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

24:40And the reason I said I put the interviews back to back is because Kevin Scott is an author. He's an artist. He's a maker. He is a renaissance man. He's great. He can talk about anything. Microsoft has a$10 billion bet on it being fair use with OpenAI. Right? Like, that's crazy. And so, you know, Kevin was like, a lot of people think this is fair use. And I was like, not everyone. And then we brought out Craig, which was really cool. So listen to those two conversations back to back. They're all going to up in the decoder feed, and they'll be on the verge YouTube. But that was the dynamic that I really put in front of everybody.

25:12like the industry has not figured out this huge problem at the center of ai and we had you know we had warner music ceo robert kinsell on stage he's a former uh head of business at youtube like i'm not on the side of the music industry very often i'm not on the side of big copyright very often but you see this dynamic and actually like shuffles the decks a little bit and the getty conversation in particular uh i think really brought it to the fore because they're making some of the technology too they want to show that you can make the technology in the right way That bit that he showed where he was basically like, we're in this race with, you know, open AI and Anthropic and Google where everybody's trying to do the biggest possible thing, right?

25:51Like everybody brags about like the number of parameters in their model and how big the training set is. And it's like, everything is supposed to be this gigantic all purpose thing for everybody for everything forever. Like AI is just windows now, right? Like, it's huge. And then I thought that was just why I thought Craig and the Getty stuff is so interesting because like we can take this smaller corpus of data that is better and we can actually make it work just as well, but more successfully for everyone involved. And I just think that's very cool. Yeah. And then somehow inside of that, there's one more piece, one more term that's super interesting there.

26:23And somehow we will compensate the artists whose work is in the training data. And I was like, how? And he's like, we just are making it up. Right. Yeah, he was very honest about like, we only have half the answers. Yeah, but he's like, right now, we're basically doing it on popularity. Like if you're, it's like the way Spotify works. So this was too weedsy to get into on the code stage. But the answer is like, we'll look at the proportion of images inside of the training data that people call up more often in the wider world of Getty. And then when people pay to generate images, we'll dole out fractions of a penny based on that sort of like underlying ranking, which is like, it is more like how Spotify works than anything, but it is not some incredible complicated algorithm about what training pixels were put.

27:12It's more like, what's popular? You get more money, you know? And like, they need to refine that. The other one, Alex, you and I watched Casey Bloys together. What, did we get anything from Casey that we thought was interesting? Casey Bloys runs HBO. It's like a very important person. This happened right after the end of the writer's strike. So we had like new information. Peter Kafka interviewed him. They talked a little bit about that, a little bit about some other stuff. Like what did we get from Casey that you thought was interesting? We got the True Detective season four trailer. Which looked sick.

27:42Just apparently very excited. Yeah. I think I was like texting you like this is my personality for the next four months. Yeah. I think we just got his reinforcement of David Zeslov's kind of way of thinking out there. Right. Like he was talking a lot about how the cable bundle was back and it was going to be on these streaming services and that like he felt that was that was good and and he wants to see that more and and then they talked a lot about this new show naked attraction that's on which was like my sister-in-law had just texted me the night before about it and i'd never heard about it and i was like yes i know what he's talking about because i just googled this and so he was kind of like defending the way that they're choosing what they put on hbo and what they what they share as HBO versus Max versus Cartoon Network versus all HGTV and all of these other channels that are now part of the larger streaming ecosystem.

28:36And yeah, it was mainly just like reinforcement of David Zaslow's kind of way of thinking. And that was nice. Like, it was interesting to see that because you're kind of like, well, how does someone like Bloys think about it? And apparently very similarly. I don't know. Neil, what did you take away from it? That I think Casey Bloys is maybe one of the most powerful people at Warner Brothers Discovery. and he knows it and David Zaslav knows it. And, you know, the stuff about HBO versus Max, like he was just very calm and comfortable with it. You know, I saw Casey backstage and I was like, do you want me to ask you some more questions about HBO Max versus Max?

29:11And he's like, Jesus Christ. But, you know, his thesis, his argument was that HBO by itself has never been a successful business in the history of HBO. Even when you think about people paying for HBO directly, he's like, people had a cable bundle and they would pay us extra money for HBO. And if we don't ride along with that cable bundle, that has never been a successful business for us. Is that a retcon? Maybe, you know, like maybe, but it is historically true. And, you know, there's a new owner at the company and that is his thesis. That's very much has a lot of things. Like what people want is 90 day fiance.

29:46And then sometimes they want shooter detective. It's not the other way around. And that is, I think probably Verge House listeners don't feel that way, But have you ever been to America? I think that's honestly, I do think that's true. Right. Like like most people are watching. The reason you like HBO and the reason you like those things is that like Sunday night you go watch HBO. But you probably weren't watching HBO every single night of the week when you were watching TV channels. I mean, you could have been. But like that was a very small population of folks and they could kind of be insufferable.

30:19Right. What are the dominant TV, like from the golden age of television and the bundle, it's a bunch of network TV series. It's Friends. It's The Office, right? And they're still dominant, which is crazy. So, yeah, you know, there was that. He talked a lot about HBO shows now appearing on Netflix again. And he was like, look, you know, the brass ring used to be syndication and we need to go back there. And we went through this weird period where everyone was trying to build their own little monopoly. And we've like, we've realized like that's not the way. And I was like, I always knew that wasn't the way.

30:50No one's told Netflix, though. Right. Well, but Netflix is a different business. It's the only one that's successful, right? They fired like just cannon blasts of venture capital money into building their moat and everyone else tried to do it. And it like destroyed the industry along the way. Casey did talk about the strike, by the way, speaking of costs going up. And Peter asked him, like, is the resolution of the strike and maybe the static strike going to bring your costs up because your labor costs are higher? And he was like, no, which I think if I was in the writer's guild or the screen actor's I'd be like, yeah, we told you so.

31:21By the way, here's all the disclosures. Our staff is unionized by the WGAE. Alex is in the WGAE. Comcast is one of our investors. Linda Yaccarino doesn't like me very much. We made a Netflix show. We made a Netflix show. I'm the EP of a Netflix show. Someone has asked us many times. That show is not because it's documentary. It was not covered by unionized. What do you want from me, man? Eli's so tired. I'm going to host a code conference. I'm so tired. All right. I want to talk more about the writer's strike. We're going to get to that in a little bit because it ended in some really interesting ways.

31:54We're going to talk about that. Let's do two more just ultra fast things about code and then get out of here. First, Neil, I am going to give you 65 seconds and no longer to talk about the Monarch Tractor CEO that you had on stage. Ready? Go. The most important interview I did at Code was with Proveen Pemetsu, the CEO of Monarch Tractor. I opened that interview by saying the entire human species is utterly dependent on tractors. and I saw Jake, like our deputy owner Jake, just start cracking. He's like, oh, and Eli's on his bullshit again. It's true. It's a fact. Ravine just like blew the crowd away by talking about his tractor.

32:29So it's an EV tractor. It has a full sensor suite. They built it to be ultra modular. All the sensor suite is in the roof of the tractor, which is just a handful of bolts and a couple cables for power and data. And he's like, that is what we're going to upgrade. Like over time, we'll just sell you new roofs. Other people can have new roofs or, you know, They're the open ecosystem compared to John Deere. They're partnered with Case. Case is making tractors using their technology. Go watch it. He's like, we're the Android. Like, John Deere is the iPhone, closed, proprietary, hard to service. We're going to be the open ecosystem.

33:00And the tractor is cool. Yeah, his line was, we're becoming the Android of agriculture, which is just an unbelievably cool and Virgie sentence. And I will tell you this. I've talked a lot about the crowd in this room. They loved him by the end of this. They were like, oh, tractors are the shit. Like one person was like, I'm going to buy a tractor for my vineyard, which is the code audience. Yeah, I did a conference one time and basically just introduced a man and asked him, so 3D printing houses, huh? And he talked for like 20 uninterrupted minutes about all the cool things you can do when you can 3D print concrete houses.

33:32And it was the most excited room I've ever been in. Like people love this stuff. It's awesome. The world runs on it. I agree. Yeah. Technology and products. I'm telling you, that's what code's all about. It's the stuff. And then the other one was Artifact Mike Krieger, which I think I continue to think Artifact is interesting, but it's like a little kind of tiny thing. But they just launched Twitter at Code, right? Mike Krieger was just like, we're doing Twitter. CEO, co-founder and co-founder of Instagram launches Instagram. Yeah. It's like, I don't know what you want me to say. Krieger's great.

34:04He was literally coding. Artifact, a tiny company. He was literally shipping code in our green room. That's awesome. And he was like, this is so much better than being at the big company. So that was really fun. Yeah, go look. It's Twitter, right? It's posts. The only real difference is you have to have a photo for some reason. There's a lot of Instagram DNA coming through. But what Mike Krieger has told me, what Kevin Systrom has told me, is they always launch Artifact with the goal of being something much bigger, with the goal of creating a much bigger corpus of machine learning data and doing more interesting things with it.

34:36And you can see they started with, it's links on the web. it's a recommendation engine for web pages to you can share links to now you can just share your own content and we will recommend that to you and they are building they're building sort of like an ai first social network it's cool and like again what what what am i hammering home here yes there's the chaos there was a lot of product conversation of code like an awful lot of what products are we building why are we building them what are the dependencies on nvidia on gpus on other stuff that we need to overcome in order to build products.

35:11And to me, Mike was like the pinnacle of that moment because he was literally building the product in the green room before he walked out on stage. He was great. And then, okay, last one, you did not successfully get RJ Scarrange, the CEO of Rivian to talk shit about the Cybertruck. But I would say he made fairly clear that he thinks the Cybertruck is stupid. Would you agree with that assessment? Yeah. You know, there's the code name of Decoder is Nealive versus Media Training. You know, it's like, can I fight you to a draw? And like sometimes I usually get to a draw, I think. Sometimes I win and that's.

35:41And then the sub-sex CEO gets in trouble. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I win too much, honestly. But it's like fine. It's a game. And that's why CEOs come and do it because they're all type A. And it's, you know, it's a game that's set up to be winnable, like not to be unfair. But, you know, you know, the questions are coming. And the reason I bring all that up is sometimes I can see the media training. And the most devastating answer you can give inside of the media training is, is, well, that's a choice.

36:11As allowable answers go, that is the most damning one. Yeah. Right. It's like, yeah, people are free to make that choice. We'll see what the market decides. It's a real like bless their heart kind of response. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like if you know what that means, you're like the one piece of news that's inside of there that was important. And I hope sort of the EV community caught this. I asked him about the deal terms to use the Tesla charger. because Rivian's using an ACS-2. And he said, everyone thinks there's some complicated data sharing agreement. There's these conspiracy theories out there, and there is not.

36:44There is an agreement to use a charger, and there is agreement to give us access to their network, and that's it. So I don't know what it's like for everybody else, but he was like, like everyone else, we thought the charger was better to use. The Biden administration did its thing. It's like some tax scheme that requires them to basically open up their network, and then everyone rushed in to use the charger in the network because the conditions were there for us to go make a deal. on not onerous terms. Yeah, fair enough. It was good stuff. There's a ton of good stuff coming out. We're going to have a lot more.

37:11It'll be on the YouTube channel. It'll be on podcasts all over the network. I did ask him about the single wiper. It's a choice. Is that where he said, bless your heart? No, that was the second. It's a choice. I was like, do you think this triangle is going to destroy your business? And he was like, I don't know, man. Don't. No, thank you. I was like, what about one big wiper? And he was like, many people have hated to say, like, it's great. You can have as many wipers as you want, Elon. All right. We need to take a break and then we're going to come back and Alex and I are going to tell Eli about everything else that happened this week.

37:40We'll be right back.

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40:10All right, we're back. Let's get to the other news of the week. Alex, I'm going to give you the choice. Do you want to do the writer's strike first or do you want to do Meta Connect first? Ooh, I kind of want to do Meta Connect first. I think both are really important, but I want to talk about some gadgets. All right, let's do meta. Three big things from Meta Connect, big annual hardware event. The Quest 3 headset, the new smart glasses, and the just weird slew of AI stuff. Let's start with the headset. You don't want to start with T-Pain? I'm not ready for T-Pain. I need like a minute before we get to T-Pain and Snoop Dogg and Dwayne Wade pretending to be not Dwayne Wade.

40:47And I don't understand what any of that. Actually, you know what? Let's do that right now. I'm angry. I knew it. I knew it. It's like, do you want Tom Brady in your house not being Tom Brady? I don't. Yeah. Alex, will you just explain what Meta is doing with all these chatbots? Well, they assume you don't have any friends and that you need artificial intelligence to be your friend. Basically, it's a bunch of chatbots, but the chatbots are designed to look and sound like famous people. So there's like a Snoop Dogg dungeon master that he tried to demo on stage. It didn't work. That was kind of unfortunate.

41:23And that's basically the gist of it, right? Like these chatbots are meant to just replicate people and build these, like enhance those parasocial relationships you already have with celebrities. And I really, really, really, really encourage you to make more friends. Wait, wait, wait. Let me offer you the flip of this. So I was reading Casey's newsletter last night and he was writing about the new version of chat GPT, which can actually speak to you. You can play these characters. It's multimodal, whatever. And he had this example in here, which I had not really considered. But he's like a teenager, a young trans teenager wrote into hard fork and was like, I get affirmations every day from GPT.

42:06Like it's the thing that I talk to on this. Like, right. And I and that's an earlier version. so I there's yeah and his whole newsletter is basically like we're on the cusp of this being these relationships being realer and like there's all the silicon valley baggage there's the endless conversation with the movie her all that stuff is in there but he's like there's something here that is worth paying attention to and that kind of unlocked my brain when I was reading it I don't know that I want to be talking to T-Pain about you know like but there's something in there what you just described is kind of the story of community on the internet since the beginning of the internet right like actually wait i want to take this back i want to be talking to t-pain now that i'm very tired but i just wanted to be actual t-pain t-pain rules like i just like there's no you should watch this podcast he's amazing yeah no t-pain is great but no i think the the question of like where is your community on the web is a really interesting and important one and is one people have been talking about for 25 years right like you go back far enough and there were people who were like, oh, these kids are talking to other people online.

43:10That's bad. And we've like come to realize that that's like, those relationships are real. And that stuff is real. And then it turns again, once it's an AI thing. And I think that changes the calculus a little bit. But there are versions of that that are good and valuable and useful. I just think this thing meta is trying to do, which is not like build tools that are good and useful and sort of human, but like make a thing that looks like Dwayne Wade that will like help me or like Snoop Dogg can be the DM for my Dungeons and Dragons games or like random celebrities will help me cook. Like that to me feels like the uncanny Valley of all of this, where it's just like, we're not anywhere with that to me.

43:56Yeah. I think what left me kind of like cold on it. Cause I do think right now I'm trying to play Dungeons and Dragons for the very first time ever. And apparently it is very hard to get a bunch of people coordinated in a room. So, like, apparently that Snoop Dogg thing is actually really, really good. If you play Dungeons & Dragons, that seems like a really compelling thing. But it just felt a lot like when Alexa started doing the voices. It feels like it just hit me that same way of, like, this feels like the technology is not ready yet. So we're having to put, like, a celebrity layer on top of it to get you to engage.

44:30Well, this is like the meta thing. It's like we launched threads. Here's a bunch of celebrities. And they've been backing into the real functionality that will make it successful or not. I think that's this, too. What you want is I want to talk to Tom Brady. I don't think anyone's ready, let alone Tom Brady, for like, you can just talk to me whenever you want. And that's dangerous if you're a celebrity in a lot of ways. Like, whatever. But, hey, come play a character and give life to a character that you can talk to with some personality. yet. I think that's very safe. It's just playing a role, right?

45:05To Meta's credit, there's big K-pop groups that already do this, where you can go talk to an AI, and it's programmed to be the K-pop star you like. So it's out there. This stuff exists already. K-pop is always on the bleeding edge of being really weird. Also, Alex, if you just spoke A-pop as AI-pop into existence, I'm going to be furious with you. AI pop. It's coming. A pop. Go watch. We have it on our site. It's in a quick post. It's on T-Pain's Instagram. It's on T-Pain's TikTok. Go watch the video. It's very strange. But I do think the more interesting piece of the AI thing is the meta AI chatbot that they're putting out and putting into basically all of their messaging platforms.

45:48You'll be able to get it everywhere you use meta products. And it's essentially ChatGPT. They're just turning on ChatGPT inside of meta products. No, ChatGPT is OpenAI. This is their own model. Yeah, but it's like functionally, it's the same. Like the goal is the same. They think it's better. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it's better. I don't know if it's better either. We've heard some people say it is. We've heard some people say it isn't. We'll just have to find out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they're big on Llama, which is their large language model. Like there's this three headed triangle now. Like Amazon just made this big investment in Anthropic.

46:22They're going to do some really interesting stuff over time. Microsoft and OpenAI are obviously together. Google is doing its own thing. and now meta is doing its own thing. And this race is getting real and really expensive and really high stakes for all four of these companies really fast. And they're doing art generation too. It's not just words. There's going to be a bunch of stickers where you can just make something up and do that. And that I'm actually very excited about because the possibility for trolling my friends is extraordinarily high when I can just make AI generate horrible art for me.

46:53Wait, can I say some deeply Verge chassis thing about that? No. What is a sticker? What is a sticker? The reason that stickers and memes and reaction GIFs and all that stuff is powerful is because they have shared meaning. Yep. Right. So, like, you're like, here's a GIF. And, like, it means something. And it carries a whole layers and layers of meaning when you share it with a friend in response to something else. I'm going to AI generate some stuff for you. De novo, like, over and over again does not carry that meaning. It's just you talking. It's just you being like, I made up words. You say that.

47:28But if you make a horrible enough one, it can be a bean. No, it's true. It's just like I don't want to. There's a part of this where it's like endlessly customizing everything actually detracts from how we communicate. Yeah, it fractures the fractures the communication. Well, it's just like it's at the dumbest level. It's like now I have to explain all my jokes to you. Like I made up a joke and I have to explain it to you instead of repeating it or riffing on a thing that already exists. is I know we got some PhDs in our audience who are full of this information. Our co-founder and friend, Dieter Bone, deep into semiotics, like the meaning of meaning, this is it.

48:08It's like right in there. It's like, what if the AI is making up ways for you to communicate that the person on the other end has no context for? But like, it's stickers. Like, it's fine. People aren't going to use them. That's what I'm trying to get at. It's like if you don't get to free ride on the history of meaning, like the stickers are just silly stickers. Yeah. I mean, there's a big, giant, like huge cultural question in all of that, right? Everything is becoming endlessly personalized versus we need things that everyone understands in order to communicate about them, which is why the office is so useful.

48:43I realized the other day that like most of the screenshots in on my phone are gifts from the office that I just use for infinite purposes all the time. There's a why are you the way that you are gif that I just use 50 times a day. And people understand it. It's great. It's very helpful. Do you know those people whose entire personalities is movie quotes? Like, they're not going to be out there generating stickers. They're a dying breed because we don't share that. Like, everybody watches their own things now. So that shared culture is dying down to Barbie movie, which is great. The Barbie movie is wonderful, but like fewer places.

49:15You're saying people don't run around quoting Oppenheimer to each other all day? Yeah. Why not? What's up with that? That is cool. I am become deaf. I'm just going to start sending that to the Verge staff every day. I love it. Alex, tell me about the Quest 3. Tell Neelai about the Quest 3. We've been wondering about this thing. We kind of knew what it was. Neelai, it's cool. What's going on? It looks bananas. I was looking at the photo of Addy wearing this thing, and I was like, I don't know. I love it. We were talking about this in Slack the other day, and people were like, I hate it. It looks alien.

49:47And I'm like, that's exactly why I love it. Because it looks kind of alien. It's got these three little ovals on the front. And they look kind of like the iPhone X camera module. So it looks like they slapped three of those on there, which feels very old-fashioned and kind of, oh, I've seen that before. But then somehow... This is in the service of room tracking, of pass-through. It's$500. It's got dual 2064 by 2208 pixels. So it's a much higher resolution than the previous one, which was only 1832 by 1920. It's going to be a little sharper. And it's got the second generation of the Snapdragon XR2 processor in it.

50:30And that's where a lot of the big stuff changes. So I think probably the most notable thing and the thing that Addy talked about in her hands-on was that the graphics are better on this thing. Like, things are sharper. The resolution's a little higher. Sean was very excited. No one else has this frame of reference because zero people bought a Quest Pro. But I have one. Is it better than the Quest Pro or worse than the Quest Pro? Because the Quest Pro is pretty good. Probably about better. The software is better, but the hardware is better. Yeah, from a pure, like, display quality perspective, it's better than the Quest Pro.

51:04Really? Yeah. It's actually, it's the highest res thing they've made, including the Quest Pro. The ongoing existence of the Quest Pro does not make any sense. So what we should note here is that Alex Heath interviewed Zuckerberg on our site in the Decoder feed. And I think he asked for the Quest Pro and Zuckerberg was like, yeah, yeah. We just had a bunch around. We had to ship them. But no, it's very clear that this is the one that Meta would like to sell you. I mean, Zuckerberg kept saying, and even Andrew Bosworth, the CTO afterwards, kept saying, this is the first mainstream mixed reality headset.

51:39Like, that is their phrase, right? And they're coming after Apple's Vision Pro in a really big way. They made a bunch of jokes about how it doesn't have a cable or a battery pack. Yeah. Which is honestly like a really good burn of the Vision Pro. Yep. It's also not$3 ,500, so that's good. But that is the pitch that they are making. They're like, this is the one. It's not finished. This is not where we're ultimately headed. ultimately where we're headed i think they think is is these smart glasses which we should also talk about but this is the one that is for regular humans now yeah it's the end of this form factor right or like the best version of this form factor you can get right now yeah exactly and i think they continue to struggle to make the case for why people would want this like a lot of what they talked about was video games they have more games they have better games there's stuff to do but then they occasionally just throw in you know meta quest for business but don't really explain that they're just like you can have it if you want it for business that's that's all we know about that they talk a little bit about it as an entertainment device which i think is interesting like they they show the same screenshot that everybody shows which is just like you can watch instead of watching one nba game you can watch seven nba games on virtual screens yeah and that is like extremely my shit but like i didn't get the sense that there is some sort of brand new life-changing use case for this it just seems like between pass-through better screens and just sort of an overall better experience of using that's great though i just want to be like going from the iphone 3gs the iphone 4 and getting a reddit retina display is like great oh absolutely absolutely and and i've a bunch of us got a demo of this i mine was relatively short but i still got to play a couple of the games and stuff it is i mean leaps and bounds better than the quest 2 Like the pass-through is not perfect.

53:27It's a little sort of warpy. Like the floor was moving a little bit. But it's better than the Pro. Oh, better than the Pro. Way better than the Quest 2, which is like black and white and essentially doesn't actually work as pass-through. Not as good as the demo I got of the Vision Pro, but that was super controlled. Who knows what that'll be like in real life. But yeah, this is a massive improvement over the Quest 2. Whether it will make people who didn't care about headsets care about headsets, to me, is still the open question. Right. Like, that's what I don't know. But if you're a person who cares about headsets, gigantic upgrade.

53:58I kind of think it didn't sell itself well enough. Like, like talking to Addy, talking to you, talking to people who got to actually try the thing was much more compelling to me than watching the actual keynote about the product. I think this is going to be true for every VR headset, including the Vision Pro forever. Yeah. And well, that's just very interesting to me because Addy, like, told me about it. And she's like, oh, yeah, the Passer is way, way, way better. And I was like, oh, dang, I kind of want it just for that. That sounds really cool. And then I don't see any of that on stage. And I'm like, well, I'm glad Addy told me.

54:32It really is. One of the great unsolved problems of VR is how to show someone what you're seeing in VR in a way that looks at all compelling. Because your options are either like show it on the two screens, ones for each eye, which just doesn't make any sense to anybody. Or you just show it like a slightly low res television. it's like this doesn't mean anything to anybody uh and i've been hearing this from people in this space for like damn near a decade now that they're like when we put this on someone's head they get it yeah and until you put it on someone's head it is so hard to explain what it is about it that works the only things i've ever seen you know there's people who play beat saber and they fill entire green screen rooms and so like they they're doing like real life overlays yeah they everyone's just gotta do that that's that's my feeling but the problem is like so many things are like sitting and using a computer like quest for business is like now you'll use excel and it's like this sucks yes yeah very large excel the price doesn't I think the big problem is the price doesn't help.

55:34One of the reasons the Quest 2 was so compelling was you were like, wow, I can get this for$300 when it was first announced, right? And they've now dropped that price back down to$300 after a brief time of increasing the price. And so a little wave there. And that was really compelling. I went out and bought it the day it was announced because I was like, that price is so low. I didn't get the$300 when I spent more money. But I was still like, wow, I'm getting such a deal. This is great. And then this one is still$500. That's the same price as a PS5 or an Xbox. Yeah. This is very hard to justify as an impulse purchase at Christmas, the way that I think a lot of Quest 2s got sold.

56:11It's sort of like, what tech present am I buying the kids for Christmas? Because it was like that lower number. And I think that's going to harm adoption because of that fact that you have to put it on, you have to try it, or you have to know somebody who has to really be compelled by it. Or actually, I think what makes it even harder is it's like not a console generation, right? it's not ps4 to ps5 a lot of people have quest 2s because of what happened last christmas and the christmas before it yeah and it's like oh that's just sitting on the shelf although i don't know i think this one is going to be a little bit tough because i think the the quest 3 is going to make the quest 4 a console generation because what it's going to do like everybody's going to spend the next year building actually usable mixed reality stuff because for the first time it's worth doing.

57:00Like the pass through stuff is good enough. And the vision pro is right. And so we're now going to get to a point where there is an actual generation of stuff to do that takes advantage of this tech. Whereas right now it's like a lot of the reason for the mixed reality is, and they even pitch it this way so that like, I can find my coffee cup or look at my phone without taking my headset off, which is useful. It's a bad reason to buy a product. And so, uh, there just hasn't, they need the thing and that will come and it can come now which is really exciting but i think it's going to make it's going to make the selling point for next year's model much easier but i don't know how much it does for like right now do you think it'll be next year's model or do you think they'll wait a few years that's the problem is i don't think they're i think they're still at console level not at phone level in encouraging upgrade cycles and i think if they release a new one next year, it's just going to be like, well, why, like, at what point do I actually invest in this very expensive thing that isn't always reliably backwards compatible, that is like growing each year by these leaps and bounds?

58:04Shouldn't I just wait until next year? Shouldn't I just wait until next year? Shouldn't I just wait for another price drop? But I think they need to be a little more thoughtful about how they're marketing this thing and pricing it. But I still also kind of want one. Yeah. Yeah, that's about right. And I think that's like the best case scenario for them. Yeah, it's like Christmas, somebody gives me like a little Best Buy gift card. I'm like... Somebody wants to throw me 500 bucks, you know, maybe I'm buying a Quest 3. Spend it. Spend it, not on Legos. It seems clear that what Meta did here was say, we have to stop building the best possible cheap thing and just build a thing that's really good and then charge what we have to.

58:42I think Apple went the same route to like the nth degree, but meta has been on this path and like snap has been doing this and others have been doing this where they're like these things have to be cheap they have to be impulse buys you have to be able to buy them for christmas and we're going to make them as good as we can and they'll get better and better over time and that hasn't really worked because it's still not possible to make a really good one for that price i don't have any reporting to back this up but i would bet good money that this hardware is not going to be earth shatteringly high margin for meta uh these things are expensive to build and hard to build and i think meta was smart to say like this is the bar for what quality is and we just have to charge what it costs to build this and yeah let that get cheaper over time as opposed to like hoping quality goes up over time because that i just don't think has worked so far yeah it looks cool though and this is by the way we should talk about the heath interview with suck suck makes this point right like making things smaller and cheaper is actually very hard um and he there's a we can even watch the we should go watch the whole thing it's great but we have a tiktok up where he's like people are impressed by the pyramids but it's actually small things the beginning of his history channel show uh one more thing i want to bring up out of the heath interview the heath interview is great mark is super loose uh super relaxed talks a lot about building products actually he's relaxed about two things it's building products he's like back in builder mode and he's like this is what's great like the last few years i've needed to be like this First Amendment scholar, statesman person, but like now I'm building shit again and he can tell how loose.

1:00:14And then he's super loose when he talks about beating people up. So loose. Loves it. Just loves hitting a guy. And that's like great. It's like this is the most personality. But he loves like MMA as a sport, not just like street fighting. Just be clear. I'm very tired. He's just out there punching people on the street. But he like talks about it and he talks about how the skill and discipline. And you can see he's relaxed. Like he's back in his zone as opposed to Senator. We sell ads, you know, like, um, and there's a lot of talking about the quest three and building that and what they've learned and all this stuff.

1:00:49There's a lot of talking about building threads and how excited that's made him. And one more confirmation that they are definitely going to decentralize and federate threads, which I think is really cool. Yeah. And he made the case you would hope he would make, which is that like, we think that the future of social, we have to give people confidence that these things are going to be around. And it's like, yes mark where have you been for 20 years right he's like we've thought about doing a facebook but facebook is too complicated so you have to do it from the beginning which is like cool you know and true like i think that's a re like re-architecting facebook for activity pub is probably not possible it's just yeah can we talk about the coolest part of the meta connect was it how ripped mark zuckerberg was i said it like three times as we were sitting watching the live stream like i cannot believe how shredded this dude is yeah like we i think we were all just quietly slacking each other just being like yo wow yeah but it was the glasses the glasses were something that i think hearing about them it was the opposite of the quest 3 somebody would tell me about the quest 3 and i'd be like oh that sounds really really cool but i'd watch the demo and i'd be like that's and then this one i'd watch the demo for the glasses and be like and then they talk about the glasses i was like actually these they sound cool like i want these glasses I have been back and forth on this a million times.

1:02:05Smart glasses to me are either a thing that everyone should have immediately or an objectively stupid idea that just should not exist. And I genuinely go between them 10 times a day. Convince me they're cool. Yeah, I do too, because I have to wear glasses and I don't want to go like, get new lenses for these$300 frames, which is probably the same price as most frames anyway, like that price isn't that different. But they were good looking. And then the woman that did the presentation for him was like, had such good energy. She was so excited to be there and talk about these glasses that I was like, are they really awesome?

1:02:41These seem awesome. And I think it was like the camera. It was just like the way the cameras work, the camera is much higher quality than it has been previously. I don't think I, I can't think of a practical use case for these glasses because they've got the, they got the audio in them. So, so you'll be able to hear stuff and you'll be able to like use your phone to ask it you can ask it questions and the responses will pop up on your phone and that seems like kind of cool and moving towards that mixed reality thing and then it's got the the cameras that will that will like stream to threads and stream to to instagram and do all of that and that seems really really cool and i don't think i actually want to be that connected to other people but at the same time part of me was like but don't high so this is actually the exact tension that i have been feeling too and neil i've been wondering all week about you because i remember when you first had a kid one of the things that you did pretty quickly was by a point and shoot camera because you're like i want to take a lot of pictures i want to document a lot of stuff but i don't want to have my phone in front of my face all the time for lots of obvious reasons and that is the exact use case that all of these companies make for smart glasses.

1:03:49Like there are kids in the demo reel for every single one of these, right? Because you can have both hands, you can swing your kid around, whatever, but you are less, there's not so much of a thing between you and especially not a thing that is otherwise trying to grab your attention. Well, there's one thing between you and your kid. You're wearing sunglasses. You can get them in regular frame. You can get them with prescription lenses. There's like, there's one thing. You can get transition lenses. My dad wears transitions. They're fine. Yeah, your dad and like every fourth grader who just got their first pair of glasses.

1:04:22I was that child. That boy was me. It was not cool, my friends. Everyone, someone please go to fourth grades across the country and tell these children. Wow. This is Joey Slater that I will not tolerate. Sorry, dad. I had an adult person try to help me to get transition glasses recently. No, it's fine. Once you've achieved in life, you can have transition. I see. That was the case made to me. They're like, no, no, you can do it now. You're an adult. Yeah. It's like your children are at the house. You're married. You got a grandkid. You're like, yeah, just take a load off, bro. Just have sunglasses ready to go.

1:05:01When you're in fourth grade, it's not just tell the children. They're just gray all the time. These little kids in gray lenses. It's a weird 1980s in Wisconsin. Anyway, yes, this is the argument. The problem is the camera's not any good. But my RX100 is a great camera. That's why I bought it. My iPhone is an extremely complicated philosophical quandary of a camera. That's why I have it. This is like, I'll have it, I'll get my hands back, but I'm going to take shittier photos. Who doesn't love 12 megapixel single non-HDR photos? People love it more than 5 megapixels, which was the previous one.

1:05:39I haven't seen the photos, but that's always, to me, it's like, you know, what's the phrase? The best camera is the one you have with you. I always have an amazing camera with me. Your glasses. Right? My glasses, my transition lenses. I know. My phone's around, you know, and I bought a really nice camera so I could divest myself of the phone. But I don't think having a more convenient camera, I don't know. I haven't seen the photos. I haven't like used the thing. again blind reacts to the the right hand glasses but you know i i don't know like it's it's more technology and when i was what david to your point i was after less yeah and i think i think to me like it's very clear that meta does not see these smart glasses as like the end point of smart glasses right like at the end of connect mark duckerberg got up and did the like almost sort of steve jobs impression of like you know when he was like it's a widescreen ipod it's a phone it's an internet communicator and he was like he showed it he was like we have the quest 3 headset we have all this ai communication stuff and then we have smart glasses and the case he made is that like the end state of this is that the first two things the quest and the ai stuff are going to end up in the glasses right like he's like this is the form factor and we're gonna put all this stuff into it over time and i don't know how long that's going to take or if that's ever going to happen but i believe them that that's the vision and i think the question we've been asking for a bunch of years now is like is there anything interesting along the way and to me just purely from a personal perspective the cameras don't do anything for me partly because i think the like real world creepiness factor is still really real and i don't i don't know how to sort through that very high Yeah, it's just like even just like walking around, like if you just walk around a city, just holding up your phone, like you might be taking a picture, you're going to creep people out, right?

1:07:33It's like whether or not you're actually doing anything, it feels bad. And so I have not sorted through how to deal with that. But I do think the thing I'm most excited to see about these glasses is whether the mic and headphones are good. because it's essentially they're trying to do this like personal audio speaker thing where you can hear it but nobody else can it has five mics in the glasses including one on your nose that's supposed to do a better job of picking up your voice which makes sense if that works that's pretty cool i don't like being a person who wears airpods all the time i would like to be a person who wears airpods less and so if that's the kind of thing that i can use like if i'm out on a walk or whatever, that's compelling to me.

1:08:16But also like it's whatever, it's 250 bucks. Am I going to buy? I don't wear glasses anyway. If I already wore glasses, I think I would be slowly talking myself into this. But as somebody who doesn't otherwise wear glasses, that's a big leap. I mean, that's why I'm like, ooh, like maybe I should get a pair of these the next time I go get my prescription updated. I mean, a pair of Wayfarers is like$165. You're not that far away to add all this other stuff. we're all learning an important lesson about the amount of margin contained right yeah maybe this is gonna drop start dropping the prices of regular glasses i only buy 20 sunglasses because i lose them and i think i've i just realized i came to my own conclusion same i bought one nice pair of sunglasses and i said if i lose these within a year i'm never allowed to buy nice sunglasses again i lost them in three days i don't they're just gone and so now I buy$15 sunglasses like four times a year.

1:09:12It's great. I bought prescription sunglasses. I've had them 10 years. The prescription is no longer accurate, but I still have the glasses. I probably shouldn't drive with them. It's fine. I will just say this. Everyone thinks this is a form factor. Apple thinks this is a form factor. The most compelling applications that are being built in the space are all virtual reality applications. Even Apple, right? When you look at their demos, it's like your court side at the NBA or there's a dinosaur eating you or whatever. They're all VR applications. There are no compelling mixed reality or AR applications yet.

1:09:45Because they haven't figured out the privacy. Well, sure. But they just, they can't even demo. Even my demo, my killer app, I will pay any amount of money for it, right? Just show me people's names. I was just at this conference and the amount of time I spent squinting at people's badges, which is just really a weird thing to do. By the way, if you're ever hosting a conference, make the names bigger on the badges. That's my one note. And now that I'm a conference host. well the font sizes next year are going to be bananas it's it's out of control it's huge everyone's gonna carry around like yard signs with their name on them uh this is my killer app this is the thing i want the most faces and names incredibly difficult to do in a privacy centric way you might have to build a worldwide facial recognition data but all very hard even that right it's not built because of those problems but it's the killer app for ar no one can do it all the ones are building along the way are vr and that is in conflict with our belief about what the form factor will be because you have to block out the world in to do vr well and a pair of glasses does not by definition does not do that and i was having dinner with a friend at the conference and they're like oh yeah but we'll just like do the things on the sides and i'm like what kind of like mad max like bullshit are you trying to sell me right now No, you just look like you had cataract surgery.

1:11:05No, you're going to look like Will.i.am in an early 2000s music video. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's a bad look. Don't do that. So I'm just saying, all of the best applications that we're building are VR applications, and everyone thinks the form factor will make those applications go away, unless you saw this block out the world. That's weird. There's a tension there that I think, like you said, David, We're figuring out if there's anything interesting along the way. The thing that's interesting to me along the way is the absolute tension between what's why you would put a computer on your face and the form factor of whatever it wants that computer to be.

1:11:42Or has to be. Right. We're very much in the like, you know, 1990s desktop tower PC thing where the only version of it weighs a thousand pounds and has to live on your wood Office Max setup. Please keep sending us your old desk setups. We love them so much. We're going to make a coffee table book. I want to be clear about this. This is my goal. It's a coffee table book called Computer Rooms. And then we're going to retire and we're going to buy a boat. And that book and that boat will be called The Computer Room. And I've just been thinking about this plan the whole time. I love it. All right. We need to take one more break and then we're going to come back.

1:12:16We're going to talk about the writer's strike real quick. And then we're going to do a little lightning round and then we're going to get out of here. We'll be right back.

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1:15:05All right, we're back. Alex Kranz, tell us about the end of the writer's strike. It ended this week kind of out of nowhere, it seemed like. Well, we knew that negotiations seemed to be reaching a conclusion. Everybody was starting to get kind of excited about whatever contract was coming. Contract is out now. The Guild still has to vote on it. So both the Writers Guild of America East and West, both of them still have to vote on it. Everybody's still reading over it. They released a summary Tuesday night, and then the next day they released the actual contracts. You can go, and if you want to, you can go pour through the whole thing.

1:15:43We have a little summary of it up on the website as well. And there's a lot of big stuff in it. They got almost everything they wanted as far as AI goes. So there's a lot of AI protections in it. You're not going to be able to go ask AI to come up with a plot and then take that to a writer and make a writer write it. And then you keep the rights to that story. you're not going to be able to do that. The writer will maintain the rights to the story because AI-generated content cannot have rights according to this contract, which is probably good. I think that was really exciting. I know I spoke to a few writers who were really, really excited about that part of it and excited to just have that protection that helps maintain the status quo.

1:16:24And then the thing that's really going to change the status quo is the data. Yeah, there's now going to be data that the Writers Guild is going to receive from these streamers like Netflix, Amazon, all these people who have been super, super opaque about their data. They're not going to be able to be opaque with the Writers Guild itself. A lot of that data is not going to come to the rest of us because it's, you know, they still don't want everybody to know their numbers. But the Writers Guild will be able to release it in aggregate. And the fact that the numbers are even going to be out there just changes things.

1:16:56Like, it's a town. People talk. People are going to know those numbers. That seems like the bet, right? I was listening to an interview with Adam Conover, who's a writer who's on the negotiating committee for the Guild. And I forget who he was talking to. I wish I could cite the podcast I was listening to. But he basically was like, if you reporters want the number, maybe you should make a journalist's union and go fight with studios. I don't care about you. I'm trying to get numbers for my people. But then what he basically said is like between the numbers that are going to get reported to the guild and the fact that this business is shifting towards advertising like we're just gonna start to know more it's they're just the numbers are going to be reported to more people people talk it's gonna start to be out there in much bigger ways and i think that's true but it does seem like like there was some rubric they invented for like total hours watched of something it's like we're still inventing the new numbers of what all of these things mean yeah there's still new numbers, but I think because they're enshrined in a contract, they'll probably start to stabilize as the new numbers, right?

1:18:01We talked about that on the podcast earlier this week, and the numbers, they've always been fake. They've always been not real. And everybody just agreed, okay, these not real numbers are the ones we're going to use. And so now we have new numbers that are probably the most realistic numbers we've had for streaming or broadcast television, if I'm being honest. These are numbers that are very, very trackable, very understood. And they're different. It's total hours of something streamed, I think, is it. And that's kind of goofy. But it's a real number. But it does mean that if 300 million people watch the first 15 minutes of something, that could be the same as if one person watches it 300 billion times.

1:18:44Which is a very real possibility because there are some weirdos out there. Like Alex Krantz. I was like, me. Speaking of K-pop fans, I have an important piece of information. Yes. So one of our sponsors at Code was Luminate, which formerly Nielsen ScanScan. They do the Billboard charts. So I was talking to them, hanging out. It was really fun. They did a session. And they were talking about how they measure things. Did you know that at the platform level, if you stream something more than 50 times in a day, it doesn't count? Because they're K-pop fans. Yeah. You just tap out at 50. Yep, that's it.

1:19:16If you're more than 50 times a day, they're like, you didn't do it. do you get the 50 i don't that's proprietary weirdness interesting right like if you talk to the people who measure things luminate which makes the charts with billboard uh yeah they're like yep there's at the platform level we like k-pop fans are like our antagonists so everything you love you can only stream 49 times a day yeah and then and then there's still some like algorithmic re-normalization. And I think this is now coming. This is my thesis. Like whatever happens to the music industry, happens to everyone else five years later.

1:19:52This is now going to come to streaming television because if you're a writer or you have a fandom and there's going to be an aggregate number that everyone agrees on, you're necessarily going to go try to game that number. I mean, the fans already do that. Like if they think their shows - But there's no transparency, right? Right, yeah. Yeah, right now it was kind of like, we're working because it showed up in the Netflix top 10 and we're working because some, some company did analysis and said, and boy, to show you up in the Netflix top 10, not guarantee you a goddamn thing canceled in the middle of the first episode.

1:20:26Yeah. But not only that, I mean, the platforms also have, you know, a hundred thumbs to put on the scale at any given time. Like the, the, what Netflix chooses to show you in that big banner, when you open the app is very meaningful. And the top 10 is like very localized. like here's the top 10 things in your house. It's the show that you were the EP of. You're like, oh, this is right. It's always the shows that they've already canceled. It's like, Alex, do you want to watch this show we just canceled? And I'm like, I do. And I hate you. So yeah, what this contract, this contract is straight up historic though.

1:20:59Also, because like there were a lot of big price increases in it, particularly around streaming. Streaming is not lucrative if you're a writer, just straight up before this. It was not lucrative. You could barely make ends meet for the vast majority of people. and the studios had gotten really good about gaming the system that existed to pay as little as possible and this kind of ended a lot of that gaming it's still going to happen people are still going to get screwed out of money that that is the nature of business but but this is uh this contract really put some really strong guardrails in particularly around streaming like they were they're anticipating i think it's like a 26 increase in in revenue for writers of streaming films that have a budget of$30 million or more.

1:21:42So all those really big Netflix, Apple TV films and stuff where previously they probably weren't getting a lot of money for that. They're now going to be getting at least$100 ,000. And that's nice. That seems nice to me. So yeah, this is very historic. SAG is still on strike, but there's a lot of movement there. People were kind of expecting this to be the way WGA goes. They get this really good deal. SAG is going to get a lot of similar stuff because of that deal and be able to close things. And if you were in the Directors Guild of America, I don't know what to tell you. You guys decided on your contract before everybody else went on strike.

1:22:21Well, I think they might have known that the writers were... Yeah, they do. They knew. And their contract is, by comparison, not nearly as good. Ah, they're directors. Yeah. They're directors. they're fine they got their producer credit like they could just put themselves in as an actor or a writer uh they'll find other ways to make the money oh every director now does a cameo it's gonna be great i will say that uh casey on stage of code was like we're doing we held true detective because we wanted the we want jodie foster to be available to promote the show we wanted people to be able to talk about it and it's like oh the sag deal isn't done but they're very confident that the writer's deal is gonna give them the actor's deal yeah yeah because Because so much of the debate is about the same stuff.

1:23:07And I think it definitely seemed to be that it was likely for the guild to get the deal done first. And then there's going to be a lot of copying and pasting from this deal to that deal. Yeah, especially it seems with the AI stuff. And I thought one of the most interesting parts of the AI piece of this deal was essentially that they punted on the question of training data. Like, can you use our work to train AI models that can make other screen plays? There was a very specific reason for that, and that's because there's so much laws that are potentially going to an effect. So why hold on to this bargaining chip when you know that California – I think it was last week, California said, we're going to look into regulating trading data and making sure compensation happens and stuff.

1:23:53I will bet you$10 right now that this deal gets renegotiated again before anybody makes a law on that front. Yeah. Right. If you know that you're operating in three-year cycles, you're like, well, that's what I mean. I think you're right, Alex. But I think everybody was just like, who the hell knows? Let's come back and do this again in three years. If it gets weird, there's a line in here that lets us yell at you. If it gets weird, that's good enough for now. Yeah. And I thought that was really smart on their part. Like, OK, we're going to kick this can down the road. Maybe something happens.

1:24:22Maybe something doesn't. We got three years to figure it out. Yeah. It's just a funny acknowledgement of like, no one really knows anything. so like let's just be cool for now and we'll figure this out later i thought that was like that was just a funny place for that to land um all right let's do a lightning round um we are already very long so let's just blow through this hit some more news and get out of here i will go first so you guys can come up with your own neil i you can quickly read five days of the verge and catch up and see where you are oh i know i already picked mine it's very obvious no no that one's mine, Alex.

1:24:53Alex and I are fighting in the Google Doc right now. There's like two cursors, like furiously selecting lines in the Google Doc. There's a lot happening right now. Mine is, there's this big shift in the podcast world. I feel like we got to talk about podcasts on podcasts. Google is killing Google podcasts because it's all in on YouTube music as the home of podcasts. I just like a random side note is I hate the fact that there are apps called Amazon music and YouTube music and their podcast apps, like bad names, everybody, like you screwed up. But anyway, Google Podcasts is going away because Google can't stop killing its apps, but it's all in on YouTube as a podcast platform.

1:25:31YouTube Music has been like a sneaky place of investment for YouTube for a long time now, and they're getting much louder about, like, we really think this is our subscription business going forward. That's really interesting. Apple Podcasts is going the other way. They're integrating a lot of stuff from outside of podcasts into podcasts, including some of the like radio stuff that they've been doing some of the different like, meditation stuff that they've been doing. There's just a lot of like audio around the Apple ecosystem that's now all being pulled into Apple podcasts. So while while YouTube goes into YouTube, Apple is pulling into podcasts.

1:26:07And I thought that was very interesting. And also to everyone who has asked, what podcast app should I use? The there are lots of good answers minus pocket casts it's a terrific app it's been around forever automatic owns it the people who own wordpress so they're not going to kill it randomly because they hate you it's a good app pocket casts i can't even mention podcasts without people telling me to use overcast they just like show up out of the overcast is a great app the only downside of overcast is that it is it's pretty platform specific but otherwise it is a terrific app let's see i feel like whichever one of you i call on right now gets to have this one no i i i picked another one let me go stay away i'm not i'm not gonna tell you stay out of my chair like literally all right nila go all right logitech partnered with a company called play seat and they've made it they've made a logitech branded racing chair i'm really unhappy because i own the same chair without the logitech improvements i own the play seat challenge for playstation vr uh and gran turismo vr it's a great chair logitech by the way if you just look at it i own their racing wheel now they're doing this chair that company thinks there's a bigger market in racing sims and they're just like going after it and i think they're right they know they know what's coming this thing folds up like that's i have not bought one of these because no i have again i have the thing it folds up it's very good yeah it folds up and the wheel stays attached and it's all very compact you can get in a closet it's just you unfold it and you put it in the center of your living room and you're like i'm to use it again tomorrow.

1:27:38My problem is I have to buy this thing without my wife ever finding out that I bought it. So I need it. I need to be able to get rid of it very quickly at a moment's notice. And there's nothing like furtively hiding a receipt that says the words play seat on it from your wife. Yeah, that's fun to explain on the credit card statement. Wait, so what did Logitech do that makes this cool and exciting? So if you just look at some of the, you know, the little latches a little better like they've made they've made some quality of life improvements because they're logitech so it's like i it just from what i can tell they've just made it slightly easier to like operate the folding and the you know they they've just like made it more ergonomic but i think it's mostly like the things that were red are now blue you know but like logitech is doing this because they want to distribute the stuff but place he doesn't have huge distribution right they're actually a little company logitech's like best buy so like i i think they're they're taking it and they're putting it out in the channels because they see a bigger market for the stuff it folds down so little dude psvr gran turismo vr we did this whole thing about the quest 3 yeah and i am telling you the gran turismo vr on the psvr 2 is one of the single most compelling things you can do in vr i believe it like even and i'm like a car nerd and i love it and it's like fine like my friends my family i put them in the thing and like they're in this silly little chair and And they're like blown away.

1:29:00You put a little fan in front of them, really get the immersion. Yeah, I stand right next to them going, vroom, vroom. Just back the truck up, roll coal on them. We did a kids react video to Project Starline at Code, which is another thing that's impossible to show people. But it's great. We should do a video of people reacting to Gran Turismo VR because it's super cool. That's a good idea. I need to stop looking at this page or else I'm going to buy this thing. Alex, what's yours? Same. I just want to close the loop. We know where Amazon Hardware Chief David Lemp went. Oh, yeah. And he's going to Blue Origin.

1:29:33So he's going to go build rockets. Just can't get enough Jeff Bezos, that guy. Just can't get enough of Jeff. So that was like everybody. Conversely, they also finally confirmed that Panos Panay is definitely coming to Amazon. Yep. That is happening. So all of the stuff that was up in the air, now we know where everybody is. Yeah. Dave's going to be over at Blue Origins. So probably. Dave's definitely going to put Alexa in her arm. Alexa, take me to space for two minutes. I need to float around a little bit. And Panos is definitely coming to Amazon. So it's both happening. I've already emailed Amazon repeatedly about e-readers as soon as it was announced.

1:30:13I'm so sorry to Amazon PR. But yeah, let's see it, Panos. Let's see a really good Kindle. As soon as the Panos news was announced, somebody just mentioned me on threads and just said the words Kindle fold. question mark that's all i've been thinking about all week panos do it give me my folding kindle i'm feeling it uh all right we have gone extremely long we need to get out of here like i said there's a bunch of lawsuits let's talk about lindy acarina somewhere neil i need to go to bed i'm back by the way code's over i am become death welcome the eye of sauron is back yeah everyone who asked for neil i was you're gonna you're going to rue how much he is back now welcome to hell but yeah like i said there's going to be there's a bunch more uh trial stuff to come it sounds like satya nadella the ceo of microsoft is going to be testifying did we talk about you were there in the room we're going to talk about that next week there's so much to talk about it's going to be great i'm excited about it satya nadella is testifying on monday we think i'm going to try and be in the courtroom for that lots more going on there we have the ftc suing amazon the ftx trial is starting next week there is like a lot still happening.

1:31:22There's a Google event coming next week. We are not short of things to talk about. In the meantime, we're going to have a ton of code stuff going up over the next few days. Interview with AMB CEO Lisa Su is up now. She talked a lot about competing with the video. Yeah, that was a good one, too. We should have mentioned that earlier. She was great and very interesting about like the future of all of this AI hardware stuff. That was a really interesting one. Products. I put products on stage at code. The bullshit was the bullshit, but the products for real. There you go. All right. We are out of here.

1:31:51Everybody's going to go just decompress for a couple of days and then we'll be back next week. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll. He took my line.

1:32:04And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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