The Vergecast - Meta's AI headset future — and that X interview at Code

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Alex Cranz break down an awkward interview out of the Code Conference from X (formerly Twitter) CEO Linda Yaccarino. Then, the crew gets into all the big news from Meta's Connect event where the Quest 3 and Meta Smart Glasses were announced. Further reading: The Code Conference 2023: news, interviews, and more Linda Yaccarino defends Elon Musk, X, and herself at Code 2023 [FULL INTERVIEW]  AMD CEO Lisa Su on the GPU shortage, the AI revolution, and Nvidia | Decoder Yoel Roth warns new X CEO about Elon and company status [FULL INTERVIEW] Artifact is becoming Twitter, too, thanks to new posts feature The Quest 3 is Meta’s last chance to win the headset war before it truly begins The Meta Quest 3 is sharper, more powerful, and still trying to make mixed reality happen Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg on Threads, the future of AI, and Quest 3 Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses: livestreaming, headphone-replacing eyewear Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses hands-on: in pursuit of content The new WGA contract will change how Hollywood works Summary of the 2023 WGA MBA Streaming giants have banded together for lobbying power Apple and Google are changing how you listen to podcasts Google Podcasts shut down in 2024 as podcasts debut globally for YouTube Music Logitech now sells a $299 folding chair Former Amazon hardware boss Dave Limp will take over as CEO of Blue Origin Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar 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 and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of surprise interviews. I'm a friend David Pierce. I didn't tell anyone we were doing this podcast. We're just here. We're podcasting. Eli Patel is here.

Hi, Nealai. Welcome back. Hi, I'm on the show. I know people have been very confused. I was just doing the code conference. And what I said to David right before I started is, I've hosted enough things. So, David, can you just drive this?

I'll just sink back into being a guest. Yeah. That seems nice. People bring you on. It seems nice, you know. I like this for you. You've moved, you've done code. You get to, like, be a person now.

This is very exciting. Yeah, just blind reacting to things. This episode of the Verchast, in many ways, the entire theme is Neli reacts. This episode is going to be very fun because the first half is stuff that you know about and the second half is stuff you don't know anything about. It's going to be great. Alex Kranz is here. Hi, Alex.

I didn't know I was doing this podcast until about five minutes ago. I'm very excited to be here. I knocked on both of your doors and I said, it's podcast time. And here we're like, okay. Put on some pants for here. Let's go. We have a lot to talk about this week. Metacenect was this week. We got a bunch of news about AI, all kinds of stuff going on. New Raspberry Pi, which I'm weirdly excited about.

MacOS Sonomo is this week. We have more... By the way, I just bought a Raspberry Pi 4. I'm like an idiot. But like, it'll be fine. It was really cheap. Yeah. Yeah, as a like smart home sensor or whatever, the 4 will do.

Like that, you immediately guessed when I was using it. Yeah. Listen, you just moved to us. It's not unclear. We have big trials going on all over the place. We're going to talk a little bit about those today, and we're going to talk a bunch about those next week. But let's start with Code. Code was that we've been working up to Code for months.

There was a ton going on. We booked a ton of guests. We talked to a ton of people. It got real weird right at the end. Oh, yeah. Nilai, you co-hosted this thing. Congratulations. You made it through.

You're back. It seemed like it went really well. Should we start at the end? Can we start anywhere other than Linda? Look, here is my goal at Code. This is how I booked everybody. I know everybody thinks about Kara when they think of Code because Kara is Kara. and she has run the conference really well for the past couple years.

The conferences I started going to is a little baby that changed my career around were hosted by Walt in Kara. Right? All the things, Steve Jobs on stage at Code, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on stage, which, by the way, has it like a lore and drama behind it. That's Walt. And like, it's both of them. And I don't mean to detract anything from like Kara. But there's a Walt component there. And like, I'm on that coaching tree.

Like, just to be really clear. Like, Walt was my mentor. He, we did the podcast together. He was on our staff. Like, there's just a piece of that that I was thinking about a lot as we were, like, doing the conference and, like, making the conference, which is very challenging. And again, I know, like, Kara did an amazing job with that. That's a high standard to live up to. Yeah.

I'm not trying to detract from that. I'm just saying everyone thinks about that. And I was thinking about the before that. And what I really wanted on stage was to be a product. reviewer was to talk about products, right? The Walt side of the equation. And we put a lot of products on that stage. So I'm very proud of that, right?

Adobe launched Photoshop for the web. Mike Krieger from Artifact launched what is effectively a Twitter competitor. There's a much we can get to all that. But that's like the part of code that, you know, there's a lot of drama. But if you actually look at our conference and you look at how much we talked about NVIDIA H100 GPUs on stage, like we made a tech conference, like a tech conference. And that's pretty cool. And we got a true detective trailer.

And we had a true detective trailer. Yeah, yeah. Like, there was a lot going on at this conference. And then there was, like, one little bit of chaos, which I will happily talk about. We should that first, because that continues to be the thing on a lot of people's minds right now. Partly because of what Lindy Akrina, the CEO of X talked about on stage and partly because of just the, I don't know, the scenery around it. The interview, you can watch in full on our YouTube channel or on the Decoder podcast. I listened to it.

while walking my son in a stroller this morning, which is a deeply weird. Oh, my. Your son is a supervillain now. That's his origin story. The, like, cognitive dissonance of that was a very strange 45 minutes. When I was a wee lad, I heard the sounds of Linda Yaccarino emanating from my father's headset. And now, now I have to destroy humanity to save it. You can go listen to the interview.

It's really interesting. But the, like, the way the interview happened. seemed to be as big a thing as anything. Because Joel Roth, who used to be, what was his job? He had a trust in safety Twitter. He was a sort of surprised guest early and talked about a lot of the things that Twitter has struggled with over the years. I don't think he broke a huge amount of new ground in terms of like problems we've known

about on that platform for a very long time. But then Linda was sort of forced to answer for a lot of those in a way that she didn't seem super psyched about answering for. Yeah. Look, Linda did a shit shop. She did. We can make a lot of excuses. and like Yol is like a very convenient excuse and like that's great.

She sucked. Like what do you want to do? I interview a lot of CEOs all the time. You can go listen to them. You know, we don't shy away from hard questions. You know what you get with Carrey Swisher. Like she did a bad job.

Like, and like I can talk about the setup there. I just don't want to give her the out. I think if you're the CEO of a major company that is the Global Town Square, da da da da da da da da. You better be ready. You should at least have some numbers. You should at least have some numbers, I would say, about how well you're doing instead of, she spent a lot of time not answering questions about how well are you doing and instead talking about her feelings about how well they're doing.

Which we've learned over the years is when you should be really alarmed about how well something is doing. Yeah, yeah. When we get to the setup and then we can talk about that. But I don't want to, for one second, let anyone walk away from this thinking that the setup or the chaos of Yol or whatever, the surprise of it should have is an excuse. there are lots of choices you can make if you don't want to be. You could, she could just walk away and she might have it, right? Sure. But she chose to be on this stage.

And all she had to say, she stayed a lot. She wanted to be on that stage, which is an important piece of public. So let me just talk about the setup. So as Richesha listeners know, one of our star guests was supposed to be GMC or Mary Barra. And she dropped out because of the strike. And we made a lot of fun at the Code stage. We're dropping out because of this right. So, you know, there's like the last minute scrambled to replace your guests.

We have, you know, people pay to attend the conference. I got a good show for them. So we booked the CEO of Rivian, RJ Scrant. She was great. And he was like sort of the one-to-one replacement. And we can, I tried so hard to make him talk shit about the cyber show. We can talk about that. But that's sort of the one-to-one replacement.

But everyone was like working hard to replace him, including Kara, right? Who had no obligations to this conference, really. But she, you know, she did it. So she was going to interview John Lovett. And I was going to be like the Kara comedy show in the middle of her thing to get Carrie back on stage. But then she asked Y'all to do it, and Y'all said yes. And the history of code, and code is unlike every other conference, every other conference. And David has worked at a lot of media companies.

Every other conference gets corrupted by advertising or sales response. Like the history of code and before that, the all things, de-conference, like, Walt and Carol, like, we're doing whatever you want and you can show up here. And they had the capital to do it. And this is like a, again, like these are people that I've worked with and around who are my, seniors, me going to their conference when I was like a $12 a post reporter and Engadgett. Like that stuff is all in my brain. Like I'm taking over this legacy. So our conference is the same, right?

We invite people. We say, you know, we have a lot of conversations, but, you know, it's a show. Like to me interviewing another person, there's prep calls and we like chat about what they want to say and what I want to say. But they don't get the questions ahead of time. In particular, the most important part of code is audience questions, which Linda refused to And there's just an element of chaos, like journalistic chaos that makes code code. It's unlike any other conference for those reasons.

And I have texts in my pocket from Walt before the show and after the show reminding me that that is what his conference was all about and what CARES conference was all about. Yeah. Yeah, he always used to say the thing that we do here is journalism. Live journalism. That's the thing that they, and they both said it. Yeah. Again, I'm just coming back to the foundations of code. So whatever.

We are all trying to fill in for Mary Vera and put on a good show and make it good. And so Kara was like, Y'all's going to do it. And that's great. Like, fine. And so, and Linda knew this information, right? Like, there was a lot of consternation about what she would drop out or not. We should tell it, like, obviously. So Kara knows her.

She'd text her. She knew. She knew the entire day. And basically, we spent the day being like, is she going to show up or not? Like, who knows? Maybe she won't. That'll be its own news. She showed up.

So that's, like, the whole backstory. Yeah. And, like, I think the backstory of it and the interview are sort of two different. things. And the interview itself actually, for all of the drama around it, is not that interesting. Like, Julia Borson did a really good job of trying to get her to say something interesting and revelatory about what's going on at X. Can I just say something about Julia? Julia is incredible. And like, watching Julia work up close was like, I was like, oh, I have a long way to go. Like, that's really how I feel like, oh, I've got a long way to go. She is overprepared.

She knows her shit cold. She knows everybody. There's one thing when you're, you know, when you're like near someone for a long time, you like, watch. them work, you like notice things about them. When Julia is in the middle of an interview and she knows that she has it, she smiles. Like, and like maybe it doesn't come through on TV, but like, in person, I was like, oh, I can see that she has it. It was incredible. It's like the poker hand, like I have a good hand tell. Yeah, it's like the tiniest little tell and she's like, I'm holding a knife. It's great. All that's great. The Linda interview was pure chaos, right? And because of Yol and because Linda had decided, I think inaccurately and inappropriately decided

that she could blame all of her problems on Yule, she kept going back to it. You know, and that's, like, a sympathetic position. I understand why, like, sort of intuitively, like, I can just be mad about Yol and everyone in this room will care about it, but she knew. But if you watch Julia, all of her, like, cable news, anchor training, she's like, I don't, I'm moving on. Like, I'm not going to let you do this. That part of it, if you're, like, a journalism nerd, go back and watch that interview. Don't pay attention to Linda. Pay attention to Julia. And it is actually just revelatory. Like, again, I watch, I've got a lot of learn. I have a lot to learn about how to do this. Just the ability to constantly say, can I finish my question?

It's a real skill to do in front of a lot of people. It's very impressive. Right. There's a room full of people, some of whom are not on any one side, right? They're just like there for the train wreck. Yeah. Some of whom are there and they're very sympathetic to Linda and some of whom are there and they're very sympathetic, like whatever it is. Or they're mad at Twitter, whatever it is.

And like the tension in that. in that room was out of control. And so for Julia to stay locked in and focused on, I'm going to ask the questions. Again, watch that side of it because it is incredible. Yeah, and it's like hard questions. About halfway through, she kind of manages to get Linda off of blaming Yol for all of her responses. Yeah. Like the first half of it, she makes a lot of remarks about like, yeah, no one knew he was here today. Yeah, it's like ever, I, promise you. You know what? Like, we all saw it app. She had on her phone. You all was on the schedule. Right? He was like listed publicly on the schedule. We updated the app like 50 times because we were moving the things are. Because she, you know, Linda had first insisted on being last. She wanted to look great. And then she was like, I know I want to go before you all. And then she switched it back. So like actually the schedule is moving all day. It's like you there. None of this was a secret. In fact, more of it should have been a secret.

Fair. Yeah, Alex, you and I have both watched the interview since the full thing got posted. Did you take anything of like substance away from it about X the company or platform? I took a lot about it from the hostility towards journalism that I saw in it. Like that was the main thing I took away was we've seen that threat of hostility from the company since Elon took over and saw it very apparently on stage. And knowing now that like she knew. Because you watch it initially and you're like, oh, she just found out. Yeah, I'd probably be that pissed on stage two. Like, no, if you knew the whole day. And by the way, not to say anything about Yol, the Yol is great. And, you know, he's very compelling and he knows a lot of shit about trust and safety. There was no content in his interview that he had not shared before.

Right. Right. Like, the things he was saying was things he said quite often about the company. That he has put in the New York Times. But by the way, if you want like a slightly more produced version of the Yule interview, You can go listen to an episode of this American life that he did with Casey Newton. Again, he's very compelling. I'm glad he was on stage.

I'm glad that audience, which, you know, is a very powerful, influential audience, like, heard it. I think that's important. But if you're Linda, there was nothing that you were reacting to that you hadn't already reacted to. Right. It was just like a very familiar. Like, you see this kind of hostility sometimes from people who don't want to give you the answers. And they have their narrative and they really don't want to deviate from that narrative. And that just seemed to be the case here.

And I was like, okay, so I'm not going to get necessarily something substantial from Linda. But I thought it was a very revealing interview, even if it wasn't like a substantial one. Like, it was super revealing to me. Is there a scientific term for revealing nothing for like the substance of something to be nothing? Press releases. No, I think, I mean, to me, even the thing. that she said, and this is the thing that has really sucked with me about the interview, is even the things that she said didn't seem like they were true.

Like, she named, I think the number was 540 million monthly active users. And she said that, or not monthly active users, just users. So whatever that means, she said that number twice. So I'm inclined to believe that is actually a number. But then she said, Julia asked about how many daily active users X has, which is actually a really important number, right? Like, there are a million external things saying X is not doing well, right? Like, there are engagement metrics that seem to be down that are all reported by third parties.

So, you know, grant of salt with that. That people on the platform are experiencing. Right. It's way down on the app store. Like, all of the vibes are bad. But the number of people who log into Twitter every day is, like, potentially the most important number. And I don't believe for one second that she doesn't know that number to like the decimal place. and instead she gets up and is like,

oh, it's between 200 and 250 million people every day. And Julia followed up by saying that it was 237 million when Elon Musk took it over. And then Linda said at 1.225. And there's just like, you don't have to tell anybody. You're a private company owned by one dude. At one point, she pulled out her phone as though she was going to check the number and then did not. And then showed the phone to the audience. And it was just her home screen.

And a lot of sleuthing has showed that X was not on her home screen. Yeah. It's a very confusing situation. And we just got a report this week about most of the big companies, daily, like daily active users. And it was so far from that. I think Twitter was like 56 million. Oh, yeah. Twitter is always, again, and I've said this many times.

And I will say it again now very clearly for everyone to hear me. criticism of Twitter or X's current leadership is in no way praise for the previous administration. They were bad. And actually, one of the most interesting things about it is you can make an argument that Twitter is so hard to run. It is such a mess that that version of bad was the only way to be. Like they had entered a steady state of horribleness. But they weren't growing. They weren't making any money.

This is why they sold it to Elon at an inflated share price because its board of directors had come essentially come to the conclusion that nothing they could do would ever bring the company to that share price on their own. That is like if you look at the mirror, you know, like every kid wakes up one day and like realizes like I'm not going to pass OK. Like I'm just not going to be a doctor. You know, like maybe that was just me. But like, you know, there's like those moments in your life were like, ah, I had better give up. Me and sports. Like Twitter as a company was like, we're never going to hit $44 a share. And they sold it to you on.

And like, again, I just don't want to say like criticism of this administration is praise. It does not imply that they were doing a horrible job such that they quit. Just flat out. They just quit. They couldn't figure out how to do it on their own. And they sold the team because he showed up like a dummy to buy it. But it's not that he's now put in place a team that will do a better job. He's put in place a team, a CEO, who doesn't appear to know what's going on.

Yeah, I think to me, like, the worst look for Linda in this entire interview, which is a fairly high bar in this particular interview, was when Julia asked about Musk's tweet about going to a fully subscription model where everyone using Twitter would have to pay for Twitter. And I'm paraphrasing, but Linda was basically like, well, she first asked to repeat the question, which was bizarre. It was a very simple question. No, I don't say, I don't think that was bizarre. I, like, everybody is like, oh, she didn't know the answer. Oh, sure. It was a total filibuster. She was straight up filibustering.

Like, like, let's give her a little acknowledgement of that, at least. She was doing something. Wasn't. But then Julia rephrases the question. And she says, I think she says, did he say that's what we're doing or that's what he's thinking about? And then Julia said, he said, that's the. plan. So at this point, it's now abundantly clear that Linda doesn't know what's going on. And then she says,

essentially in response to another question, she says, we talk about everything and then has no more response. So I don't know how I'm supposed to come out of that, not thinking that she didn't know this was a thing. I came out of that thinking she was filibustering and trying to make fun of Julia for asking the question at all. Like the way she looked to the audience after she's like, did he say that? And that's I want to know, like, Nilai, you were there. She, okay, being in the room, Linda, I don't know. I don't know. I was in that room all day.

And I would just say the, the room was packed. You know, a lot of things, if you ever go to a conference, like, the composition of the room changes over the day because people are like networking or like doing it, whatever. I'm like, they're like doing work calls, whatever. Like, this was packed. And Linda got a lot of cheers, which. Like big cheers. Linda came with an entourage. Like the Apple employees you hear cheering at an Apple event, this is like a small version of that.

Yeah. Yeah. There was just, there was an element in there that was weird. And I'll say this at the end, Julia got a standing ovation. This is a real thing that happened at the end of code. She deserved it. The conference ends, Linda leaves. Case and I walked back on stage.

I literally said, holy shit. And then I said, Julia Borson, everyone. And Julia got a standing ovation from that crowd. That's awesome. So, you know, when I say the composition of the room was, it was odd. But the people who were noisiest at the beginning were like the Linda people. Yeah. And so I think she thought the room was a lot warmer to her than it might have been.

She played to the room a lot early on. Because I think she had the sense of the room was really, was like on her side. So she kept looking at the room as though everyone agreed with her that this was bullshit. Yeah. And that was not the case. And the one example of that, which was absolutely the funniest thing that I've ever seen happen at Code. And I've been going on this conference for a decade. She said, who wouldn't want Elon Musk by their side running product?

And like, there's just like, people just like burst into laughing. Did they start raising their hands? Because it's a room full of product people. Like, what did I say at the beginning? What did I want code to be? I wanted the code to be about product. Who did we invite? Who did we put on the stage?

Who did they bring product people? And they were like, no. And Julia was like, raise her hand. And like, everyone was like, I cannot believe. You don't know, like, you don't know this is a room below product people. That was a brutal moment. All right. That's enough of that.

I could talk about this, by the way, for like, maybe the rest of it. I know, which is precisely why it's enough of that. This is why I was like, I need to be the guest. Not the house. Everybody should go. It's worth watching the whole interview. You're going to get three minutes in and your whole body is going to start to feel itchy because it is very uncomfortable. Imagine being in the room.

It's like the first half of never been kissed, which is the most excruciating movie. Then, just to make it about me for one second. Very important. Imagine me like, I have to go back out on the stage after. Yeah, was holy shit a rehearsed line? Had you like stood backstage going, holy shit, holy shit. That's on the teleprompter, actually. Casey and I were just like holding hands.

Like, what are we going to do? That's great. But yeah, everybody, we'll put it in the show notes. You should go watch it, go listen to it. It's really interesting. Let's just blow through some of the actual, like, interesting product stuff that happened. To me, the Getty AI thing was one of the most interesting pieces of, the whole show. Do you want to, do you want to just explain a little bit about that conversation

and what we got from Craig Peters, the Getty CEO? Yeah, so we had two conversations back to back to back that I really wanted to make sure we had back to back. It was Microsoft CTO, Kevin Scott, who is wonderful, and the CEO of Getty, Craig Peters, who is a firecracker. Which he wouldn't think for the Getty CEO, but like, kudos. Yeah, but he's a creative. He manages thousands of photographers. Like, once you, like, put that together, oh, I get it, you know. So Getty is suing stability AI, which makes stable diffusion. And the, you know, the lawsuit is what you think. It's whether training on copyrighted images is fair use. Stable diffusion is like some, I don't know, I don't think it does this anymore, but like, for a while, it would produce the Getty watermark in AI generated images. And he is like, come on, right? So, you know, everyone thinks that stability is kind of a chaotic company. They refuse to come on stage your code. We'd invited them to, you know, respond to Craig. And they said no. It says a lot. But, you know, Craig's entire thesis was like, you can build AI tools that don't step on other people's copyrighted stuff. And in fact, we have. And so, you know, they shut off their brand new product stuff at code. They shut off their brand new AI image generator. And we, like, had fun using it on stage. But his argument was, this industry is stepping all over creatives. And, like, what Getty makes is important to history. And we need to, like, protect it. And we need to build business models that protect it instead of just, like, racing headlong into devaluing. even further. And the reason I said I put the interviews back to back is because Kevin Scott is an

author. He's an artist. He's a maker. He is a Renaissance man. He's great. He can talk about anything. Microsoft has a $10 billion bet on it being fair use with Open AI. Right. Like that's crazy. And so, you know, Kevin was like, a lot of people think this is fair use. And I was like, not everyone. And then we brought out Craig, which was really cool. So listen to those two conversations back to back. They're all going up in the Dakota feed and they'll be on the verge of YouTube. But That was the dynamic that I really put in front of everybody. Like, the industry has not figured out this huge problem at the center of AI. And we had, you know, we had Warner Music CEO Robert Kinsel on stage.

He's a former head of business at YouTube. Like, I'm not on the side of the music industry very often. I'm not on the side of big copyright very often. But you see this dynamic and actually, like, shuffles the decks a little bit. And the Gettient conversation in particular, I think, really brought us the fore because they're making some of the technology, too. They want to show that you can make the technology in the right way. That bit that he showed where he was basically like, we're in this race with, you know, Open AI and Anthropic and Google where everybody is trying to do the biggest possible thing, right?

Like everybody brags about like the number of parameters in their model and how big the training set is. And it's like everything is supposed to be this gigantic all-purpose thing for everybody for everything forever. Like AI is just Windows now, right? Like it's huge. And then I thought that was just why I thought Craig and the Getty stuff is so interesting because like we can take this small corpus of data that is better and we can actually make it work just as well, but more successfully for everyone involved. And I just think that's very cool. Yeah. And then somehow inside of that, there's one more piece, one more term that's super interesting in there. And somehow we will

compensate the artists whose work is in the training data. And I was like, how? And he's like, we just are making it up. Yeah. He was very honest about like, we only have half the answers. Yeah. Yeah, but he's like, right now we're basically doing it on popularity. Like if you're, it's like the way Spotify works. So this was too weedsy to get into it on the code stage. But the answer is like we'll look at the proportion of images inside of the training data that people call up more often in the wider world of Getty. And then when people pay to generate images, we'll dole out fractions of a penny based on that sort of like underlying ranking, which is like it is more like how Spotify works. than anything, but it is not some incredible, complicated algorithm about what training pixels

were put. It's more like, what's popular? You get more money. And like, they need to refine that. The other one, Alex, you and I watched Casey Blois together. What, what did, did we get anything from Casey that we thought was interesting? Casey Blase runs HBO is like a very important person. This happened right after the end of the writer's strike. So we had like new information. Peter Kafka interviewed him. They talked a little bit about that, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. other stuff. Like, what did we get from Casey that you thought was interesting? We got the True Detective Season 4 trailer. Which looks sick.

Apparently very excited. Yeah. I think I was like texting you like, this is my personality for the next four months. Yeah, I think we just got his reinforcement of David Zeslov's kind of way of thinking out there, right? Like he was talking a lot about how the cable bundle was back and it was going to be on these streaming services and that like he felt that was good. and he wants to see that more. And then they talked a lot about this new show, naked attraction that's on HBO Max, which was like, my sister-in-law had just texted me the night before about it,

and I'd never heard about it. And I was like, yes, I know what he's talking about because I just Googled this. And so he was kind of defending the way that they're choosing what they put on HBO and what they share is HBO versus Max versus Cartoon Network versus all HGTV and all of these other channels that are now part of the larger streaming ecosystem. And yeah, it was mainly just like reinforcement of David Zaslov's kind of way of thinking.

And that was nice, like, it was interesting to see that because you're kind of like, well, how does someone like Blois think about it? And apparently very similarly. I don't know, Neil, what did you, what did you take away from it? I think Casey Blois is maybe one of the most powerful people at Warner Bros. Discovery. And he knows it and David Zazlov knows it. and, you know, the stuff about HBO versus Max, like, he was just very calm and comfortable with it. You know, I, I talked Casey backstage, and I was like, do you want me to ask you some more questions about HBO Max versus Max?

And he was like, Jesus Christ. But, you know, his thesis, his argument was that HBO by itself has never been a successful business in the history of HBO. Even when you think about people paying for HBO directly, he's like, people had a cable bundle and they would pay us extra money for HBO. And if we don't ride along with that cable bundle, that has never been a successful business for us. Is that a retcon? Maybe, you know, like maybe, but it is historically true. And, you know, there's a new owner at the company, and that is his thesis. That's very much has us all of things.

Like, what people want is 90-day fiancé, and then sometimes they want Trude or Detective. It's not the other way around. And that is, I think probably Vurchas listeners don't feel that way, but have you ever been to America? Like, I think that's, honestly, I do think that's true, right? Like, like, most people are watching, the reason you like HBO and the reason you like those things is that, like, Sunday night you go watch HBO. But you probably weren't watching HBO every single the night of the week when you were watching TV channels. I mean, you could have been, but, like, that was a very small population of folks and they could kind of be insufferable. Right.

What are the dominant TV, like, from the golden age of television in the bundle, it's a bunch of network TV series. It's friends. It's the office, right? And they're still dominant, which is crazy. So, yeah, you know, there was that. He talked a lot about HBO shows now appearing on Netflix again. And he was like, look, in, you know, the brass ring used to be syndication. And we need to go back there.

And we went through this weird period where everyone was trying to build their own little monopoly. And we've like, we've realized like, that's not the way. And I was like, I always do that wasn't the way. No one's told Netflix, though. Right. Well, but Netflix is a different business. It's the only one that's successful, right? They fired like just cannon blasts of venture capital money into building their moat.

And everyone else tried to do it. And it like destroyed the industry along the way. Casey did talk about the strike, by the way. Speaking of costs going up. And Peter Astin, like, is the resolution of this strike and maybe the side strike going to bring your costs up because your labor costs are higher? And he was like, no, which I think if I was in the writer's guild or the screen actor's guilt, I'd be like, yeah, we told you so.

By the way, here's all the disclosures. Our staff is unionized by the WGAE. Alex is in the WGAE. We Comcast is one of our investors. Linda Yakarino doesn't like me very much. We made a Netflix show. We made a Netflix show. I'm the EP of a Netflix show.

Someone has asked us many times that show is not because it's documentary. It was not covered that. What do you want for me? Eli's so tired. I'm host to a Code Conference. I'm so tired. All right. Let's do.

I want to talk more about the writer's strike. We're going to get to that in a little bit because, It ended in some really interesting ways. We're going to talk about that. Let's do two more just ultra-fast things about code and then get out of here. First, Neely, I am going to give you 65 seconds and no longer to talk about the Monarch Tractor CEO that you had on stage. Ready, go. The most important interview I did a code was with Proveen Pemets to the CEO of Monor tractor.

I opened that interview by saying the entire human species is utterly dependent on tractors. And I saw Jake, like our deputy owner Jake, just start cracking. He's like, oh, Eli's on his bullshit again. It's true. It's a fact. Ravine just blew the crowd away by talking about his tractor. So it's an EV tractor as a full sensor suite. They've built it to be ultra modular.

The sensor suite is in the roof of the tractor, which is just a handful of bolts and a couple cables for power and data. And he's like, that is what we're going to upgrade. Like, over time, we'll just sell you new roofs. Other people can have new roofs. They're the open ecosystem compared to John Deere. They're partnered with Case. cases making tractors using their technology. Go watch it. He's like, we're the Android. Like, John Deere's the iPhone, closed, proprietary, hard-to-service. We're going to be the open

ecosystem. And the tractor's cool. Yeah, his line was, we're becoming the Android of Agriculture, which is just an unbelievably cool and vergy sentence. And I will tell you this. I've talked a lot about the crowd in this room. They loved him by the end of this. They were like, oh, tractors are the shit. Like one person was like, I'm going to buy a tractor for my vineyard, which is the code audience. Yeah, I did a, I did a conference one time and basically just introduced a man and asked him, so 3D printing houses, huh? And he talked for like 20 uninterrupted minutes about all the cool things you can do when you can 3D print concrete houses. And it was the most excited room I've ever been. Like people love this stuff. It's awesome. The world runs on it. I agree.

Yeah. Technology and products. I'm telling you. That's that's what codes all about. It's the stuff. And then the other one was Artifact Mike Krieger, which I think I continue to think Artifact is interesting, but it's like a little kind of tiny thing, but they just launched Twitter at code, right? Like Mike Krieger was just like, we're doing Twitter. Yeah. See a co-founder and co-founder of Instagram launches Instagram. Yeah. It's like, I don't know what you want me to say. Like, Creaker's great. He was literally coding, you know, Artifact at Tiny Company. He was literally shipping code in our green room. That's awesome. And he was like, this is so much better than being the big company. So that was really fun. Yeah, you go look. It's Twitter, right? It's post. The only the only real difference is you have. have to have a photo for some reason, which is a lot of Instagram DNA coming through. But what Mike Krieger has told me, what Kevin Sistram has told me, is they always launched artifact with the goal of being something much bigger, with the goal of creating a much bigger corpus of machine learning data and doing more interesting things with it.

And you can see they started with its links on the web. It's a recommendation engine for web pages to, you can share links. So now you can just share your own content and we will recommend that to you. and they are building, they're building sort of like an AI first social network. It's cool. And like, again,

what, what am I hammering home here? Yes, there's the chaos. There was a lot of product conversation code. Like an awful lot of what products are we building. Why are we building them? What are the dependencies on Nvidia,

on GPUs, on other stuff that we need to overcome in order to build products? And to me, Mike was like the pinnacle of that moment, because he was literally building the product in the green room. before he walked out on stage. He was great. And then, okay, last one, you did not successfully get RJ's Gareng, the CEO of Rivian,

to talk shit about the cyber truck. But I would say he made fairly clear that he thinks the cyber truck is stupid. Would you agree with that assessment? Yeah. You know, there's the codename of Decoder is Nilai versus Media Training. You know, it's like, can I fight you to a draw? And like, sometimes, I usually get to a draw, I think. Sometimes I win, and that's...

And then the subsex CEO gets in trouble. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I win too much, honestly. But it's like, fine. It's a game. And that's why CEOs come and do it because they're all type A. And it's, you know, it's a game that's set up to be winnable, like not to be unfair. But you know, you know the questions are coming.

And the reason I bring all that up is sometimes I can see the media training. And the most devastating answer you can give inside of the media training is, well, that's a choice. As allowable answers go, that is the most damning one. Right. It's like, yeah, people are free to make that choice. We'll see what the market decides. It's a real like bless their heart kind of response. Yeah, exactly. If you know what that means, you're like, the one piece of news that's inside of there that was important, and I hope sort of the EV community caught this, I asked him about the deal terms to use the Tesla charger because Rivian's using an ACS2. And he said, everyone thinks there's some like complicated data sharing agreement.

There's these conspiracy theories out there and there is not. There is an agreement to use a charger and there is agreement to give us access to their network and that's it. So there you go. I don't know what it's like for everybody else, but he was like, like everyone else, we thought the charger was better to use. The Biden administration did its thing. It's like some tax scheme that requires them to basically open up their network. And then everyone rushed in to use the charge of the network because the conditions were there for us to go make a deal on not on onerous terms. Yeah, fair enough.

It was good stuff. There's a ton of good stuff coming out. We're going to have a lot more. It'll be on the YouTube channel. It'll be on podcasts all over the network. I did ask him about the single wiper. It's a choice. Is that where he says?

Is that where he said, bless your heart? Yeah, that was the second. It's a choice. I was like, do you think this triangle is going to destroy your business? And he was like, I don't know, man. Don't. No, thank you. I was like, what about one big wiper?

And he was like, many people have they decided like, it's great. You can have as many wipers as you want. You want. All right. We need to take a break. And then we're going to come back. And Alex and I are going to tell me lie about everything else that happened this week.

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Let's get to the other news of the week. Alex, I'm going to give you the choice. Do you want to do the writer's strike first or do you want to do Meta-Connect first? Ooh, I kind of want to do Meta-Connect first. I think both are really important, but I want to talk about some gadgets. All right, let's do meta. Three big things from Metacnect, big annual hardware event, the Quest 3 headset, the new smart glasses and the just weird slew of AI stuff.

Let's start with the headset. You don't want to start with T-Pain? I'm not ready for T-Pain. I need like a minute before we get to T-Pain and Snoop Dogg and Dwayne Wade pretending to be not Dwayne Wade. And I don't understand what any of that. Actually, you know what? Let's do that right now.

I'm angry. I knew it. I knew it. It's like, do you want Tom Brady in your house not being Tom Brady? I don't. Yeah. Alex, will you just explain what META is doing with all these? chatbots? Well, they assume you don't have any friends and that you need artificial intelligence

to be chat, like, your friend. Basically, it's a bunch of chat bots, but the chatbots are designed to look and sound like famous people. So there's like a Snoop Dog dungeon master that they, he tried to demo on stage. It didn't work. That was kind of unfortunate. And that's basically the gist of it, right? Like these chatbots are meant to just replicate people and build these like enhance those parissocial relationships you already have with celebrities. And I really, really, really, really encourage you to make more friends. Wait, wait, wait, let me offer you the flip of, let me offer you the flip of this. So I was reading Casey's newsletter last night. And he was writing about the new version of Chat CPT, which can actually speak to you. He can play these

characters. It's multimodal, whatever. And he had this example in here, which I had not really considered. But he's like a teenager, a young trans teenager, wrote into Hard Fork and was like, I get affirmations every day from GPT. Like, it's the thing that I talk to on this, like, right? And I, and that's an earlier version. So I, there's, yeah, and his whole newsletter is basically, like, we're on the cusp of this being, these relationships being realer. And like, there's all the Silicon Valley baggage. There's the endless conversation with the movie her. All that stuff is in there. but he's like, there's something here that is worth paying attention to, and that kind of unlocked my brain when I was reading it.

I don't know that I want to be talking to T-Pain about, you know, like, but there's something in there. What you just described is kind of the story of community on the Internet since the beginning of the Internet, right? Actually, wait, I want to take this back. I want to be talking to T-Pain. Now that I'm very tired. But I just wanted to be actual T-Pain.

T-Pain rules. Like, there's no, you should watch this podcast. He's amazing. Yeah. No, T-Pain is great. But no, I think the question of like, where is your community on the web is a really interesting and important one. And is one, people I'm talking about for 25 years, right?

Like, you go back far enough and there were people who were like, oh, these kids are talking to other people online, that's bad. And we've, like, come to realize that that's, like, those relationships are real. And that stuff is real. And then it turns again once it's an AI thing. And I think that changes the calculus a little bit. But there are versions of that that are good and valuable and useful. I just think this thing meta is trying to do,

which is not like build tools that are good and useful and sort of human, but like make a thing that looks like Dwayne Wade that will like help me, or like Snoop Dog can be the DM for my Dungeons and Dragons games. Or like random celebrities will help me cook. Like that to me feels like the uncanny valley of all of this, where it's just like, we're not anywhere with that to me. Yeah, I think what left me kind of like cold on it, because I do think right now I'm trying to play Dungeons and Dragons for the very first time ever.

And apparently it is very hard to get a bunch of people coordinated in a room. So, like, apparently that Snoop Dog thing is actually really, really good. If you play Dungeons and Dragons, that seems like a really compelling thing. But it just felt a lot like when Alexa started doing the voices. It feels like it just hit me that same way of like, this feels like the technology's not ready yet. So we're having to put like a celebrity layer on top of it to get you to engage. Well, this is like the meta thing.

It's like we launched threads. Here's a bunch of celebrities. And then they've been backing into the real functionality that will make it successful or not. I think that's this too. Yeah. What you want is I want to talk to Tom Brady. I don't think anyone's ready, let alone Tom Brady for like you can just talk to me whenever you want. Right.

And that's dangerous if you're. a celebrity in a lot of ways, like, whatever. But hey, come play a character and give life to a character that you can talk to with some personality. I think that's very safe. It's just plain a role, right? To meta's credit, like, there's like big, there's like big K-pop groups that already do this, where you can go talk to an AI, and it's, it's like programmed to kind of be like the, the K-pop star you like. So it's out there. This stuff exists already. K-pop is always on the bleeding edge of being really weird. Also, Alex, if you just spoke A-Pop as AI Pop into existence, I'm going to be furious with you.

AI Pop. It's coming. A-Pop. All right. Go watch. We have it on our site. It's in a quick post. It's on T-Pain's Instagram. It's on T-Pain's TikTok. Go watch the video. It's very strange. But I do think the more interesting piece of the AI thing is the meta-a-a-i chatbot that they're putting out and putting into basically all of their messaging platforms. You'll be able to get it everywhere you use meta-products. And it's essentially chat-G-PT. Like, they're just turning on chat-GPT inside of meta-products. Chat-G-PT is open-A-I. They've turned, this is their own model.

Yeah, but it's like functionally, it's the same, like the goal is. They think it's better. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it's better. I don't know if it's better either. We've heard some people say it is. we've heard some people say it as a, we'll just have to find out.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they're big on Lama, which is their large language model. Like there's this three-headed triangle now. Like Amazon just made this big investment in Anthropic. They're going to do some really interesting stuff over time. Microsoft and Open AI are obviously together. Google is doing its own thing. And now meta is doing its own thing. And like this race is getting real and really expensive and really high stakes for all four of these companies really fast. And they're doing art generation too. It's not just it's not just word. It's like there's going to be a bunch of stickers where you can just like make something up and do that. And that I'm actually very excited about because like the possibility for trolling my friends is extraordinarily high when I can just make AI generate horrible art for me. Wait, can I say some like deeply verge-casty thing about that? No. What is a sticker? What is a sticker? The reason that stickers and memes and reaction gifts and all that stuff is powerful is because they have shared meaning.

Yep. Yep. Right. So, like, you're like, here's a GIF. And like, it means something and it carries a whole layers and layers of meaning when you share it with a friend in response to something else. I'm going to AI generate some stuff for you. De novo, like over and over again, does not carry that meaning. It's just you talking. It's just you being like, I made up words. You say that. But if you make a horrible enough one, it can be a beam. No, it's true. It's just like, I don't want to, there's a part of this where it's like endlessly customized. everything actually detracts from how we communicate. Yeah, it fractures the, fractures the communication. Well, it's just like, it's, at the dumbest level, it's like, now I have to explain all my jokes to you.

Like, I made up a joke and I have to explain it to you instead of repeating it or riffing on a thing that already exists is, I know, I know we got some PhDs in our audience who are full of this information. Our co-founder and friend, Dieter Bone, deep into semiotics, like the meaning of meaning, that this is it. It's like right in there. It's like, what if the AI is making up ways here to communicate

that the person on the other end has no context for it. Yeah. But like it's stickers. Like it's fine. People aren't going to use. That's what I'm trying to get at. It's like if you don't, if you don't get to free ride on the history of meaning,

like the stickers are just silly stickers. Yeah. I mean, there's a big giant like huge cultural question in all of that, right? This everything is becoming endlessly personalized versus we need things that everyone understands in order to communicate about them, which is why the office is so useful. I realized the other day that most of the screenshots on my phone are gifts from the office that I just use for infinite purposes all the time.

There's a why are you the way that you are a gif that I just use 50 times a day, and people understand it. It's great. It's very helpful. Do you know those people whose entire personalities is movie quotes? Like, they're not going to be out there generating stickers. They're dying breed because we don't share that call. Like, everybody watches their own things now.

So that shared culture is dying down to Barbie movie, which is great. The Barbie movie is wonderful, but, like, fewer places. You're saying people don't run around quoting Oppenheimer to each other all day? Yeah, why not? What's up with that? I am become deaf. That's how I'm just going to start sending that to the Verge staff every day. I love it.

Alex, tell me about the Quest 3. Tell Nelai about the Quest 3. We've been wondering about this thing. We kind of knew what it was. Nayla, it's cool. What's going on? It looks bananas. Like I was looking at the photo of Addy wearing this thing and I was like, I don't know.

I love it. Like, we were talking about this in Slack the other day. And people were like, I hate it. It looks alien. And I'm like, that's exactly why I love it. Because it looks kind of alien. It's got these three like little ovals on the front. And they look kind of like the iPhone 10 camera module.

So it looks like they slapped three of those on there, which feels very like old fashion and kind of, oh, I've seen it. that before. But then somehow... This is in the service of room tracking, I've passed through. It's $500. It's got dual 264 by 2208 pixels. So it's a much higher resolution than the previous one, which was only 1832 by 1920. Like, it's going to be a little sharper.

And it's got the second generation of the Snapdragon XR2 processor in it. And that's where a lot of the big stuff changes. So I think like probably the most notable thing in the thing that, that, Addie talked about in her hands-on was that the graphics are better on this thing. Like, it's, it's, it's, things are sharper. The resolution's a little higher. Sean was very excited. No one else has this frame of reference because zero people bought a Quest Pro,

but I have one. Is it better than the Quest Pro or worse than the Quest Pro? Because West Pro is pretty good. Probably about better. The software is asked for the hardware screen. Yeah, from a, from a pure like display quality perspective, it's better than the Quest Pro. Really? Yeah.

It's actually, it's the highest res thing they've made, including the Quest Pro. The ongoing existence of the Quest Pro does not make any sense. So what we should note here is that Alex Heath interviewed Zuckerberg on our site in the Dakota feed. And I think he asked him to Quest Pro, and Zuck was like, I had it, yeah. It's like, we just had a bunch around. We had to ship of. But no, it's very clear that this is the one that Meta would like to sell you. I mean, Zuckerberg kept saying, and even Andrew Bod's,

the CTO afterwards kept saying, this is the first mainstream mixed reality headset. Like that is their phrase, right? And they're coming after Apple's Vision Pro in a really big way. They made a bunch of jokes about how it doesn't have a cable or a battery pack. Yeah. Which is honestly like a really good burn of the Vision Pro. Yep. It's also not $3,500. So that's good. But that is the pitch that they are making. They're like, this is the one. It's not finished. This is not where we're ultimately headed.

Ultimately where we're headed, I think they think is these smart glasses. which we should also talk about. But this is the one that is for regular humans now. Yeah. It's the end of this form factor, right? Or the best version of this form factor you can get right now. Yeah, exactly. And I think they continue to struggle to make the case for why people would want this.

Like a lot of what they talked about was video games. They have more games. They have better games. There's stuff to do. But then they occasionally just throw in, you know, meta quest for business. But don't really explain that. They're just like, you can have it if you want it for business. That's all we know about that.

They talk a little bit about it as an entertainment device, which I think is interesting. They show the same screenshot that everybody shows, which is just like you can watch, instead of watching one NBA game, you can watch seven NBA games on virtual screens. Yeah. And that is like extremely my shit. But like, I didn't get the sense that there is some sort of brand new life-changing use case for this. It just seems like between pass-through, better screens, and just, sort of an overall better experience of using the thing.

That's great, though. I just want to be like going from the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone 4 and getting a retina display is like great. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I've, a bunch of us got a demo of this. Mine was relatively short, but I still got to play a couple of the games and stuff. It is, I mean, leaps and bounds better than the Quest 2.

Like, the pass-through is not perfect. It's a little sort of, it's a little sort of warpy. Like, the floor was moving a little bit. But it's better than that. the pro. Oh, better than the pro, way better than the Quest 2, which is like black and white and essentially doesn't actually work as pass through. Not as good as the demo I got of the Vision Pro, but that was super controlled. Who knows what that'll be like in real life. But yeah, this is a massive improvement over the Quest 2. Whether it will make people who didn't care about headsets care

about headsets, to me is still the open question, right? Like, that's what I don't know. But if you're a person who cares about headsets, gigantic upgrade. I kind of think it didn't sell itself well enough. Like, like, talking to Adi, talking to you, talking to people who got to actually try the thing was much more compelling to me than watching the actual keynote about the product. I think this is going to be true for every VR headset, including the Vision Pro, forever. Yeah. And well, that's just very interesting to me because Addy, like, told me about it. And she's like, oh, yeah, the pastures way, way, way better. And I was like, oh, dang, I kind of want it. Just for that. That sounds really cool. And then I don't see any of that on stage. And I'm like,

well, I'm glad Addie told me. It really is one of the great unsolved problems of VR is how to show someone what you're seeing in VR in a way that looks at all compelling. Because your options are either like show it on the two screens, ones for each eye, which just doesn't make any sense to anybody. Or you just show it like a slightly low-res television. It's like, this doesn't mean anything to anybody. And I've been hearing this from people in this space for like damn near a decade now that they're like, when we put this on someone's head, they get it. Yeah. And until you put it on someone's head, it is so hard to explain what it is about it that works.

The only things I've ever seen, you know, those people who play Beat Sabre, and they've built entire green screen rooms. And so, like, they're doing, like, real life overlays. Yeah. Everyone's just got to do that. That's my feeling. But the problem is, like, so many things are, like, sitting and using a computer. Like, Quest for Business is like, no, you use Excel. And it's like, this sucks.

Yes. Yeah, very large Excel. And the price doesn't, I think the big problem is the price doesn't help. Like, one of the reasons the Quest 2 was so compelling was you're like, wow, I can get this for $300 when it was first announced, right? And they've now dropped that price back down to $300 after like a brief time of increasing the price. And so a little wave there. And that was really compelling. Like I went out and bought it the day it was announced because it was like, that price is so low.

I didn't get the $300 when I spent more money. But I was still like, wow, I'm getting such a deal. This is great. And then this one is still $500. That's the same price as a PS5 or an Xbox. Yeah. This is very hard to justify as an impulse purchase at Christmas the way that I think a lot of Quest 2s got sold is sort of like, what tech present am I buying the kids for Christmas? Because it was like that lower number.

And I think that's going to harm adoption because of that fact that you have to put it on, you have to try it or you have to know somebody who has to really be compelled by it. Or actually, I think what makes it even harder is it's like not a console generation, right? It's not PS4 to PS5. A lot of people have Quest 2 because of what happened last Christmas and the Christmas before it. Yeah. And it's like, oh, that's just sitting on the shelf. Although, I don't know. I think this one is going to be a little bit tough because I think the Quest 3 is going to make the Quest 4 a console generation.

Because what it's going to do, like everybody's going to spend the next year building actually usable mixed reality stuff. because for the first time, it's worth doing. Like, the pass-through stuff is good enough. And the Vision Pro is there. Right. And so we're now going to get to a point where there is an actual generation of stuff to do that takes advantage of this tech. Whereas right now, it's like a lot of the reason for the mixed reality is, and they even pitch it this way, so that, like, I can find my coffee cup or look at my phone without taking my headset off, which is useful. It's a bad reason to buy a product.

And so there just hasn't, they need the thing. And that will come. And it can come now, which is really exciting. But I think it's going to make the selling point for next year's model much easier. But I don't know how much it does for like right now. Do you think it will be next year's model or do you think they'll wait a few years? That's the problem is I don't think they're, I think they're still at console level, not at phone level in encouraging upgrade cycles. And I think if they release a new one next year, it's just going to be like, well, why like at what point do I actually invest in this very expensive thing? that isn't always reliably backwards compatible that is, like, growing each year by these leaps and bounds, shouldn't I just wait until next year? Shouldn't I just wait until next year? Shouldn't I just wait for another price drop? But I think they need to be a little more thoughtful about how they're marketing this thing

and pricing it. But I still also kind of want one. Yeah. Yeah, that's about right. And I think that's like the best case scenario for them. Yeah, it's like Christmas, somebody gives me like a little best buy gift card. I'm like, somebody wants to throw me 500 bucks. you know, maybe I'm buying Quest 3.

I'll spend it. I'll spend it, not on Legos. It seems clear that what Meta did here was say, we have to stop building the best possible cheap thing and just build a thing that's really good and then charge what we have to. I think Apple went the same route to, like, the nth degree. But meta has been on this path and like Snap has been doing this

and others have been doing this where these things have to be cheap. They have to be impulse buys. You have to be able to buy them for Christmas. And we're going to make them as good as we can, and they'll get better and better over time. And that hasn't really worked because it's still not possible to make a really good one for that price.

I don't have any reporting to back this up, but I would bet good money that this hardware is not going to be earth-shatteringly high margin for meta. These things are expensive to build and hard to build. And I think meta was smart to say, like, this is the bar for what quality is

and we just have to charge what it costs to build this. And let that get cheaper over time as opposed to like hoping quality goes up over time because that I just don't think has worked so far. Yeah. It looks cool though. And this is, by the way, we should talk about the Heath interview with Suck.

Zuck makes this point, right? Like making things smaller and cheaper is actually very hard. And he, there's a, we can even watch the, we should go watch the whole thing. It's great. But we have a TikTok up where he's like,

people are impressed by the pyramids, but it's actually small things that are more impressed. The beginning of his history channel show. One more thing I want to bring up out of the Heath interview. The Heathen interview is great. Mark is super loose, super relaxed. It talks a lot about building products.

Actually, he's relaxed about two things. It's building products. He's like back in builder mode and he's like, this is what's great. Like, the last few years I've needed to be like this First Amendment scholar, statesman person, but like now I'm building shit again and he can tell how loose. And then he's super loose when he talks about beating people up.

So loose. Loves it. Just loves hitting a guy. And that's like great. It's like, this is the most personality. But he loves like, MMA as a sport, not just like street fight. Just be clear.

I'm very tired. He's just out there punching people on the street. But he like talks about it and he talks about how the skill and discipline. And they're like, you can see he's relaxed. Like he's back in his zone as opposed to Senator Wee saw ads. You know, like, um, and there's a lot of talking about the Quest 3 and building that and what they've learned and all this stuff. There's a lot of talking about building threads and how excited that's made him.

And one more confirmation that they are definitely. going to decentralize and federate threads, which I think is really cool. Yeah, and he made the case you would hope he would make, which is that like, we think that the future of social, we have to give people confidence that these things are going to be around. And it's like, yes, Mark, where have you been for 20 years? Right, he's like, we've thought about doing on Facebook, but Facebook has due complicated. So you have to do it from the beginning, which is like, cool, you know. And true.

Like, I think that's a, like, re-architecting Facebook for Activity Pub is probably not possible. It's just, yeah. Can we talk about the coolest part of the meta Connect? Was it how ripped Mark Zuckerberg was? I said it like three times as we were sitting watching the live stream. Like, I cannot believe how shredded this dude is. Yeah, like, I think we were all just quietly slacking each other. Just be like, yo.

Wow. Yeah. It sucks you out. It was the glasses. The glasses were something that I think hearing about them. It was the opposite of the Quest 3. Somebody would tell me about the Quest 3 and I'd be like, oh, that sounds really, really cool. But I'd watch the demo and I'd be like, that's eh.

And then this one, I'd watch the demo for the Glass 3. glasses and be like, eh, and then they talk about the glasses. I was like, actually, these sound cool. Like, I want these glasses? Confident me. I have been back and forth on this a million times. Smart glasses to me are either a thing that everyone should have immediately or an objectively stupid idea that just should not exist.

And I genuinely go between them 10 times a day. Convince me they're cool. Yeah, I do too, because I have to wear glasses and I don't want to go, like, get new lenses for these $300 frames, which is probably the same price as most frames anyway. like that price isn't that different. But they were good looking. And then the woman that did the presentation forum was like, had such good energy. Oh, yeah.

She was so excited to be there and talk about these glasses that I was like, are they really awesome? These seem awesome. And I think it was like the camera. It was just like the way the cameras work, the camera is much higher quality than it has been previously. I don't think I, I can't think of a practical use case for these glasses because they've got the, they got. that audio in them. So, so you'll be able to hear stuff and you'll be able to like use your phone to ask it. You can ask it questions and the responses will pop up on your phone. And that seems like kind of cool and moving towards that mixed reality thing. And then it's got the cameras that will

that will like stream to threads and stream to Instagram and do all of that. And that seems really, really cool. And I don't think I actually want to be that connected to other people. But at the same time, part of me was like, but don't I? So this is actually. the exact tension that I had been feeling to. And, Eli, I've been wondering all week about you because I remember when you first had a kid, one of the things that you did pretty quickly was by a point-and-shoot camera

because you were like, I want to take a lot of pictures, I want to document a lot of stuff, but I don't want to have my phone in front of my face all the time for lots of obvious reasons. And that is the exact use case that all of these companies make for smart glasses. Like, there are kids in the demo reel for every single one of these.

Right? Because you can have both hands. You can swing your kid around, whatever. But you are less, there's not so much of a thing between you and especially not a thing that is otherwise trying to grab your attention. Well, there's one thing between you and your kid. You're wearing sunglasses. You can get them in regular frame. You can get prescription lenses.

There's like, there's one thing. You can get transition lenses. My dad wears transitions. They're fine. Yeah, your dad and like every fourth grader who just got their first pair of glasses. I was that child. That boy was me. It was not cool, my friends.

Everyone, someone please go to fourth grades across the country and tell these children. Wow. This is Joey Slater that I will not tolerate. Sorry, Dad. I had an adult person trying to help me to get transition glasses recently. No, it's fine. Once you've, like, achieved in life. Yeah, it's okay.

You can have transition lights. I see. That was the case made to be. They're like, no, no, you can do it now. You're an adult. Yeah, it's like, your children. are at the house, you're married. You've got a grand kid.

You're like, yeah, just take a load off, bro. Just have sunglasses ready to go. When you're in fourth grade, it's not just tell the children. They're just gray all the time, these little kids in gray lenses. It's a weird 1980s in Wisconsin. Anyway, yes, this is the argument. The problem is the camera's not any good. But my RX100 is a great camera.

That's why I bought it. My iPhone is an extremely complicated philosophical quandary of a camera. that's why I have it. This is like, I'll have it. I'll get my hands back, but I'm going to take shittier photos. Who doesn't love 12 megapixel single non-HDR photos? People love it more than 5 megapixels, which was the previous one. I haven't seen the photos, but that's always, to me, it's like, you know, what's the phrase?

The best camera is the one you have with you? I always have an amazing camera with me. Your glasses. My glasses, my transition lenses. I know. My phone's around, you know. And I bought a really nice camera so I could divest myself of the phone. But I don't think having a more convenient camera.

I don't know. I haven't seen the photos. I haven't like used the thing. Again, blind reacts to the right hand glasses. But, you know, I don't know. Like it's more technology. And when I was, David, to your point, I was after less. Yeah.

And I think, I think to me, like it's very clear that meta does not see these smart glasses as like the end point of smart glasses right like at the end of connect mark dr bar got up and did the like almost sort of steve jobs impression of like you know when he was like it's a widescreen ipad it's a phone it's an internet communicator and he was like he showed it he was like we have the quest three headset we have all this AI communication stuff and then we have smart glasses and the case he made is that like the end state of this is that the first two things, the quest and the AI stuff are going to end up in the glasses, right?

Like he's like, this is the form factor and we're going to pull all this stuff into it over time. And I don't know how long that's going to take or if that's ever going to happen, but I believe them that that's the vision. And I think the question we've been asking for a bunch of years now is like, is there anything interesting along the way? And to me, just purely from a personal perspective, the cameras don't do anything for me, partly because I think the like real world creepiness factor is still really real. And I don't I don't know how to sort through that.

It's very high. Yeah. It's just like even just like walking around like if you just walk around a city just holding up your phone like you might be taking a pick. You're going to creep people out. Right? It's like whether or not you're actually doing anything. It feels bad. And so I have not sorted through how to deal with that.

But I do think the, uh, the thing I'm most excited to see about these glasses is whether the mic and headphones are good. because it's essentially they're trying to do this like personal audio speaker thing where you can hear it but nobody else can it has five mics in the glasses including one on your nose that's supposed to do a better job of picking up your voice which makes sense if that works that's pretty cool I don't like being a person who wears AirPods all the time I would like to be a person who wears AirPods less and so if that's the kind of thing that I can use like if I'm out on a walk or whatever that's compelling to me but also like it's whatever whatever it's whatever It's $250. Am I going to buy? I don't wear glasses anyway. If I already wore glasses, I think I would be slowly talking to myself into this. But as somebody who doesn't otherwise wear glasses, that's a big leap. I mean, that's why I'm like, ooh, like maybe I should get a pair of these the next time I go get my prescription updated.

I mean, a pair of wayfarers is like $165. You're not that far away to add all this other stuff. We're all learning an important lesson about the amount of margin contained a pair of wayfarers. Yeah, maybe this is going to start dropping the prices of regular glasses. I only buy $20 sunglasses because I lose them, and I think I've, I just realized that I came to my conclusion. Same. I bought one nice pair of sunglasses, and I said, if I lose these within a year, I'm never allowed to buy nice sunglasses again. I lost them in three days.

I don't. They're just gone. And so now I buy, I buy $15 sunglasses like four times a year. It's great. Yeah. I bought prescription sunglasses. I have had them 10 years. The prescription's no longer.

accurate, but I still have the glasses. Perfect. I probably shouldn't drive with them. It's fine. I will just say this. You know, everyone thinks this as a form factor. Apple thinks this is the form factor. What the most compelling applications that are being built in the space are all virtual reality

applications, even Apple, right? When you look at their demos, it's like your court side at the NBA or like there's a dinosaur eating you or whatever. They're all VR applications. There are no compelling mixed reality or AR applications yet. Because they haven't figured out the privacy. Well, sure, but they just, they can't even demo. Even my demo, my killer app, I will pay any amount of money for it, right?

Just show me people's names. I was just at this conference, the amount of time I spent squinting at people's badges, which is just really a weird thing to do. By the way, if you're ever hosting a conference, make the names bigger on the badges. That's my one note. And now that I'm a conference host. Well, the font sizes next year are going to be bananas. It's out of control.

It's huge. Everyone's going to carry around like yard signs with their name on them. This is my killer app. is the thing I want the most. Faces and names. Incredibly difficult to do in a privacy-centric way. You might have to build a worldwide facial recognition data, but all very hard. Even that, right? It's not built because of those problems.

But it's the killer app for AR. No one can do it. All of the ones are building along the way are VR. And that is in conflict with our belief about what the form factor will be. Because you have to block out the world to do VR well. and a pair of glasses does not, by definition, does not do that.

And I was having dinner with a friend at the conference and they're like, oh yeah, but we'll just like do the things on the sides. And I'm like, what kind of like mad max

like bullshit are you trying to sell me right now? No, you just look like you had cataract surgery. No, you're going to look like Will I am in like early 2000s music video. No,

no, no, no, no, no. It's a bad look. Don't do that. So I'm just, saying like all of the best applications that we're building are VR applications and everyone thinks the form factor will make those applications go away unless you saw this like block out the world. And like I don't, that's weird. There's a tension there that I think, like you said, David, we're figuring out if there's anything interesting along the way. The thing that's

interesting to me along the way is the absolute tension between what's why you would put a computer on your face and the form factor of whatever wants that computer to be. Or has to be. Right. We're very much in the like, you know, 1990s desktop tower PC thing where the only version of it weighs a thousand pounds and has to live on your wood office max setup. Please keep sending us your old desk setup. We love them so much. We're going to make a coffee table book. I want to be clear about this.

This is my goal. It's a coffee table book called computer rooms. And then we're going to retire and we're going to buy a boat. And that book will be called the computer room. And I've just been thinking about this plan the whole time. I love it. All right, we need to take one more break, and then we're going to come back. We're going to talk about the writer's strike real quick, and then we're going to do a little lighting round, and then we're going to get out of here. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. Alex Krantz, tell us about the end of the writer strike. It ended this week, kind of out of nowhere, it seemed like. Well, we knew that negotiations seemed to be reaching a conclusion. Everybody was starting to get kind of excited about whatever contract was coming. contract is out now. The Guild still has to vote on it. So both the Writers, Guild of America, East and West, both of them still have to vote on it. Everybody's still reading over it. They released a summary Tuesday night. And then the next day they released the actual contracts. You can go,

and if you want to, you can go pour through the whole thing. We have like a little summary of it up on the website as well. And there's a lot of big stuff in it. They got almost everything they wanted as far as AI goes. So there's a lot of AI protection. in it. You're not going to be able to go ask AI to come up with a plot and then take that to a writer and make a writer write it. And then you keep the rights to that story. You're not going to be able to do that. The writer will maintain the rights to the story because AI's cannot, AI generated content cannot have rights according to this contract, which is probably good. I think that was really exciting. I know I spoke to a few writers who were really, really excited

about that part of it and excited to just have that protection to, that helps maintain the status quo. And the thing that's really going to change the status quo is the data. There's now going to be data that the Writers Guild is going to receive from these streamers, like Netflix, Amazon, all these people who have been super, super opaque about their data. They're not going to be able to be opaque with the Writers Guild itself. A lot of that data is not going to come to the rest of us because it's, you know, they still don't want everybody to know their numbers, but the writer's goal will be able to release it in aggregate. And the fact that the numbers are even going to be out there just changes things. Like, it's a town. People talk. People are going to

know those numbers. That seems like the bet, right? I was listening to an interview with Adam Conover, who's a writer who's on the negotiating committee for the guild. And I forget he who he was talking to. I wish I could cite the podcast I was listening to. But he basically was like, if you reporters want the number, maybe you should make a journalist's union and go fight with studios. I don't care about you. I'm trying to get numbers for my people.

But then what he basically said is like between the numbers that are going to get reported to the guild and the fact that this business is shifting towards advertising, like we're just going to start to know more. It's they're just, the numbers are going to be reported

to more people, people talk. It's going to start to be out there in much bigger ways. And I think that's true. But it does seem like, like there was some rubric they invented for like total hours watched of something. It's like we're still inventing the new

numbers of what all of these things mean. Yeah, there's still new numbers. But I think because they're enshrined in a contract, they'll probably start to stabilize as the new numbers, right? We talked about that on the podcast earlier this week and the numbers. They've always been fake. They've always been not real. And everybody just agreed, okay, these not real numbers are the ones we're going to use. And so now we have new numbers. that are probably the most realistic numbers we've had for streaming or broadcast television, if I'm being honest. These are numbers that are very, very trackable, very understood.

And they're different. Total hours of something streamed, I think, is it. And that's, like, kind of goofy. But it's a real number, you know. But it does mean that, like, if 300 million people watch the first 15 minutes of something, that could be the same as if one person watches it. 300 billion times, which is a very real possibility because there are some weirdos out there. Like Alex Kranz.

I was like me. Speaking of K-pop fans, I have an important piece of information. Yes. So one of our sponsors at Code was Luminate, which formerly Nielsen Scan, they do the billboard charts. So I was talking about, hanging out, it was really fun. They did a session. And they were talking about how they measure things. Did you know that at the platform level, if you stream something more than 50 times in a day, doesn't count?

because of K-pop fans. Yeah. You just tap out at 50. Yep, that's it. If you're more than 50 times a day, they're like, that's, you didn't do it. But do you get the 50? I don't, that's proprietary weirdness. Interesting.

Like, if you talk to the people who measure things, Luminate, which makes the charts with Billboard, yeah, they're like, yep, at a platform level, we, like, K-pop fans are, like, our antagonists. So everything you love, you can only stream 49 times. Yeah, and then there's still some like algorithmic re-normalization. And I think this is now coming. This is my thesis. Like whatever happens to music industry happens to everyone else five years later.

This is now going to come to streaming television because if you're a writer or you have a fandom and there's going to be an aggregate number that everyone agrees on, you're necessarily going to go try to game that number. I mean, fans already do that. Like if they think there's shows. But there's no transparency, right? Right. Yeah, right now it was kind of like, we're working because it showed up in the Netflix top 10. We're working because some company did analysis and said, we're in the top 10. And boy, to show you up the Netflix top 10, not guarantee you a goddamn thing.

Nothing. Cancelled in the middle of the first episode. Yeah. But not only that, I mean, the platforms also have, you know, a hundred thumbs to put on the scale at any given time. Like what Netflix chooses to show you in that big banner when you open the app is very meaningful. And the top 10 is like very localized. Like here's the top 10 things in your house. It's the show that you were in the EP of.

You're like, oh, this is like. It's always the shows that they've already canceled. It's like, Alex, do you watch this show? We just canceled? And I'm like, I do. And I hate you. So, so yeah. What this contract, this contract is straight up historic though.

Also because like there were a lot of big price increases in it, particularly around streaming. Streaming is not lucrative if you're a writer. Just straight up before this. It was not lucrative. You could barely make into me for the vast majority of people. and the studios have gotten really good about gaming the system that existed to pay as little as possible. And this kind of ended a lot of that gaming.

It's still going to happen. People are still going to get screwed out of money. That is the nature of business. But this contract really put some really strong guardrails in, particularly around streaming. Like, they were anticipating, I think it's like a 26% increase in revenue for writers of streaming films that make. that have a budget of $30 million or more. So all those really big Netflix, Apple TV films and stuff, where previously they probably weren't getting a lot of money for that.

They're now going to be getting at least $100,000. And that's nice. That seems nice to be. So, yeah, this is like very historic. SAG is still on strike, but there's a lot of movement there. People were kind of expecting this to be the way WGA goes. They get this really good deal. SAG is going to get a lot of similar stuff because of that deal and be able to close things.

And if you were in the Directors Guild of America, I don't know what to tell you. You guys decided on your contract before everybody else went on strike. Well, I think they might have known that the writers were. Yeah, they do. They knew. And their contract is by comparison not nearly as good. They're directors. Yeah.

They're directors. They're fine. They got their producer credit. Like, they could just put themselves in as it. actor or writer. They'll find other ways to make the money. Every director now does a cameo. It's going to be great.

I will say that Casey on stage at code was like, we're doing, we held true detective because we wanted the ad, we wanted Jody Foster to be available to promote the show. We wanted people to be able to talk about it. And it's like, oh, the sag deal isn't done, but they're very confident that the writer's deal is going to give them the actor's deal. Yeah. Yeah, because so much of the debate is about the same stuff. And I think it definitely seemed to be that it was likely for the GIL to get the deal done first.

And then there's going to be a lot of copying and pasting from this deal to that deal. Yeah. Especially it seems with the AI stuff. And I thought one of the most interesting parts of the AI piece of this deal was essentially that they punted on the question of training data. Like, can you use our work to train AI models that can make other screen plays? There was a very specific reason for that. And that's because there's so much. like laws that are potentially going to an effect. So why hold on to this bargaining chip when you

know that California, like I think it was last week, California said, we're going to look into regulating training data and making sure compensation happens and stuff. I will bet you $10 right now that this deal gets renegotiated again before anybody makes a law on that front. Yeah. Right. If you know that you're operating in three-year cycles, you're like, well, that's what I mean. Like I think you're right, Alex, but I think I think everybody was just like, who the hell knows? Like, let's come back and do this again in three years. If it gets weird, there's a line in here that lets us yell at you. If it gets weird, that's good enough for now.

Yeah, and I thought that was really smart on their part. Like, okay, we're going to kick this can down the road. Maybe something happens. Maybe something doesn't. We got three years to figure it out. Yeah, it's just a funny acknowledgement of like, no one really knows anything. So like, let's just be cool for now and we'll figure this out later. I thought that was like, there was just a funny place for that to land.

All right. let's do a lightning round we are already very long so let's just blow through this hit some more news and get out of here i will go first so you guys can come up with your own nelai you can quickly read five days of the verge and catch up and see where you are oh i know i already picked mine it's very obvious no no that one's mine Alex Alex and i are fighting in the google back there's like two cursors like furiously selecting lines in the google top there's a lot happening right now Mine is, there's this big shift in the podcast world. I feel like we got to talk about podcasts on podcasts.

Google is killing Google podcasts because it's all in on YouTube music as the home of podcasts. I just like a random side note is I hate the fact that there are apps called Amazon music and YouTube music and their podcast apps. Like bad names, everybody. Like you screwed up. But anyway, Google podcast is going away because Google can't stop killing its apps. But it's all in on YouTube as a podcast platform. YouTube music has been like a.

sneaky place of investment for YouTube for a long time now and they're getting much louder about like we really think this is our subscription business going forward. That's really interesting. Apple Podcasts is going the other way. They're they're integrating a lot of stuff from outside of podcasts into podcasts, including some of the like radio stuff that they've been doing, some of the different like meditation stuff that they've been doing. There's just a lot of like audio around the Apple ecosystem that's now all being pulled into Apple podcasts. So while YouTube goes into YouTube, Apple is pulling your podcasts. And I thought that was very interesting. And also to everyone who has asked what podcast app should I use, there are lots of good answers, mine is pocketcasts. It's a terrific app. It's been around forever. Automatic owns it, the people who own WordPress,

so they're not going to kill it randomly because they hate you. It's a good app, pocketcasts. I can't even mention podcasts without people telling me to use Overcast. They just show up out of it. Overcast is a great app. The only downside of Overcast is. is that it is pretty platform specific, but otherwise it is a terrific app.

Let's see. I feel like whichever one of you I call on right now gets to have this one. No, I paid another one. Let me go. Stay away. I'm not going to touch you. You stay out of my chair, like literally.

All right, Nealai, go. Logitech. It partnered with the company called Playseat, and they've made a Logitechek branded racing chair. I'm really unhappy because I own the same chair without the Logite improvements. I own the PlaySteeat Challenge for, PlayStation VR and Grand

Triismo VR. It's a great chair. Logitech, by the way, if you just look at it, I own their racing wheel, now they're doing this chair, that company thinks there's a bigger market in racing sims, and they're just like going after it. And I think they're right. They know what's coming. This thing folds up. Like that's, I have not bought one of these because. No, I have, again, I have the thing. It folds up. It's very good. It does. Okay. Yeah, it folds up and the wheel stays attached and it's all very compact. You can get in a closet. It's just you unfold it and you put it in the center of your living room and you're like, I'm going to use it again tomorrow.

You never fold it. No, my problem is I have to buy this thing without my wife ever finding out that I bought it. So I need it. I need to be able to get rid of it very quickly at a moment's notice. And there's nothing like furtively hiding or a seat that says the words play seat on it from your wife. Yeah, that's fun to explain on the credit card statement. Wait, so what did Logitechette do that makes this cool and exciting? So if you just look at some of the, you know, the little latches a little better.

Like, they've made some quality of life improvements because they're Logitech. So it's like, it just, from what I can tell, they've just made it slightly easier to, like, operate the folding and the, you know, they've just, like, made it more ergonomic. But I think it's mostly, like, the things that were red or no blue, you know. But, like, Logitech is doing this because they want to distribute the stuff. But Placee doesn't have huge distribution, right? They're actually a little company. Logitex is, like, Best Buy.

So, like, I think they're taking it and they're putting it out in the channels because they see bigger market for this stuff. It folds down so little. Dude, PSVR, Grand Tarismo VR. We did this whole thing about the Quest 3. Yeah. And I am telling you, the Grand Tourismo VR on the PSVR 2 is one of the single most compelling things you can do in VR. I believe it. Like even, and I'm like a car nerd and I love it and it's like fine. Like my friends, my family, I put them in the thing and like they're in the silly little chair and they're like blown away. You put a little fan in front of them, really get the immersion. Yeah, I stand right next to him going, vrum, vrum!

Just back the truck up, roll coal on them. We did, you know, we did a, you know, Kids React video to Project Starline at Code, which is another thing that's impossible to show people. But it's great. We should do it. We should do a video of people reacting to Grand Trees and OVR because it's super cool. It's good idea. I need to stop looking at this page, or else I'm going to buy this thing.

Alex, what's yours? Same. I just want to close the loop. We know where Amazon. Former Amazon Harbor Chief David Limpwin. Oh, yeah. And he's going to Blue Origin. So he's going to go build rockets.

Just can't get enough Jeff Bezos, that guy. Just can't get enough of Jeff. So that was like we everybody, conversely, they also finally confirmed that Panos Panay is definitely coming to Amazon. Yep. That is happening. So all of the stuff that was up in the air, now we know where everybody is. Yeah. Dave's going to be over at Blue Origins.

So probably. Dave's definitely going to put Alexa in Iraq, actually. Alexa, take me to space for two minutes. I need to float around a little bit. And Panos is definitely coming to Amazon. So it's both happening. I've already emailed Amazon repeatedly about e-readers as soon as it was announced. I'm so sorry to Amazon PR.

But yeah, let's see it, Panos. Let's see a really good Kendall. As soon as the Panos News was announced, somebody just mentioned me on threads and just said the words, Kindlefold, question mark. That's all I've been thinking about. week. Pano's doing it. Give me my folding

Kindle. I'm feeling it. All right, we have gone extremely long. We need to get out here. Like I said,

there's a bunch of lawsuits. Yeah, let's talk about Linda Akarina someone. Nealai needs to go to bed. So we're going to go. I'm back,

by the way. Code's over. I am become death. Welcome. The I have Soron is back. Yeah. Everyone who asked where Neelai was,

you're going to rue how much he is back now. Welcome to hell. But yeah, Like I said, there's going to be, there's a bunch more trial stuff to come. It sounds like Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, is going to be testifying. Can we even talk about? Wait, you were there in the room.

We're going to talk about that next week. There's so much to talk about. It's going to be great. I'm excited about it. Satya Nadella is testifying on Monday, we think. I'm going to try and be in the courtroom for that. Lots more going on there. We have the FTC suing Amazon.

The FtX trial is starting next week. There is like a lot still happening. There's a Google event coming next week. We are not short of things to talk about. In the meantime, we're going to have a ton of code stuff. going up over the next few days. Interview with AMBCO, Lisa Sue is up now. She talked a lot about competing with the video.

Yeah. That was a good one too. We should have mentioned that earlier. She was great and very interesting about like the future of all of this AI hardware stuff. That was a really interesting one. Products. I put products on stage at code. The bullshit was the bullshit, but the products were real.

There you go. All right. We are out of here. Everybody's going to go just decompressed for a couple of days. And then we'll be back next week. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

Daddy took my line. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters.

That's it. We'll see you next week.