The Vergecast - Meta Quest Pro review, Taylor Swift crashed Ticketmaster, and more

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Piece, Alex Cranz, and Adi Robertson discuss the Meta Quest Pro review. Later, the crew discuss Ticketmaster crashing after Taylor Swift fans try to buy concert tickets. Also: Elon Musk's Twitter saga continues and some weekly gadget news. Further reading: Meta Quest Pro review: get me out of here Taylor Swift crashed Ticketmaster following 'historically unprecedented demand' for tickets  Elon Musk ignored Twitter’s internal warnings about paid verification Elon Musk says he fired engineer who corrected him on Twitter Elon Musk is firing Twitter employees even when they criticize him in private Elon Musk says he doesn’t want to be CEO of Twitter, or any company Elon Musk demands Twitter employees commit to ‘extremely hardcore’ culture or leave Amazon’s Alexa Voice Remote Pro is the best streaming clicker of them all Elgato’s new Stream Deck Plus joins the knob mob Sonos plans to enter four new product categories — and the first is coming next year Apple and Major League Soccer will launch MLS Season Pass on February 1st  Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 leans into AI  Razer is upgrading the 2022 Blade 14’s two USB-C ports to USB 4 Canon’s new ‘Pro’ webcam software subscription charges $50 annually The 20-year boondoggle   The unbearable lightness of BuzzFeed The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, MetaQuest Pro, Ticketmaster, Elon Musk, mistakes were made. We'll get into all of it that's all coming up right after this. 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.

something like build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. 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 nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports. mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of the Ticketmaster Monopoly, which will crush your fucking spirit until you're dead. Sorry, teenage girls, you're dead now. And also, Nealai. I got through, man. Okay. I want. I assure you we will talk about Ticketmaster on this episode of the Vergecast. It's software. It's Monop.

There's a lack of competition. And there's Tay. This is the most verge cast keywords. It's the most verge cast you can be. You can add them all up. That's the verge cast. Nothing more verge cast than Taylor Swift. Competition issues and software and a major cultural figure.

That's our whole show. It's the whole show. All she needs is Bluetooth. It's there. That's how you get the tickets. What kind of headphones do you think Taylor Swift listens to her own music on? Oh, that's a good question. She doesn't.

She, like, and if she does, she has a very nice audio system. She has other people, like, play it back from her. No, see, I go straight to, like, wired earpods. Just, like, buy, buy a fancy coffee and walk down the street with your wired earpods listening to your new album. Like, that's the vibe. Well, that's what she would wear, like, in the Diet Coke commercial. Remember that one that would always play in the movies? Yes, exactly.

She'd be, like, singing to herself. She always wear the wired ones. That's right. Yeah. That's true. Okay, well, two things. I've got thoughts. Two things.

One, there was the phenomenon of hot girl. Wired earpods. Yeah. It took place over last summer. That was the whole thing. I could see her fitting into that. Yeah. Second, unrelated.

My favorite Bruno Mars fact in the entire world is that he masters all of his records in an old Cadillac escalade that he leaves parked in his driveway. Yes. Just because he says that's where his music sounds amazing. Incredible. It's a great. It's in a Rolling Stone profile of Bruno Mars from ages ago. He just has it. He doesn't go anywhere.

He's like, this slate is where the magic happens. You spent 10,000 on your speaker. Stupid. It's like, if it doesn't sound good and the slate, it doesn't sound good. I have to imagine Taylor has a similar superstitious audio situation. And it's the AirPods. Yeah, she's got like a pair. Wired, sorry.

Earpods. Like wired earpods. She's got a pair of those like old cost headphones with like the, you know, the foam is getting all rotted out. Like those are her special ones that everything sounds good on. Yeah. Yeah. Like she's bringing that to the National Guys studio.

I need to plug these in. They're Porter Pros. Like, I feel it. That's just my theory. If you know. I'm dying to know because it can't just be here. What if she burns it to a CD and plays it on her old disc man? Oh, that's like her thing.

Her thing. If it doesn't sound good on this disc man. So she's like, okay, I got to put it on my disc man that I've had since 2000. See how I sound. I sound great. Ship it. We're done here. How do we always end up talking about burning optical media with you?

It happens so often on the show. It's so often. All right. Hi, it's the Virchcast. I'm your friend, Eli. That's Alex Cranz. Hi, I'm your friend that's really sorry Reckless Patel has been quiet this week. He's trying to get those T-Swift tickets.

If only my clone, I can't wait to talk about this experience. David Pierce is here. I have no interest in Taylor Swift tickets. I'm over. Addie Robertson is joining us. Hi. You, okay. David, when I knew you as a young man, you cared about Taylor Swift tickets more than any other young man.

Oh, I still do. There was a day at the verge office where I had fully half of the staff on. line just to buy me Taylor Swift tickets, which is how I know I was early to Taylor Swift because this was before everyone else was online buying Taylor Swift tickets. No, if I wasn't about to have a child and thus never going out to do anything fun ever again for the rest of my life as far as I can tell, I would have been in the ticket master offices yelling at them about Taylor Swift this week. Just bring the baby. Yeah, the shows around like June. It'll be in college by then. If you leave the kid home alone by June. It'll be fine. All right, there is a lot to talk about.

will return to the subject of Taylor Swift. I assure you, ticketmaster just put out an explainer blog post. It starts with we knew people would want to buy these tickets, which is, I feel like if you are trying to explain your behavior, starting with we were aware of the problem that we made, you're already on your back foot. But we have been teasing our MetaQuest Pro review for weeks on the show in many ways. The written review is up on the website. You should read it. Addie is a great job writing that review. The video review, I think next week, early next week, it's a, it's like, it's a hard edit is what I would say. Yeah. Because it takes place not only in reality, but also the metaverse. Virtual reality. Virtual reality, which is not a predictable,

stable, or even an easy to enter environment in any way, shape, or form. Right. Like just logging into the metaverse. Very challenging. I mean, this is like the crux of your review. It's like the software is horrible. Yeah. It's the thing that really disappoints me is that meta is typically really, really good at software because it takes software in earlier generations to mean games. And it's really good at buying games.

And then, yeah, you come out with this thing. This thing is all about Horizon. It's metaverse platform. And it's, it's miserable. Yeah. So let's start. Let's actually start with the Quest two, because you mentioned games. The Quest 2 is basically a games console.

It is, I think meta itself has referred to it as an Nintendo Switch. Yeah. For your face. Yeah. It's a, it's a mid-range Android phone for your face. And it is very much geared around, it's an appliance. It's a game console. You put it on, you pick a game, you play the game, you're done.

Right. There are people who don't use it that way, but if you get it, then they have this thing just ready for you to go, which is like, hey, do you want to play BeatSaver? Yeah. And they have bought up most of the popular games and apps on the Questress. too. Like all of them. All of them.

They are. Under FTC review for buying within the company makes supernatural, right? And by the way, META put out their answer to that

lawsuit this week. I mean, I don't know if you listen to Phil Spencer on Decoder this week, but like any company that is in the middle of a competitor review

starts just self-flagellating itself about how much they suck. So Phil Spencer's on decoder and he's like, we suck at video games. Sure. We're in third place. Okay.

We're horrible. No one likes us. In mobile crap, garbage. I'm a bad man. Like, the whole thing because they want to buy Activition. Mehta is in this FTC review, put out their answer to the FTC's complaint, and they're like,

we've never made a successful VR software product ever. We've had to buy them all. I mean, not wrong. Very true. Yeah, that's both self-flagellation. I mean, you could probably cut VR out of that and it was still mostly. It's just a very funny legal document. They're like, we should be allowed to buy this company because we actually can't do it on our own.

So this would be cool if we could buy the successful company. But the quest too, Adi, I think you share this opinion with me, is a great product. Like, it's self-contained. It was until recently relatively inexpensive. It over-delivers on the core promise, which is you will experience virtual reality in a convenient, self-contained way. And you will mostly have a good time. Yeah, I think it compensates that there are things that VR headsets still just, they're always going to be kind of heavy. They're always going to be kind of bulky.

there are still just things that we haven't figured out with them. But they do a very good job of trying to streamline those things and emphasizing the positives of it. Yeah. So I just want to start there. That's the foundation for this conversation. It's the Quest 2 meta's second mainstream VR headset is a good product that like over delivers. But also one thing Adi just said that like is I think a useful construct for me.

I just went back and reread your review. And now what you just said makes a lot of this make a ton of sense to me, which is like the question. Quest is a thing you, like, put on, use for a few minutes, and then take off. And it's like, even the games are very short. Like, all the bad reviews of the games in the Quest store are people being like, this is super fun. And it costs me $19 and it ended up for 25 minutes.

And, like, that's perfectly fair criticism. But it's also like, this is not a thing you're meant to wear for hours at a time. It's like, put it on. Do your 30-minute workout. Take it off. Go do something else. Like, it is, it's an episodic thing. Although, ironically, I've spent way more time in single sessions with the Quest 2

than I have been able to in the Quest Pro, which is one of my problems. Fair. Yeah, okay, let's get into that. Yeah, so I just want to start there. It's not that I don't think any of us think virtuality is a hopelessly broken concept. I don't think that this is like dumb to chase after. There's an example from meta of a successful product that over delivers, especially for its previous price. Right.

The Quest Pro is supposed to do far, far more than that Quest 2, right? Addie, like the entire premise is you're going to wear it all day at work. I mean, I hesitate to say what the entire premise is because I am still convinced that meta doesn't know what the premise is and they just had to come up with a pitch. And the pitch they came up with, yeah, is that you're going to have meetings in this thing. You're going to wear it for all for using, I don't know, Microsoft Office. Yeah, it's supposed to be the professional, the computer that you use. It's like a laptop. Especially because it's priced like a laptop at 1499.

Before you even add the full light block. which I think is absolutely needed on this. So the first thing I would say by the Quest 2 is the hardware, when you pull out of the box, it's physically far superior to the Quest 2. Yeah. Right. It is just a nicer thing until you try to use it. And then it is immediately revealed to be a much worse thing.

Oh, I think it sneaks up on you. I think my first half hour when I wear it, I'm like, oh, this is nice. It's so much more convenient to put on. Like, it doesn't have this overhead strap. It's really, like, bad. It's really nice that I can see. outside because it has, you know, less light blocking. And then like it just, it devolves. Yeah. Yeah, because that was your complaint, right? Both of you is, is that it doesn't block the light

on the sides. And so you're seeing a lot more of the world. So your, your brain is basically like, what is reality? Vomit. Well, so it depends. Okay. And this is where this, to agree with Addy, they didn't decide what it was for. So it's trying to be several things. Okay. So if you, want to use it as a VR headset. Out of the box, this thing will make you vomit. Because of the light issue, right? Because the wings it comes with to block the light aren't on by default. So you'd put it on and like do VR stuff and that without the wings.

Because the wings are additional. They cost. No, no, the wings come in the box, but they're like magnetic. Oh, the wings are included. There is a separate thing that you can buy that's $50 that blocks out even more light. Okay. Can you just explain to me how this feels on your face? Because I have now read your review a bunch of times and talk to you both about it.

And I still cannot get a mental image. of why on earth you would put this thing on and they're like, look, it's a headset, but you can also have peripheral vision? Like, is this like leaky light? Is it like you can see? No, so this is, it's, there's a big gap. Look at pictures of it, like pictures of Adi in it or picture their own marketing materials. There are two rubber wings that can magnetically attach to the side that will block out your

peripheral vision. Okay. They are not always on. You are meant to take them off. You can take them off. And many of the marketing materials, they're not there. That's for, I think, when you're trying to do the mixed reality stuff. Right.

Right. When you're doing augmented reality and you're looking through a video feed in the headset and you're looking at the world around you and like basically the only demo that works is now you're a DJ. And it's like, man, I did this in my 20s. Oh, look, it's just me DJing to no one just like my 20s. Right. Like that's like the mixed reality. Yeah. So you want the light because you're in your environment.

Okay. So you want your peripheral vision a little bit because you're in the mixed reality world. You're in the room that you're in. Which is where the past through video also comes in. So you're like, okay, I get it. Right. And then you can put the wings on. I'm not sure what for.

For VR. I think the wings are actually completely adequate. I think the wings stop me from having motion sickness. They're perfect. Okay. So maybe that's for some people it's fine. For me, you put the wings on, you try to do VR stuff. And I just like got sick.

And I think that the pancake lenses, which make the thing thinner are harder to look through than the Fresno lenses on the Quest 2. Do you have to like relax your eyes? Is it like magic eye? It's not like magic. There's just something weird about. It's just unsettling. It's just unsettling. Like they're, I just, I just, I'm, it's less comfortable. I've heard from people who's, who actually say the opposite, who say like this thing is so much better. I like the way that it has this sort of depth of field. But that kind of makes me ultimately think it is subjective, that it is not like this is this necessarily incredibly incredibly leap.

forward for everyone. And I think that's still just resolution. It's not, you know, meta's fault here resolution is hard, but it is not a huge leap in resolution. Yeah. And I again, I'm someone who like works out in Supernatural consistently. So I spend a lot of time in a Quest 2. So I put this thing on, I was expecting a leap. Yeah. And instead it was just like inherently more uncomfortable. And you can put the full face blocker on. And then Addie and I both had this experience where it wants to do all this eye tracking, it has a camera for your face. It wants to help you adjust it to look good. And there's a little

dial on the top. Oh, no. That's like move the spacing of the lenses to match your eyes. And the Quest 2 is just fixed. It's too clear, not the problem. And then no, it also adjust the distance from your eyes. If you want to adjust the spacing, you have to reach inside it and press them together physically, which is

not my name. Which is your pupillary Yeah, your PD, your pupillary distance. So in the Quest 2, there's like three to tense. You get three choices. The Quest Pro is like 500 choices. There's lots of little stops. And you have to reach up, up through your nose and like balk it around. And the whole time it's like farther, closer, farther.

And it's like, I hate you. Then you can adjust the- It does it every time I launch an app. It's just, I understand you are trying to give me the optimal experience. I am never going to get that experience. And then there's the depth of the lenses from your eyes. Which is the wheel. Which is the wheel on top.

And it just doesn't believe that you have reached the farthest point of the wheel. It's like, keep going, keep going to the left. And both Addy and I had the same reaction, which was like, shut up, Mark. It's all the way to the left. Like, it's so annoying. Well, you guys have 20-20 vision? No. Okay.

Absolutely not. No. All right. So you guys are like wearing contacts? I'm wearing contacts. Yeah. No, I just, I have one eye that works at the house really good vision and one eye that's like 2040, 2060, and I compensate.

I'm a cyborg. No, I just live with it. I do wonder if that's part of it because, you know, they were saying if you were glasses, you're going to have to go get special lenses for it to see through it or you're going to have to go for context. And I think there's a lot of stuff here oriented towards perfect vision, perfect. There's a lot of stuff here that's oriented towards, I think, described the Quest 2 as compensating. Yeah. The Quest 2 is an average experience. Yes. Everyone has the same level of average experience, right? Like you put the thing on, you see VR, there's a dinosaur, great,

grandma screamed. Everyone got their views on YouTube today. We're moving on, right? This thing is trying to make you have a great experience. So it actually has all these more fine adjustments for you and your eyes and it is measuring things and in all of that is. Although most of its adjustments are doing things that other headsets have done, its value add is that it will detect where things are and it will tell you how to adjust it, which I'm convinced that the reason it has all these annoying things is because it's going to do that automatically in the next generation, that they have filed patents that do automatic like interpupilary distance adjustments. So I think this is a midpoint, but it's an annoying midpoint. Is it like Clippy? Like, is that

the level of annoyance? No, at least Clippy had your best interest. This is very much like, I need you to stop talking, Mark. It's as far to the left as it can go. Stop it. Stop it right now. The middle point thing seems right to me because like this seems like directionally, clearly the right thing for meta to be trying to do. Because the whole, you're never going to get to a point where it just one idea works for everybody. And I think you can either do the sort of low. lowest denominator thing, which is going to make some large portion of people physically ill, because VR is cool and fun like that. Or you can eventually build towards this thing where there is a magical solution for everybody. And I'm super suspicious of the idea that a lot of dials and knobs

is the right answer. But maybe someday in the future, if it does work automatically, that feels like a good answer. I'm just saying we've paid $1,500 and we're 15 minutes into this conversation. We haven't even finished putting it on. Right. Like, it is just, we're all right. deeply annoyed at the thing that costs $1,500 is it supposed to be the future of all computing and human experience. And I'm like, I can't turn this dial anymore to the left than it is. I would also just like to add, it puts all my weight on my forehead on like a one inch strip. And look, again, VR headset straps, often they kind of suck. This is just, it's bad in a really specific way that makes it really hard for me to wear. Yeah. And it's supposed to be more balanced.

Well, it's bad in that it's $1,500. Because I did see some like complaints being like, well, you could just go get another strap. And it's like, for $1,500, I should not have to buy additional things to make this thing usable. Yes. So just like out the gate, that's the problem that sneaks up on you. I've worn this thing for a while. I'm a little bit more nauseous than I was in the other one. And my forehead hurts. Great. Like, this is the future of work. Supernatural. Like, that's all bad. Then I think Addie has mentioned the display resolution several times. I was just not impressed by it. It has a wider, a wider field of these. But it actually...

I don't actually even think it has a significantly wider field of view. Looking up the numbers, the numbers are relatively similar. You still see pixels, right? Like you still see... Yeah, like everyone... And not to call anyone out, but meta did a lot of influencer stuff where they did the AR. Everyone has three screens on a monitor, looking through the lens. It's great.

That's what influencer marketing is for. And then you actually try it. And you're like, oh, these three screens are 640 by 40. Like, there's not enough pixels here to play the game. Because you have to go like... way, way, way, way, way, way higher than you actually think you do. Because you're not just being like resolution. You have to be like resolution under little magnifying glasses because that's what makes this VR.

Yeah. That's just, yeah, I was, I was always kind of suspicious. It's a little, um, text is just, it's hard. Like, I guess I, maybe dark mode would help, but I still just don't even think it really does. And I also should not have to activate dark mode to like read things on Google. Right. You bring up a browser window and what you're going to see is that the border of the window is going to have, you know, that like old school anti-aliasing, that's marching shimmer? Ooh.

It's all over the place. Gross. And then the text in the browser window is like not very high resolution. Do all your spreadsheets in this. Yeah. So like just from the jump, like this basic thing, I'm going to put this on and I'm going to have three screens from my laptop, which is what they marketed. I have no, no, absolutely not. I can't think of a reason I want to do this.

And if you are already, if you have to use VR for your job and you have like a workflow, then this is not materially worse, but it's also, if you do not use VR for your job, you should not do this. Do not do this. It is not a good experience. Okay. So that's just putting it on and using it like they want you to. Yeah. None of that's good. And I think the Quest 2 is superior. Okay. Then there's Horizon, which also runs on Quest 2, which is just an unmitigated disaster.

And the worst part... Let's be specific about which Horace 2. horizon we're talking about. It is a cornucopia of bad. There's horizon workrooms, which is the like conferencing solution. Yeah. And there's Horizon Worlds, which is like the hangout and play games and be cool with your friends one. Right. Sure. Be cool. It's basically Roblox by Facebook. This is not being flipping. This is the best way to describe it from what I can tell. I was like that seems to explain everything in my own. The lines around the corner to buy Roblox by

Facebook. No one could foretell. So we tried workrooms and the big feature here is it does the face tracking so you can see expressions. Yeah. Addy, this was basically a disaster from the jump. Like even just trying to get into it. Workrooms is bad. Like I don't know how to, we couldn't make it. First of all, we just couldn't make it work. Like, why is this video delayed for so long? It's because days of frustration like transpires. I'm just Addie's review. It's bad. I mean, this is some of the worst software that I've ever used. This part is so surprising to me because, like, Horizon Worlds is, like, a very hard thing to get right.

It's, like, a persistent space that you have to get a lot of people in and find fun, interesting things to do with them. Horizon Workrooms is conference rooms for your avatars where no one has legs. This is, like, not hard software. This is, like, like, the idea of how to make this work is so, so, so straightforward. And it's kind of amazing to me that they seem to have botched it as badly as it seems like they did. It's just that they spread this thing out across desktop and VR in the most confusing way possible. While not taking advantage of, you know, the social networking thing that they have been pushing into VR headsets for like three years. Like you, so you, the entire thing is virtual rooms that you go and meet in.

You can't create a meeting in VR. What? Like, unless you hook up a separate. computer and then go into a browser and then log in through this login system. I still don't know what it attaches to what account. I put in an email address. It seems to work. And then you have to invite people through email and then maybe they get an invite if you hook it up to a calendar and then they click a link. And then ideally they get into the meeting unless they don't get into the meeting. I just want to point out that the way you're supposed to do this, it's true. You're

supposed to do all this on your computer. You are supposed to install screen mirroring software on your laptop. Oh, yeah. It sends your screen into the headset. And then the cameras in the headset are supposed to detect your laptop and put a VR keyboard where your keyboard would be. Did that happen? No.

Because they have not, they don't yet support this 16 inch. So did you like take the wing off and just kind of like look out the side of your eye to type? Yeah, you kind of look under your nose. you know? Finally, all my Mavis B can paid off. I can touch type. This means at some point there was a meeting where somebody was like,

we made a prototype where you're in a workroom and you can just hit a button that says invite people. And then you can invite them by their phone numbers or their meta accounts or just have a link that you can share with people. And somebody, presumably Mark Zuckerberg, goes, no, they have to install companion software on their laptop. And like the companion software, the idea is a lot of it is you have this private workroom and you can do your three. screens thing, which we obviously have our own problems with. But it is bizarre to me that you cannot just like log into a meeting and like go into the metaphors on your headset. There's just not any reason to have to use a desktop for that. So like say Addy, you start the meeting. You want Nilai to come to the meeting and he's in there doing supernatural. He's having a great time.

No, no, no, that's a different app. But you so you won't get like a notification being like Addie wants, it's meeting time. There is that stuff at the base layer of the Quest headset. You can see if you're, it's a game console. You can see if your friends are online. It is not, and this is like a very virtuous thing to say, it is not a computer. Yeah. But like right now, if I put on the supernatural, I have it paired.

So like, if I get a slack in the middle of my workout, I can be like, oh, I should pause this and go do that. You're a monster. Yeah, what? Like whatever, whatever what? But I can do that. That is monstrous. Just stay focus. If you're getting email alerts, then in theory you should get it.

Get the heart right up to three. You know what I mean? Got to get in that zone five. Exactly. It's just like this is not how you imagine a thing works. Like this is not how you imagine a service from a company that is entirely known for connecting people. All right. Let me just describe our first attempt to meet in her eyes and workrooms.

I was at home. Addie was at her house. He, I believe, was at his house. Yeah. He may have been in our office. He was actually in the Twitter bathroom waiting for the next office. I'm like, I'm getting in this meeting. I sent Addie a link.

No one got in the meeting. This is just what happened. And so we were just like talking like no one's nothing's working. Technically I got into the meeting several times, just not very far. Addie entered a meeting at one point and her avatar was just stuck in a wall. Just stuck in a wall. I got into a different meeting stuck into a different wall. That's it.

That was our first five hours of screwing with Horizon workrooms. Just stuck in the corner. We have yet to get Alex Heath into a meeting together. true. So then we try again. Alex is like, I'm going to join the meeting. He's just like, I'm not in this meeting. The frustration level coming through Slack, which has been screen mirrored into VR for me. It's like, I'm not in the meeting. Did you guys start without me? I want to be in this meeting. Where is everybody? Adi and I are just like sitting in a table, Vera and our video director is like on Zoom. Not on Zoom. Like on a video conference. And we're just like waving our arms at each other.

So he's a real person looking down at your cartoons. Yeah, because you can, people can video conference in. The jealous. see I felt looking at Viren, who is a fully rendered human being. He's got legs. In control of his emotions and what his face looked like was off the charts. Because Adi and I are just like, are you winking? Because it looks like you're winking. The cameras.

It seems to think my eyes are half closed all the time. I can't figure it out. I'm like, out of your sleep. You just look asleep every time I look at you. You look mad or asleep or you're winking at me. And I was like, I don't trust what her face looks like. So there's no way I can trust what my face looks like. I am now just talking like my grandpa, just waving the hands around.

Just and I'm waving them so fast. The headset loses track of them. At one point I knocked into one of the controllers of my real desk. And it was like, you're holding controllers now. So then I had like weird outstretched broken hands. And I'm just like wave my hands. And easy to find my hands. I was like hand tracking has gotten quite good.

I don't think that the hand tracking, I did not have materially better results. but like in general, just meta's hand tracking has gotten quite good. Better than me less. I mean, I just didn't like me. So I was like, okay, so we have our little meeting. You can see part of it in the video. It's just not the idea that we're all going to meet together in that space and have more empathy for each other. Well, Viren lords over you perfectly rendered.

I felt that Viren was a real boy and not a cartoon was so immense. He had arms. And let me tell you, it is hard to make people jealous of video conferencing. Yes. But that's the thing. Like, I just can't get past this idea that, like, if you want to have a video conference with someone in a Matterproduct, there are 100,000 ways inside of Meta Products to talk to someone on video. And they just decided that this one, which is the one that they ostensibly care the most about and are making you buy specialized hardware for, is just a heaping pile of garbage. It's like, great job.

I mean, it's so bad. And all I can figure is that they need this to work with, I don't know, a bunch of enterprise software and it's going to eventually it's going to hook into Teams and Zoom. but A, that's not like, that's not there yet. And B, I just don't see how it gets better when you hook it into even more software. Yeah. And I promise to assume integration that just doesn't exist. Yeah. It's just like, you're like, how do I integrate?

And it's like nothing. There's press releases. Sure. This is all really validating my like overarching thesis about the Quest Pro, which is that meta absolutely did not make it to be an enterprise device and then made it and it sucked. And they were like, okay, no actual person is going to buy this. Can we get IT people to buy it? so that their companies think they're cool? Maybe. And then it became an enterprise device.

Which is what makes me kind of mad because if they had actually been honest enough to just say, this is not for most people to like use as a computer. This is for businesses that want to do business things. And then they scrapped all of the meta-e stuff. Like you don't have to create a dumb meta account to use it. You can just use it like you can use an HTC headset. It's a piece of hardware. If they sold it as hardware, I would be much more positive on it. They're just trying to create this like sweet. and trying to sell it to people who do not have a pre-existing need for a VR headset. And it's really frustrating.

Right. It's like the thing Google did with Google Glass is like I think exactly what you're talking about, where they were just like, here's like a small handful of things that this thing does. It's great if you like want to see an instruction manual while you're working on a thing. It's like there are a small number of things that Enterprise VR is like good and real and useful for. And if you just lean into that, that's fine. But meta instead was like, this is the future of everything. this is a glimpse at the Metaverse that we're betting billions of dollars on.

And also, none of it works. When you spend billions of dollars. 10 billion dollars. 10 billion dollars. And you know that you're not actually going to make money for at least 10 years. You got to do something. I don't know. He's not getting fired.

I want to come to that at the end of this. Okay. Because we're not yet through the experience. I agree with Addy that if they were just like, here's our interim point of a high And I said it's more of a developer kit situation. Yeah. But they, I think Zuckerberg had needed to show something for the name change, for the massive amount of dollars.

Right. Like, this is the thing. He's betting his entire reputation on the Metaverse. And he can't be like another year of the quest two. They're also just, they're obsessed with locking people into an ecosystem. That they're, they want to own the next iOS. And so they can't just offer this as enterprise hardware the way that Google did with class or the way that is hey, HTC.

with its headsets. Like, they have to own this whole software ecosystem, and they're bad at software like this. You know, Meta has never successfully made a VR app by itself. Well, they actually... I know if you're aware of this, meta itself will tell the court. Can I just...

This is like we're concluding, right? These are the wrap-up thoughts, but I just want to point out, we have not yet talked about Horizon Worlds at all, which is just another kind of disaster, like another creeping body horror disaster that can befall you. Mine experience was delightfully surreal.

I hear it wasn't actually that, but I don't know because that wasn't my experience because I have no idea how this system works. All right. So he can't get in any of our meetings. By the way, the idea that you would, I host the entire broadcast about decisions. If your CEO is like, I made this decision in a VR workspace, you're a run from that company. Don't work there. Just get out.

Just be like, you know what, Elon? I'm not coming to the office. I'm not hardcore. enough for this joy. Like, get out of there. So Heath can't get into this meeting. So we're like, all right, let's go into Horizon Worlds. Maybe the corporate network block Horizon Worlds. By the way, our corporate network not blocking the consumer playtime VR, but blocking the conferencing solution is a perfect encapsulation of corporate networks. Seems scammy. So we click the button, we drop into Horizon Worlds. We're trying to like go to Addie's house. Yeah, I have a house in this scenario.

She has a house in the Metaverse. It's very nice. It's full of shapes. It's full of shapes. Just endless shapes. There's a dark board. And then there's, for some reason, there's a shooting gallery on the balcony. On the balcony. It's very confusing. It's, you know, daddy. And he's like, what do I want in my house?

Shooting range. Of course. Not incorrect. Anyway, so that is Mark Zuckerberg's entire bet on the future of his company and his reputation. Look, there's a great piece in New York Times by Cashmere Hill, who's a great reporter about the people who spend all kinds of days. of their lives in Horizon Worlds, and they love it, and they sleep with the headsets on, plugged into the wall. It's very much the Matrix.

They are just brains and vats, but they love it. And you know what? It's America. You want to be a brain in a vat? Godspeed. I hope your crypto investments pale. This is where we get to, like, the problem is meta. Like, there are services that do this similar, a thing like this, and people love it.

There is VR chat. There is Roblox. There is, I mean, Fortnite, depending on how you define it. It's that meta is, in a lot of ways, just uniquely. bad at trying to get people to the places where they would have fun. Yeah. I just like, you started out by saying this, they don't know what this thing is for. So it's not designed to make you have one good experience.

It was designed to prove the point that meta has spent a lot of money making a headset. Just here it is. If we had come out of this and it was like, okay, the software sucks, the thing sucks, but like some of the new tech that meta put into here, like face tracking and the improved pass-through. And it's like if we, if there was some semblance of progress here that it was like, we're not even close to there yet,

which I don't think any of us thought we would be, but at least we're in a useful or interesting direction, I would at least feel like, okay, this is like a deeply hilarious failure, but at least is like some small step in the right direction. But it even seems like all of the tech that they built that in, in theory should have at least been like a good demo isn't. Like the fact that the face tracking doesn't really seem to work at all

in any sort of meaningful, useful way, to me is way more damning than any of the rest of this for the Quest Pro. Oh, but we should mention the video pass-through is very grainy. Like, it is not usable all the time. Yeah, if you can't read texts, you have nothing. Like, that's so simple.

When you turn on the cameras and you're passing through reality, so you're doing like fake augmented reality, it's like unusually grainy. Is it the same as the Quest 2? Because the Quest 2 is like super grainy and... The Quest 2 is black and white. So this is basically the Apicolor.

Oh, cool. That's not better. Yeah, I mean, it's just like, there's a part of me and I can't, you know, there's two ways to look at this. One, if this is the absolute state of the art, then Apple is not releasing a product for five years. Yeah. Right? Like, if this is the absolute state of the art, there's no way that Apple releases a product like this. It is just not ready.

Even if the software is great, the thing the hardware can do where they're passing through the video past your part of it, they're five years away. Or Apple is way better and they've been hinting that they're going to do it just to troll Facebook and to release. this thing. Right? Like, I can't tell. But if this is the state of the art, there's no way that the Apple that we know is anywhere close to releasing a product because there's, it's not good enough to be a consumer product, especially at this price point.

And I think you're right. Like the Quest 2 is a superior product to this. If you want to like play around in VR, even if you want to do like the thing where you have two or three screens off your laptop. Yeah. Quest 2 is better because you'll get close enough to the same experience. For a fraction. of the price.

For a fraction. And the Quest 3, they already said it's coming out next year. So it'll probably be cheap too. That is super damning because that means meta is not making quick, real, meaningful progress towards this thing that it's claims is right around the corner. Like, if things have not gotten better since the Quest 2, that is scary news for meta and the whole idea of the Metaverse.

I think there's like a lot of technological challenges that are just holding this back. There's the displays. There's the cameras that can do all the spatial stuff while also. being able to be good at pass-through. There's just a lot of stuff where it's like where, you know, has anybody actually solved this problem even in like a lab somewhere? Are there actually really good ones, cameras out there that can do the spatial audio and do the good pass-through?

Well, Addy, you've used most of the products in the market. You've seen Facebook's next generation tech for control. I mean, is anyone ready? Control labs, yeah. The thing that I'm mainly curious about how third-party developers are going to use this, because I think that the tracking cameras, it is possible a lot of, like the face tracking, it's possible a lot of the shortcomings there are software related. That there are things where, you know, six months down the line, they release an update and

suddenly it gets way better. And they release, they have a like API that's accessible enough that that gets into VR chat, which is in a lot of ways much more sophisticated than Horizon Worlds, that you have all of these potential breakthroughs that I really, the thing I'm still really, I think that the past is not viable as a good product. But the face tracking, I think, has a lot of potential and could be really interesting. And I'm very disappointed that they did not find a good showcase for it. And I think it speaks badly of them that they did not, like, communicate with developers in a way that would have something ready.

Even the main thing that should be helpful to everyone, which is foveated rendering, where they derez the parts of the display that you're not looking at and put all of the, the GPU power into the part of the display where you are looking. Yeah. Which is a very cool idea. Right. Like next generation sci-fi level idea. Like how do we get the most out of a GPU in a super constrained mobile package? Yeah.

We figure out where your eyes are and we put more polygons there. It's just a cool idea. Doesn't seem to be doing anything. There's, I think, but one game that uses it, Addie. I haven't gotten an official confirmation from the meta on it, but we know there is a game. Yeah. So, yeah. It's like, even like the core promise of the thing is like not happening.

Yeah. That you're going to get higher ones. Well, because this isn't for games that they're like, they're just not trying to get developers, game developers onto this. I mean, it's for nothing is where it lands, basically, right? Like, this is for nothing. I think that there are probably cases where this works really well for people with extremely specific needs in the enterprise VR space.

Like, if you have a thing and you really want to do a particular kind of foveated rendering or you really want to do a certain kind of mixed reality, or you just really need a, I don't know, a high resolutionish headset that you can wear that's pretty mobile. Like, I don't necessarily think that this is a bad choice, but I am also not convinced that it has any really amazing use cases that make it a must buy over the competition there. And again, the competition is their own headset. The competition is also things like the HTC VFocus 3, like there's Vario, the company that does actually have just incredible resolution in the primary eye area.

Like there are other enterprise headsets. And I mean, I have no doubt that there are areas where this is definitely the best choice. It does not seem obvious to me that it's the best choice. Yeah. Well, it's on sale. We'll see how people do. My, my, I keep thinking like a 1920s newspaper editor whenever we think about sunning this up. And I'm like, it's Zuckerberg's folly.

Like, he staked his reputation on this. idea, and this is as far as he's gotten. And I, if I were meta, I would have kept this one in the lab. Like, fundamentally, I would have been like, we're working on some stuff. We've got some great demos. Quest three's coming. We're going to have the, you know, some of the stuff they did, right? They had influencers and reporters come in and put on the headset and be on Rails for 10 minutes,

and you don't quite realize that, like, you can't turn the knob all the way. Like, in a very controlled environment, this thing feels great. And then the second it encounters reality, it just falls apart. And like, I think they had to show it. I think they had to release something to prove that all this investment was worth something, especially as they're laying off 11,000 people. Oof. And the cuts are not focused on reality labs.

They're everywhere else. I think they had to have. Although they have apparently canceled their smartwatches, which is really disappointing to me. Yeah, they canceled the portal devices and the smart watches that hadn't come out. So what they got left is this headset. And if I like, ooh. I don't know. It's something.

It's something else. The video comes out next week. All right. We've got to take a break. Addy, thank you so much. When we come back, we've got to talk about Elon. We've got to talk about Taylor Swift, there's gadgets. There's much more virtual ads coming. We'll grab it. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work.

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That's Grammarly.com. Okay, we're back. Now to talk about the two biggest celebrities on the planet, Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, who I think vibe was... Oh, my God, that's... Wait, hold on. I don't like that. That's true, isn't it?

Like at this moment in our world, that is literally true. I hate it. That sucks. Well, 50% of it sucks. Yeah, 50% I don't I'm fine with. Like Gillian Anderson's just out there and y'all are just calling her trash. It's terrible. I'm sorry.

There's not a world of what Julian Anderson. It's a bigger celebrity. Somebody called her the lady from X-Files. So upsetting. Where that curve goes up and down. Oh, yeah. No. She was definitely in 1998, like, eight.

It was Jillian Anderson. Taylor Swift was in the United States. like seventh grade. She wasn't famous. The y-axis on that scale was deeply suspect. I want to know. That's an apple chart right there. Are we going to start with Elon or Taylor? Let's talk about Taylor. I want to talk about T. Swift. Let's do Taylor. Okay. So Taylor Swift, American recording artist. Have you heard of Scooter Braun? She will destroy him. Scooter, by the way, invited himself on decoder and then uninvited himself from Dealer. Well, he saw he was like, whoa, whoa, how much is he, how much T Swift does he listen to? No, never mind.

Yeah, it was not going to happen. Anyway, Taylor is on tour, the Ares Tour. She hasn't been on tour in three years. Lots of people want to go to this show. She's got to bang her new album out. Yeah. People want to see her sing. People are excited.

I have a niece and nephew who are seniors in high school. The show in Chicago is the day before the graduate. One of the shows the day before high school graduate. So, sister, I'm like, all right, this is a graduation. We're going to do this. It's going to be fun. I bought Midnight's on vinyl, as I want to do. Oh, my God, physical media.

It's great. I want it. I have it. Burn it. My niece bought it on vinyl, too. She bought all the boot. She's like hardcore fan. Yeah. She did not get the verified fan.

That's the only way. And she's on a class trip. She's not even home. So my sister and my brother-in-law were like designated to buy the tickets. But they got waitlisted. I got in. So like everyone's already kind of mad at me. But you had to be verified, right?

Yeah. But I bought the, I mean, I've purchased from Ticketmaster before. And then I signed. I was instructed. to sign up for the presale. So you were a verified Taylor Swift fan. And I had purchased the record. Yeah.

So I got the boost. I was verified. You're ready. I was like in it. Yeah. They were in the wait list. Sucks. I was in it.

Like already everyone's like sort of irritated at me. Right? All of our hopes and dreams are on me. And I'm like, do, do, do, like, right? With your bad internet. With my bad internet in the woods. I'm looking at my calendar. And I got, you got to show up on the website, a half an hour on Ticketmaster.

a half an hour to enter a waiting room and the waiting room will dump you into the queue and all this stuff. And I'm thinking like everyone in the world, well, this will just be an ordinary software experience that I have. Yeah. Where I push a button and something happens and something happens and I push another button and takes my credit card and I've accomplished my task for the day. Yeah. And I'm looking at my calendar. I'm like, oh, this is going to be weird because I'll be on the radio talking about Elon Musk while all of this clicking is occurring. Oh, no.

And the other guest on NPR at that time is Senator Ed Markey. So it's me, the Senator Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster. We're all just going to do this at the same time. And I was like, you know what? Whatever. It's NPR. My mouth can run about Elon and autopilot. He's a politician.

He won't shut up. Like, I'll be able to handle this. Yeah. There was also like a 60% chance that Ed Markey was buying Taylor Swift tickets. Right? Like, if you think about that moment, like he for sure had another screen. NPR host also doing it. So like everyone, you know, go to buy the tickets.

We're all excited because I got waitlisted for the right. day. There's like a real chance because you had to tell them what shows you wanted. Yeah. Do you know how many layers deep into like weird insane filters you are right now? Like again, to go back to the quest thing, we haven't even talked about the buying tickets. This is all like the run up to the buying tickets. So like I'm like worried I'm going to end up getting tickets for their actual graduation. Yeah. And my family is going to have to make a very important decision. You script graduation. That's easy. Yeah. We're going to skip graduate. But we, what? We got the right day the day before graduation. It's all good. So I'm like in line on the phone.

I'm like First Amendment debt. I'm like, go on your knee-lis stuff. The Nelai stuff. You can listen to it. I think I did a good job. I don't think you would know that I was like in a dead flop sweat looking at like chrome all this was happening. The thing is just immediately a disaster.

Crashing all over the place. It drops you in the queue. The queue says 2000 plus. The queue in Chicago does not move for hours. Oh. Meanwhile, all their cues are moving. Other people are getting booted. People are just lying all over the internet.

Like, I got to. in the queue, there's no tickets left. All of you should drop out, like, insanity. And, like, various big tech engineers are making Chrome extensions to show you your actual place in the queue. In, like, live. Live. That's incredible. Because in the page source, there's actually the number of people in front of you. Uh-huh. Oh. So, like, I'm watching TikToks of, like, teenage Taylor Swift fans. It's like, here's what you do. You open. And Marky's just. You hit View Source. You scroll down to line 220 of the source code. And then it will show you the key of how many people are in front of you that it's using to render the thing. And I'm like doing all this.

It's just over there being like, yeah, government. Yeah. So the queue's not moving. AOC's tweeting ticket masters of monopoly. This is all bad. Six and a half hours later, the Chicago queue moves. You were on the radio for so long. I was only a radio for now.

I canceled like all of my meetings. Like many of my meetings. I have most of my meetings on a Tuesday. Yeah. It can't today. And I was just like openly telling people, like, I'm trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets. And people, yeah. Fox Media, the company that it is, the team that we have, everyone's like, I understand.

That's a high priority. But also, this was like a cultural moment in that way, that it was like everyone could have used that excuse on Tuesday. Right. It's like, no matter what you were doing or what your responsibilities were, if you were just like, ah, Taylor Swift tickets, everybody would have been like, I understand. Please let me know if I can assist you in any way. Yeah. It's like we were all united in fighting ticket master that day. I was in more than one meeting where somebody was like, I'm here.

I'm paying attention, but I'm also trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets. Yeah. I wasn't, that was wrong. Yeah, which means I'm not here and I'm not paying attention. I wasn't at my regular computer. I was at the, because I was on the radio. Yeah. Podcasting set up.

So like, it was like, it was just like everything was great. I was on my 2015 eye pack. The whole thing is ridiculous. It's finally come through. It's a six o'clock at night. It lets me through and it immediately crashes and puts me back to the queue. This happens three times. I would.

So it gives you the page that it's like you have tickets. Do you want to buy them? And you say yes. And it says, ha ha, just kidding. Back in the queue. So then you finally get in. Oh, my God. And it's ticket master.

So you're looking at it like a picture of Soldier Field. And it's like, and then here's the part that again, I got through, I managed by tickets. I feel very lucky. I'm going to complain about the process of winning. Just like, bear with me. It's fine. This is the worst fucking video game I've ever played in my entire life. Because they're just lighting up seats on a giant picture of Soldier Field.

And then they're fading out. And you have to decide. So you have to, it's like, I need six tickets. I need them all together. There's like clumps of two and four everywhere. There's packages. All the tickets are being like bought by the 17,000 other people that are trying to buy tickets. And you're like, okay, I'm going to hit refresh the sections around where I want to sit are lit up.

I'm going to double click on those and it's going to zoom very slowly. And while the zooming is happening, sold out. I'm going to watch the seats that have been available disappear. So then it was, I'm going to refresh. I'm only going to zoom halfway. I have one of those Logitech mice where you can undo the wheel detents and you can smooth scroll. So I'm going to figure out how to roll it exactly halfway. And so I get click targets.

They're not huge. They're just some click targets. And then I'm going to try to click six times as fast as I can. When I say it's the worst video game ever made. Like, I did this for a half an hour. Oh, my God. The whole time I was like, this is so stupid. You know I want six tickets.

Like dinner's ready. You know how much I'm willing to pay. Just like, it's a computer. Yeah. Instead you're playing like scroll wheel arbitrage. Just like find six tickets near each other that with this total number. Yeah. And then be like, these are your tickets.

And I'd be like, thank you, sir. No. It's like, here's what you're going to do. You're going to refresh a picture of a stadium. Some parts of the stadium will be blue. You're going to try to scroll in on the zoom, on the blue parts to find little orange circles with stars in them. Then click on six of those.

If you don't click on all six at once, someone can take them from you. Then you have to start over half an hour. Get all the way through this. You're not good at this game. It sounds like a Mario Party mini game that I would have hated on the Nintendo 6.4. It was the worst video game I've ever played. I called my sister in the middle of this and I was like, I'm going to cry. And she's like, are you in?

I'm in, but it's worse something. This isn't even over yet. There's actually, there's one more layer of software chaos. Okay. They get in. I get the six tickets. They're in the car. They're not all together.

I got four and two. I feel great. hit the button. Save payment information. Put in the three-digit CVVM on the card. Yeah. Doesn't go through. What the fuck?

Try it again. It doesn't go through. What the fuck? Enter the card over again. Start from scratch. Put the card in. It doesn't go through. You've tried to pay with this card too many times.

Dumps me back out. This is a real thing to happen. Right as it dumps me back out, I get a text message for my credit card. Fraud alert. Were you trying to buy tickets one ticket? I was like, yes. I literally wrote yes. Fuck you.

back. And it was like, go ahead and try again. I was like, no, I can't. Did it all gun. Played the video game for another four or five minutes. Got the tickets in the end. Played the video. I was good at the video game. It was good around. Yeah. You know how you're like playing old school Mario. And you're like, you kind of suck and then like, I don't know if this is ever happened to you. It's happening when I was a kid. Like, there'd be like a power blip or the game would crash right at the end. You're like, I've got to do it again. And then the second time you really get at it. Yeah. Is that? Yeah. Perfect. All intended actually. Ticketmaster. That's like. Finally at 730. I played the. I played the. the video games paid with a different credit card. Okay. Sent my sister of Victoria's screenshot. And she called me. She's like, how do you feel? And I was like, I hate you. Like, this has been one of the worst days, my life.

That was literally your day. Like, that was what I did that day. Oh, my God. Now, the parts of this, right? And I've seen other ticket vendors, like, there are ways to do this better. But it does not create the cultural moments that all the artists want. Right. You want Ticketmaster to crash.

That is a sign of success. You want there to be more demand than you have sales for. You want all your customers furious. You want, in some cases, you want the secondary market because Ticketmaster owns the secondary market and they get a cut of all those sales. I mean, that was like the whole thing with the PS5 and the Xbox series X where it's like, okay, you want to be in the grind. I don't actually.

I hate the grind. I mostly agree with that premise, but I think it turns on you eventually, right? And it's like, it has clearly turned on Ticketmaster in this moment, which we should talk about. But I think one of the interesting things to me is when people do and don't get mad at the artists involved. Because there have been times where, like, this just recently happened with Blink 182, where everybody got really mad at Blink 182 for charging like many hundreds of dollars for basically every ticket to every one of its concerts. And then that became this whole story about actually how Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing works, which is more like airlines where it's all about supply and demand. And they essentially surge price and so now everything is really expensive so that they get the secondary market out of it. And it's like this whole system sucks and is opaque.

And who we decide to be mad at seems to vary kind of based on the day. And of course, Taylor Swift has never done anything wrong in her life. So we can't be mad at Taylor Swift. So it's starting to come for her, right? People are like, why have you said anything? Why are you apologizing this? Starting to come. But a lot of the early anger was pointed at Techmaster.

Ticketmaster did put out their explainer blog post today. By the way, they canceled the actual public sale. So they said they sold out, which is not. I mean, literally, Ticketmaster's whole excuse has been like, did you guys know that Taylor Swift is this popular? And we're all like, yes, it's Taylor's like, everything Ticketmaster has said is basically like we are bad at our jobs. So the thing that's really just on the tech level. So their whole thing was they were overwhelmed by demand, as David Singh. They're expecting 1.5 million verified pre-sale people.

They 14 million people showed up and they got three and a half billion requests. Okay. I believe you that that is a crazy number is more than you thought. But that's also, even that itself is a technological failure on Ticketmasters part, right? The fact that 14 million people needed to generate three and a half billion requests to their servers to buy ticket is already a failure of Ticketmaster's technology. And there's like some bots in there, but it's like you know how many people because of how this all, this whole system worked where you have to be a verified fan and some people were on a wait list and some people weren't. You know the total number of people who are eligible to buy tickets. those people should go into a system that can manage that demand.

And then the other 12.5 million people in bots can go to a YouTube video or like whatever it is. You can just send them somewhere else. That's the thing that does not add up in this explanation and this blog post and all these other things they've said is somehow, even though we were in control of gating this demand, we let through these other 12.5 million people in. bots who generated three and a half billion requests. And then we sold out of tickets. And they put the other two million verified fans, including your sister. On a wait list. On a wait list. So they didn't even like, so there's like 14 million people being like, I'm going to get in. And your sister's like, I can't. Yeah. There's just a procedural step here that doesn't add up. That's like you are not in control of your software. And then you can

zoom that out. Right. So take a master's owned by Live Nation. Actually, the chain of corporate ownership here is great. Take a Master's owned by Live Nation. Okay. Because Live Nation is a big concert promoter. They own a lot of venues. They bought ticket master in a deal that many people are putting AOC and your friendly local podcast host, Stanley Patel, things should not have gone through because of clear vertical merger. Now the, now tick, if you want to play, if you're an artist, you want to play in a city, you have to like go deal with the mob. Yeah. Like, they own the venues, they own the ticketing. You're paying some money to this corporation. Totally vertically. They also, Live Nation also manages a lot of artists. Yep. Like directly. Yeah, they have

It's even more, like, literally from the building down to the person working the building, they own every single part of the whole stack. 30% of Live Nation is owned by Liberty Media, which also owns F1, which is great. Cool. I mean, Liberty is a huge investor in Warner Brothers Discovery. It's just like, it's just a big consolidated situation. Yeah. That's not to say that Liberty CEO, John Lone is not kind of like a straight shooting genius.

He's like, here's what I do. I buy everything and then I make money. I appreciate that about it. But it's just this big stack of consolidation. Taylor Swift, not a live nation artist. Taylor Swift's tour is run by AEG, which is the only other big monopoly. They put on Coachella and all this other stuff. And so Ticketmaster's defense is you all think we're a monopoly, but even AEG chose Ticketmaster.

Because you're all that exists. And it's like, yeah, because anyone else who tries is crushed by your monopoly. Yeah. Like that's the actual problem here. No other ticket vendor can reach scale because they can't go to Live Nation venues. and they can't service Live Nation artists, so everyone else is small. So when an artist at the scale of Taylor Swift

has to go buy the service, her options on the market are risked with companies that cannot operate at the scale or you. Bob's ticket sales. Right. It's like if your choice was AWS or yourplex server.

Like those are Taylor's choices. Come on, Taylor. It's going to be great. And like that's like the fundamental thing that people are talking on here is because Live Nation owns Ticketmaster, no other ticketing service can address those venues and achieve the appropriate scale. And Ticketmaster is Monopoly and they can concoct these like ultimately unsatisfying explanations.

And that's all you can do. Well, I think it's more than that too. It's also they don't have to do a good job. They never have to do a good job. And they never have done a good job. Name a time where Ticket Master, like using Ticketmaster was a pleasant experience. Okay. 1987.

Were you high? When I bought the tickets from the back room of the Coles department store, which had the ticket master computer. That was it. That was it. Yeah. And then. That was like a real thing. That was their, by the way, that was innovation was they put computers in like department stores around the country on a proprietary ticket master network.

You had to go to the stadium where it's being sold. And my sister would do this, like stand outside and wait a day or two in advance and go through and do it. It's kind of like when you go to buy a PS. Yes. three. Alex, are you just explaining how buying tickets works? You know what? Yes.

We have young audience. We have like their young verge cast people who are like, what was it like before? Papa? We'll just go back. So the movie days and confused, like a huge plot. Like the plot of this movie is the next day they're going to go buy tickets. Yeah. That is true.

Yeah. You don't think that that's the plot of the movie. That's the plot of the movie. Which is if they have to make it through the night and not be so stoned they can't go by tickets. Which would be more fun getting really stoned and barely making it in time to buy your tickets by lining up or what you did on Tuesday? The worst video game in American history. I'm going to go with the other thing.

That movie seemed rad. But so there's like this middle ground. That's what I'm saying. There's a middle ground if you have to physically go and buy tickets in the 70s with your friends. Yeah. Great. You can do the computer in Coles. Matthew McConaughey is there.

Yeah. Then there's the 80s in early 90s where ticket master is like, here's what we're going to do. Sears is going to sign up for a phone line. We're going to give them a 20-baud modem and a weird mainframe and train someone to use it and we're going to consolidate ticketing on our client server system.

Yeah. This is legitimately the ticket master innovation. Right. They built a weird network on the phone lines. Which, by the way, the government broke up 18T and required the phone companies to allow things to connect to their phone lines. Just a side note.

It's a card of phone decision. We think about it a lot here at the first cast. It enabled Ticketmaster to explain. then they moved out onto the internet got rid of the checkout staff at cole's department store don't need them and they're like you're going to do it yourself self checkout yes so the the thing they're doing is still this network it just you're doing self checkout and it sucks and it sucks but they own they still own the network they still control the venues and now they control the artists and you would think that any big company the number of tweets I saw our friend marquez tweeted

uh Taylor should just start our own ticketing company it's like yeah now you're all the way at the point where it's like, oh, I could just set up a server and run tickets. Oh, you get your Plex server. Yeah, you get your Plex server. Yeah, you get your PLECLEC, I don't know if you know this. An NVIDIA shield, a single NVIDIA shield can run all of Ticketmaster. It's true. What you don't have is the four decades of venue contracts that you need and four decades

of being mobbed up in the music industry and then being owned by Live Nation and then being on and on and on. So at the end of the day, it's not the technology has been commodified out, even though that was a thing that enabled the business in the 80s. Now it's just a bunch of contracts that you can't break through. Right. There are plenty of other ticketing platforms on the internet. Like if you just want to say, like, Taylor Swift could have gone to Event Bright and been like,

hey, I'm going to sell all my tickets through Event Bright, right? Like, there's a million of these out there. It's just that none of them can sell interesting tickets because of this actual monopoly that exists, right? It's like the only way to take down Ticketmaster is to build a bunch of concert venues. Like, that's literally what it is. And to sign Jay Zay into a 360 deal. Right, exactly.

And easy. Yeah. And so it's like you can't, you can't beat Ticketmaster without essentially taking on the entire live music industry, which no one is able to do because it's impossible at this moment in time. We have a grand idea is for how to make a combination YouTube video decoder episode about this. So I'm going to put a pin in this. We'll come back to it. There's a great John Oliver segment about this. Also, you can just go back to the 90s and watch Pearl Jam testify to Congress about the Ticketmaster Monopoly.

That's a real thing you can do with your time while you're waiting for your dealership tickets to live. No, they're sold out. That's the video that Ticketmaster should have sent the other 12.5 million people to. That would have been a cool move. All right. Let's quickly talk about Elon. Then we'll take a break and we'll do a gadgets. Sounds good.

We'll do a gadget lightning round. Elon. David. What's going on? So we're kind of out of the like brief bonkers chaotic product phase and into the like Elon Musk blows up the orc chart phase, I would say. So I think right around now, as we're recording this, is the set deadline for all Twitter employees to literally fill out a form on the internet, as far as I can tell, that says either I am committed to being, what was the, what was the quote, extremely hardcore in building

the next phase of Twitter? Or if you check yes, welcome to, you know, hardcore Twitter. If you check no, that is, you have resigned from the company. This cannot possibly be legal. I am not a lawyer. I don't know anything. There's just no way that this is how many of this actually works. But so that's happening. He's like he's very clearly trying to weed a lot of people out of the company as fast as he possibly could, right? He's been firing anyone who criticized him on Twitter. He's been firing people who criticized him in Slack. He is out there saying he doesn't want to be the CEO of Twitter or any company, which is something he said before. I think he said that during a deposition about Tesla.

And so he's just now at this place where he's like, okay, Twitter blue, we rolled it out. It went horribly. We're rolling it back. That's now set to come out November 29th. And it's very clear that he is in full, like, birth. turn Twitter the company to the ground and build it back up phase. And whether that's going to be possible, I think it's the next thing to see. But like, that's the distinct vibe I get is that he's really, really hoping a lot of people

check no on that box tonight, right? Except too many people check now already. There's a problem. This is happening while we've been recording. Oh, wow. So the deadline is arriving. There's a newsletter called the pragmatic engineer that's been reporting on this. That authorized a Twitter account.

He's been putting a lot of stuff there. Basically, like teams of 50, 40 people are like, I'll quit. So Elon is now holding meetings where he's like, Because it gets severance. Because they get severance. Although the terms of the severance agreement are not, they haven't been released. So you have to basically say I leave. I agree to a contract that I haven't read, which is, I wouldn't do that.

I wouldn't do that. They're already being sued over that. It's like the lawsuit got filed while we were talking. When he fired half the company two weeks ago, he promised severance that at least as far as we've heard so far has not yet materialized. So I think there's a lot of reason to believe this is not. up and up. Right. So he's already in labor lawsuit, number one, but then too many people are leaving, so he's asking him back. He's already relaxed his work from home rules. So initially he said

you can either work in this office or it's resignation accepted. Got a lawsuit for that one, too. Got a lawsuit for that one. Because you have to have an office that's inclusive and accessible. You have to make accommodations for people who need it. And he's not to do that. Can you tell that Alex is a person who handles all this stuff on the verge team? Can you tell the managing editor is a good manager. Sorry, sorry. There was a time when I knew this stuff. But now, I got Alex Kranz, everybody.

It's great. Highly recommended. He hasn't made reasonable accommodations for people. He's relaxed the work from home rules into this sort of ransom situation. Yeah. Where if your manager vouches for you that you're extraordinary, then you can work from home. He's cool, man. And if they're wrong, they're fired.

And it's like, I would not. do that. Yeah. It's just another bet I wouldn't make because who knows what the criteria are and whether they will change. What is the definition of cool, man? Also, you've already fired half of everyone. Why would I be like, they're great.

I'm putting my job on the line for it when no one knows how you make decisions. Yeah. That's another lawsuit that's waiting to come. And so he's having in all hands, I believe right now, the reason Alex Heath is not with us on this episode is because there's an all hands happening while we record where he's basically saying, please stay at Twitter, even though I have asked most of you to leave if you're not hardcore enough. Is that about the summary of it? Yeah, that's about right. And this is, this is perfectly in keeping with what the last several weeks have been like, right? It's just,

like, all the Elon Musk era of Twitter has been is just whipsawing back and forth between these, like, grand proclamations and really quick shipping of something, oh, God, that didn't work. We have to undo that. And then, like, 15 minutes later, some crazy grand proclamation slash new feature in a different direction. Like, this is what blue was. This is what very. verification was. Remember the official badge that was there and gone and there and gone and there and now I think it's gone again. The verge keeps getting the official badge and it keeps going away. Like over and over. This keeps happening. It's like it honestly is like the company is just absolutely spinning out of control in all directions at all times now. And there has been a lot of

people saying essentially that this is on purpose, that this is how you do a cultural reset and that he is trying to blow up the company. And you've got to figure that there's going to come a time where he looks around and goes, oh, God, I need some employees. I keep thinking about the thing he says about WhatsApp, right? Where he's like, WhatsApp got to 2 billion users with 50 engineers. Like, does he just want 50 people to work at Twitter? Because, like, he's well on the way to that. Yeah, I think that's the entire thing.

You know, a lot of people have been saying, oh, he's going to blow it up because he wants to blow up Twitter because he's mad because he had to pay 54 or 20 a share for it. I don't believe in that for the record. And I don't think that at all. And I think the idea that he's going to destroy it out of spite, I think is wrong. I just don't know that. Yeah. I think he is aggressively saying, like, think about it. His companies, he maybe didn't create.

those companies, SpaceX and Tesla, even though he's technically a founder. He didn't create those companies, but he created the culture there. And he created a culture that is very like, we work hard. That's it. We just work hard. We go as hard as we can. Sometimes sexual harassment happens. And that is the price we pay for doing really cool rocket ships and stuff. And Twitter is from a very different culture of like, we care about our employees. We believe in work life balance. We believe that, like, people shouldn't die just to make a weird app on the internet. Yeah. And so he has to reset that culture.

And he can either do that, like, the slow and gentle long-term way, which would take years, or you can be like, everybody get out. And I'm going to take the wreckage. I'm going to save a bunch of money because I'm not having to pay all of these people. And if I can weather the storm of the shit show that I've created, then on the other side of this, I'm going to be fine. And it seems very clear that that's the decision he's made. Even though it's a bad one. Gross.

I agree 100%. And I think the thing that he's doing is thinking that Twitter is the same as Tesla and SpaceX, right? And this has been sort of talked about to death that like, you know, oh, he runs Tesla and SpaceX. He must know how to run Twitter. Why are all of you people on Twitter mad at this? And I think like what seems to be true is that working at Tesla and SpaceX like largely

sucks. But there are a lot of people who work there believing that it is in service of something really good, right? Like we are either going to space or we are like saving the planet. Or we really like Elon Musk. The entire point of a Tesla AI day is to like inoculate people get the, or not inoculate, but I wish. But like, bring them in. Everyone, here's a guy in a suit.

Everyone's got an MRI shot. But it is about like making, like finding these people who will put up with all of his bullshit who will see a dude in a suit dressed as a robot and be like, that's the future I want. Inductinate. There's a word. That's the one I meant to say. So he really is out like Tesla AI Day is there to indoctrinate these people. And he's got to do that at Twitter now. And that's like that's kind of his plan. He's like, I'm going to get out everybody who doesn't want to be a part of my vision. Who doesn't want to be. The problem is that his vision does not make any sense and is actually not really well articulated. Well, because his vision is what Elon wants. Elon gets. That's the vision. He's really out there saying, Do you want to be a part of an Elon Musk enterprise? If not, get out. No, I'll be more charitable. And I've been very rude to Elon on Twitter because I know that he's reading all the tweets and that he reads the virtue every day.

It's great when you know that you have that feedback loop. Yes. With SpaceX and with Tesla, the vision is crystal clear. The steps to the vision are obvious. And the challenges are crystalline, right? SpaceX is we want humanity to be an interplanetary species. I need to put people on Mars. To get there, we have to launch rockets and land them because the first problem is cutting the cost of a launch down.

Right. And they went and they solved the first engineering problem, which is launch the rockets, land them, make the rockets reusable. Very impressive. Very impressive. But like, there's a big goal, right? There's all the goals underneath it. And then there's the first goal, which is land the rocket stage and reuse it to lower the cost of getting to orbit. And they went and accomplished that.

And then that one in the market, as it should have. Yeah. Now our rocket launchers are cheaper than everyone else is. We're the market leader. Let's go. We win. Right. Okay.

Then his goals are like, hilarious. Like, space suits look cool. So kids want to go to space. Like, this is the thing he said. I thought it was like one of the raddest things he's ever said. Yeah. Right. It should look cool.

It should be inspiring and awesome. Okay. We're going to totally computerize the capsule so that when we send astronauts the ISS, they're not really doing anything. They're just looking at screens because computers are better at this. They did it. Yeah. Okay.

So, like, you see, like, they're solving these really hard engineering. challenges that are all baby steps to the big goal. Tesla, I think, is the same way, right? We want to reduce the amount of emissions on the planet. Everybody who works on autonomous driving knows that computers are better drivers than people. You want to decrease the rate of fatalities. You can argue about whether that will ever come true. You know, it's a noble mission.

It's a more challenging AI problem than almost anything. I would say we're not much farther along the autonomous driving curve than we were five years ago. Well, and that's actually a, good like counter example of what you're talking about right where like i would actually argue that Tesla's vision for self-driving is incredibly like murky and unclear and in the way that it's vision for like you know curbing emissions and electrifying the entire vehicle industry is like crystal clear and to your point it's like it has steps towards it and we kind of know what the end game looks like self-driving is just this like messy thing that nobody kind of knows what it's going to be at the end

yeah it's proving so much harder to do and so even ion's vision some of his pronounce have assumed that he will solve this hardest of all engineering problems. Yeah. We'll have a million robotaxies in a year is a thing that he has said on the assumption that they will solve self-driving. Right. And so they just have to keep doing it. But like he assumes he will solve the engineering problems.

He will do the thing. The problem with Twitter is even the big pronouncements, the pronouncements at the level of we will go to Mars or we will have a million robotaxies in a year or whatever it is. His big pronouncements are like, shit, the online news association was. talking about in 2007. Yep. Bloggers will compete with journalists.

Citizens will make the news. Yeah, he was tweeting a lot about that. We will crowdsource truth. And it's like, you guys, like, I live through this. It was boring the first time. Like, do you want to, can I just like do a search about bloggers versus journalists and show you some crap from 2001? Like, we did this already.

And we know what it looks like. And it is true that social media has like changed the dynamics of the news. And like, my God, man. Like, we cannot do, like, the best journalists, the most relevant journalists you can think of, all came up as hardcore bloggers and social media personnel. Like, down the line, you pick a field in journalism and you're like, who's at the top? And it's like, that person had a blog spot. Yeah. And they blogged their face off.

That's where we all came. Like, it's just true. Like, the thing that he is describing is happening on Twitter already happened. Yep. It happened at scale. It reorganized the show. shape of the world. It's happening as we speak sometimes.

It's happening on TikTok right now. So you just, you can't get to this vision without, A, engaging with the fact that the conversation has already like been had at massive scale with, in a way that reorganized the shape of the culture. Like black Twitter exists.

Do you guys remember we spent like several years of our life just talking about the words on fleek? Yes. And who should get paid for the words on. That's Twitter. That's black Twitter creating culture. Yep. and having it cycled out into the mainstream.

And there was, I mean, to this day, I think there's a reasonable discussion and debate over where the money should flow. That cycled into TikTok dances. Like, we've just done this a thousand times. Ferguson is a, Casey Newton and I both have t-shirts that Jack Dorsey and Doreen gave us. After Ferguson, after Black Twitter, like, used Ferguson to create awareness of police brutality, they handed us T-shirts at a conference that said, stay woke with a Twitter bird on them.

I can't find my, I know Casey. Like, we did this already. Yeah. And you cannot destroy a company and say, my vision is what this company was already doing. Right. You have to engage the very squishy problem of what do you mean by a town square,

a digital town square. You have to engage with reality. Right. And I just think, like, yeah, maybe he's got a vision for Tesla that you can understand. And I think that's a great vision. And I honestly think SpaceX is the more impressive company because the challenge was harder. And the idea that you could actually reinvent a government-run business in a market-driven.

Like, that's so cool. And notably he doesn't run that day-to-day there. Notably, Gwen Shotwell runs that company. Yeah. Oh, SpaceX got sued today by nine employees. This is following on a great piece of Lauren Greshrut for us. They wrote several employees at SpaceX wrote a letter saying this company basically tolerates sexual harassment.

Yep. They all got fired. They were dragged into a meeting where they were told, this is Elon's company, either with Elon or against him. Yep. To follow the lawsuit. So even SpaceX,

someone insulated from the chaos because of the person of Gwen Shotwell, maybe not so insulated. Yeah. I just think there's no vision for Twitter. So you cannot blow up the company. Yes. Right?

And say, I've got a vision, and it's these platitudes that are like 2001, 2003 level, what does it mean for journalists to use the internet platitudes? because obviously we're all just going to dunk in you all day and night. But that's the thing. It's like it would be one thing if he was basically trying to recreate Twitter from the ground up,

which would be like a very funny outcome. Because he is, he's tweeting all the things. Like, I'm just looking at his Twitter now. His most recent tweet says Twitter is like open sourcing the news, which like I guarantee you Jack Dorsey has tweeted at some point in the mid-2000s. I guarantee it. Dude, do you remember when Reddit tried to figure out who the Boston Marathon Bombers were and then got it wrong?

that's what happens when the open source the news. Yeah. So and then, but he says that on the one hand. And then he talks about, you know, making the X the everything app, which nobody knows what the hell that means. But it has something to do with payments. And apparently Casey and the platform crew, they got a thing that says he's bringing long tweets back. So he wants to invent blogging. It's like Twitter has always been this like weird sort of amorphous thing.

Apparently Vine might come back. Like there is no plan. I just want to read you a headline. Here's a headline that we wrote in 2013. Reddit apologizes for online witch hunts. It asks community to be sensitive of its own power. This is after they open source the news and they try to figure out who the Boston Marathon bombers were until they found the wrong person and an online mob descended upon them.

We have been through the cycle before. So these platitudes that are ignorant of all of the history of these ideas are not going to motivate anyone at Twitter who is deeply aware of, like, again, I would need to say this every single time. Criticism of Musk running Twitter is not praise of Twitter under previous administrations. Poorly run company. A badly run company. But one of the reasons it's run so badly is because it has always been paralyzed by its own, like, its own overwhelming power. Right. Twitter's influence is disproportional to its size and its revenue. And because they've always been so aware of it, they're paralyzed into not doing anything.

Whereas Facebook hilariously influences directly proportional to its size and revenue. And they're like, screw it. Let's do a genocide. Right. Like Mark Zuckerberg is like, screw it. We're so important. I need to set up a Supreme Court that will issue four decisions a year. Yeah.

Twitter is like, what if we are just paralyzed? And I just think like I'm looking at all this must stuff. And again, he told his staff, Twitter is at heart, a software and servers company. And it's like, no, it's not you. You are a social sciences company. You're a content moderation company. You run a small country and you're the king of that country. And the most important thing about that country is if the citizens of that country can pull your pants down, they will.

That's Twitter. You're the king of a country whose sole purpose is to pants you. Good luck. It's not software and servers. But he thinks it's like I genuinely think a lot of his stuff about making it the town square doing all of this is platitudes to explain the fact that like what he really wants. He wants to do the big X-Everything app. That's like his endgame. He said it repeatedly.

And I think everything in between that is just, how do I get people to abide by the cult personality that is Elon Musk? If you want to do the ex-Tadvade, you've written about these apps before, right? In China and other countries, we chat is like a dominant social fabric app. Everything happens on this. And he wants to do that. Like he said repeatedly, I want to do that here. And with his current team, he's not going to do that because that's not what

Twitter is. But you need more than 50 engineers, it turns out. You need more than 15 engineers. You need more than 229 million users. Yeah. Yep. You need a lot. Like, one of the reasons WeChat works is there's like a one and a half billion people

in China and they all use it. Well, and the, I mean, this like, WeChat had a hook, right? Like, WeChat had, we chat was first a like massively successful messaging app. And that was the thing it had going for it. And then once you have that, you have this big captive audience you can bake all kinds of stuff into. And for a million cultural reasons, this is impossible to do in the United States. I would bet anything you asked me to bet that no one, including Elon Musk, will ever pull this off in the United States because it is just not how our ecosystem works and how we do life in technology.

But it all requires more than 50 engineers. And it requires a thing people want to use, which is being systematically destroyed on both ends every single day by Elon Musk right now. Yeah. All right. So we've wrapped up Elon. We'll see how this goes. Every day is chaos. I will tell you once a week, the Virgin editorial team gathers,

and I say, are we over covering Elon? And we all kind of look at each other, and we say, not yet. So we have received a request for a button on our homepage that will turn Elon stories off. We've taken... That's a good idea. It's just a straight Elon filter. There's other stuff happening. The tech industry is in turmoil.

There's new gadgets, which we should talk about. But this thing that is happening at Twitter, I feel like is the biggest story in the world. because for, I mean, well was my thesis and welcome to hell, Twitter will destroy your reputation and potentially cause grievous damage to other companies. And it's happening so much faster than I expected. So we'll see how this goes. If you has to sell more Tesla stock,

who's not great. Okay, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about gadgets on this, the Verchast. I love a gadget. It took us an hour and 40 minutes to get there. We're in an hour 40. All right.

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Claude.aI. slash vergecast. Okay, we're back. We are just way over, just ridiculously over. 45 more minutes of Elon, let's go. Let's go. That's going to be fun. We're going to talk about gadgets.

Alex, run the lightning round. It's barely on here, but what I really want to talk about is that Qualcomm announced a whole new brand for Windows CPUs. Because this time, this time, Qualcomm is serious about Windows CPUs. Okay, I cannot, for the life of me, remember this word. I looked at it a lot last night, and I was like, oxymoron? Oroboros? Like what is it? Orion. Orion. Oh, it's a Y.

Or, why. No? O'Royan. Oh, Ryan. Oh, Ryan. Oh, Ryan. It's poorly spelled O-R-Y-O-N. I'm going to call it Orion. Orion. It's Orion. It's Orion. O'I-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-I. I will hear no other answer. It's Orion forever. Quakum did this to themselves. It's definitely Orion, but it is Orion.

So there are no details about the CPU. No details. It will be released in 2023. What is interesting is that this is using part of a company called Nuvia that Qualcomm acquired a couple of years ago. That's made up a bunch of engineers who worked on Apple's chips back in the day. And those eventually became the M1, which is a very, very good CPU. So theoretically, the same could happen for Qualcomm. But given that Qualcomm's been trying to do this for how many years? I'm not super optimistic. Quakom chips to me are like the LG display screens that you see every once in a while where they're just like, here's a neat thing we made and then you never see it again. Like the number of times quacom has been like, oh, there's a problem that you have with your headphones slash car slash tablets slash television slash wearables slash PC. We'll fix it. And then they put out a chip and you're like, is this the one that you said was going to fix it?

And they're like, yeah, it's slow. But next generation, we're going to fix it. It's going to be great. And this is just what we do. It's like we are kicking the football and Qualcomm is, is Lucy just jerking away its chip every time we try to get. It's driving crazy. So I want to two things. One, Qualcomm announces at their yearly junket in Hawaii.

We did not attend. Which we won't take, we won't let companies pay for junkets. And I don't want to send anybody to Hawaii unless it's me. We're just not paying the money to Hawaii. You're like, and I go to Hawaii. To watch them be like, here's a spelling of the word of Ryan that you've not. seen before. No further details.

Perfect use. So this happens like, this happened late at night at Hawaii time. We're just like, what is this? No details. Yeah. But know that there is a very fancy

Qualcomm junket going on in the background. There are, by the way, entire industries that are basically like junket driven. Mm-hmm. Like I love cars. I'd love to cover cars more. We have to overcome the ethical barrier of the junket driven car media,

which we cannot do. Like 90% of entertainment media is like, do you want to just go hang out with Chris Evans? You can for 30 minutes. come to Budapest. I do. I do. I will.

Thank you for asking. It's like, yes. I know that the disclosures are a joke for us across the board, but it's like, oh, man, I can't do that many disclosures. Too many. That's just the verge. That's the verge cast, folks. We took a trip to Hawaii. We went to Budapest, Chris Evans was there.

Then I drove a Cadillac across the mountains. That was also, like, it's all like that. Whatever. It's fine. We do our best. We pay for when it's important. But there's this big Qualcomm event going on. So there's a bunch of Qualcomm event.

Second thing, Nuvia is really fascinating, right? So a bunch of X Apple engineers. They got sued by Apple. Qualcomm by Nuvia. So Arm has sued Qualcomm so you can't make these trips. Apple's mad at Nuvia. So you took some stuff from us. And Qualcomm is out there being like, Orion.

We're doing it. It doesn't matter. So it's just like these chips, this name, a lot of baggage underneath this collection of letters. And what if it just sucks on top of all of that? It finally comes out and you're like, cool. It's going to. High three level. Yeah, it's just, I don't know.

Are we at a point now where Qualcomm like made one really good thing 20 years ago and we just forgot that they never made me a list? Wait, I need to, I need to be, I need to make clear. Hold on. Apple did not file a lawsuit against Nuvia. Oh. They filed the lawsuit against Gerard Williams III, who is the chief architect. Ah. He was a chief architect of the M series.

and then he left to start Nubia. So they filed it against him, not NUvia itself. This is important but not important because presumably he's architecting the chips in Niuvia. But anyway, Apple's got a lawsuit against some of the things that are happening in Nuvia. Arm has a lawsuit against Qualcomm. And you're right, David. They've got to actually make the chips.

They've got to be good. But theoretically, they bought this company to get ahead of the curve lawsuits. Yeah. O'Ryan. Orion. All right. What's next on the online area? All right.

Next up is, I mean, this one's for me. I'm very excited about it. The Elgado's new stream deck. It's the stream deck plus and it's got knobs. That's it. I will say this is one of our best headlines ever. And Alice wrote it. Elgado's new stream deck joins the knob mob.

Yeah. It's definitely sounds like a hip hop crew. It's very pretty. I want one. I have no idea what I've used it for. Yeah, same. Like, it's perfect. I just, I don't know what I'll do with it, but I'm going to have a great time.

It's got a bunch of knobs. We've been seeing that a lot in like the keyboard space. Everybody's like, you know what your keyboard? board needs, big old knob. And it's nice that stream deck was like, you know what? Yes. Yeah. Let's do it.

This just makes me happy. Like the verge believes in buttons. This is like a thing I feel very strongly. It's like we, we the verge, we believe in buttons. And this has a lot of buttons. Yeah. And it has a little tiny touch barry thing. But you don't have to touch that because you can just control it with the knobs.

And the knobs look nice. They have a little like reflective thing on them for when the light shines. It's lovely. It makes me happy. Yeah. Everything about this. Put them all to my volume so that I can spin all. All of them at the same time just to make the volume go up really fast.

It's going to be sick. It's going to be really, really cool. Every button is an emotional adventure that you can take. It's true. Any button you see in your life, someone put it there and someone pushes it, and those are all decisions. A lot of feelings got to get tied up in all those decisions. I love it. And then Sonas had their earnings call this week, and they confirmed that they plan to enter four new product categories starting next year.

One of those is likely going to be some Sonos headphones, which I don't personally think makes sense. but I feel like David has contested this before on the Vergecast with me. Yeah, I just feel like if you're Sonos, you have to make headphones at some point. Like, it's just, it's taken them too long. Like, just make headphones. Like, we get it. Your Sonos. I kind of thought them getting into the whole portable speaker thing was a weird idea that

it's like, if you want to invest in the home, invest in the home. But they need to do other stuff. So just buy all the way in. Make your AirPods Macs competitor. Make your AirPods competitor. and just try to be the real full audio company that runs your whole life. Like, for all I know, they're going to start making, like, third-party speakers to put into your car. Like, Nila's going to swap out the car play thing in his Jeep for a Sonos thing in his Jeep,

and that's where this is going to be. It could happen. It could happen. But, like, I think what was really interesting is they said new categories. So we know that a bunch of Chris Welch has done a lot of reporting and shown that we're getting a new, like, Sub, I think we're getting a new kind of replacement for the Sonos play five. The Optimo. The Optimo.

It's good. It's great. But these are new categories. One of them may be a home theater box or your dream. They've got to make a receiver. I'm telling you the thing they should make. Patrick, if you're listening to this, and I know you are, make a receiver and make the lights really big on the front. Yeah.

Right? Just a big atmosphere light. One light for every speaker channel. Boom. Just big lights. Just look at a glance. It's all I want in the world. Just see everything.

Yeah, the home theater thing seems like it's definitely going to happen. Like that's another one where it's just like Sonos, just finish the job. Right? Like they've been sort of trending towards this for a while. It's like either make a TV or make a set top box. Just do it. I'm bored of dealing with your nonsense. Just make the damn box.

But gigantic LED indicators for Atmos for vision for every channel of speakers. That's all I work. Really, like, I imagine now that if I were to like walk into your house, there would just be like a glowing neon. Dolby Atmos sign above your television. It's just like... You know, we actually don't watch movies. We just watch that one Atmos cliff.

We're here in a forest and it's raining. Like, come... Let's go watch a movie. I'm like, you're in this forest again. All right, what else you got? And then Chris, this is also from Chris. He really, really, really liked Amazon Alexa's voice remote pro. Is that the one with the big buttons?

It's got the big buttons. It's got backlight. So you can, like, see the big buttons. It's still got... buttons that are like Netflix, Hulu, but they're buttons you'd actually use. No Blockbuster in sight. So Netflix, Prime Video, Disney Plus, and Hulu paid to be on this. They paid and like, okay, I'm glad you took their money and not what's Walmart's thing called. Voodoo. Voodoo. I don't want Voodoo ever. It's never going to happen. I used Voodoo for a while because

it had a higher bit rate than anyone else. And then Walmart bought it. And now I don't know. It's garbage. Don't use it. No, there's like one Voodoo fan here. You're like a Plex person. I love Plex, but I don't love Voodoo. I do like. I do. I liked that they all... All heads were deep on voodoo for a while. It's fine. I didn't have good internet then. That's why.

I bitterly hated it. It's a remote. Not off the rails. Welch gave it an eight. It's got good buttons. He really, really liked it. It was great.

We're starting to see a lot of stuff coming from Matter. So Jen Toey was in Amsterdam for the big matter announcement two weeks ago. And so we're starting to see some of that stuff start to come out. TP Link has got a huge router that's going to have Matter in it. But also is doing Y4. 7, you cannot currently, I think, buy anything that uses Wi-Fi 7. So that's some real future-proofing. But it also is, it looks like a cross between a gaming PC and a UPS.

You can like, the lights on it are customizable. So you can make like a little smiley face or a little sad, like angry little face. When I think about what I want my router to do, it's wink at me with it. Only when like you're like, is the internet being slow because my computer or the router and you look at it and the router winks, that would be like choice. and then Wise is getting into the mesh router business. I don't know if I would use a router from Wise, but it's happening. Yeah.

I mean, it's like Matter Time. And then there's like the one plug that you can buy. Yeah. So a lot of news. A lot of it's really great. It's on the site. You should all go read it. A lot of really great stuff.

The one other cool thing that was announced this week, which is actually the like one of the early 2023 stories I am most curious about is that Apple announced that the Major League Soccer streaming service it's been working on. is launching, I think, February 1st, and it's going to be $100 for the whole Major League Soccer season. I'm not even really an MLS fan, but like what it looks like when Apple builds a streaming service from scratch for sports, I think it's going to be fascinating. Yeah, they've said no blackouts. You get all the live games for $100 a season. They're going to do a like red zone style whip around show. Apple has, I would not say, done like a super great job of broadcasting sports so far.

Like it felt like it like hired a bunch of people who had never watched baseball to do its baseball show. But it's going to be really interesting to see like these two like really tied together and were like from the ground up we're going to build a new thing. And I think it's going to be fascinating. Can you do a whip around show for soccer? What's a whip around show? So like NFL Red Zone is like a whip around show where it jumps from game to game to game. Okay. But like as interesting stuff happens.

No, but like it has a very like football is a very organized sport. Yeah. Right? They're like it's called. red zone because if you're inside the 20 yard line, you're in the red zone. Yeah. So whenever any team is in the red zone, red zone cuts to that team and they're like, they're going to score a touchdown or a field goal or not, this is the exciting part of the game we're going to show to you. Yeah. And all the games happen at the same time, mostly. Right. That's the key. There's so much going on simultaneously that

it's really easy to do that. Where if you're cutting between three basketball games in a night, like, it's just, it doesn't work the same way. And then it's not as structured because you're like, Right. The soccer ball is near the goal. It's like usually nothing happens. Yeah. I feel like soccer does not lend itself. Yeah.

Like soccer is like the red zone. The beauty and elegance of these kicks and runs. The beauty and elegance of dudes falling and pretending they're hurt. There is going to be a lot of the whip around show that says, look at this awesome pass that accidentally went out of bounce. Like there's going to be a lot of that. I'm just saying. And I'm ready for it. Maybe there is somewhere internationally.

There's like a football whip around shit. I just not aware of it. please let me know if you've heard it because I'm just thinking structurally how would you produce it? I mean, it's literally it's going to be a lot of like beautiful runs and beautiful passes and almost goals. Like that's what highlights are now, right? Like I watch, I'm a big Arsenal fan and so I watch the like 16 minute long highlights of an Arsenal game if I miss it. And it's like a one nothing game that they get 16 minutes of highlights out of it. So it's like, they're going to do it.

It'll be there. It'll just be like, look at this great kick that no one got to on the other end of it. And you have to appreciate that, Neely. It's the beautiful game. I did. That's what I say. Like, look at the power and elegance of this long pass that it's a nil-no. Aaron.

Yeah. That's fine. I'm very excited for Apple. Let's try this. I just like, this is the lead up to Apple trying to get Sunday ticket, which is like the big prize. To get a sport that people actually watch. And that's why, like, this, just as a product, that's why I'm fascinated by this for that exact reason, because there are bigger prizes out there that this is going to be what they try to get.

Yeah. And Eddie Q has very public. been like, we're not going to just take rights and rebroadcast things. We want to do it our own way. And this is their own way. And it's like, all right, this is their attempt to make something that looks like Red Zone, because if you take it, you've got to make Red Zone. I mean, it sounds way better than everything.

My brother tries to watch football games. And then I have to deal with the phone calls because he can't watch the football games. So this already, I wish he was into this kind of football because this seems like it's going to save me a lot of phone calls. Because you're going to buy the one thing. from Apple. Yeah. And you're still going to get the phone calls.

I hate it. All right. We got to wrap this show up. There's some more stuff. I think it's very funny that Canon is trying to charge people $50 a year for their webcam software. Don't do it. Please. Just buy a capture card.

Please. For $50. Go buy another webcam. Just don't give them your money. It's very good. This is terrible. But some good news. Razor is upgrading the USBC ports on the 2020 to USB 4, which is cool.

And they're doing it through soft. Software. Through software. That's awesome. Good job, Razor. Good job. Okay.

Some stuff on the site you should read. Miyasado had a great piece about BuzzFeed, which BuzzFeed is a public company now. They just had some earnings. Not great. BuzzFeed pretty weird. It's like a bittersweet. It's like a poignant. Yeah.

It's like at the end of the day with a cup of tea, wistful or like early in the morning. Mm-hmm. You know, like when the dawn breaks, you can just feel like the beginning of a day. If you want like a sad Sunday, read the story. Some people want a sad Sunday. Packers fans If you want to like You know

Be like if you want to like I was young once Like reading this story Oh wistful We got a great piece for a man of Chicago Lewis About the Department of Homeland Security It's 20 years This is a big package for the year It's called Homeland

Quite frankly it's a ward debate If you're a Pulitzer voter You're listening to this first of all What are you doing? Second of all give this A Pulitzer Yeah vote for us We're great

We're like to do that I don't know if that's in the rules It's probably fine It's probably fine. It's probably fine. Department of Homeland Security is a boondoggle. Like a pure boondoggle. Nobody wanted to create it.

They bunched all this stuff together. Corporate structure. You know how I feel about corporate structure. It's just a mess. Read the story. Everyone quoted in the story is like, this thing's a mess and it sucks. It just got it right.

It's great. And then lastly, James Vincent has a great piece about AI copyright, which no one knows what's going to happen with this generative AI copyright stuff. Very complicated, very vergi. Love the story. Two more things.

One, by the time you listen to this, we'll have our first set of tweaks to the redesign coming out. So you've got a new hero. The new top of the page will be, we're going to have a top five stories and the story story when we move down. We think people are going to like it.

We've got some big ideas without a mobile, which the thing that happens is you watch new web design. Everyone clicks on everything. Yeah. So your ability to measure and see what's working and not is like just goes to hell.

Yeah. So yes, we waited. We waited for the clicks to calm down. We figured out what people wanted. We think it's going to be great. It's going to be fun. We're going to switch the river eventually to light mode because people have asked for that. And we're going to add a toggle so you can switch back and forth.

Please. And we're adding comments to quick posts. That's coming later. That's the thing I'm most excited about. Yeah, it's be good. It would be great. With all that's happening, the time I listen to this, new hero, go check it out. Don't let us know what you think.

That's going to be very cool. And these fools will be back on Wednesday. David, Alex, Russell, Brandem, Jen Toe, doing some cult. We have some fun. We have some fun Friendsgiving-y stuff we're going to do. I think we're going to, we're basically. going to try to get Jen to blow up her house with smart kitchen gadgets. So assuming we all survive, it's going to be really fun.

That's great. All right. That's it. We're way over. We'll see you in the metaverse. That's the Vergecast. You can tweet at us for however long that lasts. David's at Pierce.

Alex is Alex X-Trans. Addy is at the Dextriarchy. I'm that reckless. We'll see you in the metaverse. That's it. Rock and roll. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening.

If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at vergecast at the verge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge cast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.