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

26:56So XAI's genius move was to develop a gigawatt-scale energy hub right across the border in South Haven, Mississippi. And so you can see on this map, we'll have to pull up the photo. They're hacking the world. Yeah, it really is this crazy arbitrage. I think Dillon Patel called it 4D chess that only Elon can do. 2D chess. It really is 2D chess. You look at the map, and it looks like chess. Just regular chess. Maybe behind enemy lines. I'm not exactly sure what the correct analogy is. I mean, it's a good bet. You go over to Mississippi. You talk to the governor there of South Haven. and you say, do you want me to hire a bunch of people in your state?

27:40Mississippi says, sounds great. Let's do it. The benefits of the American state-based system, right? Every state can compete for jobs, for business, for energy production, whatever it takes to get it done. Also today, I think Elon said or claimed that Grok5 will begin training in just a few weeks, and he thinks that Grok5 will be capable of reaching AGI. And so I'm not even sure how we're benchmarking that or quantifying that. Brock has obviously been doing fantastic on RKGI, our favorite. Everybody has their own definition. Everyone does now. And we have goalposts. We're going to keep moving.

28:15We're going to keep moving. We are in the goalpost moving business. What have you done for me lately, Foundation Labs? That's what I like to say. Exactly. Anyway, the keynote is starting in just 50 seconds. We are going to be broadcasting it live and giving you commentary on the keynote from MetaConnect. I am impressed that we've gotten this far without leaking anything. We have a list of embargoes, but we pulled it off. We did it, and we got through. Capital J, journalism. Yes, exactly. Well, Amanda Goodall on Acts says, if your interview process takes longer than electing a pope, you're doing it wrong.

28:59Of course, the pope was elected in two days. Two days. Your remote hire doesn't need five rounds of interviews. I said what I said. And Gabe says, yeah, well, I bet the pope can't debug a distributed system. Gold is up 40 % in 2025. That is crazy. Everything is up. Everything is up. Gold, Bitcoin, the market, everything is ripping. with some friends who predicted this. I remember in our group chat what our buddies was saying. The golden bull run. There's also somebody put a golden statue of Trump holding a physical Bitcoin right near the White House. Can you just put up statues? We talked about this with the bull, right?

29:41Maybe. I mean, we talked about this with the original Wall Street bull, right? The guy built it in his, he built the bull, the famous Wall Street bull in his apartment and then just dropped it off. But there was a Christmas event at the time, so we had to leave and come back and sneak it in there and put it down. I guess you can just make statues and just put them down in the real world. The other news in the venture world, artificial intelligence chip startup Grok raised$750 million at a post-funding valuation of$6.9 billion. We've got a lot of said Grok will be a$100 billion company if it doesn't get bought before then.

30:17We've debated on the show before who would be a potential buyer for Grok. Yeah. Number of players, but we'll see. This is a fantastic milestone. We'll have to have Jonathan on again soon. Yeah, we've had a couple of the folks on the show. Alex Cohen had a great post here. What was this? On Salesforce, so last fall, one of Salesforce technical teams told large Salesforce customers that using AgentForce, the software firm's new artificial intelligence for automating customer service and other functions would require extensive planning. The product information the Salesforce team shared. We're going live, Jordy.

30:54We're going live. It's time. Three, two, one. Here we go. There he is. There he is. Mark, we're ready for you. All right. Here we go.

31:11No way. Here we go.

31:16Wow.

31:24Throw on some tunes.

31:40Live demo. Ballsy. High risk. High risk, high reward. Love it. And I will say the speakers in the new Meta Ray-Bans have improved dramatically. Yeah.

31:59There you go.

32:07Just ripping emojis on the way in.

32:18How's it going man?

32:22Hey there's Diplo, good to see you Wes.

32:35So the glasses can support life. They must.

32:45Maybe that's the one more thing. We'll see. Here we go. Packed house at Meta Connect 2025. Here we go. We'll talk about these in a minute. Here we go. Welcome to Connect. All right. No chain. AI, glasses, and virtual reality. Our goal is to build great-looking glasses that deliver personal superintelligence and a feeling of presence using realistic holograms. And these ideas combined are what we call the metaverse. Now, glasses are the ideal form factor for personal superintelligence because they let you stay present in the moment. while getting access to all of these AI capabilities that make you smarter, help you communicate better, improve your memory, improve your senses, and more.

33:47Glasses are the only form factor where you can let an AI see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day, and very soon generate whatever UI you need right in your vision in real time. So it is no surprise that AI glasses are taking off. This is now our third year shipping AI glasses with our great partner, Essilor Luxottica.

34:18And the sales trajectory that we've seen is similar to some of the most popular consumer electronics of all time. Now, we are focused on designing glasses with a few clear values. Number one, they need to be great glasses first. Now before we get to any of the technology, the glasses need to be well designed and comfortable. And if you're going to wear glasses on your face all day, every day, then they need to be refined in their aesthetics and they need to be light. So in addition to working with iconic brands, we We have spent years of engineering obsessing over how to shave every fraction of a millimeter and portion of a gram that we can from every pair of glasses that we ship, and I think that that shows in the work.

35:14Number two, the technology needs to get out of the way. The promise of glasses is to preserve this sense of presence that you have when you're with other people. Now this feeling of presence, it's a profound thing. And I think that we've lost it a little bit with phones, and we have the opportunity to get it back with glasses. So when we're designing the hardware and software, we focus on giving you access to very powerful tools when you want them, and then just having them fade into the background otherwise. Number three, take super intelligence seriously. This is going to be the most important technology in our lifetimes.

36:01AI should serve people, not just be something that sits in a data center automating large parts of society. So we design our glasses to be able to empower people with new capabilities as soon as they become possible. We think in advance about what kind of sensors are going to be necessary, and we make it so you can just update your software and make your glasses and yourself smarter and direct AI towards what matters most in your life. All right. So with all that said, we do have some new glasses to show you today.

36:38And... The air horn's on my side. I want to start with these. The next generation of Ray-Ban meta glasses. Here we go.

36:52Now these are the original and iconic design. I think that this is actually the most popular glasses design in history. It's also underrated how smart it is for Luxottica to not get steamrolled. Now with double the battery life. That's a great partnership. I wear them all day. They never run out of battery. It's got 3K video recording, double our previous resolution for sharper, smoother, and more vivid videos. This feels very fast-paced for Akino. Really good pacing. And meta AI keeps on getting better. So last year I did this live demo translating live between two people. We were doing that on stage.

37:34Now today I am excited to introduce a feature that we call conversation focus. It's a new feature coming soon that is going to be able to amplify your friends' voices in your ear. So if you're in a noisy restaurant, you're basically going to be able to turn up the volume on your friends or whoever you're talking to. This feature's crazy.

38:04And conversation focus, it's not only going to be on the new Ray-Ban metas, it's going to be available as a software update on all of the existing Ray-Ban metas too. This feature makes being in a loud restaurant bearable. Now, to show this, we've got Johnny Cirillo and Jack Coyne in the streets of New York. Yeah, people are into watching... ...into the wearables at concerts. Hi, Johnny. Hello, how are you? Got the Renaissance vibes going on? It's going on, baby. Jack, I just put my name in. It's going to be a couple minutes. Nice. I need your advice. Every time I get my picture taken, I feel like I'm not being normal.

38:41I want to feel like just a regular person when I'm... One sec, Jack. Hey, Meta. Start conversation focus. Starting conversation focus. Okay, go on. As soon as the camera comes up, I start to have this, like, serious... Deer in headlight. Yeah. Yeah. How do I be, like, more normal? Oh, man. How do I be more natural, like, when I'm getting my picture taken? Sometimes I play around with something, like, your collar, fix your sleeve a little bit. Your tan. Yeah, just like... Sort of action. Yeah, like nobody's around, you know what I mean? You've got to... I think I can get ready. Good demo. All right.

39:13Value of having a camera on the headphones. Conversation focus. All right, we are also improving live AI. As we optimize battery and energy efficiency, meta AI is going to transition from being something that you invoke when you have a question to a service that is running all the time and helping you out throughout the day. Now, to be clear, we're not there yet on all-day live AI use. This is one of the major technology challenges that we're still working through. But today, you can use live AI for about an hour or two straight. So to get a feeling for what this is like, let's cut to Chef Jack Mancuso, who's coming to us live from a kitchen on Meta's campus preparing for the after party.

39:56How's it going, Chef? All right. So what do you think? Maybe let's make, I don't know, what should we make? Maybe like a steak sauce, maybe Korean-inspired type thing, just to show what the live AI is like. Yeah, let's try it. It's not something I've made before, so I could definitely use the help. Hey, Meta, start live AI.

40:20Starting live AI. I love the setup you have here with soy sauce and other ingredients. How can I help? Hey, can you help me make a Korean-inspired steak sauce from my steak sandwich here? You can make a Korean-inspired steak sauce using soy sauce, sesame oil. What do I do first?

40:44What do I do first? You've already combined the base ingredients. So now grate a pair to add to the sauce. When I first got my pair of Meta Ray-Bans, I'd wear them when I'd walk around. I'd take my dog for a walk. And I would wind up just having... They're showing the most cutting edge. the thing that you can only do with having a camera, looking at the actual ingredients, piecing it all together. But I would just ask it about the history of the Roman Empire and just be talking to it like it was any other LLM. And I think that I'd love to know the actual breakdown. Yeah, I'd love to know the actual breakdown of meta-AI queries that come through the glasses.

41:26How much are the uniquely unlocked? When you talk to a lot of folks that use meta-ray-bans, a lot of them will say, yeah, I take calls on them. And it's like, it's not something you can just say at keynote. But it's important to have function. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you need to have the unique unlocks, like the key features that can only be done when you put this particular set of technologies together. That's the key demo. But a lot of times, like, you know, you go back to, like, the, you know, so much technology, we wind up just using it for messaging. We wind up just using it for knowledge retrieval.

42:00That type of stuff. And, you know, last year at Connect. What else were they? We also released a limited edition clear frames. I got them right here. And they were pretty popular. They sold out in a few days. We've got a new limited edition transparent matte frames. You can see the other internals here. With two colors.

42:21Do they not have anything in the... Get them quickly because they're probably going to be sold out in a few days too. Now look on the other side. Now it's been pretty fun to see how designers... You think you'd put stuff everywhere. taken Ray-Ban Meta in a lot of different directions. You know, some of you probably are familiar with the fashion label Luar, run by Raul Lopez. Are you? I am not. I'm actually not. And, you know, he's a bold designer who's bringing together sportswear and high fashion. He recently debuted a look that's centered on Ray-Ban Meta at New York Fashion Week. Raul's actually here today, along with Christy Baez, modeling the look that he created.

42:59Here we go. There he is. Awesome. Good to see you. All right. All right, that's the next generation of Ray-Ban Meta. We're really excited about this. They're available now starting at$379. All right. That price point. This summer, we launched our first pair of AI glasses with Oakley, the Oakley Meta Houston. This next announcement is what I've almost leaked. Did he talk about slow-mo? ...oply synonymous with sports for 50 years now. They're available in a number of great colors. And by the way, you can, on the screen right now, you can see a massive skateboard ramp to the left of John. And I don't think we want a Docs who's going to be skateboarding in a little bit, but we were seeing a few practice earlier.

43:57Look at these. The van guard. Now this is the iconic Oakley aesthetic. These glasses are designed for performance. And on these, we push the battery even further, even more on a marathon, using them the whole time on a single charge. And then you can turn around and run another marathon on the same charge and still not be out of battery.

44:24The camera is centered for perfect alignment for shots. It does not feel like you're holding the camera at all. It's got a wider 122 degree field of view so you can capture all the epicness of your adventure in 3K. And it's got video stabilization. That means that as you're going down a trail, you're going to be able to capture some really great video. All right. The open-ear speakers are the most powerful speakers that we've shipped yet, with six decibels louder than Oakley Meta Houston. So they're great for running on a noisy road or biking in 30 mile an hour winds. You know, I actually took a call on a jet ski a few weeks ago.

45:07It was great. I could hear the other person fine over the engine. And our advanced wind noise reduction makes it so that you can basically be standing in a wind tunnel and you'd still come in clear to the person on the other side. I mean, the person had no idea I was on a jet ski, which is good. All right, we've added slow motion and hyperlapse capture modes so you can capture your adventures in new ways. These modes are also going to be available on all the new glasses that we're announcing here, the new Ray-Ban Meta, the new Oakley Meta Houston's 2. And you can trigger these with Meta AI. Great footage with any of the new glasses.

45:43Yeah, take a slow-mo video. We're partnering with Garmin.

45:51Have you ever done hyperlapse? Are you familiar with this? I think they're about to talk about it. Take a bunch of photos, stitch them all together, and it smooths everything out. Video when you reach certain speeds or different distance intervals or, you know, like every mile of a marathon. And then when you're done, we'll just stitch together all the videos for you, and you can overlay the stats on top of them, and you get a nice video that you can share wherever you want.

46:19That goes wild.

46:23And we're also partnering with Strava. So you can overlay your stats from Strava 2 and share all the same type of content with your Strava community. This is big.

46:37We put an LED in them. So that way it can light up in your peripheral vision to help keep you on your pace target or heart rate zone target. So that's going to be really useful. I didn't catch that on the demo. That's very cool. A Garmin device, too. These are also our most water-resistant glasses yet. With an IP67 rating, they can get wet. I've taken them out surfing. It's fine. It's good. I'm going to put this to the real test. What's that? They're also designed with swappable... Surfing? Two-wave hold-down. You know about two-wave hold-down? No, what's that? Normally, surfing, you'll fall. If you fall, the wave will fall over you.

47:17and you're going to be you'll come up two wave hold down is when another wave comes in the set oh so you have to wait for the second one to come in and so you'd be really potentially sitting basically on the on the surface if you're lucky kind of waiting for it to roll over and then pop up do you wear sunglasses when you surf? no but I'm going to do now goggles or anything? no yeah nothing? I can see you going surfing and bringing a pair of is that just the nerdiest thing you could possibly do? that would be typically what's the right style?

47:54I would definitely be caught wearing some scuba gear while surfing. And a hat? You don't wear a hat? I feel like a hat flies off immediately. Yeah, it's hard to keep on even if you have it strapped on. What are those things that go behind? Look at this footage. Are those bokeys or something? Yeah. This is Red Bull, right? Yeah. Yeah, the best. Yeah, camera's in the center, so I think it fits inside a helmet better. Also lighter. Yeah, I do wonder if they'll work with Oakley on a ski goggle. Oh, yeah, that would make a ton of sense. Probably leak in the next thing. No inside knowledge. No, but it does make sense.

48:42Oakley makes ski goggles now. Yeah.

48:53Now for the announcement we're all I'm waiting for. Oakley Meta Vanguard. All right, we are selling them for$4.99. Pre-orders start now, and we're going to ship them on October 21st. Priced to sell. And shipping fast. Anons everywhere. Rejoice. All right. Now let's check out those glasses I walked on stage with. Here we go. All right. We have been working on glasses for more than 10 years at Meta. And this is one of those special moments where we get to show you something that we poured a lot of our lives into and that I just think is different from anything that I've seen anyone else work on.

49:43I am really proud of this, and I'm really proud of our team for achieving this. This is meta Ray-Ban display.

49:59These are glasses with the classic style that you'd expect from Ray-Ban, but they're the first AI glasses with a high-resolution display. and a whole new way to interact with them. The metaneural band. That's this game. He's had it on since the beginning. We've got two wrists for a reason. People are teasing it. This isn't a prototype. This is here. It is ready to go, and you're going to be able to buy that in a couple of weeks.

50:36All right. We've demoed this on two separate occasions. One new here. There are two key innovations. Obviously, there's a ton of the stuff that we saw in the Orion demo, and people were talking about the last MetaConnect. The last MetaConnect came out in Orion, presented it, but it was a demo, now getting ready to ship. It appears in one eye, it's slightly off-center, so it doesn't block your view, and it disappears after a few seconds when it's not in use, so it doesn't distract you. And it's not visible from the outside. Yeah. I mean like 42 pixels per degree, which is sharper than any major headset that's out there, and up to 5 ,000 nits of brightness.

51:19So it is crisp whether you're indoors or outdoors on the sunniest day. This required a custom light engine and waveguide to deliver this. It's a lot of awesome technology that we're really proud of. Then there's the neural interface. every new computing platform has a new way to interact with it. So for the glasses, we are replacing the keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, buttons, dials, with the ability to send signals from your brain with little muscle movements that the neural... I can't wait for people to try this. It's a really wild experience. It is crazy. They are so natural. a company that was doing something like this, and then obviously added a bunch of folks to the team to build it up.

52:12But yeah, it is a completely different interaction paradigm. We have built a neural interface into a durable, lightweight, comfortable, and good-looking wristband with 18 hours of battery life and is water-resistant.

52:32Changing the volume when you're listening to music by just going like this. That was crazy. Crazy experience. I want to get into this in more detail. We've got two options. We've got the slides, or we've got the live demo. Slides, slides. Give us slides. We're slide enjoyers here, but we'll take the live demo.

52:55Now, one of the most important and frequent things that we all do on our phones is send messages. So when we were designing these meta-ray-bands, we wanted to make it really easy to send and receive messages. And look, Boz is messaging me right now. All right, now, okay, I could go ahead and I could dictate with my voice, I could send a voice clip, but I've got this neural bit and it's silent. And now, and you know, a lot of the time you're around other people. so it's um good to just be able to type without anyone seeing and he's doing both at the same time he's talking while he's training that is so aggressive yeah when we tried this uh i first realized quickly we forgot how to write yeah it is it is you pick it up quick yeah it's like riding a bike something about actually having a pencil or pen in your hand that makes easier to come back.

54:02What do you think? Just to write my face. Alright. It's definitely a new skill. It's like learning to type on a new smartphone's keyboard or actual keyboard. There we go. It's just interesting to be thinking about sitting here. I get a message from somebody and I just need to respond like this. It is incredibly natural. I don't know what happened. Yeah, I'm interested. I mean, you can see the... Maybe Boz can try calling me again. He's dictating text as well. And I'm wondering, what do you think the breakdown will be between people writing with the handwriting input versus just whispering to it or talking to it?

54:48This is... You remember trying the microphones. It was pretty remarkable how you could just whisper and it would still pick it up because of the location of the microphones on the device. Video call. Let's go for a fourth.

55:12All right. Try it again. I keep on messing this up.

55:18And if not, then we'll go for the less fun option. Okay.

55:26I don't know what to tell you guys. All right. Live demos, man. But we're going to go to the next thing that I wanted to show and hope that will work. All right. um takes guts the functionality that he's testing is you you basically I can call somebody and give them a first person view of what I'm seeing yeah so you went out of the room I called you while I was wearing these and you saw what I saw and I saw you yep which was kind of funny I mean it makes maybe more sense for both wearing them but and you can imagine that at some point they just do an avatar yeah and then think about you're at the grocery store and it's like, hey, which one do you want?

56:11Right, you can call. Yeah, yeah. From Spotify, here's California Dreamin' by the Mamas and the Papas. Here we go. All right, and if I want to adjust the volume, I act like there's a volume control in front of me and I can just turn it. That's pretty good. That is a really good interaction there. I mean, it's not that hard. Don't these have volume rockers on there? You can slide your finger up. Yeah, you can slide your finger. Even that, a little bit easier. What do you think the difference between the input for handwriting versus talking to will be? The difference in terms of usage? Yeah, like if you were one year from now, you have access to Meta's internal data.

57:00Obviously, there's going to be a bunch of people that buy these, try them, they use them. Some of them are addicted to the handwriting. Some of them never use the handwriting. some of them use 50-50. What do you think will be more popular in a year? I just think the ability to communicate in text without a device is highly useful in certain circumstances, but not necessarily the way that you're going to have long, drawn-out conversations. Yeah, it is really this case where you need to be... Yeah, okay. So now, like I was saying... Oh yeah, this is really cool. It centers the voice, gives you subtitles for the person that you're talking to, obviously.

57:42In any language. Yeah. When I watch TV, I pretty much always have the subtitles on. I can hear fine, but I find that it just makes it easier to follow along. But if you have an issue hearing, then I think that this is going to be a game changer. Yeah, I agree. And it's also cool, it can do translation. So if I'm talking to somebody who speaks a different language than me, I'll get a translation in my native language right on the display, real-life subtitles. I do that a lot with the subtitles and movies, but I feel bad about it every time I turn them on because I'm like, is there something wrong with me?

58:12Why can't I just enjoy it the way the filmmaker intended? Maybe he's a subtitle enjoyer too. Maybe. Like I've made this film to be enjoyed with subtitles. I somehow believe that Tom Cruise would not want that. He doesn't believe in frame interpolation. I was trying to call you. I knew what happened. Were you busy? Yeah. You know, all right. All right. You got some sick shoes, man. Okay, this is important. I'll take some photos. You know what? Let's go ahead and take a video just because we missed that opportunity before. Thank you. Say hi. You want to wave? All right, there you go. Just a couple of lads.

58:49Yeah, you want to show the case? So the charging case for the glasses. This thing's pretty cool. It's nice and flat. Fits in your pocket. Fits in your bag. And then, look at that. Pops open. Oh, wow. Oh, interesting. It sits flat when it doesn't have them in there, but then when you put them in, it gets bigger. Simply, and then I can just go ahead and just browse through them and look at them after. That's all you're going to be able to do one day. I think that's going to be valuable. Very cool decision to put the heads-up display offset so I can have a conversation with you right here. And if I'm getting a message or a notification about something, it's not like blocking your face.

59:31Yeah, I was watching the Google I.O. keynote, and I mean, it was a little bit more like VFX-y. It wasn't as much, there obviously wasn't a live demo like this. And it felt like they were centering the HUD like much more in the center of field of vision. And it does feel like the Call of Duty minimap is maybe the correct paradigm. How the meta displays and the neural band come together to enable some pretty amazing new things. The last thing that I want to show is a glimpse of how this is going to work with agentic AI. And, you know, the basic idea here is that, you know, we all have dozens of conversations throughout the day.

1:00:10And if you're anything like me, then in every conversation, there are normally like five things that you want to follow up on. You know, maybe there's something you're supposed to do. Maybe there's a conversation that, you know, this reminded you that you need to have. Maybe someone just said something that you weren't sure about and wanted to confirm or want more context on. But the thing is, it's tough to follow up while you're in the middle of a conversation. So if you're anything like me, you probably don't, and then you just forget a lot of these things. So the promise of glasses and AI is that they're going to help with this over time.

1:00:43So you just start a live AI session, and the glasses are going to be able to see what you see, hear what you hear, and they're going to be able to go off and think about it and then go. Can you tell if the indicator light's on for that? I feel like this is going to be the same discussion as the AI pin. It's always listening to me. There's questions about, you know, can you maybe not have it listening to me right now or I want to know if it's listening to me. Being really clear on that is pretty important. Hey, Jake. I'm so glad you reached out. Hey, yeah. I was hoping you could help me on this board.

1:01:18I'm building for my brother. Oh, of course. Hey, Meta. Start Live AI. So for the board, my brother needs something with a wide tail so it's easy to catch waves, but the performance of a narrower tail. What about a swallowtail shape? Oh, that's great. Yeah. But maybe three fins. Is this accurate? Fact check this. You're the surfing expert. Is that what you would recommend? When would you use a swallowtail? I have no idea what any of this means. Actually, a few weeks ago, the supplier confirmed that the fins will be here in October. That's great news. Squallowtail, I usually surf for squallowtail with a quad setup.

1:01:58What's that mean? Or twin fins. So you have three options. You have a traditional thruster, three fins. Thruster? Thruster. What's a thruster? Three fins setup. Okay. Yeah. Then you can surf with that. Does no one surf just the normal one fin, the old... Single fin. Single fin? Is that not popular anymore? Longboarding. It's Lindy. It's Lindy. It's Lindy? People still do it? Yeah. Okay. Mostly longboarders. A meta AI. What's the Lindiest surfboard? Or the trad one. So there you have it. This is the next chapter in the exciting story of the future of computing. And so we got meta Ray-Ban display, our first AI glasses with high resolution display, and the meta neural band, the world's first mainstream neural interface.

1:02:55The glasses are going to come in two colors. They're going to come in black and sand. And they also all come with transition lenses. So you can wear them indoors. They turn into sunglasses when you go outside. and you are going to be able to buy the set for$7.99 in stores, where you can get demos as well, on September 30th. All right. I'm pumped that people can actually go and try it, buy it immediately. Yeah. In what? This is going to be big for John Exley. He's going to be able to have the show up running. 12, 13 days, two weeks. Exley's going to be able to have the show running perpetually on the heads-up display.

1:03:39I mean, there's a big question about that, right? Like, obviously, Meta's starting with first-party apps, WhatsApp. They obviously have a deep integration with Spotify, Instagram. But, oh, yeah, I mean, we are streaming live on Instagram. We have got the next generation of Ray-Ban Meta, including our special edition. You've got the Oakley Meta Houston's that we released in the summer. You've got the Oakley Meta Vanguard for performance. And now you've got the Meta Ray-Ban display. those are our fall 2025 glasses.

1:04:13If you go to meta.com slash about right now, the first header nav item is AI glasses. That's how important they're framing this. Family of apps is like deeper, VR is to the right now. AI glasses is the category that are dominating, wanting to dominate. Now we want to help bring about a future where anyone can just dream up any experience that you can think of and then just create it. So even though, obviously, the Ray-Ban display, you can immediately start thinking about other apps that you develop. I mean, you're just saying, like, people watching live streams, people watching all sorts of stuff, people using essentially third-party apps.

1:04:56Hot dog, not hot dog. Running perpetually. I mean, truly, like, the Cluely team, like, they should want to integrate with this, right? There should be a ton of companies that want to... Yeah, it's worth noting that their entire thesis at Cluelay is always on AI is undeniably directionally correct. Yes. I think the interesting thing is that if you want to be a platform and you want this to be a platform, you need to be open enough that you are willing to let other companies win in the subcategory, right? And so the iPhone came... The whole point of this is that meta wants to be not just a platform, but a hardware platform.

1:05:39Yeah, exactly. And so I think that... You've got to be somewhat open. You've got to be friendly to developers. You've got to let people integrate and build cool experiences on top of it. We haven't gotten a lot of messaging around that yet, but you have to imagine that it's coming, right? Yeah. Because... And even in gaming, right? You think about historical, these online, offline games like Pokemon Go. Yeah. I do wonder what announcements we'll see in the next two weeks. I feel like gaming is an easy give. It's harder for a tech platform for like when the iPhone says we have a clock app, like the flashlight app, you know, like people built these different things.

1:06:17And then the beer platform never made a beer app. Missed opportunity. But they, yeah, I mean, as a platform, you have to be able to, you have to be willing to give up on your first party apps, or at least, like, allow them to compete in, like, a somewhat free market on top of your platform. And it'll be interesting to see, like, how aggressive developers get about, you know, plugging in and figuring out where the actual APIs are. How friendly is the ecosystem? We've spent the last couple of years building from scratch to replace the Unity runtime, which is great, by the way. Think about some of the apps.

1:06:55You could build something like Guitar Hero or like the piano, for example, where it's just like heads-up display. It's flashing. I think that's one of the better-selling apps on basically all the VR headsets. You pass through, you see the actual keys, but then there's virtual elements laid over the keys. and I've actually done that with a... I forget. There was some app that I had where you basically just put your laptop on top of the keyboard, and then it overlays the keys as they drop down, and you can play the piano. Pretty decent, pretty decent. We just got this demo. Yes, yes. Got to be in the center of the octagon.

1:07:36Whoa. Today, we are rolling out early access to Hyperscape. Did you see the brand that was on the floor of that UFC octagon? In the demo, I don't think it had logos. It didn't, but in there, I believe it did. I need to roll it back, but it looked like there was a Lucy logo there. I don't know if I'm hallucinating that, but I'm pretty sure I just saw that. I mean, you guys are a sponsor. We are a sponsor, so yeah, totally possible. Now, eventually, you're going to be able to... Yeah, this is cool. We got this demo earlier. And it whirled into Horizon and had them all be connected, too. All right, this one.

1:08:12This is our new immersive home. rendered entirely in MetaHorizon Engine. Visually, it is a big step forward from where we have been. There is no 8-bit Eiffel Tower here. Oh, good. You can call back. You can pin different apps to the wall. Like this Instagram app, it automatically renders your posts from creators and friends in 3D. We're in such a weird time with this, like how you actually experience a virtual world. Like earlier this week, we were talking about Fei-Fei Li's World Labs. She's doing Gaussian splatting, Gaussian splatting. And so you take a bunch of photos, run it through a training run, an algorithm that runs cooks.

1:08:59And then you can move around in the browser. And it looks extremely photoreal until you get like outside of the house. Not too far. And it kind of like, yeah, it kind of breaks down in this really interesting, like bizarre way. And so they brought that to the Oculus world, the Quest world. But you can also generate real worlds using a traditional 3D pipeline. And I feel like these two technologies are on a collision course because they don't play well together right now, but they're starting to and we're starting to see demos where you can go take a bunch of photos, it builds the Gaussian splat, and then from there it generates 3D geometry that can be interacted with because in those Gaussian splats, you can move around like a camera that's just flying around.

1:09:44But if you pick up a ball and throw it against the wall, it won't bounce. And obviously, that's a prerequisite for basically everything. Michael just confirmed Lucy's logo in the UFC ring. Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy. I mean, wow. That is wild. Nice work, Tim. This happened years ago with my first company. Somehow, there was a Super Bowl ad, and they needed— It was for Fast and the Furious, and they needed an ad to go on a billboard in Times Square where the cars are racing through. And they couldn't use an actual ad. And so my ad guy knew someone in Hollywood and was like, you can use our brand for free.

1:10:24We'll send you like an image of a billboard that you can Photoshop or, you know, VFX into the shot that will go in the Super Bowl ad. We're like, wow, we got our logo in the Super Bowl ad. It's also been really neat to see how many people are using Quest to watch video content. You know, it's just a lot more immersive. So we think that this category, watching video content, is going to be a huge category, both in virtual reality headsets and on glasses, too. So we're launching a new entertainment hub that we are calling Horizon TV. and I don't think we actually want this down. A bunch of great partners to include a bunch of movies and TV and live sports and music.

1:11:13I'm talking about this. That Disney Plus is coming to Horizon TV and bring along content from Hulu. It's such a basic functionality, but when the Apple Vision Pro launched, I remember seeing you open up the apps and what was the top left app what was the app that they if you read it like a book left to right like what was the app that they wanted you to open it wasn't any of the crazy vr video games 3d worlds it was apple tv because they were like look the one thing apparently the the apple team they'd the one of the folks that they'd hired to work on the apple vision pro came from dolby cinema and they were like the one thing that we can know that we can deliver is just like a movie watching experience And I feel like there's, I don't know, Palmer Luckey has that quote about like the warfighter will be wearing a VR headset before the average consumer does because you can spend so much money and you can mandate that they wear it.

1:12:07And there's all these different reasons. I still feel, I might be wrong on this. We'll have to talk to folks and debate it. But I still feel like there's a world where the VR headset replaces the TV before it replaces the MacBook Pro or like the laptop. And I know you never watch movies at all, and also probably have never watched full film in VR, but I feel like the screen pixel density for the Quest is on a trajectory where it's going to be cinema quality level pretty quickly. But you can't just show up and be like, yeah, of course, you can log into this app through the browser. It needs to just be there natively.

1:12:48for a while. One important thing, they're not trying to develop some massive content. They're not trying to build a film studio dedicated to... Maybe they should. I don't know. I mean, I honestly think that there's a world where they should buy Terminator 2. They should buy, and they should give that pre-installed in the Quest when you get one. When you get one, you should just get a free copy of Titanic or Avatar. Because one of the first movies that I watched in 3D in VR was Avatar. Because I was like, that's a movie that needs to be experienced in a huge screen in a theater, and VR can actually afford you that.

1:13:26It doesn't quite hit the same when you just watch it on a TV or your phone. And so actually having a partnership that allows you to deliver that, at least in just a few clicks with just a few logins, like that's better. But I'd like to see a movie pre-installed. It goes back a long ways, two decades really. Talk to me about where that comes from, why you believe so strongly in this. I've spent my filmmaking career trying to really engage people, draw them in, get them involved, get them involved in the story and the characters. I was first exposed to 3D filmmaking in 1998, I think, and it was massive film cameras for Universal for a ride show.

1:14:07I thought we've got to be able to do this better. Some sort of demo? I was a super early adopter. I think it was George Lucas and then me. and that was in 99, 2000 and I said why can't we just slap two of these things side by side and make 3D you know well it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that and so 25 years later I'm pleased to say I've got a great 3D team and we've made it not only made my films we've made the 3D cameras available to a lot of other filmmakers doing concert films and sports for TV which didn't last long and lots of big movies, Ridley Scott, that sort of thing.

1:14:46I just love 3D personally. I love authoring in it. I love seeing the end result when it's done properly. And I think it's how we perceive the world. Why would we throw away 50 % of our data and see everything through a single eye? It makes no sense to me. And I just see a future which I think can be enabled by the new devices that you have, The Quest series and then some of the new stuff. Hopefully it's going down the line. We got to talk to them, take them through what's happening. You don't realize SaaS companies are going to release cinematic. Before they release a real product. I mean, if the launch video meta continues, it's going to be like, yeah, we're excited to launch our product.

1:15:33Go to the nearest IMAX theater to see it. I mean, those companies better. Buy a ticket. Buy a ticket. Hit the box office. Hit the box office. I don't know if people know this. James Cameron's like a complete purist when it comes to 3D, which means he actually films it with two different cameras because there's a lot of... Once there was a 3D boom, like theaters just realized that you could just charge more money by saying, hey, there's a 3D version. But then they realized that they could create a 3D film from a 2D production. And so they'd film the whole movie normally, and then they'd go in and they'd they'd have a whole team of rotoscope artists which would basically cut out from the image okay jordy you're in front of that background i'm going to cut you out and put you on a different layer in post basically and kind of fill in the background blur it says we're doing it live yeah he does do it live um and uh and and with it with like ai and stuff that's got to be easier to do but uh i i would be i would be surprised if uh if uh james cameron is is is putting down the the super heavy um 3d imax camera anytime soon he he was also famous for like operating the camera himself and there's all these pictures i don't know if he does it all the time he i think he says that he he's not comfortable doing like the full steady cam remember we saw that on the new york stock exchange floor um but uh but But if it's just like a shoulder mounted shot, he will actually be like, I want to manage himself.

1:17:07Founder mode. Founder mode. OG. What is the Founders podcast anecdote about James Cameron? He taught himself visual effects while he was a truck driver, right? This was scary. This was scary. Oh, yeah. You were asking about this. He was reading and driving. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is that he was... Whatever book Senra was reading, it was clear that I think James was driving trucks while reading books. It did make it sound like that. It seemed like it was... Who knows? It might have been pulled over. It might have been taken to rest. Yeah, the story was like he was driving trucks, and then in his free time, he would study visual effects and study cinematography and get up to speed on filmmaking.

1:17:45But it's very funny to come across it. Hey, maybe, you know, the next James Cameron is probably using the Meta Ray-Ban displays. They got their books right here, their truck driving. They're doing great. That's the future. Let's listen to James Cameron a little bit more. Been able to prove that there's more emotional engagement, there's more sense of presence. You know, if you're going to watch a Blumhouse film, a horror film, your fight-flight reflex is more engaged, right? Hopefully, if you're watching... One of my first VR experiences was with... Which one? It was back when it was Oculus. It was post-acquisition, but it was the first consumer version.

1:18:23Maybe it was actually Developer Kit 2, DK2. It was this huge block on your face. and you had to hook it up to a PC. It would not just run by itself, and I connected it to Half-Life 2. And Half-Life 2 is an action game, shooter. Not too scary, but there's this one level, Ravenholm, where it gets really dark, and the zombies start coming out and jump-scaring you. And I remember turning around, seeing a zombie run at me, and actually jumping out of my seat. And I played this game before, and the reaction to a 2D shooter horror film is just not, It just doesn't scare you that much. It just doesn't hit like that.

1:19:04But in VR, it was something pretty crazy. I think our task, the reason that we've partnered, and it's under, you know. Can we get a wrist check? Oh, yeah. And Sarah Melkin. On who? James Cameron. What's he got? Oh. There they are. Wait, is that on his right hand? Oh, is he a lefty? and showrunners, because by the way, I think episodic television, short form, long form, I think that's the low-hanging fruit that people have historically ignored because so much 3D content was just made from movies. I'm not talking about Avatar. I can't make movies fast enough to feed this pipeline. We do it at Lightstorm Vision, my 3D company, as we build cameras and systems and networking and tools to give to other films.

1:19:52He looks great. He looks like he's got a few more, at least a few more avatars. A few more Founders Podcast episodes. Job's not finished. Other filmmakers and showrunners and broadcasters. John, the BMX bikers are lining up on the ramp. Oh. That guy's got like an Evel Knievel helmet. So there's two, back there, there are two half pipes that go like this. Do you think it's possible to transfer from one to the other? The transfer, the angle makes that not possible. Yeah, right, it wouldn't be possible. Because the ramp is actually coming back this way. But there is a section that they have to clear that we're both looking at and look like a death trap.

1:20:35Yeah. It's pretty crazy. And it's not only just bringing down the hardware, but it's making the hardware smarter. There's a lot of software solutions. And if anybody is tuning into this live from MetaConnect, just know that you can walk up here and say hello to yourself. And it will take care of, you know, the decision making around what makes good stereo, what makes it easy on our eyes, easy on our brains, where we're not getting eye strain and all those things. So it's taken us 25 years to figure out the kind of algorithm for that. It is worth noting that this time last year, we were both having the conversation that, you know, I can't make this technology brothers have had in the past, which is we should start a podcast.

1:21:21Yes. This was the we should start a podcast. This was. Month. Yeah. Going from like, you know, auto. Here we are. You have the ability to interocular distance can be an automatic. Auto stereo. Auto stereo. So yeah, this is one of the things that really, I think, has made this partnership so great. And you get a sense, I think, of it from the two of us. We're effusive about the partnership. Is you are somebody who has had. It is crazy. There hasn't been more of a 3D movie push. Of the story you want to tell and how you want people to experience that story. Probably because of the display resolution.

1:21:52Works a little bit more for gaming. Does that matter? I mean, if you have the catalog, why not distribute it widely, right? Like, Avatar's been shown on free TV with commercials. It's also been shown in theaters. It's super expensive prices. It's 3D, right? Yeah. But, yeah, I think it goes back to the VR companies really focusing on the long-term promise of what's possible with VR, immersive worlds, huge video games. But, yeah, I mean, you have to get the install base up to actually get that. I don't think you need to get the install base up to make 3D, the catalog of great 3D cinema, a fantastic experience on a headset.

1:22:38So I would be... It's starting to feel like it's picking up momentum, not only in the hardware, but also in the content side. You are willing a future into existence that you saw clearly. And this moment in history feels a lot to me like it did back in the early 90s, late 80s and early 90s when CG was first manifesting itself. And, oh, you're going to replace actors and it'll never look real. And, you know, analog is the answer. And that's why I founded a company called Digital Domain. I wanted, you know, it was revolutionary in its moment. Founders. today and it's ubiquitous today. So I've actually seen historically in my own life experience how you can actually make massive change and you know and then that led to 3D.

1:23:25Okay, well everybody accepts the fact that we go to digital movie theaters now, right? Obvious, right? Except that when the digital technology existed it wasn't adopted right away. It took 3D to get the theaters to convert to digital projection. It took you. Well, we were in the middle of that. You wouldn't release. Yeah, we were right in the middle of that. Unless they updated the theaters. Yeah. And it was actually talking to the team at Texas Instruments that developed the chip that made digital projection possible and saying, embed in your servers and in your electronics the ability to carry two image streams.

1:24:00And because they did that, then digital projection just rolled out, and now it's everywhere other than the occasional art house someplace with a 35 millimeter print. But when you've lived through enough of these revolutions, you start to see them coming as a wave, like a good surfer. I know you surf. That's right. I watch it from the beach. You watch it from underwater. I watch it from underwater. Listen, we've got one more exciting piece coming. I want to thank you again for coming to Connect. It's really our honor to have you. I can't wait to check out Avatar, Fire, and Ash, as I'm sure everyone here will agree when it hits the theaters in December 19th.

1:24:40Thank you. I love Avatar. We have our first guest on the way over. As a special surprise, we have an exclusive, never-before-seen stunning 3D clip from Avatar Fire and Ash for everyone to check out in demo stations here for attendees and available on all MetaQuest devices in Horizon TV for a limited viewing window. Thank you all. Thank you, James. and trust the process. This is all going to be very exciting. Here we go. Check this out. So we have our first hands-on live with the Meta Ray-Ban displays. You can't even tell. It is remarkable. It's so close to the original Ray-Ban. You couldn't tell at all, right?

1:25:24So when we walked in to get the first demo. But you assumed that they were smart glasses. I assumed they were smart glasses, but I didn't know they were the display model. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable. They've really shrunk it down so much. I mean, we tried Orion, and Orion is blocky. It doesn't look like a full consumer product. And obviously, when they announced it, they were messaging, hey, we're going to shrink this down. And the narrow band is really light. Yeah, I mean, people are already wearing bands like this all the time. I see more and more people wearing two devices on their wrists.

1:25:52People are very comfortable with this. I don't learn. All right. We've got an after party over at Meta's platform. Here we go. Diplo's going to play. There you go. Please join me in welcoming Diplo.

1:26:09Well, we are moving over to our first guest of the stream, Chris Cox, the chief product officer at Meta. People are also starting to learn that you're a big runner, and you've got the whole Diplo Run Club. Exactly. So what do you think? Should we run over to Classic Ambas and take these things for a spin? Absolutely. All right, let's do it. Meta, play B right there. From Spotify. Go for a run. And I believe they're going to run right past us. We will wave to them when they run over here. Going for a light jog before hopping on the show. Love to see it. A warm-up. Great. And we are ready for our first guest of the show.

1:26:53Welcome to the stream. Chris Cox. Let's do it. Thanks so much for hopping on. How you doing? Welcome. This is Jordy here. Grab a headset. There you go. Shades or not? Yeah, please. Throw them on. It's a little hard to wear under the headset, but you can make it work. Nice. Yeah. Which ones are you grabbing? I brought my own. I got these Navy ones. What are you daily driving these sets? I like the Navy. Great. And they're a transition. Here, pull up the mic a little bit so we can hear you. There you go. Great. Can you hear me? Loud and clear. Sweet. What does your organization look like right now?

1:27:33I mean, you've been at Meta for 20 years, right? Almost 20 years. Almost 20. Congratulations. It's a massive company. How do you fit into today? So I'm the CPO, Chief Product Officer. I lead the family of apps. So that's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, threads, edits. Working very closely with Alex and Nat, building out all the AI stuff that we're doing. I also lead our privacy team, the team that thinks about protecting user data. Yep. how has your frame of mind changed in the age of ai around the trade-offs the decisions around how you build the products it's a new era for product guys yeah it is um i mean it's changing these days it's changing we like one week at a time that's how much is changing um how people engineer prototypes can now be done stuff can be done in hours that used to take weeks um and part of what we're trying to do for the company is just encourage everybody even if they know what they're doing to take risks on trying to do things differently and to learn as quickly as they can all the way down to the way infrastructure is built the way bugs are detected the way optimizations are made to ranking for example we've been ranking news feeds since 2006 yeah we're now starting to deploy agents to think about how to do that themselves and already seeing pretty interesting wins in terms of just making the experience better for people.

1:28:55So I would say it's changing very rapidly and it requires a huge amount of constant attention to make sure that we're staying on the edge. And what about at the product level for consumers and how you think about like product quality? Historically, it was easier to be like, does the button work or not? Yep. And now we're in an era where AI is probabilistic. You don't have the same ability to have consistency? How has that kind of shifted your thinking? A lot of it, I mean, AI can be used to detect edge cases a lot more easily, which is really important. AI can be used to scale a judgment to lots more types of people and lots more languages, for example.

1:29:31One of my favorite features on the glasses is live translations. And then one of my favorite features we've started to roll out on Instagram is captioning and lip syncing so that you can take any video creator's language and translate it into the native language of the viewer along with lip syncing this to me is like um very very fundamental if you think about what it unlocks yeah it's kind of like tower of babble level phenomenal to take any voice and translate it into the voice of the listener so it scales the kind of thing that's just pure human connection but it does it in a way that's instantaneous and could let um somebody who speaks a relatively small language family experience the rest of the internet or experience the speaker of anybody out there.

1:30:16Yeah, it'll be interesting to think about news superstars, internet superstars starting out default global just because they're able to just be instantly translated across the entire world. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, you said something about, you said you could scale a, what was that, a resolution or something? You had some word for it, but I'm interested to know how you think about the trade-offs between like rethinking products entirely from the ground up in AI native ways versus like there are so many amazing like unlocks with like captioning and just translation just like if we take them for granted but you got to go chop the wood and actually get them out into the products uh how are you thinking about balancing those or there's like two different teams where you're kind of thinking about a greenfield project that could be like an entirely v2 or or do you see yourself as like iterating towards whatever that next version of the product looks like we we do a lot of both yeah um we basically ask every team to have a portfolio to make sure they have something that's gonna they're gonna deliver in the next year okay and then something that's gonna come three years from now that's much riskier that's in the prototype phase where you're playing around with ideas um you're literally prototyping something that doesn't quite work and if it does work you're not thinking far enough in advance We do this for every single part of the business.

1:31:37So WhatsApp does that. Instagram does that. Our ads team does that. And that way you're sort of constantly having a product pipeline of things that require a lot more risk taking. What you're starting to see now is that the farther out stuff, you can code up a lot more quickly. You can play around with a lot more quickly. and then the near term stuff, you're able to scale. What I was saying before is you can take something that works for one set of users and just scale it out a lot more quickly. Yeah. How are you thinking about talent internally? We've seen a couple highly entrepreneurial folks join to build MSL.

1:32:17What does that look like on the product side? Meta has like a really rich history of acquiring and bringing, you know, some of the greatest founders into the organization, turning them loose, growing them into huge products. Is that something you want to continue on the product side? Is that something that's more important in the age of AI? How are you thinking about that? Yeah, we've had, going back to the very earliest days of the company, like I was, one of my earlier jobs was building up the product management team and the way we did it, and this is before product management was really a thing.

1:32:47It wasn't a major discipline in software. So I couldn't go out there and find a lot of experienced product managers, aside from Google, was the only company that was like still standing from the dot-com. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's crazy to think that only a little while ago, there wasn't young people that were like, I want to be a product manager. It just didn't exist. It wasn't the past. So this is 2007-ish, 2008. And so the way we did it was like, let's go find the best small startups and see if they'd want to work with us. So this was Brett Taylor, who was leading FriendFeed. This was Gokul Rajaram, one of the founders of Google AdSense, who was leading a team called Chilabs.

1:33:22This is Blake Ross, who built Firefox. it was just these like legendary for me it was like these are legendary people we were all like 25 they were too um but we part of the reason that was such an interesting looking back is like we had a lot of founders at the company um and we loved that the energy that a founder brings the entrepreneurial energy is really powerful especially at a company that is in white space like social media was brand new um smartphones were kind of brand new so you want as many people as you can, frankly, that can operate or like comfortable being at a company and dealing with like, okay, I need to like actually check a bunch of boxes to deliver something to billions of people.

1:34:04I can't just do that in a weekend. Um, but you want the sort of, uh, aspirational, just like energy of a founder. So we do, um, acquisitions. We also are frequently seeing people leave and go found a company and then often come back and sort of understanding sort of all the goodness of big companies and all the goodness of the outside world and trying to get the balance right between the two. What are the buckets? How are you thinking about the value? We talk about super intelligence. We talk about AI. It's extremely broad. It means things for different people. How do you think about the categories that AI can deliver value in?

1:34:49I can I can think of entertainment. I can think of connection. But what's your framework in terms of making AI, integrating it through meta platforms and just making it valuable for end users versus this abstract kind of concept? Yeah. So, I mean, just thinking about the displays and the wearables we lock today, a lot of this is going to be about something that is with you all day long. When we talk about personal superintelligence, it's basically this idea that your computer should understand what you care about. It should understand what you're thinking about today. It should understand your life, your values.

1:35:25Yeah. What you're trying to get done, what you're interested in, the people you care about. Like that's what a, that's what a super intelligent assistant that you could design for yourself would know. And then when you open Instagram or you open Facebook, everything you see there should be responsive to like your interests and values. And like, if you think about things from that perspective, like we're a pretty long way. away. I'm still seeing things that like may not be interesting to me today or were interesting to me weeks ago. It's not like up to date to the second with like the way that people are.

1:36:01Like if you have a really close friend who knows what you're reading today, like they'll talk about today, you'll talk about the news today. And so for me, it's just taking the idea of what our apps do today. They connect you with people, they connect you with your interests, they help you create content and just bring the barrier of all of those things down. So that to me is like how you extend the product forwards. And then with these, with these glasses, I mean, you really, once you start wearing them, you do start to have a sense that this could replace a lot of the, like pulling your phone out of your pocket handwriting.

1:36:35Yeah. And, and, and that type of thing just feels like, Here we go. We got Mark. We got Diplo and Mike. Running around. There we go. Look at that. There we go. They did it. Credit for Mark for going on a run before Joe and jumping on his show. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's good to meet you guys. Have a good race to you today. Cheers. Really quickly, let me tell you about FAL. FAL.AI is the website, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models, all in one place. develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Our next guest is Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram.

1:37:15We will bring him down. It's an app you've probably used before. Yes. You're probably watching TVPN live on Instagram right now. We are streaming live on Instagram for the first time ever today. It's a regular thing now. Yes, very excited for our vertical layout. Well, we will bring on Adam whenever we're ready. Adam's looking incredibly sharp. We're swapping things out. and the run has concluded. They're taking photos, and we are bringing on new products. Here is the... Here's that case that you saw. I can't believe it's so cool that it folds up flat. Yeah. Here we go. We're ready. Let's bring them on.

1:37:59Adam, how are you doing? Here, we're going to have you put on this headset. There you go. You can't hear me, can you? No, we can't hear you. Barely. It's noisy. I'd like to be talking to you before you can hear me. Good to meet you. Hi, I'm John. Nice to meet you guys. Welcome to the show. What's happening? There's people running by. Yes, the run club, I believe, is completed, concluded. Mark Zuckerberg's right over there now. It barely broke a sweat. Yeah. It was, and Diplo. Yeah. Diplo's here, yeah. I was like, okay. Yeah. That's cool. Another day at the office. All right, take us through how the glasses play with Instagram over the long term.

1:38:35we saw a demo where Mark Zuckerberg was it seemed like he was live streaming is that something that's going to come to the glasses you think? Yeah, I think so in general, I mean Instagram is about trying to inspire creativity and having people connect over that creativity we started as fun square photos with big filters and ridiculous borders that were kind of fun as in a way to help people create things that they wanted to share And I think in a world where you can take pictures with things like these or live stream what's going on when something special is happening in your life, we love the idea of bringing that to Instagram.

1:39:15The platform feels like remarkably stable, super feature complete. There aren't a lot of feature requests that people are angry about and, oh, why don't you have this feature? It's got a lot. The critical feedback comes in other forms. You still get that, I'm sure. Do you ever check my comments? My question is, there's two things going on in AI. I put on a hazmat suit before I go in there. Yeah. I mean, I go into the requests once a week. I feel like it's important. I usually leave feeling pretty poor about myself. Try to refresh, get a good night's sleep, shake it off. But there's a ton of stuff going on in generative AI.

1:39:47What about in core AI? Do you feel like there's still room to get gains out of core AI models just on better recommendation feeds with bigger models, bigger training runs? What is the gap to just getting people better recommendations? Absolutely. There's a number of different ways, if you want to go into the tech side of things, about how these frontier models can change how we do, how we recommend content, how we understand people's interests. One big pillar of that is content understanding. These omni models, these models that can work across text, video, and photos, they can understand things in much more nuanced and complicated ways.

1:40:25before if we wanted to build a classifier that understood what something was about we'd build a different classifier for every topic yeah we'd only come up with so many topics and now we can look at these not that used to be these pieces of technology that we couldn't actually read directly as people and we can use lms to make sense of them and we can say like oh these two videos are in the same place on a map now we know that is a vintage arsenal 90s highlights yeah like we never could have done before so that empowers things on finding content to help people connect too that that that's going to empower things on giving people more control over the recommendations and their experience on instagram these other apps um there's all sorts of really compelling opportunities that i think are going to come to fruition over the next couple years on the gen ai side do you have a view on how much ai content we're going to be seeing people like to complain about ai slot but i i've seen some incredible ai generated videos i'm sure we've all seen harry Potter Balenciaga, it clearly still had a human element in it.

1:41:21It wasn't just make me something that gets lights. There was a human touch to that. It was enabled by AI technology, right? Well, I think you're going to see, like with all other technology, that there's going to be good and there's going to be bad. And the most interesting content that I've seen that has been generated with AI or AI has been part of creating it have had a point of view that has come from a person. I do think what you're going to see is, you're going to see, yes, more purely generated AI content grow over time. And some of that is going to have real risks, things like deep fakes, trying to misrepresent what's happening.

1:41:52Some of it's going to be really inspiring and trying to help you. You know, you can imagine things like creating tutorials to learn how to do things that you couldn't do before. And a creator might not have been able to do that. Now they can use these tools that do just that. I also think you're going to see a lot of content that is sort of hybrid. We don't talk about this a lot because we're more focused on the extremes. But AI can help people just clean up photos, clean up videos, make every clip in a reel, the same lighting. There's a lot of basic stuff that is actually, I think, super important opportunity for creators.

1:42:22My view, it's like if you've built an audience that cares about you and cares about your content today, you're going to do really well over the next 10 years. You're going to be able to make more content. You're going to be able to make better content. And then the exciting thing is the entirely new categories of people that never thought to make something because it was really hard or they never thought to learn, right? I mean, the beauty of Instagram early on and even Facebook was like Facebook, you could just type out a message and hit return. Yeah. Post it. Instagram, you could take a picture, post it.

1:42:51Maybe you add a filter, maybe you don't. And it's just about reducing that friction. The question I have is like, how do you think about the push and pull between keeping Instagram? You know, I feel like in your comments, keeping Instagram, Instagram, right? We think about people have an idea of what an app is, and then there's constantly pressure to add new things and do new things. But how do you think about that push and pull internally? So I think about our reason to be is about inspiring creativity and helping people connect over that creativity. I see an amazing piece of stand-up that I know is going to really hit hard with my brother, and I send it to him, and then we talk about it.

1:43:33You're seeing the shares are higher than likes and a lot of reels. Yeah. So it's about sharing reels. It's about responding to stories. It's about connecting over your interests. Now, how people do that on Instagram is going to have to change. It's how people communicate with their friends and how people entertain themselves inevitably changes. Often people think of Instagram as a feed of square photos. But if we didn't evolve, if we didn't add video, if we didn't add stories, if we didn't add DMs, if we didn't add reels, we wouldn't be here today. You wouldn't be asking me any questions. And so we have to figure out how do we evolve forward but stay true to our core identity, to our reason to exist in the first place.

1:44:10That's a balance. Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we get it wrong. We push too hard sometimes. I've been on a fair amount of that feedback, and I appreciate it. But like I said, if we didn't evolve, we would just slowly become irrelevant. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Yeah, good to meet you guys. I've got to get you guys a little bit less on X and a little bit more on X. Oh, we're coming over. We're live streaming on IT right now. We are growing. I know, but we're going to be in your comment section. Yes, we're working on it. I want the heat. I want the real feedback.

1:44:39I want to know what we're doing well and what we're not. For sure. For sure. We'll talk soon. Thanks so much. Thanks for coming on. Don't forget to take the headset off before you walk away. I just, you know, take this and pull the whole set down. I think it's a good look. Yeah, it's a great look. All right. Thank you so much. Fantastic Aquanaut, too. I got to mention it. Yes, it is beautiful. Excellent taste. Good eye. Let's tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And our next guest is Connor Hayes. Connor Hayes.

1:45:08Not H-A-Y-S. He's got an E, H-A-Y-E-S. Put an E in there. He is the head of threads. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Throw this headset on. Great to meet you. Good to meet you, Connor. Throw this on so we can hear you. This is crazy out here. This is a crazy event. Thank you for having us. The BMX riders are in the air. Everyone's going. You guys are in headset. You're not like... Oh, yeah, yeah. When you're out with this headset, it's a wild environment here. So, yeah, I mean, everyone knows Threads. Take us through, like, what is the scale of the platform? It feels like it's massive.

1:45:40Where is the biggest success of Threads? Because, you know, we've heard about other platforms. You know, Instagram famously started with runners. Where's the RC and Run Club? Where's Threads really found its footing? Yeah, we recently announced that we crossed the 400 million monthly active mark. So hit the screaming eagle, maybe. I don't know. That's great. And we've done really well, actually, globally. So one of the main ways that people find out about threads is through promotions that we do in Instagram and Facebook. We make the content that's most popular in threads and show people there.

1:46:10So basically anywhere where those platforms are big, we've been able to attract people to threads. Speeding back and forth. Yeah. Sorry, Adam, we're going to end up on Instagram now. I appreciate it. This is threads time. Japan, Korea, the U.S., India, Brazil. It's pretty much a global platform at this point. Alex Heath is doing a 50K. He's here. We're going to hang out with him. Yeah, sorry. We ran into him earlier today. Congrats, Alex. He went independent today. Yeah, he did yesterday. But yeah, that's great. Talk about the different inflection points. Because obviously there's the big launch.

1:46:44But it's like building any new products. It's a roller coaster. And it feels like you guys are really figuring things out. I find myself in the... I certainly am a DAU now because I'm just constantly, even if it's not necessarily like muscle memory to open threads, I'm getting, I'm finding it. I see it on Instagram. I'm getting pushed over. Yeah. I mean, yeah, one of my kind of philosophies as a product person is anytime you can launch something with a bootstrap, do it. I think bootstrapping off of Instagram was like 100 % the right thing to do in the beginning. We had this really big pop. I think it kind of established the platform, got a lot of people in there.

1:47:20But I think what you quickly find out if you were using threads at that time versus now is that not all the people that are best at Instagram are going to be best at threads. So the format is so different. So we had to spend a lot of time kind of getting the threads native people onto the platform and then also helping users build a thread specific graph. So that has been kind of the last year. And it feels like we're starting to break through and have some power users that really love the product. It's so fascinating because I feel like Meta has done a few of these greenfield projects before uh facebook camera there's been other apps that eventually got rolled into instagram it was this always the plan is this surprising internally am i just out of the loop here like it is a unique story right i was on the team that that like helped build threads in the beginning yeah took a little detour yeah yeah um but uh we actually debated really really heavily in the should it just go on instagram right and that was actually my original pitch yeah i'll admit as like, that's the ultimate bootstrap.

1:48:18Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. It's like, you've added stories, you added reels. Like there's been so many times when Instagram was a fertile ground for that. Like why, what is fundamental about you need a separate app? To his credit, I mean, Mark was the person that pushed us the hardest on this. I think his point of view is that the use case, and I think over time, it ends up being distinct enough that you kind of want it to feel like a separate space. Sure. If Threads is going to be the place where it's like fresh perspectives on what's happening now in the world, That's a little bit different than like, what's the most entertaining and visually appealing concept?

1:48:48Yeah, it's reading versus a reading network. When something happens in the world, you want to go to where things are that news is breaking and being discussed, right? The discussion is key. Yes. And I do think it's just, you know, wildly different thing. You open Instagram and you might be seeing what Instagram thinks is what you're going to be most interested in that moment, not the story that just broke. And so I think that it's like a distinctly different ecosystem. We actually got criticized for this. There was like, you know, Casey was making fun of us a bunch in the beginning because it's like the Threads feed would be showing him things that were like a week old or six days old.

1:49:25That was a lot of because we built on top of Instagram tech. Oh, interesting. You know, Instagram pushes for timeliness with the content. But if there's something that's awesome that you missed six days ago and it's not about some breaking news thing, you are fine seeing a funny video that was posted six days ago. So actually a lot of our thread specific relevance investment over the last couple of years has been training for timeliness, trying to get it to feel really fresh. And you actually create a constraint for yourself because the pool of content that you can pull from is then inherently smaller.

1:49:55How big is the thread team? I don't know if I'm able to share that. Well, Adam was relative to the rest of the company. It seems like you're clean and scrappy. Adam was pitching us on live streaming on Instagram. We're live streaming on Instagram right now. Is live streaming going to come to threads? Talk to me about where the product goes because pretty soon you could build all the Instagram features if you're not careful. Sometimes you go into an interview and you know that there is going to be a question that you're going to be asked. This was the one. I mean, listen, we just talked about you want Threads to be the place where it feels live.

1:50:26It's what people are saying about what's happening right now. We just have such a long list of basic stuff that has to get done. I've been like this catchphrase that I've been giving to the team is like be the app that ships. you can come up with, we could sit here for like two minutes and come up with a dozen features that are missing, um, making replies better, making notifications work really well, like getting the profile to feel really good, getting search better trending. So those are the things that we're going to be focused on in the near term, but I do think it'll probably, there will come a day.

1:50:53Well, if you launch it, call us first. We'll be the first one on. I promise you and commit to you that that is what, thank you. Well, thank you for coming on the show. We appreciate you. Thank you guys. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. Have a good one. See you on threads. If you want AI to handle your customer support threads, head over to fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Our next guest is Roberto Nixon, a fantastic Instagram creator, a friend of mine. We've been DMing for years now talking about tech. He does these incredibly polished Instagram reels. Please, he's firing up the Meta Ray-Bans.

1:51:33There we go. Welcome to the Stream. How you doing, man? Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Throw the headset on so we can hear you. There you go. Oh, beautiful. My mind made it. I'm on TVPN. There we go. Long overdue. Great to have you. Take us through your reaction to the event today. Look, the one thing I'll say is you guys know in tech, every couple of years is like a, can you curse on the show? We don't, but you can. There's a holy crap moment every few years in tech, right? Like, you know, iPhone 4, retina screen. Yeah. The EMG band, the metaneural band that comes with the new metaray band display feels like magic.

1:52:11It's so natural. I picked it. So we've demoed it a couple of times. I was shocked that I picked it up. It just felt like it feels like using a phone with no phone. Yeah. It's like a crazy thing. Yeah, and so I tried to lash it with Orion, but Orion has eye tracking. This one doesn't, so it's a little bit more precise. And the new pinch and... Yeah, the volume button. That's when I was like... That's great. So that was my favorite part of the keynote, but I'm also a sucker for those new Oakleys. I know, I know. Well, talk to me about just MetaRaybans as a creator tool. We saw after the iPhone keynote, Mr.

1:52:49Beast said, I'm going all in. All my cameras are going to be iPhone and 17 Pros or something. Do you think this will be a daily tool that you use in creating content? Obviously, you're still going to use cinematic footage for a lot of the stuff you do, but how does this fit into actually creating content? I would say for everybody's different. Here's my thing a lot of times when it comes to Instagram. Some people get frustrated by this. I think personally it's kind of cool, but sometimes the process gets more love than the art, than the final result. So me, when I rock these, it's always bts it's always pov sure so i put out like a piece of art let's call it like a video and then i'm showing the process behind it the pov from the glasses that combination is killer so you get two pieces pieces of content for one idea so that personally that's how i use them i think live streaming is another great use case um so but i think every creator is using them for different things well thank you so much for coming on the show we got to have you back and hang out more we can talk so much more about the career economy and whatnot all right have a good one We have our next guest, Alex Wang, coming onto the stream.

1:53:48Let me tell you about Profound. TryProfound.com. Get your brand mentioned in LLM searches. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Alex, good to see you. Congratulations on the new gig. My man. How are you? How are you? Good to see you guys. Do I do anything? No, no, you're good. We can hear you. Talk to us about the first day on the job. How are you settling in? How's it going? Honestly, it's been incredible. It's like a lot of fun. I think, you know, building an AI lab in 60 days flat is kind of an incredible activity. But, you know, it's a good way.

1:54:25Give me your pitch if you were trying to hire me if I'm some hotshot AI scientist. I think Meta has everything necessary to achieve superintelligence. There are no obstacles. We have the business model to support building literally hundreds of billions of dollars of compute to be able to actually produce the technology. We have an incredibly talent-dense team. Our team is smaller and more talent-dense than any of the other labs. The other labs are like 10 times bigger. And our team is about 100 people of cracked AI scientists. And that's how we're going to get there. And we're going to be incredibly bold.

1:55:00And we have the scale of products and business to be able to deploy superintelligence to every person on the planet. Yeah, what are you looking for in that 100 people? Are you doing two pizza teams? Like, who's fitting in really well right now? I think that the AI researchers are all pretty, are incredibly kind and lovely people. And so I think we've been able to just build a team of great people. Everybody's trying to build super intelligence. Everybody is excited to be able to build, you know, potentially the most important technology of all time. And we're, my job is like ensuring that we have the conditions to be able to do that.

1:55:36Yeah. Talk to me about the pillars, how you're thinking about research, safety, product, how all that comes together. In the position of MSL as opposed to other labs where you have pretty much every human in the world that you can actually distribute these products to. Yeah, I think so. So we kind of split the team into three pieces, infrastructure, research and product. Yeah. Research obviously has this job of building these models, which will ultimately, you know, be super intelligent over time. Product is responsible for ensuring that, you know, over time they do get distributed and used in novel and interesting ways by the world.

1:56:15And then infrastructure is this very difficult challenge of building, you know, literally the largest data centers in the world and continue to scale those over time. I think that the over time, like, you know, not only having the distribution of all Meta's products, but also truly like having this incredibly talent dense team is going to be is going to prove to be a huge differentiator. I think that like, you know, one of our guidelines for building the team is that people have to be in the in the very top handful from one of the other labs. And if you just do that, if you just build a team of the very best people from the industry, you're going to be very successful.

1:56:54Talk about the advantage of having a hardware team that's been at it for a decade versus maybe starting in the last year. How closely are you in touch with them in terms of showing what capabilities will be coming down the pipeline from the MSL side? I mean, the amount of engineering that has gone into this thing is absolutely incredible. They have the transparent versions. we can see all the fucking shit that people have like painstakingly engineered over the course of a decade. I mean, and it's not a, it's a, you know, we've, we've done a couple of demos over the last month or so, but this is a product that people are going to be able to have their hands on in two weeks.

1:57:33A hundred percent. And like, and fundamental, like, I think, uh, you know, glasses are the natural delivery mechanism for super intelligence. Like it is, you need something that will see what you see, hear what you hear, and then can easily deliver information to you. Yeah. It's literally right next to the human sensors, the human sensors and the human brain. The human sensors next to the, to the digital sensors, merged. Yeah. Yeah. Slap together. Yeah. It's happening. And, um, and I think it like, I mean, like my, my view is like, it will literally just feel like cognitive enhancement. You will just, you will gain 100 IQ points by having your super intelligence right next to you.

1:58:14Yeah, or you like talk about chatbots, right? It feels like the chatbot meta like is here, but it's not, it doesn't feel like what's going to be the most important thing in a decade from now. Yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally, if you look at like the AI industry, there's been relatively low innovation on the product side. Like ChatGPT was one of the first products that we had and chat was one of the first products and it still is the dominant product for ai delivery and then on code you've seen innovation with like you know cursor and agents and all these all these other products but um but yeah we're just still in the like from a product innovation standpoint we're still very much in some local maxima and um any like this is true of any consumer product there are going to be many innings of innovation that come along the way and so our bet is that we're going to be able to be pretty bold and iterate and build some very innovative new product experiences.

1:59:11Do you buy into that idea of AI writing 90 % of your code? Is that just you're writing 10 times as much code or you can write the same amount as a thousand person team with 100 people? What does that actually mean when people throw around that 90 % of code will be written by AI? Yeah, I think it's impossible to understate the degree to which I've been radicalized by AI coding. Like, I think that fundamentally the role of an engineer is just like very different now than it was before. And, um, you know, I think, I think it like feels obviously true that for any engineer, including me, like I've written a bunch of code in my life, like literally all the code I've written in my life will be replaced by what will be able to have been produced by an AI model within the next five years.

1:59:53And so what's your advice for young people then? Um, I think you just have to figure out how to use the tools maximally. I think like It's actually in some ways this incredible moment of discontinuity where if you just happen to spend 10 ,000 hours playing with the tools and figuring out how to use them better than other people, that's a huge advantage. And adults all have jobs. So you guys are on freaking TBB. They're not vibe coding. Where's your cloud code? Yeah, it is interesting. We were at YC Demo Day last week and talking and looking at the eras of the sneaker flippers, the people doing Minecraft servers.

2:00:32And it feels like the people today are going to be leveraging the tools, not just to learn them, but actually making money from them while they're in middle school, high school, etc. I think it's exactly that kind of thing. It's almost like, you know, when personal computers first came about, like the people or just computing in general, the people who spent the most time with and grew up with it had this immense advantage in the future economy, like the Bill Gates, the world, even the even the Mark Zuckerberg of the world. So I think that that moment is happening right now. And like if you are like 13 years old, you should spend all of your time vibe coding and just, you know, that's how you should live your life.

2:01:09It's amazing. um well thank you so much for coming on the show yeah i'll have to have you back for a longer conversation again soon this is fantastic congrats on the new talk soon uh in the meantime let me tell you about turbo puffer turbo puffer.com serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles and object storage fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable used by the best we have andrew bosworth bos how you doing welcome to see what what shoes are you wearing we saw them we saw them photographed in the in the in the keynote let's go ahead and do this let us know we got the shoes there we go and they say buzz on them yeah alex trust is a instagram alex albert okay brooklyn-based artist fantastic honestly he was solving a problem for us we're like how can mark use the zoom feature when he's one foot away from me yeah he's right next to my face i don't want it to be my face yeah and so we needed some detailed shoes for it and that's Great.

2:02:04That's great. There you go. On the Oakley's, no less, we're being brand loyal. Yep. Of course. Oh, that's great. That's great. In the future, do you think I'll be able to just point the glasses at the shoes and say, hey, go pull these up for me, order them, deliver them to me? 100%. Ideally, in the future, you don't even have to. Later on, you're just like, oh, I wanted those shoes. It knew that I wanted them. I love that. That's great. I got a budget. I got a shoe budget. I'm going to authorize your credit card with Meta. Here's my shoe budget. Yeah. It's just like, yeah, this is my budget for this week.

2:02:29This is great. This is great. So here's the thing. Here's the thing. I don't think this can be like the thing that feels incredible here is that you walk on the screen onto the show and you're wearing the new displays. And you're not thinking, oh, this guy's wearing a computer on his face. It's crazy. You're saying this guy's wearing a pair of glasses. We do have this problem, I think, in the tech industry where we look at a set of features and we're like, oh, this is the same. These two things are the same. It's not the same. You look at what's come before and you look at this. You're like, I'm sorry.

2:02:57This is a different thing. And I think that's what we've done from day one. Mark said it. If they're not great glasses first, we're just not doing them. Yeah. You told Ben Thompson, you ship the V1, but the V3 is what you want to be your V1. Has there been a secret V2? Because I feel like Orion, and then here, this is the actual V3, but it seems polished. We've got, so Orion is a different tech tree. It's like a whole tech tree of augmented reality, which is very much following the V1, V2, V3 kind of model. Sure, sure. This is, I will say, this is an uncommonly good V1. It's good. I'm not going to lie to you.

2:03:29A lot of that is because I think the neural interface is V2. Yeah. And that's really, you can feel it. The neural interface feeling as smooth as it does, as natural does. What's funny to me now is if I wear the Ray-Ban Metas and I'll just walk around and I'll be pissed. I'll be using the interface. I'm like, ah, I'm not using the display glass. I can't use the interface. It's crazy. It's crazy how natural it is. We picked it up. I mean, we've done a couple demos now and it's just, you pick it up and it's just like using it. It's just. immediate translation from using a regular mobile device. So a year ago, Jordy made the prediction that in the future, you might have multiple pairs of glasses, a work pair, a sports pair.

2:04:02Is that going to hold for a long time? Yeah. People already have a lot of glasses. Yeah. You've got different styles. You've got different things. I think that's appropriate. In the future, yeah, you want to have the full functionality of augmented reality. That's one zone. Sometimes you just say, yeah, I'm just going to my kid's soccer game. I'm going to take videos. That's all I need. I do think you're going to end up with a strata, the entire line where you're getting the full AR, these AI smart glasses with displays, AI glasses that don't have displays, and maybe even some stuff at the lower end.

2:04:28There's a whole range there, and people should be able to dial what they want out of that. If you were a young founder excited about AR, how would you be planning the next five years? Well, there's two really important things. The first one is you have to embrace AI, and these are really tightly connected. People didn't see that five, six years ago. Now it's so clear. It's very unlikely to me that in the AR... You've got to give me some credit for that, by the way. I don't think, I think broadly tech didn't see the intersection in the same way. Now it feels natural because you guys are up there pitching live AI, real-time AI.

2:05:00And it's like, oh, makes total sense. But they felt like different tech trees at one point. And in the future, you're not going to have an app store. I don't want to go figure out what the app for my toaster was called and make toast, man. I just want to talk to the AI and let it handle the back end. So it's a lot about what's the functionality you're producing? How is that going to integrate with AI? and then I would be thinking a lot about dynamic UI. That's the thing that no one's cracked yet, including us, is how do you get it so that the UI that I need is available when I need it? Generates in real time.

2:05:29As opposed to just like this fixed set of things that I got to go learn every time I have a new appliance in my life. Totally. Talk about the tech tree in VR. It feels like James Cameron was on stage. I've said for a long time that this is, I don't know if you agree with me, but I feel like people will be watching movies in VR before they're playing fully immersive 100-hour AAA games because you've got to get the install base up, and Avatar in 3D already exists. It's a great experience. You know, he's such a passionate guy, and he cares so much about the quality of the product. He really was not a fan of headsets until Quest 3.

2:06:04Yeah. And it finally got high-res enough and AVP and all these different things. And then he was like, oh, I'm in. He went from, like, not that interested to all the way in. You saw him on the screen. Just hyped. Fired up. He's totally fired up. And that's because we finally crossed. So up until then, you know, listen, watching on your TV was better. It was. Like, why would you watch it in the headset? It was better. That's not true anymore. And it won't be true in the future. Like, we're going to be, he's seen the future. He ruined all my secrets on stage. I keep bringing them back. And so that just does keep getting better.

2:06:34The future isn't just the tech, though, and people underestimate this. A big part of what is premium in the headset space is lightness. It's weight, it's comfort. Those are premium features. And that's kind of different than the previous generation. And that's not how it was with phones or laptops where you wanted it to feel solid and sturdy. You want it to feel plasticky and light. But when you're a wearable, that is one of the most premium things you can deliver. So we're looking at not just the technology, but how do you package it into the smallest amount of space and weight? Talk about the decisions to around the heads up display specifically in the display lenses.

2:07:07They allow you to interact with the real world. It's not meant to cut you off. But what went into those decisions? Yeah, so from day one, Mark, you heard him on stage. We wanted this not to be interruptive. If this is a thing that's constantly flashing notifications up on your face, that's a pretty annoying piece of technology. That's not a technology that you're going to be delighted by. So literally the way we did this was we thought, what are the top ten things that you take your phone out of your pocket for? Taking a picture, changing the song, listening to music, get a playlist, send messages.

2:07:39You're going to get a navigation. You're going to get directions. and we just started working down that list and making sure that we could do those things on the headset. We're doing it in partnership with the phone. It's all part of the same ecosystem, but that's one less thing you have to take your phone out of your pocket for. That's one more minute that you're engaged in, whatever it is that you're actually doing. Everything, I mean, the handwriting stuff. Did you guys try that demo? Yeah, yeah, crazy. You know, that was a 2027 maybe thing. No way. And then in the last year, we just blitzed it.

2:08:04The team did incredible work to blitz that, and that's another thing. Now you can respond to messages without having to take your phone out. Who's the fastest handwriter at Meta now? I'm not exaggerating. This will sound like I'm blowing smoke, but it's not who I am because I'm very competitive. It is Mark now. He was not good to start. He got his glasses. He had the handwriting like two weeks ago, but he knew he was doing it on stage. So he runs this company on WhatsApp. And so he has been doing every single message that any of us have gotten for two weeks is in WhatsApp. I literally think he went from like the 10th percentile to the 99th percentile words per minute.

2:08:34We have a touch typing demo that we do with no keyboard, nothing, just from cameras. No way. And I was number one until Susan Lee, our CFO. And Excel jockey is always number one. Excel jockey is going to crush number one. I'm number two at that. But, yeah, no, I'm not exaggerating. I say, Mark, we watched him on stage. Like, oh, damn, he's a keyboard demo. You're leaking that. But that seems incredible. I mean, the name of the company is Meta Platforms. It feels like this is a hardware platform. There weren't that many things where I was like, I want an independent developer to play around with this.

2:09:06But for those, I want the innovation to flourish. I want the kid in the college dorm room to build something that runs on that. What is that going to look like? I want the beer app. I want the beer app. Come on, give us the beer app. The pressure has been immense on us ever since the Ray-Ban Meadows kind of really became a hit last year to produce there. We have some exciting announcements tomorrow on API development for some people. It's too tough on the glasses. We worked with Spotify to do the Spotify app. And we really had to rebuild it with them to help them design it to make sure it met their specs.

2:09:39Even Instagram on the glasses, we had to redesign it with Adam's team. So it's so tight. The thermal and space is so tight. And it's so expensive to run the radio. You lose your battery and thermal so fast. So the apps can run locally. It's the worst it's ever going to be, right? That's right. Everything is exquisite right now. Over time, obviously, we want to buy that space back and open it up to developers. but again, I think a lot of it is going to go through the AI. A lot of it is going to be you invoke the AI to accomplish the task. That's not just on us, whether it's MCP or something else.

2:10:11That's on our industry. We've got to continue to build what is the web of interaction design for AI apps because we all know that is where things are headed. What about on the other side of the big tech partners that could potentially vend messaging into this? We were at YC Demo Day a few weeks ago, and we were talking to a team that like, they're like, well, this AI agent will run on your laptop and it'll suck in all your messages. And we're like, that's probably not going to last for that long. But is there any hope that other platforms will play ball and say, yes, there's enough demand. What's it take to get iMessage showed in here or Gmail or anything like that in there?

2:10:50Yeah, so we would love to work with these partners, as you can imagine. And I get it. We're so early on in the technology for Google or for Apple. at first they're just thinking, can we do it at all? Can we do our own version? What's that look like? But we have an opportunity here, I think, as a meta to not only establish a consumer category that nobody's in. I think the more people play in that category, the more attractive it is for us to work together to make sure all of our use cases are supported there. You never want the platform to get in the way of a great consumer experience. That's true for us and that's true for them.

2:11:21So it's too early to say. We're literally day zero. Actually, probably day minus 30 on these things. But we are getting there rapidly. The actual, like, it looks like there's cuts on the glasses. Those are, is that a design touch, or is that actually a wave guide? Is that a functional feature? Yeah, these are called the input gratings. Okay. So you've got a little liquid crystal and silicon display right here. It's piping light in. Yeah. Total internal reflection of light. It spreads that light out across a bunch of different pipes and channels that then shoot it in my eye through what we call a geometric wave guide.

2:11:51And so I have a display on that right now, so you can't. You do, and we can't see it. You can't see it. That's crazy. Wait, did you just turn it off? Yeah, I just turned it off. Wow. I got you. That's remarkable. I can't wait for people to go and just demo these because it literally is a science. It's a science fiction we've been promised. At 29 years old. Heads up to slide. It's in every video. I've told my team, it's yesterday's future, today. It's like the things that we were promised are finally arriving. Thank you guys for doing a demo and letting people buy it this year. Yeah. Not that it doesn't happen that much in AR.

2:12:28We appreciate that. Yeah. What's next for you at Meta? What are you focused on? What do you want to deliver this year? For us, look, the really big arcs, obviously, are continued towards full AR. So we're really excited that we're supporting the entire strata we talked about before. Full AR, display glasses, regular glasses, and even other exciting fun factors that I can't yet tease. On the VR side, we're advancing the hardware. We have multiple fronts that we're advancing the hardware on. And also on the software side, supporting creators. Gen.ai, don't sleep on it. That is the real unlock. You've got Roblox, you've got Minecraft.

2:13:02They're awesome tools. You've got tremendous communities there of creators, but there is a ceiling on how good the rendering can be in those platforms, which we know. And it's also, you have to be a certain level of creator to be able to produce good content in those platforms. And with Gen.ai, you can lower the floor. We just played around with the basically prompt to game functionality. It's crazy. I was talking with the team that gave us the demo, I was like, it was like not that long ago that I was like coding little iPhone apps Pong. It would take me two days to like get a functioning app and you're able to just prompt it and be like, hey, change this character completely.

2:13:39Change the entire world. And getting a decent 3D texture used to be like you needed an artist and you needed like a whole bunch of things. And then also with the new Horizon Engine, like making it so it looks better. And we think that's going to be something that appeals to people, not just in headset, but on mobile. Yeah. I remember, I believe it was a couple years ago, you shared a photo of your home setup, and you had the teleprompter, and you had the VR headset. What does that look like today? A lot of the focus has been about getting the glasses into the real world with the Run Club. But are you using these in front of your computer as well?

2:14:09Yeah, I use these. At this point, I'm pretty much using these all the time. Me and Mark kind of like have just been on nonstop. Once you get these on, you start using them in that you're in the thing of messaging. It's pretty next level. Like even earlier, I was just coming up on stage. Mark was messaging me about the things. I will say as a CTO, you feel a certain responsibility to your setup. You've got to really go over the top. I'm now shooting hilarious Leica cinema lenses. The ones that Ina Ritu shot Birdman out of is my VC setup. I've gone too far. That's amazing. I've gone too far, and there's no turning back.

2:14:44Well, we've got to have you on the show. Call in with those lenses. We'd love to have you remotely. That's amazing. We're excited to get the glasses because John and I will be on the show. Yeah. We want to not be on our screens. Right. I have, I usually have a computer open when we're at our studio because the team might text me, Hey, this guest running late, whatever, being in a world where we can just be live and get a notification. Hey, we've got a guest running two minutes behind. And it is, it is underrated. I mean, obviously like we're all hoping for like app store, super open development, but I was just talking to some of our team and I was like, wait, we could actually like pipe tons of crazy stuff just through the WhatsApp API.

2:15:16Like that's not that crazy to do. And WhatsApp has a bunch of primitives that you can build around. So there's going to be some cool stuff. And there's already WhatsApp apps and the whole ecosystem of developers there. Yeah, awesome. Alex Himmel, who runs the Rareables division, a year ago when he got the first prototypes, he gave a whole speech. And nobody knew he was doing the teleprompter. Oh, no way. Apparently on the glasses. And he was swiping the slides and the gestures. So there's a lot of potential here for these kinds of integrations. Yeah, that's great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

2:15:42Thanks for having me. This is fantastic. By the way, I love the show. Thank you. This thing rocks. We have a lot of fun. And I want to get out shotgun shooting with you after all your practice and robo recalls. Yeah. It really did completely change the game. I'd never shot a gun in my life. I honestly can't believe that's a true story. It is a true story. It is a true story. And I don't remember. Only playing robo recalls. Yeah, no, no. That's a spectacular story. Yeah. It was remarkable. Yeah, it was great. Anyway, thanks so much for having us on the show. This is great. We will talk to him later.

2:16:12Up next, we have Eva Chen. Next time we do this. Yes. 12-hour stream. 30 minutes a guest. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Not nearly enough time. But we have Eva Chen, the VP of Fashion Partnerships. Welcome to the stream. Thank you so much. I'm learning. I'm learning. It's been here. Let's throw this on. I'm more of an enthusiast. Yes. Jordi's the enthusiast right there. Okay. Yeah. I'm John. This is Jordi. John and Jordi. Jordi. And Jordi. Jordi. Jordi? Jordi Hayes. Jordi. Okay. Here we go. I didn't say Jordi like finding Jordi and I was like, I don't know. Something like that. Call us whatever you want.

2:16:47We're just happy to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Now you can hear us. I can hear you perfectly. It's quite a vibe here. I mean, it's insane. Guys, it's a vibe here. It's like a music festival. Wait, what frames are you wearing? I'm wearing the Skyler. Are we live? Yeah, we're live. Oh, my goodness. Here we go. We're live. Welcome. All right. I'm wearing the Skyler, which is like a subtle cat-out. Looks good. And they're transitions. I like it. And you can put prescriptions in them. And it's like a great everyday class. Yeah. I wear them all the time. I'm using them for headphones and live streaming, taking content for Instagram.

2:17:18Yeah, there's been tons of fashion partnerships. Mark referenced some online. Is this a Lububu? Is this the first Lububu? This is the first live on the show. We sent one to a guest, Bill Bishop. We sent him a Lububu. That is a wild one. It is a meta-branded Lububu. A little meta bucket hat. Fantastic. The jorts? Is that a one of one? One of one? One of 20? One of 20. One of 20. Mark actually just got the last one. There you go. Sorry, guys. Apple Market's going to be crazy. Talk about actually how to get these products accepted in the fashion community. Fashion community, I don't know that much about it, but, you know, very exclusive, limited, released, only 20 of those.

2:17:58This product's available for everyone. How do you actually think about the steps of what activations, what partnerships you want to do, in what order to actually get traction within the fashion community? Totally. Well, the first thing is that to make a stylish glass, period. Something that, like, people on campus here are wearing them. They look like regular glasses, and they blend right into everyone's style. When you partner with a company like Esselor Luxottica, and you're working with Ray-Ban, which has, like, the number one glass. Most iconic pair of glasses. It's iconic. Think about it.

2:18:31James Dean. Oh, yeah. You know, like. Silhouette. Like Bruce Springsteen. Like, everyone. Bob Dylan. Well, I remember Casey Neistat. That's what I think. Yeah. I think about James Dean a little bit more. But, you know, they're an iconic glass, and it just blends into everyone's style. We're here on the Meta Campus. You can see hundreds of people wearing these glasses. It looks good on everyone. That's great. That's the first foundational thing. And then in terms of the technology, once people try these on, I've worn these to fashion shows, Front Row, Milan, Paris, London. Everyone who tries them on is, like, blown away.

2:19:06because not only do they look good, they're just like the capabilities are next level. What's coming next? Unbelievable. Yeah, what is the future of the Meta Ray-Bans display look like in fashion? Am I going to be able to put these on in a physical changing room and have it AI generate me in a different outfit? I mean, I was already trying glasses on earlier using like an AR try-on mechanism. I remember I was looking in one of the setups that they had over there. Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. What does that look like? I mean, that's the dream, right? That's something that, like, as someone who works in the fashion industry, that is, like, kind of the holy grail.

2:19:44To be able to try on glasses and then see yourself and style yourself in different outfits. I don't know if you've seen the movie Clueless. It is a seminal movie for me in terms of fashion. Oh, yeah. Fantastic movie. Jordy has never seen a movie in his life. But I've seen all of them. Okay, start with Clueless. He watches for me. Clueless is great. Start with the Clueless. Okay. But, like, there's a scene where Cher Horowitz is going through kind of, like, virtual try-on. Sure. closet yeah i remember that but that's like it's another one of those things that's been sci-fi right like the display feels like science fiction today we need to get there but for now like with these new glasses the ability to be able to kind of have that experience of seeing something asking meta ai hey meadow how would you describe this dress and they would say oh this is like a 1950s fit and flare dress style that's going to be so helpful for people as they're learning and stretching in the fashion industry.

2:20:33Yeah. Yeah. The other thing, I mean, we were talking with, was it Boz or Chris with this, but just like seeing things in the real world and being like, I want that and being able to like, like basically decrease the friction between, oh, I don't have to like Google it or do a reverse image search. It's just like instant. Yeah. There's a lot of friction right now, just in general with fashion, right? Like I'm on Instagram, I'm scrolling. I see a friend's really cute outfit. I have to tap. If she didn't tag it, then I have to like screen grab it, WhatsApp it to her and be like, hey, Ami, where are these shoes from?

2:21:06And then she has to write back. Then I Google it. And it's just so many steps from inspiration to actual purchase. And I mean, listen, that's my dream, like in terms of reality labs to get there to make commerce easier. But for now, I think in terms of the everyday consumer, just being able to see the world around you in 3D, to be able to ask questions and feel like you're being interactive, it's amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is fantastic. Congratulations to me. I look forward to more fashion segments. Yes, absolutely. We'd love that. We got that. We got that. Thank you so much.

2:21:43Have a great day. Bye. Let me tell you about numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Our next guest is Tiffany Jansen. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Good to see you. Good to see you. Welcome to the stream. I can hear you now. What's your day been like? How have you been enjoying Meta Connect 2025? You know, the day's flown by. Let's get the mic up a little bit. Perfect. The day's been great. It's flown by. I mean, the product announcements were phenomenal. I got a demo the Meta Ray-Ban displays yesterday. So I was really excited to see, though, the announcements around it.

2:22:21It blew me away. Do you think that these products are ready to be integrated into a creative workflow, your workflow? How do you think they fit in? Obviously, there's so many creative tools. When would you pull a Meta Ray-Ban product off the shelf? Oh, absolutely. I mean, well, for one, while you're on the go creating content, it's huge. Organic content, being able to capture those moments instantaneously, I think is going to be a game changer. Even thinking about the Meta Ray-Ban displays, using Meta AI while I'm walking around. and ideating, that's huge for a creator to stand out. Sure, sure, sure.

2:22:57What advice do you have for people who are maybe getting started on creating content on meta platforms? Utilize AI. Really treat it as almost a coworker, you can think of it as. It's one of my favorite ways to, if I have an idea, but I maybe can't fully piece it together and I want someone to bounce it off with. You know, I work by myself. I work from home. I need that collaboration. You really don't have a... How big is your team? My team? I mean, my team is about five people. But you're saying when you're in that creative workflow, you're really... Yeah, when you're in that creative workflow, I mean, for scripting, for coming up with ideas, that's my role.

2:23:31That's my job. So, you know, I have some people I can ideate with. But I find, honestly, the more I do that with something like meta AI and it can keep on keeping track of what I'm thinking and really wanting to put together, it's almost better sometimes. Any advice for content creators that want to interview the Mag7 CEOs? Yeah. You've been doing that. Who have you interviewed so far? So far, last year was Mark, and I know you guys have him up next. And then last year was Mark, Jensen. I did Satya. Satya Nadella. Yeah, I did. The list goes on, and it's been great. You know what? I think the key or the secret is just be yourself, be authentic, be knowledgeable, with what they're building.

2:24:18And yeah, they're also down to earth. It was great. Yeah, we asked a couple other folks this. How much content do you think on Instagram is going to be AI generated in five years? That's a really great question. Well, I mean, okay, five years. Let's say what right now, I would say we're already probably at 40 to 50%, honestly, I think. Certainly like AI enhanced, AI enabled, AI in the loop, but there's still a human somewhere involved. Yeah, it's kind of the question of like, what company is an internet company? Yeah. It kind of just pays you in the background, right? Maybe they have a physical product, but they distribute it with the internet, right?

2:24:53Yeah, you kind of just forget about it. I know. Yeah, I don't know what it will be. Maybe it will be closer to 80 % to 90 % to some way AI touches it, but maybe... Still a human taste and point of view. I like the human touch. Yeah, I mean, if you go back to the original Instagram, it's like, what percentage... It's almost like asking what percentage of photos were not filtered? Hashtag no filter. Like, that was a trend, but most people filtered them. 100%. And like in the future, most people will be like, yeah, check the box. No AI. Yeah. Check the box to also like fix the lighting or add subtitles automatically.

2:25:23Like there's a lot of things that AI can do that still keep the core human element, but then add a bunch of stuff on top. Collaboration. Yeah. Yeah. There's also, have you seen those videos on Instagram of like where people take some very technical concept and then they turn into a song? I saw one around steel coils. Have you seen this one? I have. I have. And that's one where it came from the human. And clearly that came from the brain of a human. And then AI was just used to make the song and the voiceover and stuff. Anyway, it's been fantastic having you on the show. Thank you so much for hopping on.

2:25:52Thanks, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. And up next, we have Vanta.com. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform helps you get compliant fast. We have Mark Zuckerberg joining in just a few minutes. Founder, no. What has your reaction been to the overall MetaConnect 2025? Jordy, how are you doing?

2:26:21I think it's impressive to see, like, you know, the immediate reaction I have is how important it is to keep the band together. Right. It is crazy how long some of these folks have been there. Chris Cox, Adam Aseri. Right. It's like you need to keep talent focused. And, yeah, I think talking with Boz and, like, understanding, I do feel like only five years ago, people were not seeing the connection between glasses and AR, VR, and AI. And the intersection is just beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, the original MetaRaybans, it felt like such an add-on little side project almost. And now it's like the center of their annual keynote.

2:27:08And they're really building a lot of different stuff on top of it. Uh, that's been fascinating. Um, we got to read a post here from, uh, Atlas creatine cycle. You thought we weren't going to print out posts and read them. Here we are. Here you are. Atlas live, live at Meta connect. My prompt. Let's get some ice. Let's get you some ice cream. GF agent. Okay. Yay. Will you have some? My prompt. Probably not. I'm kind of full GF agent. Okay, fine. Thought for 30, 46 seconds. I'm not hungry. I honestly don't understand that. It's a classic interaction. If it recreates human interaction perfectly, it will behave exactly like a girlfriend.

2:27:48We got a real post here. It says, bro, last night was a testament to our culture and civilization. It was. It was. We are ready. It is an absolute party action. We are bringing Mark Zuckerberg on before he hops on. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. These are corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Here we go. Let's bring him on. Mark Zuckerberg, live on TVPN. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Mark? Good to see you. Good to see you. Congratulations.

2:28:26Massive day. You got a bunch of fans here. Love to see it. Yeah, it's a fun one. You still winded from the run? No, that was a pretty conversational pace. That's conversational pace. Love it. Yeah. Yeah. React to the Kinect announcements. How do you envision the next phase of this with developers? I mean, there's so many cool ideas that I could imagine happening on Ray-Ban display, but there's an immense amount of constraints operating in such a small format. What does this look like over the next couple of years? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that there are two platforms here that are interesting.

2:29:03One is the display glasses and the other is the neural band. Sure. And I actually think both of them could evolve into important platforms by themselves. So the glasses, I actually think there it's pretty clear, right? I mean, you saw there's the nav where there's a bunch of different apps. We're going to try to start off with partnerships and start off getting some of the most used use cases and really nailing those and getting them in there. And then over time, hopefully we'll be able to open it up in some way, but I think we need to figure that out. The neural band, I think is going to be an interesting platform by itself, because I mean, right now, we're basically we designed it to be able to power glasses.

2:29:44I mean, that was the purpose. But there's no rule that says that it can only be used to power glasses. So I think that's an interesting thing to explore over time, too. I mean, you can imagine, you know, something like this when you're sitting at home and watching TV being pretty cool, too. So I think we need to figure out what direction this goes in over time. But this is a pretty good start. We've been on this for many years. The display is going to get all the attention, but the neural band is insane. I can't wait for people to try it. I mean, the fact that you can buy this in a couple of weeks is just insane.

2:30:13Talk about the team's foresight around the intersection of glasses and AI, because now it seems incredibly obvious, right? It's like always on this live AI. But it wasn't that long ago that people thought these were like two different sort of like tech trees and they didn't see the convergence. Yeah. I mean, look, every new important technology needs a new class of devices in order to make it first class. And I think glasses have three main advantages that I think are going to be just make them the ideal candidate to be the next major computing platform. One is that they help preserve this sense of presence when you're there with another person.

2:30:51I mean, you take out your phone, you're gone from the moment. glasses have the ability to bring that back. Two is that glasses, I think, are the ideal form factor for AI. It's the only device type where you can let an AI see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day. Soon it's going to be able to just generate a UI visually for you and your vision in real time. And then the third thing that glasses can do, it's really the only form factor that can bring together the physical world that you have around you with realistic holograms and blend those together. And, you know, I think it's one of the crazier things about living in the modern world is that we have this incredibly rich online world and you access it through this like five inch screen most of the time.

2:31:33So I just think that it's like only a matter of time before these two things are basically fully merged and glasses enable all of that. So that's kind of been the plan all along. I mean, we, when we started Reality Labs or the the kind of precursor to it, I think it was back in 2014. It was basically like we went public and became profitable. And then that's when we started working on these longer term bets. That's when I started FAIR for our AI research. And we started the precursor to Reality Labs. But yeah, no, I think that these two tech paths really kind of go together. I noticed you took a picture of Boz's shoes on stage.

2:32:10Yeah, they were nice shoes. They're fantastic shoes. We saw them on the stream. Talk about what personal super intelligence means longer term. Is there a world where I'd be able to take a picture, look at your watch, say that looks like a good gift for my business partner, find it, order it, send it to him? Yeah, well, I mean, look, I think where we're really going with personal super intelligence and the glasses, it's more the live AI vision that I talked about. So right now with the glasses, you basically you can invoke that AI. You can say, hey, meta. You can do the gesture with the neural band, bring it up.

2:32:44And you can ask it a question. But I think where this is going over time is basically you're going to have, it's just going to be on all the time. You'll be able to turn it off and you'll obviously be able to have control over it and all that. But you'll be able to think about AI as more something that is just running all the time, that has context on your conversations. If there's something that comes up in a conversation that it thinks that you should know as you're having the conversation, it'll be able to go off and think and find the answer to that and then just show it in the corner of your vision.

2:33:12If it thinks of something that it thinks that maybe you should, you know, be reminded of after you're done with the conversation, it'll be able to go off and process that and come back. So I actually think that this kind of agentic AI vision of it having context to what's going on in your life and then being able to go off and do work for you and then bring that into your view when it makes sense, I think is going to be really powerful. That's It's something that I'm really excited about. It can sense that you're forgetting a word and it just pops up. Yeah. Yeah. Or I mean, my version of this, I mean, I just, ever since I've been thinking about this, I've just been running this thought experiment where every time I'm having a conversation during the day, I'm like, wow, like there's information that I wish I had during this conversation.

2:33:52I mean, the most annoying thing to me is like, you're having a conversation. It's like, you need to go check in with someone else about something and then go back to the person you're talking to. Here, it's like, all right, you can just like send them a quick message with the neural band, get the information that you need. It's kind of like multitasking. You're like the best power user for this. I've run a couple brands. I've advertised on Facebook a bunch. I've advertised on meta platforms. What does the role of a brand look like? Is it shifting in the age of super intelligence? If all my customers have personal super intelligence, is my experience running a brand going to be different?

2:34:27Well, I think the brands are going to become more important. I mean, I basically think that all kind of economic theory assumes that people have access to perfect information. And I think the Internet took us a step closer to that, and AI is going to take us another step closer to that. But in a world of perfect information, what matters? It's that people trust you and that you have a good reputation and that they know what your work is. So, yeah, I think that the evolution of how people think about brands, I mean, that will obviously shift with every new technology. But I think it's only going to get more important.

2:35:03Yeah, I feel like there's already a little process where people find a product. They see it on Instagram, but then they might search the comments or go to their favorite creator. What does my creator friend think about this? And super intelligence being able to go around and do some of that for you, surface it all. That makes a ton of sense. Totally. Talk about the work with James Cameron and the future for virtual reality. How many pairs of glasses do you think people will have in the longer term? Yeah, that is a good question. There's this interesting tension between condensing everything into a single pair of glasses, yet at the same time humans love to have diversity.

2:35:38You don't want to wear the same watch every day. Yeah, I think that you're clearly going to be able to have a lot of interactive and immersive experiences on glasses. AR glasses. But I think the right analogy is kind of like augmented reality is the future of phones. It's the mobile thing that you're going to take out with you. And I think virtual reality is the future of TVs. And the reality is, is that the average American spends, I actually think it's still, they spend about as much time on a TV on a daily basis as they spend on their phone. And, but there are different use cases, right? One is more immersive and interactive.

2:36:16I think they're both going to be important. And the experiences are going to be limited by how much compute you have. You are just going to have less compute in augmented reality glasses. I mean, you only have so much space to fit a battery and compute and like the connectivity to whatever other device it's running is not tethered, right? Because you don't have a wire. Whereas with VR, you just have more real estate. So it's kind of like the difference today between you have mobile games on your phone and then you have much more advanced games on a gaming console or a PC, which can have a lot more processing.

2:36:51I think the same is going to be true here. You're going to be able to have great experiences on the glasses kind of like akin to your phone. You can do pretty much anything. You can watch videos on your phone, do whatever. But if you want the kind of most immersive version of it, I think that there's going to be a dedicated thing for that. Yeah, you're using the MetaRayBan display on the way to the office, reading some emails. you might sit down at the desk, walk in, right? Yeah. I think it's time for a size gong. You have some big announcements today. We'd love for you to hit this gong for us.

2:37:19Here we go. Congratulations on Meta Connect 2025. All right. Fantastic. We would love for you to sign this as big as you can. And we're going to... We're going to retire it. We want the gong game signed. We're going to retire this and hang this in the studio. We're going to hang it out of the gong. As big as you want. Hang it in the rafters. All right. There you go. Thank you so much. Congratulations. Thank you. Good to see you guys. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you. into the present. All right. See you guys. Fantastic watch, by the way. Thank you. We will bring on our next guest, but let's first tell you about Figma.

2:37:47Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. We have Alex Himmel joining us. The number of people standing over here that are... It is crazy. Waving at Zuck. He's crazy. This is our biggest live show ever, for sure. Lots of people here. We have Alex Himmel joining next. A couple minutes. Okay, we're going to hang out. Alex Temple is the VP of wearables we will show the gong we want to show off the gong careful here game hit the game hit gong this will be retired to this one right here this camera over here there we go look at that game hit here we go Mike Zuckerberg's signature love to see it we are building the museum of technology business back home.

2:38:38Yes. And that will be a staple. I like that. I think the agentic commerce thing is going to be a big discussion over the next year. We saw OpenAI teasing it. There was that leaked screenshot or like say it was kind of intentionally leaked screenshot of like ChatGPT having an order stab. Google's obviously thinking about that. Some analysis had that breakdown. What Duck was saying about having perfect information, right? Today, the internet is so that consumers could easily research a product, right? You could be at a store, look up reviews. What does the creator think about it? Now it's like even less friction and that you can just be looking at something.

2:39:14It can be pulling up like, hey, Andrew Huberman actually doesn't like, not a big fan of it. Yeah. It was funny when you were saying like, I'll have my credit card saved with Meta. And I'm pretty sure they probably have like hundreds of millions of people that already have credit cards. I already have one saved from the Meta AI app because I put one down to buy stuff in the Oculus Quest store a long time ago. We have Alex Himmel coming on the stream next. Award winning. Looks like. Yeah, it looks like you won an award. Let's bring him on the stream whenever he's ready. Thank you for tuning in to TBPN live from MetaConnect 2025.

2:39:51We appreciate you. Here we go. Let's bring on Alex Himmel. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Good to see you. Fresh off a run. Fresh off a run. Looking sharp. Throw this on. There you go. Yeah. Having fun. Congratulations on the day. Absolutely massive. Let's get that mic down. There you go. Perfect. All right. We in position? Yeah. Okay. Take us through your role. Look at those. Oh, yes. By the way, we were bummed. I wanted to open the show with the Vanguards, but they were still under a bar go. But those will be Jordy's Daily Driver. What time did you open up? We started at 4.30. That's right, before.

2:40:33You could wait like one more hour. I know, I know. You would have been okay. Walk me through your role, how you fit into the organization, what you need to do specifically to get all the products out today. Well, today's a big day for us. I lead the wearables group at Meta, and we announced a whole bunch of wearables today. A few things. We had a few things. Usually we announce one device, but today was a real stack up. We had, if you like the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, we had software updates for them, and we had brand new Ray-Ban Meta Glasses Generation 2 with tech improvements for the battery life, the image quality, got an AI mode for the camera.

2:41:10Talked about the Oakley Meta Houston's, the Oakley Meta Vanguard's, which I'm wearing, which are designed for sport, which is pretty exciting. And then, of course, our first pair of display glasses. Don't forget the Neural Band, which I'm wearing. I've been wearing it all day. What lessons are you pulling from previous meta projects around wearables, hardware, supply chain? There's new challenges, but I feel like you've done a lot of this stuff before. Those are my kids over there. Oh, hello. How are you doing? They got Ray-Ban medical masks on. They're looking great. They're so stoked. Yeah, we've got to get a small pair for the kids at home.

2:41:43I know, I know. Well, so we've been working with S-L-Exotica for a few years now, and our first generation was the Ray-Ban stories. and then, and those didn't do as well as we had hoped. Then Ray-Ban Meta, the Gen 2 really exceeded our expectations. What was the, what was the metric? Was it just overall sales or churn? Because I feel like whenever we're talking wearables, like, you know, Christmas comes top of the app store and then it's, we gotta, we gotta get the retention up and it feels like the latest products are finally passing that, that retention and we're not seeing as much churn. People are using them.

2:42:15Is that how you measure success these days? Yeah. I mean, there's the metrics. So we're pretty metrics driven. as a company, we do look at retention. We look J-curves is what we do. So the X-axis is the days after you've purchased. And the Y-axis is the percent still retained. So we're looking for that to be high and be flat. So if you look at the advantage between the original meta stories and then the meta Ray-Bans, was there a jump in the 12-month retention? Yeah, just picture two lines and one was way higher than the other. I think it's just the image quality was good enough to be able to share on Instagram and WhatsApp and elsewhere on your phone.

2:42:54The audio quality was good enough to answer calls, listen to music. And then the form factor, it was subtle improvements, but we grind away at millimeters and milligrams. And they were just a little bit more comfortable, a little bit lighter. And it was the small things that added up. And we built on that for the new generation we're launching. We're pretty excited about the full lineup. I think these Oakley Meta Vanguard, I think they're going to be a hit. I've been using them for a few months now. They're waterproof. This feels like something that, I don't know. I was like, every guy in my friend group is going to want one of these, right?

2:43:26They look great on women too. Yeah. Yeah, no, but specifically, I mean, like for me, when I think about like as a kid, I was like, I want to buy a pair of Oakleys that just have that iconic shape, right? And I can just remember doing them in all the activities, whether it was running or hiking or skiing or snowboarding, right? It's like this is going to be something that you're going to be seeing everywhere out in the real world. Who's faster, you or Mark? Well, we came in around the same time today. You did? Okay. No, we were. He's a tie. They both medaled. We both medaled. Yes, I'm still dressed from the run club.

2:43:57And we had 30 people wearing the vanguards and taking a video. So we're going to have some good footage. Mark's pretty fast. Don't bet against him. Yeah, he's got a serious, serious workout routine right now. I knew he was going to set the pace. I wasn't sure what pace he was going to set. Well, we know he's the fastest handwriter at Meta, but I don't know if he's also the fastest. Oh, man. I mean, not only is he doing 30 words per minute there, I noticed he was saying something and writing. It's a lot going on. Like, that's a lot going on at that, which is pretty impressive. Talk about some of the partnerships on the sort of, like, active side with wearables.

2:44:29I know you have the Garmin partnership, Strava. What else? Like, how did those come together? And what else are you thinking on that front? You know, Garmin makes the best smartwatch in the world. I've been wearing Garmin's for over 15 years. I do marathons. I've done an Ironman. I've been a heavy Garmin user. And they sell a lot of watches a year. So they have good penetration in the market. And we're thinking, hey, if we're building a pair of glasses designed for sport, who better to partner with than Garmin? And it opens up auto capture, which is going to be a really big thing that's really fun.

2:45:00So if you go for a long bike ride or if you go for a run, we had it set up for this run. So we were taking a short video every quarter mile automatically from the glasses. And then it stitches together in a reel at the end of it. And like my like hero scenario is you run a marathon. You set it up to take a short video at every mile marker. So it's 26, 27 videos. You want one at the finish line too. And then it stitches them together. And then you've got like a fun shareable reel at the end of it. And to do that, you know, we're using the location triggers from the Garmin watch to make that possible.

2:45:32I think we can do a lot more with Garmin. There's a lot of scenarios that are enabled, but we're very excited about the initial. How important is it to actually distribute compute across your body? Because you could potentially stuff all this in there, but then you get some big heavy headset. Do you want to be leaning on other parts of the body to have sensor data and whatnot? So our strategy is, you know, I believe in familiar form factors. I think that over the course of hundreds and thousands of years, people have gotten used to wearing different devices. And the ergonomics are dialed, and it's taken a lot to get there.

2:46:07And so we're trying to lean on that. People wear watches, but in order. I can only think of two people in the world who don't wear glasses. Sunglasses or optical. Watches, just about everyone. And they kind of go from there. So we're pretty excited about those form factors and what they enable. and runners and people doing sport have been wearing watches for forever, right? Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, guys. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds.

2:46:44Julius.ai. Very smart to figure out where to innovate. We don't want to innovate on form factor. We don't even really want to innovate on design, right? Yeah. and uh welcome to the stream how you doing welcome to the show uh please put that headset on welcome to the stream uh this is Rocco the chief wearables officer here you go at Luxottica hi there you go big day congratulations very big day would you mind taking us through take us back in history tell us the story of that original cold email to Mark Zuckerberg how did that happen what inspired it walk me through that and you know you know like the company obviously is like the market leader in uh in in i wear and i always had a passion for technology and uh so like one day you know like i decided you know i decided you know really to um pitch you know like a bunch of technology companies and the way that i was doing it is actually google you know their email of executives.

2:47:46So like, you know, like one of them was actually Mark. And the email at the time was Zach at Facebook. So, you know, I wrote this email, which at the end of the day actually became what is Ray Ban Meta now. But the idea was simple, you know, like having an amazing recognized design of the Wayfarer. and the most recognizable brand in the world, which is Ray-Ban. At the time, I think my collaboration was only on Instagram. And then Mark convinced me that we had to do something bigger with all the different platforms. And yeah, after that call email, Mark replied to me after three days. Pretty fast.

2:48:36Pretty fast. and then we met and then before we launched something, it took probably a couple of years. Yeah, it was pretty fast. But it's nice when you don't have to innovate on the design, right? It's so key to just be able to focus on what is the value, what is getting the technology right. Yeah, I think that was honestly the key of the success and it's still the key of success today. Mark today even on the presentation said glasses need to be like beautiful glasses before anything. And then you almost find the technology as an added value. So yes, we started with the most recognizable frame, the Wayfarer, Ray-Ban, and the technology is the magic that we baked in the product.

2:49:24How do you think about scaling production the way that these are priced? I think they're going to be selling fast. Yeah, I mean, you know, there are like three, obviously, let's say now, today really we launch three architecture, you know, like you have the eyeglasses, the new generation, Ray-Ban Metal Gen 2, then you have Vanguard, which, you know, it's a sport architecture. and then you have the display glasses and you know I do think you know like it's already scaling AI glasses camera plus audio and is doing really well so we are very proud of the already the success we have in the market we're gonna build on that you know Oakley is the second brand that we introduced to the family that really defines the category with the ribbon and then you know we're gonna probably need to do more brands after that and then you know and you you saw i guess you probably tried orion your more advanced yeah the thicker exactly that's you know was always mark dream and you know like and we started to do uh at the time ray-ban story now ray-ban meta and um you know which is a much simpler product but the vision is still there the dream is still there so that's we're gonna get uh you know to hopefully the glasses will be the next computing platform and that's you know that's the kind of in between you know yeah so do you think there's uh room or products in your portfolio that uh still have the ray band or a classic silhouette a classic style but they just give the technologists more space to work with it feels like until we can miniaturize everything there's value in having more space to work with no you're absolutely right that's you know the like the the most critical thing you know the miniaturization of the technology uh thank god in i what is happening something interesting that you know actually glasses chunkier glasses are now a trend yep so i think we are right on the on the good Good timing.

2:51:37Good timing. So, and yes, but you know, the goal is obviously to reduce the form factor to a smaller form factor even with display. And you saw even, you know, Vanguard, beautiful glasses, great form factor, you know, but everything needs to be smaller. I think we did very well and, you know, we proved that it's doing really well on the product of Ray-Ban Meta. and we will get that even with the other generation on other platforms. One step at a time. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you, guys. I'd love to talk more. This was great. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

2:52:17We are ready. And we have Privy. Privy.io. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails. Certainly securely spin up white label wallets, signed transactions, integrated on the infrastructure all through one simple API. We'll be telling you more about Privy. And we have a surprise guest. James Cameron. Good to meet you. I'm John. Welcome to the show. Pleasure. We're going to have you throw this headset on. They are. They are. I think once you put them on, you'll be able to hear us. Ah. There we go. There we go. Peace. Perfect. Thanks so much for taking the time. No problem. Really excited. I am a VR is overhyped one year, underhyped one year.

2:53:02I remain extremely bullish about the idea that I will be watching cinema in virtual reality. Am I crazy? No, not at all. No, I think you're right on the money. I had a kind of epiphanal experience when I saw the Quest 3 with my own content on it. I mentioned it in my remarks. It's like, okay, I know what that's supposed to look like. And it's this. Yeah. Right. And, you know, theaters are hit or miss in quality. But with the quality control on the device, you're always going to get that brightness level. That brightness level can be an order of magnitude greater than a movie theater. Think about it.

2:53:40So movie theaters are supposed to run 16-foot Lamberts, which is a metric like nits, right? I don't know how many nits it's the equivalent of. And that's based on the SEMTI kind of engineering standard for the movie industry. But very few of them do. and they're mostly down around 10 or 9 or 3. So at 3, you're literally at a tenth of what the Quest series displays do. And so to me, that's phenomenal. So brightness is obviously not the only metric. You've got spatial resolution, right? Field of view, all that. How close can you be to the screen? And I just think it hits a sweet spot. Yeah, people talk about like you need to watch it as the filmmaker intended.

2:54:24and this stuff didn't exist when you created the film, so we can't satisfy that perfectly. But at the same time, we're getting to a point where you can recreate the theater experience, right? Yeah, and look, hopefully if this becomes a pivot for people to take their entertainment media on VR, AR, MR, whatever you want to call it, devices, not the glasses. The glasses are obviously a separate thing, and they're cool. They're very cool in their own right. and I saw the newest ones demonstrated today. Unfortunately, not at the demo on the stage. But, you know, I mean, I can vouch for that. The stuff's amazing.

2:55:03You've probably seen it already, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What did you think? I mean, yeah, we've been blown away by the demos broadly. My question is, how should the film industry respond to progress in VR? Because clearly you're paying attention, but probably to a level that the rest of the industry isn't. Yeah, I think VR is a broad term, and it's constantly getting redefined. And I think when you hear VR, the average person thinks, okay, gaming, okay, immersive, I can look all around sometimes. But even just thinking of it as like the next television platform. Right, so let's narrow that down to it being essentially a media player in stereo.

2:55:43Because the gorgeous thing, the elegance of this, is that a good VR headset is a stereo display, right? And it may be the best stereo display. And what did we have previously? We had TVs that didn't work, right, where you had to find a sweet spot and you couldn't watch with other people, all that crap. And then you've got cinemas that are hit or miss. Some are dark, some are fine, right? People love the cinema experience. I pray, I hope and pray that never goes away. But I want people to see what I created. And so, yeah, so I think that if you think of VR as an innately stereoscopic display device, then that's a differentiator from the best big 80, 90 inch flat panel screens.

2:56:30And most people consume their media on smaller devices anyway. And the thing is, this gives you the feeling of a large screen. And you can spatially adjust it. You can move it in close, or you can just keep moving it out and expanding it until it spatially feels like you're in a bigger display space, right? Yeah. And so if a filmmaker today, they need to assume— I didn't answer your question. And this is the cool thing is, like, you know, maybe when you were starting your career, you couldn't assume that the Quest 3 was going to ever come, even though it was sci-fi. but today filmmakers today should assume that in 30 years everybody's going to be able to watching in that type of experience i think filmmakers and i'm less honestly this is going to sound a little weird coming from me i'm a little less interested in movie makers because they can't generate the content quickly enough what i'm interested in is live feed of sports any form of live entertainment you know concerts and so on and short post episodic because we can get that out there quickly by next year or the year after we can get that stuff out out there on mass right so i'm interested in showrunners that are doing hit shows i don't want to i can't i said this in my remarks i can't create enough content to move the needle individually but i can act as a catalyst by providing the tool set to any production anywhere that wants to just say, okay, well, we're already here.

2:58:02We got a crew. We got some actors. We got some lights. We can do it in 3D. The only reason they don't is because there's no defined distribution model. But that's coming. That's what the Disney Plus agreement with Meta Horizon TV, Horizon TV itself, you know, everything's going to change in the next 18 months. What are you most excited about in AI at this very moment? Which type of AI are we talking about? Specifically in a filmmaking context. Okay, so for filmmaking, we're talking about generative AI. We're talking probably about text-to-video and other video-to-video and that sort of thing. I'm guarded because I think it's an answer to how we bring down costs and become more efficient.

2:58:48I was going to ask, do you think there'll be more like$10 million films made relative to$100 million films? Does it change the shape of what's getting funded? I think what you'll get, I think it's going to affect the middle to the high end of the curve in the following way. Most films involve VFX now, right? And it's going to affect the toe of the curve. Yep, makes sense. But the lower part of the slope is not going to change that much. And I say that because if you're not using VFX, you're not going to enjoy a great reduction in your overall cost. Caterers, Cove Actors, grips, you know, I mean, grips, dollies, the normal stuff that a small production uses.

2:59:25If they're not doing VFX, you know, how are you going to make catering cheaper with with with A.I.? You're not. But I say the toe of the curve because where filmmakers used to come in through, I don't know, music videos or low budget horror films and things like that, that that that entry portal has shrunk so much in recent years. It's so difficult for filmmakers to get a toehold. but now you can basically make a movie by yourself. Yeah, we have a friend who for a very small budget made a full sci-fi film, which would not be funny. He would have been single location, one house horror film a couple years ago.

2:59:59Exactly. So now what does that guy do next? He takes that to a studio and he says, now give me a budget. Right? I don't think anybody that wants to be a filmmaker wants to replace actors and replace the process of filmmaking, but it gives you a new entry point into that business. Well, thank you so much. Last question. How do you work? What makes your approach to your work unique? I don't know. I just ask myself, what will the 14-year-old version of me want to see? And then I do it. I love that. That's amazing. That's a great mantra. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We really enjoyed this.

3:00:36Cheers. Have a great rest of your day. We have Vishal Shah coming on the show next. Next, he is the VP of the Metaverse. VP of Metaverse at Meta. The mayor of the Metaverse. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

3:01:21Good to meet you. But also, we just know generally with technology advances, lowering the floor to help more people create things. That's just, we did that with video on our phones. We think there's an opportunity on that for immersive experiences in VR. So we both predicted where that was going, but also helped drive it. That's the work we've been doing on alternative AI for years. There's the new engine we build on Horizon. All this is in service of a prediction, but also a roadmap that we set out four years ago when we re-branded the company. We said it was a 10-year bet. We're four years in on that journey, and I think we're making a bunch of good products.

3:01:54I feel like there's sort of like a fracturing of the technologies that are happening right now. We got a demo of a Gaussian splat where you could take images and then walk around a virtual world. Didn't generate physics, didn't generate geometry. And then simultaneously in a different demo, we were going from text to prompt to physical 3D objects in something in Horizon Engine. In a game world. In a game engine. And so are these two things going to come together at some point? Like how do these things actually merge and on what timeline? Yeah. I mean, in general with things like this, with research, we both push the research forward on an independent path.

3:02:31We then find the way to productize that research. So hyperscape, which is the sort of Gaussian splat representation, that's been researched for some time. We productize that as an environment. This for the first time we're bringing capturing so anyone can put on a headset and capture a space. Yeah, and the immediate reaction that I have is I never want to, like, if I'm looking at a house on Zillow, I want to be able to experience it this second. Totally. And I feel like that's, like, right around the corner. And it's so magical, obviously, for things like that. But imagine a place that you know that you can't physically go to anymore.

3:03:02And then imagine bringing someone that you care about that also knows that place to that place. Yeah, recreating memories. When I was getting the demo, I was thinking if I have a good enough video of my one-year-old playing around 10 years from now, I'm going to be able to just generate a world of that space and just almost relive it. And so this is kind of back to your question. You have to push the technology boundaries, but then the vision is very much to bring these things closer together. So it's not just an environment. It becomes interactive. It has geometry. You have collisions as you're moving around the space.

3:03:32You bring other people into the space. So we're laying out all the pieces. Some have made more progress, frankly, than we thought even four years ago. But the idea is that they all fit into one general vision for how we bring people together when they can't physically be together. And that's the general thing we set out to do. Yeah. How do you think about the different windows into the metaverse? We saw a demo today where the traditional game engine world developed. We were able to interact with it on a phone. I'm not sure if it was streaming from the cloud. but you can clearly see that mobile is a path into a space that you could also explore on a Quest.

3:04:10Yep. But is there a world where you could bring that through to the other family of apps? Short answer is yes. Part of the reason we brought Horizon to mobile, and by the way, what you played today, that is not just streaming, that's a live game that's being edited and then you're playing it live. Yeah, yeah. But the idea is that most people today don't have access to a headset. Sure. And so how do we give them a taste of what some of these experiences are like? Not as immersive, not as great as being in, but you can start to play with these experiences, see what they feel like. That's, you know, in the Horizon app today, we've started to see, well, okay, how else do people discover these experiences across the devices that they have and the experiences that they're in?

3:04:49You're in Instagram, you're on Facebook, someone messages you something on WhatsApp, and can you just jump in really quickly? Again, not as good of an experience as jumping straight into an immersive headset, but this doesn't require you to make that leap on day zero. you get to kind of build a taste of what that looks like. How are you? Sorry. James said he was extremely bullish on live entertainment in virtual reality. Walk us through what that looks like over the next few years. A big part of what, and it's so weird to follow James Cameron. I'm putting it out there too. It's a tough act to follow.

3:05:20He's your friend. My friend, Jim. Part of what we are working on together is not just building content. it's updating the entire workflow and tool chain for how content gets made so that it can be stereo by default so how do you shoot on in the field how do you edit in a truck that's parked outside a stadium how do you then broadcast that up to the cloud how do you get that distributed it's the entire tool chain you need that to exist if you want to do something immersive you need more content so the products have better retention right so every time you throw in a headset you have something that's right there that you haven't necessarily seen before that's the key point something you can't do anywhere else.

3:05:56I can, I can watch a game on TV and it's fantastic. I can't feel like I'm sitting courtside. I can't fly around a Formula One track as if I was a drone floating on the track. I can't actually even experience a race like that. You bring up Formula One, eventually you're going to be able to drive on the real race. And there's some sports that you can't actually see the whole arena track. And so you can't actually experience that in the physical world the same way you could in headset where you can kind of move around the space etc so the point is we have to update the tool chain we have to bring experiences that you can't get anywhere else but in use cases that people are familiar with gaming is amazing this device is the best gaming device on the market but not everyone's a gamer so how do we expand the things that that people can do and see the differentiation that a fully immersive 3d native device can accomplish and that's a lot of the work we're doing together how are you talking to brands about the metaverse these days.

3:06:51I remember there was, I mean, the metaverse was like very hyped. Now it's kind of underhyped. I think there's actually really solid progress being made. We heard a story about Ikea selling a ton of product in the metaverse and Roblox and stuff. And meta is known for, you know, any brand, as small as possible, can go and participate. Are we, how far away are we? What are your conversations with brands like? Yeah, I mean, look, four years ago, if you didn't have some metaverse chief something or another in your company, you were failing. two years later. If you had a Chiefs or something or another in your company, you were failing.

3:07:23And so I think the hype is dead. To your point, we've been making a bunch of rates. We've been making a bunch of progress in the background. Today, a brand can come on. They can create the space in Horizon. It's fully open, UGC. But they have to have a reason. Is it the case that your physical footprint should just live in the virtual world one-to-one, maybe? Can you do things that you can't do in the physical world? Yeah, that's interesting. But in these things, generally, we follow the same pattern everywhere. Build something great for consumers. Make sure it's got some scale retention. It's growing.

3:07:54I think brands will find an opportunity to reach people where they are, but we need people first for them to actually care. And then is there opportunities for them to build a business and to entirely new sets of businesses that can't even exist in the physical world? That's absolutely the vision. But we just, you know, 10-year vision, and I think we're making it. Yeah. What about the flappy bird of VR, of Metaverse? How long until, I mean, the demo we saw today felt like somebody who's non-technical could get there um when are we going to see this kind of rolled out and we're going to see this explosion of like the the early app store where every things that you guys could never come up with no matter how many people you hire no matter how much we spend you need the creative the creativity of a billion people yeah no this is exactly where we see the generative ai stuff going yeah it isn't you know the prompt isn't make something great you you have to have a good idea you have to have something that is unique and and novel, but the speed of iteration can be dramatically faster.

3:08:46Yeah. And you, as an individual, can do a thing that maybe you need an entire kind of skill set that you don't have today to go and build. That's the idea. The other really interesting thing, if you look at Reels and you look at other video content, ideas are all just remixes of one another. Yep. And so it isn't just going from scratch. Yeah. It's just like, what is four different ingredients put together? And so we have some ideas on what we're going to be doing there that we'll talk about more next year. But the idea is that it isn't all from scratch. It is somehow taking best ideas, putting them together, put your own spin on it, but then give you the tools to do that really easily versus having to build it off from scratch.

3:09:19Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a fantastic conversation. We'd love to have you back. Thanks very much. Anytime there's more to talk. Cheers. We will talk to you soon. John, think about the opportunity, the metaverse opportunity. It was overhyped for a while. Yes. As the tech improves, a fashion brand, being able to set up a retail store you put on, meta understands your avatar. You can just walk around the store trying stuff on, looking at a mirror like you're in a retail store, seeing yourself wearing the items. Like the whole virtual try-ons have been overhyped forever. But having the demos, you remember we were doing the demos earlier with Quest?

3:09:55It's like you could look around and it's not that difficult to swap out. I could be swapping out your clothing, reacting to it. It is. The competition is going to heat up. I feel like people, all of the tech firms are going to be taking wearables. I mean, they already are taking it incredibly seriously, but there will be a redoubling of the efforts as these products roll out and actually get in people's hands, and then developers start building on them. Like, you can see with the Ray-Ban displays, it's going to be hard to ship an app on here, but once you start doing that, then you're really in that platform era, and you have the beginnings of the ability to, I mean, going back to the building.

3:10:40It's like how much will it matter to be the first product in market with a incredible display built in? Can they get to that App Store moment first? Yeah. It'll be a knockout, drag out fight. As always. It'll be a lot of fun. Anyway. This has been insane. This has been insane. It's a party out there. There are tons of people here. Thank you so much for tuning in to TVPN at MetaConnect 2025. Hope you enjoyed the stream. It has been an honor. We will be back in the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital tomorrow, Hollywood, California. We will see you at 11 a.m. Pacific.

3:11:19And before we go, I need to say, we should say thank you to the whole Meta team. They have absolutely crushed this. They're putting a little bit of heat on our production team back at home, obviously. Michael, Scott, Ben, and the whole team have been here helping out. But the Meta team has been absolutely incredible and has totally set the bar on what TBPN. Never would have imagined this when we first set up the microphones and cameras. We were like, the whole shtick is that it's just two people, no guests. Paper. Yeah, an hour. Yeah. And then it's this. You know, these things work in mysterious ways.

3:12:01But tomorrow morning, we'll be back to just two people talking. Talking shop. Hanging out. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you tomorrow. We'll see you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Cheers.