiky tweet, even a little. So I just, for the record, want to say that spokesperson Tom Lodge lets me know that I want to

assure you this is a real plan with significant work already undertaken on products we will release and that we continue to work through the details of how we're going to manage the software aspect. And as we move closer to launch, we're committed to consulting with organizations active in this space. For example, if I fix it in Fairphone to ensure our offering is as meaningful as possible. He admits that the proof will only come when they release their products. But Sonos Pinky Swears is my new phrase. Okay. I feel like this is a second time Senos has announced a big thing and then everyone misinterpreted it and they're like, no, we should have said more.

Just a lesson for all of us. Finish your plan. Then release the plan. All right. That's it. That's a Vergecast. You can tweet at us. Alex is Alex E.

Heath. I'm at Reckless. Deeter's at Backlon. Tuesday. Deeter, which one was it? Matter. Matter. Yeah.

That's a good one. The holiday spectacles continue with matter. By the way, Jen, our new smart home reviewer has been working on that. matter piece for a long time. They're coming out together. Like the matter podcast, which features Jennifer quite a lot, is put into her big matter explainer. It's a huge, huge splash that you will understand what's coming.

And what's coming is actually a lot. It's a spectacular. Yeah. I think Tony Fidel makes an appearance in the John's Matter piece. It's good. We talk about thread just a little. Actually, a hell of a lot. It's there.

It's good. And then, as I mentioned earlier, John Hanky, C of Niantic on. decoder next Tuesday. These last two decoders, by the way, they're not CEOs, right? It was Miss Excel, which is on track to be our most popular episode of Decoder ever. People

love Excel influencer as a concept, which I should have expected, because when I heard about it, it's like, oh, we got to do that. And then Jonah Erlich from Constitution Dow talked about blockchain. That was a good one. And I will say the response to it is, like, people being like, this is all

the problems with blockchain or people being like, look at how awesome blockchains are. There's no in between, which is, I think, a sign of a good episode together. That's it. We'll be back next week. That's a rush cast, rock and roll. Get a boost.