Tech Stocks Rocked by Global Selloff & Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Talks New In-House Glasses

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18:58Milly F.:The famous adage goes, if you can't beat them, join them. And for Netflix, that means embracing the smartphone. The streamer knows that it's competing with your phone for attention. You've got a Netflix show up on the TV, but really you're far more focused on composing a banger to the group chat. To keep people engaged in its content, Netflix is turning your smartphone into an interactive controller with a new game called Unhinged. It's a horror title from in-house developer Night School Studio with voice work from Zoe Kravitz and Sadie Sink coming to the app June 30th. In the game, which only takes less than an hour to complete, your phone transforms into the lead character's phone, which you'll use as a flashlight to illuminate the darkness and answer texts and calls.

19:37Milly F.:as Netflix's head of narrative game, Sean Crankle told the New York times. If you're ever looking at your phone, it's because we want you to. Netflix is desperately searching for a breakthrough in its video games unit, which launched in 2021, but has struggled to find a wider audience. It's hoping that by jacking up the level of immersion and leaning into people's phone use, we'll present a gateway drug for users to discover its other video games.

20:00Andrew Bosworth:I think this is so smart on so many levels. One, the fact that the technology is just dead cool. And that's actually what developers said is that they discovered that you can point your smartphone at a TV and it will reflect the flashlight on the TV. And once they came upon that, they're like, oh, we can build an entire horror game around this. So the fact that a tech insight led to the development of this, I think, is very cool. I also think the length of the game is very smart because they realized that when you sit down on the couch to watch Netflix, you're probably on the couch for, you know, 20 to 50 minutes.

20:32Andrew Bosworth:Let's make the video game the same length as that. the play time here if you're good it's 20 minutes if you want to take your time a little bit it's closer to 50 minutes so that is much more akin to an episode of tv than a traditional video game that sometimes stretches on for hours and i also love that they leaned into the fear associated with being in your own apartment so this game basically takes place mostly inside where you're going to watch it for from it's going to be inside on your own couch so horror design for the living room is such an interesting wrinkle here in something that does feel uniquely Netflix in a way that maybe some of their other video games have not thus far.

21:09Milly F.:And the big picture here is that Netflix is kind of on the back foot. Remember, Matt Damon came out and said that he's heard that directors and showrunners have been instructed by Netflix to reiterate plot points three or four times in the dialogue because people are distracted with their phones. A report came out a couple years ago that said just 1 % of people played Netflix video games despite this big push. Also, if you look at their stock, we did the stock market story earlier, but Netflix is not doing well on the stock market. It's down 30 percent this year. It's down 50 percent. It's been cut in half over the past year.

21:42Milly F.:It is battling for attention from Instagram, from TikTok, from YouTube. All these factors are playing into just sort of investor souring on Netflix right now. So it's throwing a lot of things at the wall. It's trying a horror video game. And I don't think it's a coincidence that this is it's a horror because horror is huge right now. Now, Backrooms and Obsession are dominating the box office, and they released a new Hot Ones spinoff, so they're trying a lot of different things to get back into Wall Street's good graces.

22:08Andrew Bosworth:Who would have thought, though, that the video game that may or may not be popular from Netflix is not tied to one of their existing franchises? Because they tried that. They tried to do a Black Mirror video game. They tried to do a Squid Games experience on the TV, but this has no relation to anything that they've made before. it's an interesting bet but I do think that this bet on bite-sized interactive entertainment is something that will succeed for the most part I'm interested in playing it which is I think their target audience I don't play video games I don't even really watch Netflix but the fact that I can use my phone and like point it as a flashlight on the tv I think that is very compelling well I

22:46Milly F.:also thought this was interesting because they do want people like you who don't necessarily play video games and to figure out how to hook you they look to the early 2000s nintendo consoles like wii and nintendo ds which i'm you probably didn't play video games but i'm guessing you played the week i did play so they looked so this was their inspiration is those early 2000s nintendo consoles that just hooked people very low barrier to entry they weren't gamers but they're like the that seems like something that would be accessible to me and that's sort of what they're trying to copy.

23:17Andrew Bosworth:I was a Wii sports resort legend back there. Ping pong, you know, the plane flying game, archery. People listening are like, this is the least surprising thing I've ever heard. It's very fun. All right, let's switch to the finish with some final headlines. Yesterday, federal officials announced charges against 455 defendants across 45 states and territories and what was the largest coordinated health care fraud enforcement action in Department of Justice history and the second biggest fraud takedown ever by dollar amount. The cases range from unnecessary medical procedures to opioid fraud to even a skin graft scheme where tissue was marked up by 2 ,000 % and billed to Medicare for patients that didn't even need the treatment.

23:59Andrew Bosworth:Prosecutors say some defendants used the ill-gotten gains to buy luxury cars, watches, and homes. One funded the construction of a beach resort in the Philippines. The newsletter 1440 wrote that healthcare fraud costs the U.S. between$100 and$170 billion annually, which is roughly 3 % to 15 % of total healthcare spending. This was one of the biggest operations ever, cracking down on it.

24:23Milly F.:Pretty lucrative until it wasn't. Up next, a new audiobook of Homer's Odyssey was released yesterday, narrated by Michael Caine, the legendary British actor you might know from dishing folksy wisdom as Alfred in the Dark Knight trilogy. Except the voice you hear isn't exactly Michael Caine's. It's an AI clone. Caine has licensed his voice to the AI audio company Eleven Labs, which produced the audiobook using 20 other AI voices, plus AI-generated sound effects and a musical score. Given all the hype around the Odyssey this summer, with Christopher Nolan's movie coming out in less than a month, it's going to be a fascinating test case to see whether audiences gravitate toward AI-narrated audiobooks.

25:01Milly F.:So far, even though AI narration is widespread, read just 16 % of audiobook listeners said they listened to an AI voiced audiobook.

25:09Andrew Bosworth:Also, reviewers did not like the cloned Michael Caine voice. They did say you can definitely recognize it as Michael Caine. He does have a very recognizable voice, but then they were saying that during the biggest moments of the book, it lacked emotional depth. Some scenes that they pointed to when Odysseus comes back and sees all the suitors occupying his home. I don't know if this is a spoiler alert. If you haven't read the Odyssey at this point, you got to read it. He shows very little anger when he's recounting that. The frightened suitors sound oddly calm in that situation. So some of the big emotional moments just fall flat when you don't have an actual person at the reins there.

25:47Andrew Bosworth:One part of the puzzle that definitely likes this are the actors themselves. I mean, Michael Caine is obviously very much on the tail end of his career. The fact that he can license his voice and still make money off of his voice is something that is appealing to actors. So I don't think this is the last of the AI enhanced creative workers debate that we are seeing because there are two parties that are on other sides of the debate, honestly. It probably will get better eventually, but I'm not sure it's quite at the level that consumers are going to want to hear a pretty flat, emotionally listless voice reading an all-time classic.

26:25Milly F.:I wish he's still alive. I wish we just got him because he does have one of the best voices of all time. Either way, with the Odyssey coming, you're probably thinking, I should probably read this or listen to it. You are very much a proponent of listening to it, whether it's the Michael Caine AI-generated version or any other audiobook of the Odyssey, because this is the way it was originally intended to be consumed back 3 ,000 years ago.

26:47Andrew Bosworth:Long oral tradition, baby. That's what I kept saying when I would say, yeah, I'm reading the Odyssey. Well, I'm actually listening to the Odyssey, but you know what? That's totally okay in my book.

26:56Milly F.:Finally, we close out every Wednesday show with Suggestion Box, where Toby and I each share a recommendation to get you over the hump of the week. I'll go first. We didn't play a pre-show game, but I'm just calling it right now. My rec is to gamify your walk. So we all know walking is important and it's especially pleasant in the summer, but sometimes you just want a little something to spice it up. Well, Rob Walker, the author of Art of Noticing, has a really fun idea. Just start counting random things you expect to encounter on your walk and don't end your walk until you hit that quota. For example, maybe tomorrow I'll go for a walk around the city and keep going until I see 20 people in U.S.

27:34Milly F.:soccer jerseys. You could also count dogs, signs, honks, people wearing hats, really anything to occupy your mind and stop it from pondering all the things you need to take care of.

27:42Andrew Bosworth:I absolutely do this on runs more than walks, but I have come back actually from runs on the West Side Highway and quizzed you. I'm like, what sport do you think I saw the most of, of jerseys that people were wearing? And it was always lacrosse. Like how many Ivy league schools do you think I saw? But it is fun. I mean, all you're trying to do is pass the time. If you're not listening to the Odyssey on your walks or runs, maybe do this. I think that is a great recommendation.

28:06Milly F.:It's also good on road trips where you can take bets with people in your car and you'll say like, how many, or how many subways are we going to see in our car until we get to our destination? So it's a good game to play as well.

28:17Andrew Bosworth:My recommendation is the website absurdlyoptimized.com. As the name suggests, the site's owner, Ben, goes to absurd lengths to optimize things like pancakes or french fries or nail clippers. For instance, on the absurdly optimized pancake page, the description is a systematic investigation of acid-based neutralization, CO2 production kinetics, gluten inhibition, and the Maillard reaction as applied to a 125-gram flour batter with an interactive stoichiometric calculator that adapts to whatever is in your refrigerator. You can then go down on the page and move little sliders that adjusts the recipe based on tang and fluffiness.

28:57Andrew Bosworth:The French fry page is fantastic. He also does product reviews of things like nail clippers and hand mixers. I just love people whose brains work like this, where he made subpar bats of French fries, and instead of just stopping there, he goes, you know, no, no, no, I'm going to go down the rabbit hole and figure out how to make good French fries. You see the problem, you put in the work, and you solve the problem, even if it's as small as a pancake.

29:19Milly F.:We may have to retire this segment, because I just went to this website, and it has literally every recommendation for anything in your life. I'm seeing absurdly optimized meat slabs, making your bedroom steamier, using science to plunge your toilet, towel absorbency quantified. So there's literally everything. I'm not sure what we could add beyond what this guy has at absurdlyoptimized.com. He covers all the bases.

29:41Andrew Bosworth:He genuinely is just the best of humanity, I think. I genuinely think when you make a pancake, most people just put the Bisquick in and you're done. But he looked at that and goes, I know there's more variables here. What if I tested every single one of them and brought it to the masses? It is a usable website. Like I encourage you to go make a recipe based off of what he has optimized. So it's very useful. It's very fun. And shout out Absurdly Optimized. All right.

30:07Milly F.:That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com or DM us on Instagram at mbdailyshow. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Liu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham. And our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Technical direction by Nina Miller. Hair and makeup is taking a walk. Couldn't you have done it at any other time? Devin Emery is our president. And our show is a production of Morning Brew.

30:37Milly F.:Great show today, Neil.

30:38Andrew Bosworth:Now stick around for our conversation with Meta CTO, Andrew Bosworth.

30:43Milly F.:Andrew, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Big day for you guys. So my first question is, I wear glasses. They help me see better, but don't do a whole lot more than that. Still, life's pretty good. I manage. Why would someone like me switch over to meta glasses rather than just buy another standard pair?

31:00Alex A.:Yeah, I mean, if you're already wearing glasses, especially now you've got audio, you've got video camera capabilities and you've got AI. And honestly, if it was just even the first two, it's enough. The most popular thing in the glasses is people listening to music, being hands free podcasts, by the way. Great on the immediate plug. They play great on the headset. You can do calls. The audio is great. Super popular in particular with people who are biking, hiking, going out for runs. And then you've got the hands-free capture. So you're out there. The best camera is the one that you have with you.

31:33Alex A.:Don't worry about taking your phone out of your pocket. You've got it hands-free on your head. For me, especially as a parent, young kids, 11 and 9, as soon as I get the camera up, first of all, I feel bad. It's kind of between me and the moment. But it doesn't matter because 11 and 9, they're gone. They see that camera coming out a mile away. they are not doing whatever cute thing they were doing before. So it allows me to kind of do that, share that with my wife while still being present at the moment. That's enough. Then you've got the AI features, which really have just gotten so much better in very recent history.

32:00Alex A.:This was kind of a fringe benefit even six months ago. In the last couple of weeks now, it's a major, major use case for the glasses. And you can use it conventionally. You can ask it things. That makes sense. We can also control the device with it. So you're hands-free. You're on a run. You're on your bike. Hey, take a video. Take a photo. and send it to my wife, that kind of thing. So it really is, I think for somebody who wears prescriptions, it's kind of a no-brainer because you've got to add all this extra functionality. For me, I don't wear prescriptions. I still like to wear the glasses.

32:28Alex A.:So that's a good sign.

32:29Andrew Bosworth:But so you mentioned the phone multiple times and kind of describing some of those use cases. Are these meant to replace the phone now or maybe eventually?

32:37Alex A.:I think over the long period, we can imagine that. Your phone's awesome. Your phone has all kinds. It's why you keep all your stuff. It's great. We love it. When we started this project years ago, our thought was, what are the things that are so valuable if you could keep your phone in your pocket and still do them? So right now they work with your phone, right? It's in conjunction with your phone, whether it's Android, whether it's iOS, doesn't matter. They help. What's cool is, yeah, as we start to see this technology progress, you can see more and more ways to keep your phone in your pocket and still take advantage of the functionality that's there.

33:05Alex A.:And over the fullness of time, you could imagine not just glasses, but a wearables kind of constellation of devices that you have replacing that functionality. But that's not where we are today. and it's not gonna be where we are for a while. So this is really something that you use in addition to your phone.

33:19Andrew Bosworth:But so when I go out of the house, I do the phone, wallet, keys, check.

33:23Alex A.:Right, classic.

33:24Andrew Bosworth:I feel naked if I don't have my phone. Is there a feature that you can point to now or maybe eventually where it will start being like phone, wallet, keys, glasses, and I feel naked without my glasses out there?

33:36Alex A.:Yeah, I mean, the way that this is headed with AI especially is if you think about AI today, a lot of the work that you're doing with AI is just giving it the context that you need for it to answer the question. And so you're like typing in, okay, my wife and I had this conversation. We're trying to make this plan for next week. What do you recommend for these types of things? I think there gets to a point where if you have AI that's able to be fully contextually aware with you, so it sees what you're seeing, it hears what you're hearing. It's private. It's just for the AI. It's just to help you.

34:06Alex A.:Now you can ask any question you want, and it's already on the spot with recommendations if it hasn't already prepared it in advance. I think it becomes kind of an unmissable accessory in that AI future. We're not there yet. We've got a ways to go. You can do it right now. You can activate a live AI session. And so you can have it be live for a period of time. But your battery will die in about an hour. So it's kind of a tight tradeoff. So we've got work to do before we get to that point. For me, at least today, though, we literally started listing, like, what are the top reasons people get their phone out of their pocket?

34:38Alex A.:And, like, music was number one. So it's like, okay, number one, got to do music. It's like calls is number two. Great. Camera's number three. Great. We've got to do that. So that is how we're approaching it.

34:46Milly F.:Wait, did you actually do research on this? Or were you just kind of like thinking off the top of your head?

34:49Alex A.:No, we did research. We actually, it's like, what are the top 10 use cases that people take their phones out of their pockets for? Can you do those? And so when we added, you know, our display glasses, it's like, cool, messages. You can do those there. So all these different pieces that we are constantly thinking about, how do we continue to bring the value that you get from your phone to a more convenient form factor?

35:07Milly F.:Okay, let's talk about the form factor. So one phrase we keep hearing from Meta and all the rivals is that glasses are perhaps the most exciting hardware category of the AI era. Why glasses? Why isn't it phones or any other form factor like a pin or a pendant or things like that?

35:23Alex A.:Yeah, there's two answers to that. The first one is glasses are already socially acceptable. It's usually widely worn. People wear them all the time. You're used to seeing them. You're used to seeing them indoors. You're used to seeing the outdoors. We have a style and a language that we've evolved over a long period of time to deliver these things in ways that are attractive. And so it's just comfortable for people to wear glasses. Do I think it could also be headphones and pendants? And sure, I absolutely think people don't want to wear glasses. It's totally fine. We should have lots of different ways of doing it.

35:48Alex A.:But glasses just are a thing that a lot of the population already wears and all the population is comfortable with. And the second reason is, to what I said before, AI, what it wants most of all is the ability to have the context to answer the question. And these see what you see, they hear what you hear. and then you want to have some system for getting that context back into your brain. And that's either going to be a display, which is in front of your eyes, or through audio, which is kind of by your ears. So they're a natural place hanging out right by our major input and output devices, our eyes and ears.

36:17Milly F.:In the MetaLab in Northern California, are you guys working on anything else besides glasses that may deliver AI to people's bodies? Oh, yes. We're working on all the things.

36:28Alex A.:MetaLab has a very expansive investigative portfolio of devices that we think could be great. And we're constantly building things that, you know, and then making a decision relatively late in the build. Like, is it good enough yet? Should we ship this or not? Or do we want to try again? And yeah, we're quite proud of that. We've been doing this for a long time. It's very exciting for us to be at the point now where we're getting pretty good mass adoption of the glasses. And, you know, what we're launching today really is just more styles. And because, frankly, get rid of all the features, if they don't look good, if they're not comfortable, people aren't going to wear them.

37:01Alex A.:most consumer electronics want everyone to adopt the one same style. We've never believed that. We've always believed this is going to have to invert that and you're going to have to meet every person where they are. And so it's not enough to just do glasses. You have to do all these form factors. It's not enough to do one style of glasses. You have to really support a broad range of glasses. So yeah, the portfolio that we have to manage at Reality Labs is pretty expansive.

37:23Andrew Bosworth:So I want to drill in on that fashion aspect because I was watching Zuck's Instagram video where he posted about the glasses and he said, it's almost fashion first and technology second. You're kind of responsible for that technology aspect. How has it been trying to manage, you know, the fashion aspect while also saying, hey, we need battery life in these things. We need to actually work.

37:43Alex A.:Now, what makes you think I'm not, no, just kidding. The fashion guy. No, I think, I think for us, we, this is a thing that we saw to our great credit. I think we saw early on, hey, we need to be experts here. We're not going to be experts here. Let's partner with SRL Exotica. Let's partner with the people who are the best in the world at this. And so obviously we have the Ray-Ban Meta, we have the Oakley Meta Glasses. These are Meta Glasses. They're still made with our partnership with SRL Exotica. They're still our manufacturing partners. They still make the lenses. They're still doing distribution for us.

38:10Alex A.:So these really are still made with, in conjunction with, you know, the best glasses company in the world. So we are partnering with, I think, the best in the business when it comes to thinking through how to position needs in the market.

38:23Andrew Bosworth:You also collaborated with Kylie Jenner on one of the models. Did you interact personally with her? How was like the collaboration effort between someone who's clearly very fashionably knowledgeable, but maybe isn't as clued on the technology side?

38:35Alex A.:Yeah, I want to give a shout out. It was awesome working with her. So our industrial design team spent a whole day with her early on and then again later in the development cycle. And, you know, this isn't the case where it's like, oh, let's like get some money and put some name on it. No, no. Kylie was involved in the design and development, like everything from the shape, the materials, the finish, the sizing, to the case, and how it was going to be positioned in the market to the campaign that's out there. If you've seen the billboards, they're kind of, they're so cool. No, it's actually tremendous shout out, because, you know, as you can imagine, people who got computer science degrees don't predict themselves in some future to be in a world where like they're working with Kylie Jenner on fashionable products.

39:16Alex A.:No, I was super, we were super blown away. She was, she had really strong opinions about the design. She really put her stamp on it. I think it was a great product, and I think you can see it in the result.

39:24Milly F.:Some of the biggest question here for a lot of consumers is privacy. People do not like to be filmed in public unless they're on the streets after a Knicks game. How are you guys alleviating the privacy fears?

39:36Alex A.:Yeah, I mean, I think we've got a couple really things that we're proud of. Obviously, even from the first generation, we've put a light on, so when you're recording, which your phones don't have, right? And I think there's quite a few videos of people in the subway in New York being surreptish as they recorded, and we've all kind of adapted as a society to the fact that phones are these devices that are capable of video recording at all times but at least there is a phone out so you know it's possible we decided to be a little bit more overt than phones with our glasses by putting the light up and then in the second generation we actually added like tamper proof work so like if the light is obviously tampered with then the video won't record there's a cat and mouse game happening there and you kind of constantly have to kind of iterate against bad actors but for the most part Like we are trying to be very forward because the truth is it's not just for the people around you.

40:17Alex A.:It's for you. You want to wear the glasses because they make you look good. They have, you know, they're useful to you, but you won't wear them if they make other people around you feel uncomfortable. Right. And so it's really important for everybody involved that these be something that everyone feels like, yep, this is on the up and up. We understand how this works. This is OK.

40:31Andrew Bosworth:So I've tried the Oakley Meta glasses and because I'm a runner and I have run down the West Side Highway with the indicator light on that I'm filming. and I get some looks for sure. How have you managed sort of almost the stigma that comes with that light being on, even though people are aware of it, they're still a little wary of being it?

40:52Alex A.:Yeah, we're still in like a very norming phase and I think I do go back to the beginning of cell phones when cell phones first had cameras and the degree of anxiety people had at that time. This is even before the iPhone. I mean like when flip phones first had cameras and people were trying to figure that out. So I think there is like a period where we as a society kind of start to build norms around these things. I will say, if you look at the popularity of the product, the numbers that we're selling and the amount that they're being used, it does seem quite out there. It's out there. It's in the world.

41:20Alex A.:Every time I go to a kid's sporting event, you're seeing, actually, they've been hugely popular with the World Cup because they also do live translations. So people who are traveling are getting translations. So my sense is we are now in the phase where these are becoming normal, and people are like, yep, I see them. I know what they are. I understand what they are. But that's not a complete process. That's something that's going to take a while, as it did with phones, as it has with any technology that kind of suddenly gains some penetration in the market.

41:44Andrew Bosworth:So I was thinking about big technological shifts over time, and I came back to cars, which, you know, they replaced the horse and buggy, but they also led to suburbs and drive-thrus and motels and all these second-order effects. What do you see as some of those second - and third-order effects around, like, how society is organized once these become more mass-adopted?

42:05Alex A.:Yeah, it's funny. I think there are, when I think about immersive technologies, I could imagine things like VR really changing some structures in terms of how we think about movies or remote work even over time. I feel less different. I feel like these are much more integrated into the way that society works today. I think they're not so much going to be displacing physical infrastructure. I think you have people who are like probably on their phones a little bit less having a little more confidence that the digital artifacts that matter to them will be brought to their attention over time by AI I think AI certainly has a powerful effect of its own separate from the wearables I think the main advantage of wearables is the assistive opportunity they give every person like every single person and we sometimes see this most obviously in people who have disabilities so these are tremendously popular with the blind community we just donated 108 ,000 pairs to every blind veteran in America last week.

42:59Alex A.:The blind community who previously would have been, we had one of our blind PMs told me, she's like, look, I can get to the restaurant. I've got Google Maps and I've got a cane and I can get there. Then Google Maps tell me, congratulations, you're at the restaurant. Where's the door? So she uses the AI to ask the question. Meaningful. But the truth is all of us at some point are going to have trouble with our vision. We're going to have trouble with our hearing. Like we have conversation folks in these glasses. We can do live captions on the display glasses. At some point that'll benefit us. That'll benefit our parents.

43:25Alex A.:Memory. I talked to Oscar Mike, this tremendous veterans organization that works with people who had traumatic brain injuries. They struggle with memory and cognition. They need to know if they took their pill or not. It could be a matter of life and death. Tremendously important stuff. We're all going to struggle with our memory at some point. This is going to be all of us. At some point, it's going to hit all of us. Even without a traumatic brain injury to blame it on, I often can't remember people's names. Like I like even without that. Right. So I think what's his name? Exactly right. Good old what's his name over here.

43:50Alex A.:So, so, so my point being like, I think we all benefit from these superpowers. So I think really the glasses are about giving each person, whether they have a disability or not, maximum capability of their own facilities to maximize who they are and what they want to do in the world. That's what we mean when we talk about personal superintelligence, by the way. It's like maximizing you for who you are.

44:09Milly F.:Okay, you aren't the only player entering this space. Many different companies are racing to build AI hardware. Is there a competitor that worries you the most and why is it Snap?

44:19Alex A.:You know, I tell my team, it's a true story, and you can ask my team someday. I tell my team, in our industry, in the hardware space, very different than the software space, every time a competitor makes different choices, for example, on weight and comfort, that's an opportunity for me to learn. Because it's very expensive for me to put a product in the market. And I can't do 10 of them. So if somebody makes different choices on me than me and we see how the market responds to that, that's a gift. I get to learn from them on what to do or what not to do. And so I am excited to have competitors in the space give me free looks.

44:53Alex A.:It's like being on the golf green. Your buddy, he gets up just right behind you, and you're getting a free look on the read. That's amazing to me. That doesn't mean we aren't paranoid. We're from the Valley, so it's Andy Grove's Valley, and only the paranoid survive. Obviously, you take every single competitor very seriously and assume that they're completely competent in all their execution. Everything's going to be perfect. And you work against that as a metric, so we're paranoid about it. But I do like that there's a lot of people investing in the space. I do like that there's enthusiasm for the space and that we get to learn from all these competitors.

45:21Andrew Bosworth:When a new product comes out, do you just go buy it and order it and put them on and wear them like a normal consumer?

45:26Alex A.:Yeah. I mean, not everyone, but quite a few of them, I think, especially if there's something I think that there's new, especially if there's innovations in how the usability is and the interface design. I want to make sure I'm really on the cutting edge of what's possible and I want to make sure I understand where the alternatives are.

45:42Milly F.:What was the biggest engineering challenge in building these glasses? Like when you made these glasses, I know with support from from SLO Luxetica, but you made them on your own now. You know, did you think to yourself, wow, making glasses easier than I thought or harder than I thought? And like what kind of surprised you?

45:57Alex A.:It's it's harder than we thought because we're just used to having a lot of thermal space and a lot of compute. And these are very constrained. So the amount of battery you can put in here and have it be a comfortable weight, the amount of processing you can do on the device before you have to run the radio and radio kills your battery. Like the tradeoffs are very tight. And in a way, this is, you know, engineers will make fun of me, embedded systems engineers have known this for a long time. We've just been very generously gifted these tremendous amounts of compute over the course of my lifetime, right?

46:25Alex A.:You've just been writing Moore's Law and laptops and phones and servers are incredible. And when you're going to a very, very small system on a chip, you're going to a very small footprint of memory, very expensive to run radio, very tight battery. Yeah, you're running into some very old school engineering problems that frankly, my generation didn't have the experience of the previous generation of engineers at getting good at. So we're kind of having to discover those old techniques again to work really well in these embedded systems that are really a small form factor.

46:54Andrew Bosworth:I want to zoom out a little bit because we've talked about the glasses, but Meta is a very large organization at this point. And our coworker here at Morning Brew, Dan Toomey, made a video titled, What Does Meta Actually Do Now? That video got 1.6 million views. So we have you here. What does meta actually do? Yeah.

47:11Alex A.:Uh, I think it's, it's a, one of those things I think happens a lot with communication and media companies is you just become part of the tapestry of society. It kind of reminds me always of that Bill Burr bit of like, everything's amazing and nobody's happy. It's like, you know, someone, it's like we've integrated communication tools like WhatsApp and messenger and expression tools like Instagram and Facebook, um, so deeply into the fabric of our lives that it doesn't even occur to us that those things require like real work and effort to make and produce and to grow and to continue to make great.

47:43Alex A.:And there's other things that have always been hard for people to see. The degree to which Meta is the engine of small business growth, not just in America, but around the world, undeniable. To talk to any small business owner trying to find their customers, we are the way that they do it. We are driving their businesses. And that's the majority of new jobs created in America in the last decade are coming from small and medium businesses powered by our technology. I promise you that. and it's a story that we haven't done a great job telling but it's a real story and it's a story of a global story it's an American story and that continues we continue to be a tremendous powerhouse in the space of connecting people with their audiences and I've always believed from the beginning when you do this really well everybody benefits the people who are running these small businesses are benefiting because they're finding the right customer and the customer is so pumped they found this business and so that continues to be the major engine for us even as we also So do this work in reality labs, do this work in the meta super intelligence labs, like to advance these these frontier technologies.

48:42Milly F.:We got to talk about the vibes in Menlo Park. Last week, you reportedly said that morale at the company was the lowest it's ever been given layoffs and a reorg. What exactly broke down and what is your plan to win back employees?

48:54Alex A.:Yeah, well, it's there's kind of three layers of a perfect storm, as it often does happen. One of which is the entire industry is going through is a period of absolutely insane change. This is by far the most insane period of technological change in my career. And I've heard the same thing from people whose careers were twice as long as mine's. This is a totally insane change, not just the magnitude of it, but the speed of it. It's happening very quickly. And so there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty for all of us. The core value prop that I thought I had all else in the world, if everything else fails, at least I can write code, and that's a rare and valuable skill.

49:28Alex A.:And that is under some threat. So there's this total, almost industry-wide context of uncertainty and unrest. Seeing this, you know, I think Mark made really bold moves inside the company to make sure that we were positioned to be at the forefront of this shift of AI. And I really have been super impressed by it. It's, you know, I'll give Mark a lot of hard times. So this is happening to me, I happen to have been super impressed by. but we did not do nearly enough work to connect those two dots for the company. Be like, look, we're all feeling this anxiety. We understand the change. This is, we're doing this to make sure that we stay ahead of the change.

50:06Alex A.:And then you have a third piece, which is, you know, you're doing a layoff and a layoff is going to be unpopular. It's going to be hard. It's going to cause people to feel anxiety, feel them, feel an acute uncertainty about what's going on in the world. And so there's like all these different layers. I do feel a little bit fat. I wrote kind of quite a long memo internally to the company of all the different things that I thought, you know, we could have communicated better or that we did wrong and how we can do it better. And only one of like a thousand points was snacks, but that was the only thing people attached to.

50:32Alex A.:So, but by the way, it was also the most, most popular thing I wrote. So it's not a bad thing, but yeah. So we really are as a leadership team spending all of our time right now, trying to talk to employees and be like, look, we screwed this up. We're going to like, we're going to take these steps. Here's the kind of commitments that we're going to make. Here's the stuff that you want to hear from us. We're here for that. I honestly just thought my, My macro thought is like, there's this anxiety and we were not doing enough to keep them close to us as we made the shifts we need to make to stay on top of it.

50:59Andrew Bosworth:It's not just a meta issue, though. AI in general is deeply unpopular just with the general public. According to a recent survey, the only thing more unpopular than AI right now were the Iran war and the Democratic Party. What are tech companies doing wrong when it comes to marketing AI?

51:17Alex A.:Yeah, it's a story as old as Silicon Valley, unfortunately. we call it the hype cycle, right? So the Silicon Valley, almost every technology that comes out of Silicon Valley has the hype cycle. We, we, we, we kind of talk it up to the, to the moon and then it inevitably fails to immediately materialize all those expectations. So you have what we call the trough of discontentment and then we like grinding and get it back. And so I think, I think AI is a very real technology. It's a great technology. It's important. It really will do things like cure diseases and make your everyday life easier. It really will.

51:46Alex A.:We haven't actually done all that work yet. So we have this very cool and intelligent thing for some of us who are willing and technically capable of like going through unbelievable complicated morass, we can unlock this power. So we're feeling super in awe of it. But bringing this to billions of people, that is the work. And it is work that takes time, not just to get the products right, but also to get people educated enough to use it, to take advantage of it, to care about it. It's like the internet was great. I remember being on the internet, right, like 1995, and like, this is going to be amazing.

52:19Alex A.:The internet didn't really hit mainstream for like another seven, six, seven years, right? Like, it just takes time. And so I think the answer to this is like, we are hyping a thing, the costs of which are real and being felt today, the benefits of which are still theoretical for most people. And it's our fault, like, we shouldn't do that. What we should do is lead with real value. I do think this is the thing, again, I'm very pleased with the focus at Facebook on consumers, bringing this personal super intelligence to every person, just making your life better. And you can do that with the glasses.

52:49Alex A.:You can do it with the meta AI app. It's really good. New Spark, our new model is really, really good. It's great at local. If you want to find recommendations near you, it's great at commerce. You want to help shopping. It's really good at health. If you want to get some extra health tips on how to better engage your primary care providers, it's really good at several things. And this is real value and we don't have to dress it up. We don't have to oversell it. You can take it or you can leave it, but it's real value.

53:11Andrew Bosworth:But again, maybe something that's different than comparing this to like the internet revolution is like a lot of AI leaders say this thing could kill us. Like this thing could be attained super intelligence and like wipe out humanity. How is that? Like that hasn't happened in other technological cycles. So this does feel a little different.

53:29Alex A.:Yeah. I mean, I would say that there's always somebody who's doing hyperbole. Like crypto. There was definitely crypto people who were saying that this thing was going to be like all your money is worth nothing. I do think there exists in every one of these hype cycles somebody who sees a line that looks like this and assumes it goes to infinity and is wrong. And then there's a hype cycle crashes. And I think they get a lot of air time because it's like they're saying a crazy thing. I don't believe that. I think this is a great and useful tool. I find myself sometimes with no friends in the AI space because I really believe so strongly that AI is an important, profound, transformational tool.

54:06Alex A.:maybe the most transformational tool since computing itself certainly a relationship there where it's making it making the computers much more useful to us by better understanding us in our context and being better able to help us with what we need i think making software something that isn't exquisite and rare but something that everyone can contribute to is a huge benefit to society i really believe in the power of it and i think in five or ten years we will feel about ai the way we feel about phones. Like, yeah, this is an awesome tool. And I'm like, my life is better because I have this tool.

54:38Alex A.:Um, what I would like for my, at the same time is like, we need to show, not tell. We need to like, be like, let's, let me just demonstrate you the value. If I thought I was building a thing that was like going to devastate humanity, I would not build the thing. Uh, I'm like, I just call me crazy. I simply would not build it. Um, that's not what I'm building. Uh, and we are building AI the same level as anybody else is building AI. And I believe very strongly and it's potential to help people. And I don't think it's that kind of thing.

55:05Milly F.:So I went to your website, boz.com. And the first thing that - It's a strong domain. It is. Strong domain name. The first thing that I see is this write-up and you write in one of them. Shame is a powerful force in our society and prevents us from sharing our lessons. We protect ourselves from criticism, but also prevent people from connecting with us meaningfully. How can people overcome shame?

55:28Alex A.:Brene Brown, I mean, I hate to be so cliche on like the podcast circuit, but Renee Brown really was somebody who I, I did not have even a language for thinking this through until I listened to kind of her research about shame and the impact that it has on people. And I kind of grew up, I would say with a little bit of that, that construct, maybe a masculine construct of like project strength all the time, you know, like don't let anyone see any kind of weakness. And it was a very isolating way to be as a young man. And I lost a lot of valuable relationships doing that. And the craziest thing that happened was I had great friends who were so generous for their time to come to me and like kind of talk to me about the impact it was having on them, on people around me.

56:10Alex A.:And my wife now, my girlfriend at the time, I got some feedback at work about this and I came home and I was kind of complaining about it. And she was like, yeah, but they're right. And she was like saying it with all love in her heart. Like it was no judgment on me. There was no shame. She's like, yeah, but they have a point, right? Like that you do kind of do that thing. And it was really shook me to my core. And so then I started this complete 180. I was like, what if I just like said everything I was afraid of? And I was like, Hey, I kind of think I screwed this up. Like I did this thing wrong.

56:36Alex A.:And it was unbelievable. The response I got, the generous response I got from people, um, you know, owning a mistake like that. And, and in a way people perceive me as way stronger, like way more, um, you know, like it's like, wow, like that's real strength. Like the real strength isn't in like appearing strong. It's being strong enough to be like, yeah, I screwed that up. That's my bad. Um, and listen, I have time, I've opportunity for this constantly. It's not like I'm like not screwing things up at this. I hope to screw them up less often or less badly. Um, but even just this thing with it, with the employees, you know, that we're dealing with internally, you know, I'm out there being like, yeah, no, we screwed this up.

57:13Alex A.:I screwed this up. Like I thought we thought you were with us. You weren't with us. We brought you on these changes. We didn't talk to you about them. I know better than that. I should have done better. Um, you know, we're making this acute change or we're rolling this thing out. We did a crappy job explaining it. It's not, it doesn't fix the problem, but at least you're able to deal with it earnestly. You know, I think, um, and one of things that's hard being in a big company is you don't have as much of a personal relationship with people. Right. And so to, to them, you're almost a caricature.

57:39Alex A.:You're not even a real human with like your own foibles and mistakes. Um, and, and, and they depend on you. So your mistakes are more costly for them than they are for like a smaller thing. So, um, so the stakes are very high. Um, and I'm, I'm certainly not perfect and continue to make mistakes. And, and the only commitment I can really make to people is I try to live up to try to own those mistakes and do better the next time.

58:01Milly F.:Got one final question for you. You've been with Meta for 20 years since 2006. What keeps you engaged and what lessons can young people who are listening to this, just starting out in the workforce can take from maybe your, your insanely long tenure at a single company?

58:16Alex A.:Yeah, it's a shout out really. So there's really two answers to this. The first one is I work with great people and everyone you go back in time to go back to like great teams of people who work together in history. And it is a team game. It's a team story. you know it's not just that I like working with Mark but Chris Cox and Javi and Tom Allison and these folks I work with I've been working with these guys most of them 15, 16, 17 years my own team Alex Himmel the guy's been working with me 17 years and there's a real it's not just a good vibe which is nice but also you can do more we know each other so well we can kind of finish each other's sentences we kind of have a sense of in our heads, I have a version of like, okay, boy, you know, who's amazing at this is this person over here.

59:06Alex A.:And they're going to come in, they're going to make this work stronger if I go bring them in on this thing. Um, and so the team is a big part of it. Truthfully, even that probably wouldn't be enough. I am such a, I get so, um, bored so easily. Like I don't, it's like after a year or two of a thing, even before it's done, I'm like, yeah, I get it. Like I've intellectually, I figured this out and I'm like, not excited about it anymore. I've been very lucky. This has been a company where like every two years I could just do a completely different thing inside the company. If you look at my current job in reality labs, I'm doing robotics now.

59:35Alex A.:That's awesome. Two years ago, I wasn't doing robotics. And so it's like, oh, so now an entirely new area to go explore and understand. That's very fortunate. My major advice that I give to young people is to follow the steep part of the curve. Doing the thing that you know you can do well is always a very appealing choice because it feels very safe. and I think you're going to do that and you're going to get bored and eventually it's going to be the only thing that you can do. And so I advise young people to do is like find the steepest part of the curve. Where are you going to learn the most?

1:00:06Alex A.:Early in my career, because I was jumping every 18 months basically to new things, I kind of joked I was like a miss, you know, I was like in Karate Kid. I was waxing the car. I was painting the fence. I didn't appear to making progress. And my career appeared early on to be moving much more slowly than my peers who were staying in one place and kind of getting promoted up. And then my career at the end took this more vertical turn because it turns out I knew how to do all the different parts of the value chain from the different jobs that I had done over time. And it's just so much more fun to learn new things.

1:00:36Alex A.:Learning new things is like just amazing. It's what a gift to be able to learn things. And so that's been the real key to my longevity probably is just working with a great team of people where I like look forward to going and seeing them every day. And when I'm challenged, I know that they're going to pick me up and help me out and make me better. And then having the opportunity in terms of the domain to just keep doing new things and learning more.

1:00:59Andrew Bosworth:Hang out with good people. Hang out with young people. All good advice. Andrew, thank you so much for sitting down with us and talking through Meta and the glasses and everything else. If you want more of Andrew's thoughts and ideas, you can check it out at Boz.com. But thanks so much for sitting down with us.

1:01:15Alex A.:Thanks for having me. About to get a lot of referral traffic to this blog.

1:01:18Milly F.:I think the last thing that was posted was in February.

1:01:20Alex A.:Yeah, I got it.

1:01:21Milly F.:Now you have to write a lot of blog posts. There's good stuff on there, though.

1:01:25Alex A.:Thank you. Thank you.

1:01:26Andrew Bosworth:If you're preparing for a podcast, there's good stuff.

1:01:29Alex A.:I'm glad. I'm glad. Yeah. The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wired's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.