Meta's new smart glasses look like the future

25:45It's so ugly. Oh, I remember this thing. I tried this thing. The thing looks like a ball-up angle. It really does. And it uses EMG, Kranz? Yeah, yeah, it used EMG. Like that particular technology, the EMG technology has been around a while. We've seen it in other stuff, but it's always like been kind of, nobody's gotten the software part of it right. And the form factor. It looks like a fit. Yeah. Like this thing is not bulky and it just sits on your wrist. Yeah, this looks cool. Did you have to wear it tightly around your wrist? It's tight, but it's not like, like there are sensors that indent a little bit into your skin, but it wasn't like uncomfortable.

26:23I wore it. I left the demo room with it still on to go interview Zuckerberg. And like, they came running after me. We're like, you still got the band on. Like, please let us keep that. So if we're talking about, you know, the three parts of this, I guess on the puck, I just like, David, I agree with you that this feels like the right combination for now. They obviously don't want the puck to be in the picture long term. But I think we're a long way away from that. Yeah. They made the decision, which I think is the correct call is that they want the glasses to be as light as possible and to not burn your face, which is what I've experienced a lot, not literally burning, but just they get really hot.

27:02And so they'd made the decision to offload most of the app logic onto the puck. They invented their own Wi-Fi protocol and it has to be 12 to 13 feet max away at all times where the glasses just don't work. Why do we call it a puck and not a computer? I mean, why do they call them glasses and not a computer? I don't know. Is it a circle? Yeah. It looks like one of the big iPhone brick chargers you could put on the back of the iPhone with MagSafe, like a big-ass anchor charger. Yeah. It looks like you could put it in your back pocket, but you want to wear a belt. Okay. I could put it in my back pocket because I have huge back pockets, but yeah.

27:41I mean, the idea is like... Are you wearing JNCOs? Did we just learn something about it? Yeah, it's a weird flex. All right. Yeah. I know you live in LA, but like how bad has it gotten over there? It's pretty bad.

27:55Yeah. So the puck is the right trade-off to make because these glasses only weigh 98 grams, whereas the vision pro is like five, six X that. And I, like I said, I wore them for two hours and I, I never felt like uncomfortable. Um, and the funny thing about the two hours I was informed as we were wrapping, like, you know, there's a bunch of met of employees in the room. I'm, I think I was the second journalist ever to try them. I've also written about these extensively. So they, they were really like on edge and they, um, towards the end, like I took them off and I could just hear everyone breathe a sigh of relief.

28:32They were like, you just broke the record for longest demo. Actually, longest continuous wear of them at two hours. We were like, yeah, we thought they would just crap out by now. Was there a battery indicator or anything? No, no, there wasn't. And they didn't swap them out or anything. That's cool. Okay, you wear glasses. How heavy versus the ones you're wearing now, which seem fairly lightweight? Like you notice, but like I have a pair of chunky LA glasses that honestly felt in the same ballpark. Okay. Like it wasn't. It wasn't too heavy. Because like it was on the ears. It was just those earpieces are so big.

29:09No pressure on the ears. I mean, if anything, it's a little on the front of your face. But, and the thing that struck me was, you know, they told me definitively, like the frames will be half as thick in the consumer version. Okay. So, okay. Wait, that's it. That's my cue to argue with you about paperware. Okay. Okay, so just describe the product that you saw, which is a very impressive demo, right? Lots of people saw the demo. Everyone is suitably impressed. Great. The thing that they accomplished that no one else has been able to accomplish is getting that display to work in that form factor.

29:4198 grams on your face, two hours of battery life. You can look at reality through the lenses, and it will put, from what I understand, labels above boxes of cocoa. That's wonderful. Mark Zuckerberg can play along with you. They had, right? They've iterated it and developed the existing EMG control band. We put a computer in a giant battery and are sending signals from it wirelessly to something else. Challenging because I've got to do it in real time, but a thing that existed. We put it all together in a product and we sell it far, far away. I'm giving them credit for a bunch of stuff. Some stuff they iterated, some stuff they bought, some stuff they had to build from scratch.

30:21and spend billions of dollars that basically no one else has managed to crack yet. All great. It's a long way from here to there. Three years. So that's their promise. And so the thing I would say is it's a vapor till it ships. And Meta has the extraordinary opportunity to show a thing that isn't shipping. They're all proud of it. You can see they're bursting with pride. They, in particular, built a display technology they can demo for two hours with a variety of people doing stuff that no one else has been able to do. Magic Leap, hacking the GPU of your brain, I think, is the closest to this.

30:59And they had people sitting down next to a box the size of a refrigerator, and they couldn't ship it. What is the... And Meta doesn't have to do that, right? They're selling the Quest. They make a bunch of money selling ads. They got Kristen Bell being an AI voice. They have a whole business that's running that can subsidize this thing, it's still vapor, in my opinion. Like, they have to ship it. They're just able to be confident that they've gotten this far. But it's unclear to me what this actually looks like as a product. Because I sincerely doubt it will have a wireless compute puck. And, like, once they start shipping the neural wristband, it won't take on a life of its own in some other way.

31:42And it will be completely divorced from the Quest ecosystem. there's just like there's a set of unanswered questions here that I think it's very tempting to pre-answer or imagine and that honestly is the fun part and I'm excited to do some of that with all of you but it's also like three years a long time a lot of things can change in three years and a lot of other things have to go right like the lenses in your story they are planning to ship regular lenses right they're going to go from silicon carbide to glass well they wouldn't tell me the material. And the truth is that they're parallel pathing like four or five different options.

32:18So they're right. But if your big innovation is the display and you're like, we have four options to bring this display to mark, you actually haven't picked. I think you're being simplistic when you say display, because the display is the projectors, the wave guides and the lenses. The lenses specifically are what they can't manufacture in a cheap enough way at scale. So the lenses will be different. The projectors are on the path of what I saw going to be the same kind of technology. They invented them, you know, from scratch, the wave guides, the same, they wouldn't tell me what the lenses are, not because I don't think they don't know necessarily, but because they haven't fully decided because they're locking these things in on like a timeline that is aggressive, but also they don't want to speak before they like, if they would have said, you know, let me back up like they decided to not ship orion two years ago so the timeline for this hardware stuff is farther out they when they when they say you know this is coming in a few years it's not like we have not set anything up for this to happen in three years they have they're on a believe me heads will roll if there is not a consumer version of these air classes in a few years but those are the stakes the stakes are we are rather we're all double clicking on cars to see what happens or heads will roll.

33:40I don't want to shy away from the stakes. The part of me that says it's great to imagine how these products might work, especially products that are meant to deliver AI as a new platform that replaces smartphones, on balance, I don't believe it probably doesn't work is the right answer. And the fact that they got the display to work, which no one else has ever achieved as far as I can tell, is incredible. Now comes like an incredible hard part. Okay, but let's talk about these lenses though, because like the lenses is part of the magic of these things, right? Like they went with this really expensive product to do this, to have the best light refraction and stuff.

34:19And that's because that material exists in the world. I mean, very little of it exists in the world. They usually make it all. But like they have to do all of that. Now they're going to have to go to a whole different thing, which presumably would have a lower price but similar qualities. And that seems not like an engineering, but like a science problem. And that seems like a big science problem for them to have. I don't think they see it that way. I think the - Yeah, I'm sure they don't. Yeah, I kind of agree with you. I mean, look, here's what they told me the consumer version will be. The frames will be about half as thick.

34:53Projector technology, the projector technology will be very similar, will be in line with what I saw. The wave guides will. The field of view, which was 70 degrees, which is super wide. will be slightly smaller, but not like dramatically. And the puck will exist, the band will exist. Like, it's just the lenses that they I think are looking at a few options, and they don't have to make the call right now. So they're not committing to it. And on the why they're not using silicon carbide and why they did it in the first place, is they told me they had hoped that the rest of the industry, whether it was other companies doing AR headsets or even the EV industry, for example, which hasn't grown in the last five years, I think, as everyone thought it would maybe five years ago, which is when they began the manufacturing of Orion and Ernest.

35:41They thought the rest of the industry would go to silicon carbide and build up the economies of scale with them. And they ended up being the only company that was trying to do this. So that's like a really interesting bet, right? But you think Apple and Google and Samsung are all going to go forward, invest in technology, and you'll just catch the tailwind, and that didn't happen. Yeah. They thought economies of scale would make silicon carbide more efficient and less costly to produce, and that didn't happen. I mean, Boz told me 90 % of the cost is the lenses. Yeah, because it's like having two diamond rings on your face.

36:17Yeah, but I'm coming back to the thing no one has solved is the displays. So whether the lenses are the key element of the displays or just they happen to have bought a lot of silicon carbide and they use them this time, like I don't – I'm curious to know like how much of the thing that they demoed is down to that lens. Because everybody's vision is the same, right? We're going to put glasses in your face. You're going to look at the world. We're going to layer digital information over the world. And then you're going to be able to take action on it. This is Apple's vision and they couldn't build it, so they built the Vision Pro.

36:53and if Apple is like we can't make it good enough on a timeline to sell here's a VR headset that fakes it Meta doesn't have to do that Meta's business is good enough to keep funneling money into this R &D project I think I'm curious if you read on Zuck wanting to show it because I think he was just having the time of his life yesterday at Meta Connect like showing off all the toys that he's built and like how far ahead of both Apple and Google in various ways there were a lot of shots at Apple and Google in that case Wait, Neelai, you and I have paid a lot of attention to these companies this year and have talked about this.

37:26Would you bet for or against Apple having something that looks and works an awful lot like Orion and is just as expensive to make in existence in their offices right now? I would say they probably have 500 variations of something that looks and works exactly like Orion. And Apple is not the kind of company that shows off science projects like this at all. They just won't do it. they've talked about it right i mean like tim cook in the lead up to the vision before the vision pro existed tim cook was like i'm making glasses like i'm gonna everything that he ever described was orion so i think zuck loves the fact that he showed off the thing that apple has been describing for years well before apple was ready to do it i do wonder like when apple's like we need chips they go to tsmc and they're like we're gonna buy all the chips we're gonna build you a factory corning, but it's your, we don't want to own it.

38:23We just want to build it for you. So we have the capacity for it. You, you run it. We're not putting that on our books. Like that's the level that Apple makes investments at. And I, I don't think they were able to pull off this form factor. And even with the vision pro, the form factor compromises are like now in retrospect, like ludicrous, right? Like the battery pack, all the stuff, right. The hand tracking. Um, Actually, even the Orion that uses your eyes for the pointers still feels like a miss to me. That's still overloading an input within output. I disagree because of the band. The eyes, when they're your drag and not your click, and the click is not sticking hands up, it works pretty well.

39:03I thought the same thing with the Vision Pro. If you try Orion at some point, I'd be curious to hear how you think when you try it. because the eye tracking was surprisingly good with the band. When you were having the conversation with Neelai, were you able to also do other stuff at the same time? Yeah. Because I'm just curious how that works if you're looking at him and then you need to move something over here. And that means you have to drag it. So you have to kind of look away from him in a potentially awkward way. You could stick your hand out and pinch it and drag it, or you could glance at it really quick, tap your fingers together.

39:39Oh, because it does hand tracking too. It does hand tracking and it will merge hand tracking with all of it anytime you put your hands up. That's smart. Yeah. Well, the reason I brought all this up is like Apple punted on the big problem, the display problem, and then tried to solve a bunch of the other problems. Or at least show you what a bunch of the other problems could look like if they were solved. Like hand tracking, like Windows in space, spatial compute, all this stuff. But they couldn't solve the display problem so that you end up with a Vision Pro. Even in the compromised state of the Vision Pro's form factor.

40:07Sure. Meta has solved the display problem, at least we think, in a way that costs$10 ,000. And we have yet to see how they will solve the rest of the problems. And that is kind of just an interesting place. I agree. Here's the company that could not solve the display, but they shipped the product, like the operating system and the app model and the blah, blah, blah. And then here's the company that solved the display, but can't ship it because it's too expensive. Eventually, it seems like the answer is going to be someone will get to the right answer in the middle first. But again, I keep coming back to like Heath last year when Meta tried to front run the Vision Pro.

40:42One of the things that Zuckerberg basically said was we could have done something as good as the Vision Pro, but it would have been as expensive as the Vision Pro and we don't want to do that. I think it is perfectly plausible that at a bunch of other companies in the tech industry right now, there is a thing that looks and works and costs just like Orion. And then there's whatever Snap has. And I was going to say, the difference is there are only two companies willing to show it to people. And of those two, Meta is just absolutely kicking Snap's ass. But in a certain way, kudos to Meta for being the ones who are actually willing to be out in public, sort of showing the state of the art on what they're working on.

41:16But I genuinely wonder how far ahead it actually is, because the gap between we've made a thousand of these and they cost$10 ,000 each and we can make millions of them at a reasonable price is so much bigger than anybody ever makes it out to be, including experienced hardware companies. Like the gap between I can make one and I can make a thousand is huge. And like kudos to Meta, they're there. But thousands to millions is a completely different thing. Wait, wait, wait. But have we seen people wearing, is there an increased use of glassware in like at Google, at Apple? Like, does it just seem like more people have bad vision in thick glasses?

41:54I mean, Google's been showing off the, there are the prototype glasses in a bunch of Google videos recently. Like they're, that kind of look like the size and shape of Orion. Like this stuff is just out there. I just, as The Verge's foremost face computer expert, again, this is a cry for help. This is not a brag. I actually will push back on you guys. I do not think anyone has anything working in this form factor as a standalone kit that is not completely on rails or something on a desk that you look through. I don't think that actually exists. Can I, just for the sake of our own comments, can I just say a bunch of nouns so that people...

42:30What? HoloLens. Xreal 2 Pro Air, or whatever it's called. HTC. Other companies. Yes, I know other companies have made glasses before. I know that the Holo—Alex and I have both changed spark plugs wearing a HoloLens. Like, the form factor innovation here is real. Yeah. Like, getting it down to glasses. I'm not trying to take away from that. I'm just pointing at, like, it's vapor until it ships. Like, it's just one of our rules, right? And the distance from what we see today to a product, all of the questions I have to answer in the middle—this is what I was asking about the Quest. It's like, they've answered a bunch of these questions with the Quest.

43:09I suspect they think that some of those answers are the wrong answers, actually. And they need to go in a different way to enable some of the things they want with true AR glasses. I think that's right. I also just think that before this week, I honestly didn't know where they were at with this in terms of how they were going to do it. And I feel like after this week, they actually have the right approach of how they're going about it, which is just relentlessly focusing on the form factor, which meta has made a lot of hardware mistakes over the years and has, I think, just not had the right priorities in terms of what they're building and what it's for or even understanding what it's for.

43:50It took them 10 years really to understand that the quest is really just a gaming device, even still. How much do you think that's the Ray-Ban lesson? That's part of it. But I just I think I think there's clarity here about why people would want these. And like something Zuckerberg told me was, I thought, pretty illustrative of this is like, we want them to be just as good when they're off, because we know that you're not going to have the AR on maybe most of the day. And so focusing on that first and letting the technology then kind of fill in, I think is the right approach versus just how they've approached hardware so far, which is like, let's just put as much technology in something as we can and see how people will use it.

44:33And here they're like, no, we know how people will use this. It's utility. It's like heads up, lightweight interactions, video calling and AI. And the form factor is primary. and that's what like that's the intro of the piece like i walk in and i'm looking at them you know i'm probably four feet away and i you can't tell you can't tell that they're ar glasses and it's like yeah even that in as a prototype and i struggle with this because yeah nila it is vapor until it ships but it's it's also not like it's somewhere between a mirage and a product like it's it is real like i touched it i used it but it's not it's not productized So seeing that and going, wow, like the form, like, and it's going to be half as thick in a few years.

45:18Like, okay, I finally see where this is going, especially with the band. And I feel like before this week, even I, as someone who's been reporting on this a lot, couldn't really see where they were going. And I think they feel so confident in where they're going and the clarity of what they're going to do that that's why they shut it off this week. And also I think Zuck just thinks it's really cool. Yeah. And he's right. It is really cool. No one else has done it. Again, I'm just not taking anything away from it. No one else has pulled off the display. Like hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, have been thrown at this problem of can I put lenses in front of your face that can convincingly in 3D augment reality, not just show you a TV like the X-Real glasses do and not require you to wear a HoloLens and still have no field of view.

46:02Like billions upon billions of dollars in this industry have been thrown at this problem and only Meta has allowed people to wear it for two hours. And it's not an overestimation to say that they have probably spent Snap's market cap on Orion in the last 10 years. And it's like no other company would do this. Like Apple killed the car project because it's like we don't see a realistic timeline to shipping. We're not even sure what it is. Like this is a uniquely meta thing. And it's like a personal thing for Zuckerberg, which is just like, screw Apple and Google. I'm never going through this shit again on mobile, you know, that he's gone through.

46:39Actually, hold right there, Alex. I want to talk about Zuck versus Apple and Google. And I want to talk to the Ray-Bans a bit, but we got to take a break. So let's take a break and come back and then we can talk about Zuck's war with Tim Cook. We'll be right back. Adobe Acrobat Studio. So brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do. Do your work with ease and speed. PDF spaces is all you need. Do hours of research in an instant. With key insights from an AI assistant. Take a template with a click. Now your Prezo looks super slick. Close that deal. Yeah, you won. Do that, doing that, did that, done.

47:09Now you can do that, do that with Acrobat. Now you can do that, do that with the all-new Acrobat. It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. All right, we're back. he threw it for the break we're talking about zuck and you said he doesn't want to go through this shit again which is you you just interviewed him for quite a long time you saw him on stage at meta connect i mean he is i mean the hairs flow in the the latin t-shirts are in latin he's feeling himself he's bringing out he's got a chain he's bringing out mma fighters for meta ray-ban demos just for the hell of it at this point take mine out he's like i can produce in the mma lightweight champion of the world at will like here he is get out of here it's great it's all good but the the thing that strikes me about that is yes there's a politics of it which maybe we should talk about a little bit but he really thinks that these glasses are the next great computing platform and he wants to win that fight more than anything and he probably perceives that he's ahead but put that in context of why he does not want to lose to Apple and Google.

48:24There's so many reasons. Do you guys remember when all of Facebook's internal apps went down for like a full day and the entire company like ground to a fault because Apple revoked its developer license? I do. That's just one example. There's app tracking transparency. I don't want you to get into a moral debate about that, but like it objectively like killed billions of dollars of Meta's ad revenue. Um, there's all of the app store policies that he's talked about for a very long time. Um, like people think of meta as just an app developer and they are really in terms of their business, but they came up, you know, 20 years ago, they watched mobile happen.

49:05They tried to do a phone failed at it. Um, Zuckerberg has always wanted to be in control of a platform. And this is something that I think like companies that were born in the mobile era don't even really think is possible because it's like you just come into the reality you're in. But he knows what the reality was before mobile when he was building Facebook early on. And I think they really feel that if Apple does glasses and the Vision Pro people start using it and they ship a cheaper one and these start selling, maybe they don't let MetaZaps on there at all. And there's this just real tension there of who has the distribution control.

49:46It's why Google pays billions of dollars to Apple to have search in Safari. Whoever controls how you access your thing ultimately has leverage over you. And Zuckerberg's been feeling that pretty acutely for 10 plus years. And so, yeah, this is as much about inventing the future as it is correcting the past. And I don't think any company without that unique context would be doing this. So that's a uniquely meta thing. Can I just read a quote from the interview that I thought was very telling? You guys spent a long time talking about basically what AR and AI are going to do to the next generation of gadgets.

50:23And then what he says is, for what it's worth, I also think that all the AI work is going to make phones a lot more exciting. You know, blah, blah, blah. AI is cool. If I were at any of the other companies trying to design what the next few versions of iPhone or Google's phones should be, I think that there's a long and interesting roadmap of things that they can do with AI that as an app developer, we can't. like to me that's the whole thing right he's like if i am convinced that if meta had its way the puck wouldn't exist on orion the puck would be your phone yes that's what those companies want and they just can't do it because the only companies that are ever going to be allowed to do it are google and apple and and like and so if i'm mark i'm like oh a gigantic part of what i am doing should be tethered to this thing that i'm just not allowed to touch and that would piss me off.

51:09They are so mad that they can't automatically sync photos off your Ray-Bans into your iPhone camera roll. They can do it on Android. It's super annoying. It's so dumb. They can do it on Android because the APIs are there. Android's a little looser. iOS? No. The reason the first ones, the first Ray-Bans also had a lot of issues, they had a lot of Bluetooth pairing issues and limitations with what they could do with Apple. And Apple is, because of the EU, gradually being forced to open up its APIs. But yeah, they're pissed they can't sync photos to a camera roll. But why doesn't Meta complain more, I guess?

51:43They complain all the time. They complain all the time. We saw Epic put their money where their mouth is. Does Meta do that? It doesn't seem like they do. Well, Meta's also monopolistic. Yeah, I was like, is it because they know that Lena will be like, yeah, that's true. This is what I mean by the politics of it all. And Alex, in your talk, like, Mark, there's just hard shots at the EU, like, throughout your interview, where he's like, they should figure out what they want. And it's like, dude, what they want is, like, slightly better Bluetooth on our phones. Right? They want to open, interrupt between messaging platforms.

52:19And so that is bad for WhatsApp. Like, straight up, I think they're trapped between we would love for you to kick open the doors on iOS, but also don't do that to any of our platforms that have the same kind of restrictions. I mean, they're being forced to do interop with WhatsApp. Like we just wrote about, you're going to be able to message people outside of WhatsApp. Yeah. Yes, there's truth to what you're saying. I would argue like Apple is still super locked down and it's opening up over time, but I don't think they think Apple will open up soon enough. And so it's like, we need to just invent the next thing.

52:54Well, and I think my read of this is that if you're meta, the easiest way to get where you're going would be to start all of this cool AR stuff as an accessory to your phone, right? And the reason that the Ray-Bans have worked is that they are an accessory to your phone. They're a vastly underpowered accessory to your phone just because of what they're allowed to do, but also the restrictions of the technology and stuff. But like the 1.5 step of this transition you would want to be your your phone becomes the computer and then you you have a bunch of new wearable accessories that you use. You're just not allowed to build that.

53:30And so what all these companies have to do is basically like engineer a giant societal shift out of nowhere because the like gradual change that actually would make this make sense is just walled off to all but two companies on the planet. And if I were anybody but one of those two companies, I would be really pissed about that. So what has Zuckerberg done? He has gone and linked up with the Italians and the French because it's technically Ellesor Luxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban, is French and Italian. But what did you think, Nilay, of his comment? So they've just done a 10-year deal with Ellesor Luxottica.

54:04The idea is that Meta's tech stack is something Ellesor will be able to put into any of its lines. It owns a ton of brands, Oakley, Ray-Ban. It's a monopoly. You and I are both wearing glasses made by them right now, presumably. Pull over in your car. Look at your glasses. Probably made by Exelon. They just bought Supreme, so Supreme glasses. He confirmed in our interview that they're buying a stake in Ellesaur Luxottica, which was news. But his comment about he thinks that Ellesaur will be for Europe and smart glasses what Samsung was for Korea and phones. Incredible. It's a good line. It's a great line.

54:44It is extraordinarily presumptuous in the best possible way. Yeah. Like if you're at Samsung, you're like, yo, we were Samsung before. We make ships. Our nuclear reactor division is doing just fine. So that is confusing. But what he means is Android is the operating system enabled Samsung to enter the mobile phone market. But Samsung is now even more Samsung than it was before. I would point out, by the way, a Saturday Samsung alert. If you are a virtual listener, you know that Samsung required all of its executives to work six days in the office to insert a sense of urgency and crisis into the company.

55:27They don't make anything, so all they can do is come up with deals. They cut the price of one of their gaming monitors by 50 % and gave you not one but two TVs for free if you buy one. Incredible. It's on the website. Saturday Samsung, everybody. You had to go on that tangent. You had to. It's just incredible. Every part of Saturday Samsung is better than the last. But what he's saying is there was a hardware vendor in Samsung, and Android came along, provided it the operating system and the opportunity to go address the world market, and now they are Samsung. Again, extraordinarily presumptuous in the best way.

55:59Are you saying that Estelore Luxottica is a hardware maker and are something is the operating system that will let you go become Samsung? Well, you're missing some key components. right? SLRS Auto doesn't make chips. Samsung makes fucking DRAM. They're like the hardware maker. They make OLED displays and chips. The first processor in iPhone was a Samsung ARM processor, right? So like the industry was built on top of Samsung from the jump. I'm pretty sure I'm looking at these new transparent Ray-Bans they announced. I'm sorry, Tom Warren, translucent. Translucent Ray-Bans. I just really ran into, like, I work with a bunch of nerds this week.

56:42And I think it's a Qualcomm chip inside, actually. I'm just saying, like, all of that, like, Samsung's latent capabilities were brought together because Google provided them an operating system that let them become dominant in phones. Maybe Microsoft could have provided an operating system. You remember Samsung made a bunch of weird Windows phones in the early days. um i but does luxotica have chips and ram or does it just have design chops and retail distribution i think that whole comment was basically another like shot at the eu because the big criticism of the eu regulatory stuff is we the united states it's...

57:22Deeply weird, libertarian, unregulated United States makes the tech companies, and you make the taxes. and all you have is Spotify, which only ever complains about not having access to iOS. And that basically is the shape of the complaint. We have European listeners that are going to argue with me about something or the other. It's fine. But that is the shape of the complaint from Silicon Valley. And I think Mark is saying, look, I'll take one of your companies and I'll turn them into Samsung. Just get the hell out of my way. And I don't know that that comparison holds up because, again, Luxottica does own everything.

57:53But instead of DRAM fabs, they own Supreme. supreme yeah it's just a very different yeah but potentially like as the as the proprietor of the neil eyes insane theory of wearable bullshit uh i'm ready i'm ready for this if you're opening this door i'm walking right in you you have to acknowledge that making the d-ram and owning supreme might be equally important in this like oh they are they think it doesn't you can't sit here and tell me that fiddliness and value are opposing things unless you agree that looking good on your face is important. And there are a small number of companies that are very, very good at making things that people like wearing on their face.

58:35And I think you could argue that a lot of companies in tech have tried to acquire or develop that capability and can't do it. There's no way Meta would have made these. There's no way they would look anything like these. It honestly, it might be easier to learn how to make DRAM as a company than to learn how to be cool. Yeah. OK, well, can we just clip that that line and just put it on TikTok and just let it live its own life? I sincerely believe that. The history of technology said that is probably true. Easier to make DRAM than glasses that look good. I mean, the ones that they wear, like they got just a little, right?

59:10The Orions, because they look like Buddy Holly glasses from the 50s. Which are actually kind of coming back. Like that was another thing. That was another thing Zuckerberg said is like, it's kind of nice that chunky glasses are back in style. This is like a Zuckerberg long game, right? Like he bought off a bunch of fashion houses in the background. I was like, make the glasses bigger. And like, you know, it's like that scene from Devil Wears Prada. He turned all the knobs on Instagram to make vintage cool again. And now it's back. I mean, he's right. He's right. I was at the Snap event the week before and I saw someone wearing what I thought were the new spectacles and they were Prada glasses.

59:43I'm just saying. cerulean was picked in this room for you Alex that's what's happening here no but like I'm saying I agree I'm very excited to get my clear Ray-Bans on Monday they look so good they only make them in the small size and I have a huge head and I'm furious about this you're 49 or 50 or 52 whatever what's the bigger go bigger 52 is like 60 just as big as they can be 52 is like most brands are like sorry like yeah i know which is why you're probably a 50 i'm like a 49 50 these are comfortable stop measuring my head first of all i've just been enough with you in person to kind of you know map it in my mind i have a side hobby of head measurement yeah it's not problematic at all uh i'm just saying as big as they can get and i know boz has an equally sized noggin and i know that he should have built the bigger ones because the regular ones come in two sizes and these only to come in medium.

1:00:43But I'm getting them on Monday. I'm very excited. It's the first time I've got them. I think the clear ones look sick. I'm excited to do all the stuff with them. The jump that I'm curious about, right, because now meta AI is more conversational. It can remember things. They've added some capability to it. That's all running in their cloud still, right? Like you talk to the glasses. It talks to your phone. It uses your phone's connection. They've got a decent amount that's on device now on the glasses on device. Yeah. Cause they're, they're doing with llama, these super fine tune distilled models.

1:01:16So the latency on these is like pretty incredible in terms of how quick the AI is. It's not humane pin, wait a minute to set a timer. It's like answer something in like a second, right? Or like, tell me what's in this photo and it does it in a couple seconds. And I got the demo of the new AI stuff that they're adding to the Ray-Bans. So did Kylie. So did Jay. And it's like, wow, okay. They're, they're understanding this form factor and what's unique about it. So being able to like, look at a phone number and say, call that phone number. And it just calls it. And the call comes in on your glasses because it's paired to your phone or scan that QR code.

1:01:55Like you're looking at a menu, the webpage for the menu just gets sent to your phone. Um, like breaking down some of the interactions you would do with a phone that require extra steps and like just like taking a step away is like a kind of an aha moment when you do it you're like oh like this is where it's going yeah and it's the first time that i feel like ai makes sense in a wearable um and did you guys watch the keynote in the live translation demo that zuck did yeah that's when he brought out the mma fighter yeah he said yell some words at me in spanish that is wild that is wild that is like that is like putin's earpiece on stage, like at scale, you know, for like anyone.

1:02:36Um, and it works. I mean, it was a thing like Google promised a couple of years ago, right? Yeah. I think that the really interesting part of this is these ideas are all just the ideas. Like these are the demos we have been hearing about or promised for a decade, if not more, right? Live translation. Like Apple has live translation on your iPhone. You just open the app and it'll do it. Google can do it. It's the form factor. Like you're saying, Alex, that like, okay, we've put this in glasses. Your phone is away. There's no screen. There's just an ambient computer, another thing that has been promised for a billion years.

1:03:11And it's just paying attention and helping you out as you go through your day. Does that ambient computer require sending an awful lot of data to Meta? It sure does, right? It just really, really does. But that's the trade-off. All the way down to one day, I'm guessing Orion will have my dream feature, which is I will look at someone and it will tell me their name. Yes. And that will absolutely require Meta searching its gigantic worldwide surveillance database of names and faces. But like they're going to build that. What's the technical name? I was waiting for you to bring this up in my Orion demo.

1:03:44The VP of wearables at Meta said we're excited about name tags. Yeah. It is the feature. If you can do name tags, it doesn't matter. I will wear the backpack. Yeah. Right? Like all day long. Everybody at CES. I want to double click on what you said, like that the phones have live translation, because I think this is important when we're talking about like these form factors. Yes, they do. Like, especially iOS 18. It's really easy to just do like live language translation from the action button and from the action button. There's something about not having your phone out, though, that feels like, oh, I would actually use this.

1:04:19I like think about like talking to someone in another language and holding your phone between you. It's like an interview. Like, it's just awkward. but it's like, oh wait, when this is in a form factor where like they can't even hear that what they're saying is being translated to me in my language and I'm not even pulling a device out, like all of a sudden these features make sense as like something you would use in the world. And I think that's what these mean. Like these, it's like taking all these concepts and like putting in a device that like, oh, like you'd actually do this. Yeah. Cause they are cuter than the pixel buds.

1:04:50No disrespect. Well, so here, these are, they're just, again, the ideas, the end state, the goals, very familiar. Everybody shares them. The demos, as described, very familiar. Everybody has the same ones. It's really down to where is the form factor? How fast can we get there? Can we ship it at scale? Are the phone makers, the operating system vendors going to get in our way, which is a big deal? And you're kind of like, okay, well, the closest Apple is fundamentally is AirPods. Yeah. Right? Like fundamentally the closest they are to this kind of idea is AirPods. They haven't put glasses on their face yet.

1:05:25They have an Apple Watch that doesn't really do any AR stuff. They have pinchy pinch. You can tap away with an Apple Watch. I wear my Meta Ray-Bans. The number one feeling I have is, boy, I wish this actually tied in with my phone so I could use Siri because then I would have access to all my stuff. Yeah, Siri could just like text the wrong person at any point. I could just play my music. okay so that's that so it's airpods for apple alex you were just bringing up the pixel buds yeah that is google's although does google remember that it made the pixel it made the pixel buds too which sure yeah the review came up the same time uh yeah the metal event so nilai airpods great example with my airpods i can say hey remind me about whatever i can say whatever i want it to remind me about at a certain time right and i'll get the notification in the reminders app with the Ray-Bans, you can say, Hey, look at this and remind me about it at whatever time.

1:06:20Right. Cause it can see. Yeah. That's like, that's wildly useful to me. I cannot tell you how many times throughout the day. I just want to have a snapshot of whatever I'm looking at and go back to it later. And like those ideas, because you literally have a camera on your face, you can't do that with AirPods. And so you're right. Like the closest we have are these earbuds that are internet connected and can hear our voice. There's something about adding the cameras though. That's big. So, you know, the, the prevailing theory of why the camera control button is not just on the pro phone, but also on the regular 16 is that Apple at visual intelligence, and then you'll be able to quickly access the camera and look at stuff.

1:06:57And when, when you say theory, you mean Apple just said that out loud in that many words, like they haven't shipped yet. It's vapor till it ships. Like, no, but I mean, that is it's whether it's good or not as a question, But like that is that is clearly that is half the purpose of the thing. Like they have just said as much at this point. My theory, whether Apple has its own unified theory of what it's doing. It's like, sure. I've used Control Center and iOS 18 enough to be like, did anybody pay attention? But also there are there are increasingly convincing and well sourced rumors about things like AirPods with a camera, which would that look like?

1:07:31And an Apple Watch with a camera, because I agree with you, Heath, like the camera is the thing. both as the input and as like the activity, right? Like I hear from people all the time for whom the reason to have the smart glasses is to take pictures of your kids, like, or your pets or whoever. Like I'm convinced my dog knows when I take out my phone to take a picture of her. I'm a hundred percent sure and she runs away and now she doesn't anymore and I can take a picture of it. It's awesome. I can't wait to get these glasses. Did you buy the glasses too, David? I already have two pairs. Okay.

1:08:00I don't have a great answer for why I have two pairs. Do you have like the large size or the small size? Because if you don't need the large size, I'm in the market. I have, I don't know, I also have a big head. So we'll have to figure this out together. Alex, how big do you think David's head is? What do you think, 49, 50? I'm going to guess he's like a 48, 47. Neil has like a 65. Yeah, I'm saying, bigger the better. It's not insulting to me, 80. Let's go. The bigger the better.

1:08:28So we talked a lot about the meta stuff. I want to make sure we talk about two other pieces of Meta Connect that are important and then spend a little time in open AI before we go to the later end. The other piece of Metaconnect that I think is deeply fascinating is you guys did talk about AI a lot and how it will be expressed. It seems like they're chasing a big distribution advantage with glasses that maybe other people will catch up to. But then there's like training data and open source models. Zuckerberg said, and I think this is one of the shots at Google, like I think all of the we're doing live demos were shots at Apple for doing infomercials.

1:09:04I think when he says things like, we are the Linux of open source, because Llamas, like that's a shot at Google, right? Yeah. We're just going to have more distribution. We're going to have more development. We're going to be better at everybody else. Bees open, always bees closed, which is usually Google's model. And that's just not how Google's doing it. They had to suck up a lot of training data. And you asked about people wanting to opt out. There's all the celebrities on Instagram right now saying opt me out of this. His answer, explain his answer. And then we should talk about a little bit because it was really interesting.

1:09:35Yeah. He said the quiet part out loud, which is that everyone thinks their data is more valuable than it actually is for these models. In aggregate, it's valuable. But when you're a company like Meta and it's like the entire world is your corpus of information and the internet at large, what exactly do you have to have? And I think, you know, we were talking a lot about publishers and about how Meta has basically thrown its hands up on news. And, you know, Rupert Murdoch is in Australia saying, pay me or I'm going to take your news off. And Zuckerberg's like, fine, like, whatever, like people don't even like this.

1:10:13Um, so we were talking a lot about publishers, but I think he's kind of just saying that, look, like, yes, you know, people have feelings about their data being used to train these models. Um, and yes, we're all doing it, but we also like, if you, you know, if you don't like it, like go away, like whatever. So it's really interesting to me about this is that's the line to the publishers. Like, we will derank your news. We won't have news on threads however you want to interpret all of the many things Adam Asaria said about that. There's no opt-out for any user of these services unless you're in the EU from having your stuff trained on.

1:10:56And guess where meta AI is not available in the EU. Right. And he did say, I remain eternally confident that we will launch this in the EU. Something like that. On stage. but there's just I would just draw a connection and I think it is very funny to dunk on people posting what amounts to chain letters on their Instagram stories being like dear Zuckerberg by the statute of Rome I command you from not we were doing this on our Facebook walls like 15 years ago yeah this keeps happening yeah this is a chain letter like that's what it is and it's like people think the law is magic words you know and if you just like issue an incantation to the internet like someone has to do what you say it's like usually chain letters have a lot more like promising death than than these yeah i really miss that i wish if it was like send this to 12 of your friends or zuckerberg will appear in your house in his latin shirt and beat the shit out of you that would be great have you ever fallen down the hole of uh courtroom videos of people uh invoking the sovereign citizen defense yes and like local courtrooms and then they're like shut Shut up.

1:11:57And the judges are like, that doesn't mean anything. You're going to jail. They're like, by what authority? And the judge is always like, because I'm the judge. And it's just like that. That's happening on Instagram. And it is very funny. It's Michael Scott on The Office yelling, I declare bankruptcy. It is exactly that. And then somebody pulls him aside and says, that's nothing. And he goes, I didn't say it. I declared it. That's what these people are doing. So it is very funny. And Tom Brady, who has a meta deal to use his face for a chatbot, has done it. He did. He did it. He did. They canceled the deal because that idea was bad.

1:12:30And they came up with a better idea of what if we just used a celebrity's voices and said they were the celebrities instead of pretending they were other characters? Yeah, it was Tom Brady as like Barry, your workout partner or something. Yeah, it was very confusing. Not great. But it was his face. And then Kristen Bell. You can just chat with Kristen Bell. She put up one of these that Kylie noticed because she's a Kristen Bell fan. And so she's like, you have a deal with Meta AI and you have an Instagram post saying don't use my stuff for Meta AI. right well that was before she saw the zeros on the check yeah money money is cool yeah they're paying for these celebrity voices great reporting millions of dollars the rest of us yeah so here's what i will just say about that thing the idea that you can negotiate with meta feels intuitive to everyone right or any platform i'm posting my stuff here i should be able to tell you how i want you to use it, but you don't.

1:13:25And the answer is, well, you already signed the terms of service and you go away. You didn't, but everyone knows nobody reads that shit. When half of your users are like collectively trying to renegotiate the terms of their agreement with you, that means there's a problem. Like kind of, they're doing it on your platform though. That's the thing. Like, well, that's fine. But like, you can't, there's, there's so other things in the world where like, you don't get to negotiate on this level, except for weird internet terms of service that everyone agrees, no one reads, right? Like, and I would just say like, if you are one of the many, many, many young staffers in DC who listens to the show, which is a weird audience that we have, and I love you.

1:14:09I'm glad that we're making the commute to your basement office in the capital better. You should look at all the people posting. I don't want you to train on my data on meta's own platform and the basic response of, yeah, go fuck yourself and be like, oh, this is actually what regulations are for, right? Like the people are expressing that they do not like that the terms of this arrangement are not in their favor. And no one as an individual has enough power to change it. And Mark Zuckerberg is like, everyone overvalues their work in this context. so I don't have to pay attention to it. Like that is actually the problem that like, it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat or a Libertarian or whatever, that thing is the problem that governments are meant to equalize.

1:14:59How is this any different from using data for ad targeting? Think about when we copy and pasted protest messages on Facebook 15 years ago, what was it about? It was there using our data for - I'm putting this all in the same line. Right, this is all in the same line of things. My point is - When everyone is like, I signed this agreement, I didn't read it. Right. And now I've handed over whatever leverage I might've had because I signed this agreement that I didn't read. And the second I made aware that I, that by saying abracadabra, this is like go back in my favor. I will just happily start yelling abracadabra as loudly as I can.

1:15:32Like that is, that's the problem. Yeah. But that's also just like, no one reads EULAs and that's, that's. But like, so who should read the EULA for you? Should we all hire? And you can't do AI. And then, and then what are you? Do you have bargaining power if you disagree with the terms? No. If the using iTunes updates its terms of service and ships it to you, are you like, you know, Tim, paragraph five, a couple of notes. Are you saying that social media needs to unionize? I am saying terms of service agreement should be illegal, like flatly. Because they're a contract. Kristen Bell for president.

1:16:05They are contracts no one reads. And it's these moments. I just have a lot of empathy. I've written the don't believe the Instagram meme story five times in my career. And one time I got a call from Instagram. They're like, thank you so much. And I was like, I don't like this. Because it happens over and over again for a reason, which is whenever you offer somebody back the mechanism of control over their own information, they're like, yeah, I'd like that back, please. Yeah. Universally. Yep. And no one reads the agreements. The agreements change all the time. The agreements always change in favor of the platform using your data for more and more and more things.

1:16:44And then you get Zuckerberg saying everyone overestimates the value of their individual data. And it's like, who? What is the mechanism that you would rebalance this equation with? There isn't one. There isn't one. And I think Zuckerberg's also thinking, yeah, guess what? You're using Instagram and you're going to keep using Instagram. Well, he's not incentivized to say, actually. Yeah, we should deliver more value. Yeah, he doesn't care. He's like, yeah, give me all of your data for free so I can make lots of money and afford my cool shirts. Like, of course he is. Look, I'm not saying we all shouldn't dunk on a bunch of people posting abracadabra to Instagram.

1:17:16Like, we absolutely should. We should. It is one of the funniest repeat memes that can possibly exist is people basically doing sovereign citizen on Instagram. Like, very funny. But if you just – I'm just – one step back from a place of empathy, it's a bunch of people communicating that they don't like the terms of the agreement. And there's no mechanism to channel that into any change. That agreement is not changing. I fully agree with you. And that's how I framed it to him. I'm like, do you sympathize with this icky feeling people have about this trade-off and the sense that value is not flowing back to them?

1:17:51And he said the thing about how everyone overvalues their data. Well, there's also a sense of, yeah, if you feel this way, stop using the product. We were doing this about ad targeting and our data being used for ad targeting 15 years ago. and copy-paste messages on Facebook. Everyone's still using, well, not everyone. Three billion people apparently are still on Facebook. So for them, it's like the platforms, they don't see any data to suggest that this value exchange is actually unfair because in their mind, we would stop using the services. Yeah. Yeah, and that just presumes that people have that power.

1:18:28What do you mean? You can afford to do that? You can delete Instagram? Yeah, I would say these things are businesses for a lot of people, right? This is a way they advertise their businesses. This is a way they advertise themselves if they're influencers. Most people in the Verge's newsroom are no longer posting on X. People can make decisions about the apps that they post on. People can. Even when they have career implications. I think there's also a lot of journalists who are still on X. I think there is a power imbalance there that Neelai is speaking to of like, these people have no power in this relationship.

1:18:58It is gone. It is, if you want to use this, suck it up. And I think people slowly get tired of that. Right. I think it's just that there are very few other relationships you have. If you are a creator, and creators are mostly just business people at this point. They're all running content businesses on the terms of the platforms. If you're a celebrity, you're just a content business on the platform, which is why I think the celebrities are so fast to be like, don't use my stuff. Like, they know they do not want their voice and likeness to use without payment. And I'm just – all I'm saying is from a place of empathy, one step back, there's no mechanism to channel this frustration into anything.

1:19:37And that is actually – again, I don't think you have to be very political on either side of the spectrum. It's like, oh, this is actually the thing we should – this is what it's for, right? Like a lot of people, like most people in the society would like to renegotiate the terms of their agreement with the large platforms. That is called a privacy law, right? We're just going to reset the floor of the agreement. A lot of people want to reset the terms of how their content can be used for training. That's just an AI training law. Like that – it's just very simple. And like I don't know what those laws should do or how they should read or whether you are a conservative and you think the answer is like, I don't know, some weird public-private partnership that the Heritage Foundation runs.

1:20:21Like those are those ideas. Or you're a hardcore liberal and you're like, I will start a government commission. and we will, the government will set the rates, which is what we do in copyright law. Like there's a million solutions to this. I don't think that's a very liberal solution in copyright law. I'm just saying there are government entities that set rates in other parts of this world. But it's just, I would just point, like we're talking about AI and distributing it and who has the power, where the models run and how powerful the experiences can be that you had, Alex. And underneath it all is like, hey, do all of these people feel ripped off?

1:20:54like is that is that okay and like zuckerberg's answer is zuckerberg's answer i asked sundar pichai this about youtube in the same kind of framework of a question how do you feel about opening a training on youtube and he was like i think that would be inappropriate and it's like do you understand why all of your creators think that's inappropriate and he just like sighed at me and i i suspect something else is gonna happen there like some set of lawsuits or some scarlett Johansson open AI situation where it just becomes less and less tenable to be this, this blithe about it. We, we should get off this point.

1:21:30Cause we could do this for hours and we'll end up talking about the Fediverse and it'll be a whole thing. But let's do it. But the thing is no one has any reason to believe that any of what you just said is true. And what's actually happening is everybody is now saying the quiet part out loud. Eric Schmidt is out here being like, Oh, you want data from the internet? Just steal it. Mustafa Suleiman was like, Oh, it's all free. It's on the internet. You can just have it. Like, this is what everybody thinks. And there has been absolutely nothing to convince them otherwise so far. So if I'm Mark Zuckerberg, why I'm going to look around and be like, oh, I'm going to be the good guy here.

1:22:01And it's going to cost me in this race to AI that is suddenly the only thing anyone cares about. Like, no, of course he's not going to do that. He's going to say, oh, you like Instagram? Keep using Instagram. We can do this for another hour, but also his new attitude, which is like, I no longer apologize for everything. Apologizing was a 20 year mistake that I'm not going to make anymore. Yeah. No. Dude, you grow the hair out. You get a little older, you know, like I'm thinking about growing my hair out. I watched that interview. I was like, oh, I could get that. Is it the cauliflower hair? Is that what they call it?

1:22:29Look, when every 12-year-old in your boy is gifted a gold chain and you have to make a decision. And I made one decision and I'm saying I could remake that decision. You could. The hair is getting long. You could. Yeah. I feel like you're like, you're a few months away from curls. Oh, this hair is very curly. I could tomorrow. We're not talking about this right now. We are changing the subject. Mila's hair is so French and we need to go to a break. Yeah. Can we, just before we go to a break, I do want to talk about OpenAI. Oh, yeah. It seems like chaos over there. What is going on over there, Alex?

1:23:00Did you guys know that OpenAI is a nonprofit? Do they know that? I'm not sure they do. I think they're finding out and that's what's going on, honestly, like at a very high level. But everyone's leaving. Like Mira Morati, the CTO, is leaving. Greg Brockman, the president, apparently just vanished. Yeah, there's this great photo of all of the execs, Aaliyah, Greg, Mira, and Sam together for this big New York Times profile. This was like right before the boardroom coup, which Neelai was almost a year ago when you were at Disney. No way. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? You were at Disney not getting to ride the rides almost a year ago because we were reporting on this, which is, yeah, nuts to me.

1:23:41But there's this photo of him and all these execs, and now they've just Photoshopped out everyone except Sam Altman, who's the only one left. And what's happening is that OpenAI just raised the largest round of funding of all time. I think they just went above Elon's mega round for XAI, which was, I think,$6 billion on purpose, of course, optics. They're valued at$150 billion, which is more than the market cap of Goldman Sachs. Guess what? OpenAI is legally still a nonprofit. They get tax breaks in the state of California as a nonprofit. They make billions of dollars a year. And so what's happening is this very chaotic, fast transition from what was a research lab, we're going to invent AGI, all the Ilya stuff, to in the last year when Sam won the board coup.

1:24:33no, we are a large commercial for-profit next big mega tech company. And they hired a CFO, they hired a CPO who used to run product at Instagram, not the other one who used to run product at Instagram, who's an anthropic. And they are very chaotically turning into a real big company. And I think what you're seeing is a lot of the previous era being abruptly managed out, quitting, what have you. And it's the Altman show. And he famously does not have equity in OpenAI, has been doing a ton of interesting dealings with other startups and investments around OpenAI. It is now reportedly going to be getting a large stake in this new for-profit company that they're creating.

1:25:21I will love to see how, what the tax implications are of this transition, more to come on that. And the state of California really doesn't like when nonprofits become for profits. It's a very, very contested thing. And yeah, I think that's what's happening at high level. So Mira, the CTO is out who was memed with her reaction to, did you use YouTube to train Sora? They were very unhappy about that from what I understand. And then their head of research who literally just did an interview about the new reasoning model with Kylie a couple weeks ago, who won out against Ilya in the research kind of group battle a year ago.

1:25:59So yeah, it's just like stuff's happening very fast. And yeah, big picture, this is OpenAI entering a decidedly commercial big tech company phase. They are speed running. That'd be terrifying for us, given that they were supposed to be the safeguards of AI. Well, yeah, now Ilya is doing, Ilya is doing super safe, whatever AI. So it's going to be Yeah, but he doesn't have the money. No, he raised a billion dollars. He raised a bunch of money. Yeah, he raised a bunch of money. But not as much. No, not as much. Yeah, not as much. But, I mean, they are speedrunning the Facebook Google Playbook, which is move incredibly fast, let regulation catch up, let, you know, just outrun your competitors.

1:26:39And it's intense. I mean, the vibes that we hear is that working inside OpenAI is just, it's way different than it was a couple years ago. The pressure to ship, the pressure to make things commercial. And so that research culture that built the company originally is being just broken down. And it's very messy right now. Yeah. It's a bummer. My sense of it, David mentioned Mustafa Suleiman earlier, who is now the CEO of Microsoft AI. Microsoft is reacting to their former research investment becoming a product company by being like, now we have a CEO of products. Yeah. Which I'm very curious to see how that relationship manages over time.

1:27:16All right. We should take a break. We're going to go through the lightning round at lightning speed because we are so over at this point. We'll be right back with the lightning round. Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition.

1:27:53Check them out. See how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. All right, we're back. We are so over. We are often asked how long the show is supposed to be, and the answer is not this long. Six and a half minutes. But we're never going to tell you how long it's supposed to be. It's actually a 90-second show. We've gotten some incoming on Lightning Around sponsorships. Again, I don't make the deals. I just walk around Vox Media demanding why the deals aren't made, which has proven to be ineffective. So I'm going to try some new strategies. But today we remain unsponsored, which is a personal failure.

1:28:30For somebody who complains about greater influence and brand deals as much as I do, I'm horrible at this. I should make some of that money. Anyway, the lightning round is available to sponsor. I might say your company's name if you give us a bunch of money. Or I might not because of ethics policy. You won't know until you pay me money. That's lightning round. All right, Alex, let's start with you because I think you've got the most relevant lightning round item. after that previous conversation. Yeah. Trip Mikkel at the New York times has this great story about what Johnny I've has been up to post Apple and this design firm he founded called love from lots of nuggets in here.

1:29:03I thought it was very interesting that he says in the story, he interviewed Ivan June and this came out the week of iPhone 16. Um, the timing was interesting. Um, but yeah, Johnny's he's working. I think the times kind of buried the lead here. Uh, Literally, it's like the last paragraph of the story. It's very, very end. He confirms that he's working on some kind of AI device with OpenAI. It sounds like they haven't quite nailed down what it will be. It was the first time he confirmed it on the record. My understanding is that Love From is super small. It's like 40-ish, 50 people. There's only 10 people working on this project.

1:29:41Yeah, and a wild detail in the story is as Mr. Ive climbed a wooden staircase to the studio's second floor that morning. And by the way, he bought like a whole block, a city block of downtown San Francisco for their office. He said he spoke about Lovefirm's clients, Lovefirm's clients, which pay the firm as much as$200 million annually. That's very good. And that includes like Airbnb, Ferrari. He just designed a$3 ,000 jacket with Montclair. Lovefirm is like 50 people. So how much money are they making? Johnny Ive. This is crazy. They bought a whole block in San Francisco. Like they're doing good.

1:30:18Brian Chesky is paying him$200 million a year to riff on what the Airbnb logo should be? Can I just tell you a story about the Airbnb-Johnny Ive connection? Yeah. Because I was reading this, and it says what he worked on. They did the experiences where you can live in a pineapple house or something. Whatever Airbnb nonsense is happening, right? Airbnb last year, the year before, after the Johnny Ive stuff was out, announced a bunch of redesign stuff and an app redesign and all this stuff. And we emailed them and we're like, was this the stuff Johnny and I have worked on? Because obviously that is very relevant and interesting detail.

1:30:57And they're like, yeah, yeah. And then we like pushed it and they freaked out at us. And they're like, that's not wrong. Everyone's like, take it down. And we're like, but you said, okay. And we like adjusted the story. You can like read it. There's all these like back and forth corrections in it because Airbnb is trying to clarify this. And I was like, what is the point of spending all this money on Johnny and I have if you don't want to say that he worked on this stuff. Yeah, that's worth easily a hundred of the 200 million is just to be able to put Johnny Ive in your press release. Check out the new Airbnb app designed by Johnny Ive.

1:31:25I don't know. Brian Chastis is coming on Decoder in a little bit. I'm going to ask him about it in addition to talking about Founder Mode, which he's excited to talk about. But I read this profile and I was like, but yeah, we tried to write the story about him designing this app and they were like not into it. They were like pushed back on this idea that he had done it super hard. He's like the Wizard of Oz. He just needs to be in the background. There's also a part in the story that I loved where he designed a steering wheel for like an EV Ferrari. And he's like, he completely rethought what a steering wheel should be.

1:31:56I'm like, it's a circle. Oh, he didn't do a yoke? It's definitely a circle. Famously a car guy. It's very good. Yeah. So I just think it's like Ive is clearly gearing up. And I think there's a lot of pressure on him if this AI device is going to be real. Like that is a, that is your Johnny Ive. Like this thing has to work. It has to not be the humane pin. And he's, he's got Evans Hankey who succeeded him at Apple leading design at Love From working on this device with him. So it's, it's a bunch of OG Apple people that invented all of like the original Apple stuff with him. So that's a really interesting situation to watch.

1:32:35We've seen one company with a very similar description to that make AI hardware and it didn't go super great. So we'll, we'll see. Gosh. Yeah, you know, like he doesn't have, for example, Apple's famed antenna team, which once had to save his ass from his own designs of wireless product. It'll be super thin. Whatever it is, you can bet it will be thin. 25 minutes of battery life. Five. I'm very curious. I mean, after we just had this whole conversation about Meta, they have all of the same problems. Like Apple is not going to give him hooks into iOS. Presumably. Or the reason that chat GPT got announced as integrated in iOS 18 is when this device comes out, Tim Cook would be like, it's mine now.

1:33:17I just have a feeling whatever it is, it's going to be so deeply, deeply weird that it's going to be awesome. Like I've, the longer he's away from Apple, he just is doing weirder and weirder stuff. And so some kind of AI device from him is like, yes, I want it. I'm excited about it. Yeah, I agree. It's going to be insane. And I love it. Altman probably isn't going to be excited about it because he wants something that he can sell and make lots of money. What do you mean? OpenAI is working with him. Yeah, I know. But like is that the guy you hire if you want to make something really commercial and sell and make lots of money?

1:33:49I mean you could argue Johnny Ives done okay with that. He's done – yeah, he did great. He made the iPhone. He made the iPhone in Apple. iPod did decent. This is a design firm. That's true. I will say there's a picture of him in that profile where he's just holding his iPhone in like a regular blue Apple rubber case. and I'm like, that's not weird enough for Johnny Ive. And I go, but he made the iPhone. No gold Apple watch either. Gosh. It was upsetting he put his feet on the couch. That was the part that got me. These gorgeous white couches and he had his shoes on them. I was like, oh, hurts.

1:34:20He can just get new ones. All right. Kranz, what's your lightning round on? Sean got a hands-on with a PS5 Pro and if you like to pixel peep, it's going to rule. I do. It's apparently, he says it really lives up to the hype as far as like things just look a lot clearer they're a lot prettier it's awesome in that way but also it is still so much money and and you can there's a lot of photos in his piece where you can go and look and try to see the differences and it is sort of like playing highlights as a kid you can see them but you gotta you gotta look for them so uh i would say if you don't have a giant monitor that you sit like two feet from you're probably okay but otherwise this is cool i will say that i was in the queue to buy the the ps5 pro 30th anniversary edition and then i forgot i was in the queue and i was in the place in line the one to really look at is in in david may turn on me before we recorded because i pointed this out is the ratchet and clank rift apart you can really see the ray tracing working it's it's it's beautiful thank god i've always said that's the main thing missing from ratchet and clank rift apart is is ray tracing that's the thing preventing me from enjoying ratchet and clank rift apart there's a very funny line in sean's hands-on where he he notes that all the controllers were wired so they couldn't get far away from the screen and not see the ray tracing anymore choice it's pretty good all right david what's what's yours while you're over here neil i denigrating google's headphones uh chris welch published our of you of the Google Pixel Buds Pro 2, which is a name that I have never said correctly until just now.

1:36:04So I'm very proud of you. They're awesome. They're, they're smaller. They sound better. They're a little more expensive. Uh, seem great. But the thing I just want to point out is that Google absolutely crushed this hardware cycle, like in a, in a way that Google never has before the, the TV streamer is great. The buds are great. The watch is great. The phones are great. The Foldable phones are great. Like Google just like did the whole thing this year. And that is sort of wild to me. Do you think that's Rick Osholo now runs the whole thing? It's Dieter. It's all Dieter. No, I think whatever. And Dan, don't forget Dan.

1:36:38Yeah, it's Dieter and Dan. They did it. Thank you guys. I think there's a certain amount of this that is like the compound interest phenomenon, right? It's just like Google's been at this a while. And like, hey, Google, if you're listening, this is why it's good to stick to things because you can make them better over time. and then they're good and people like them. Like that's a concept. Try it with other things. But at any rate, like what Google did here is not like reinvent the wheel as it is prone to do all the time. It just made all of its products better. And it did that a bunch of years in a row.

1:37:09And I think the thing Rick Ostrolo gets credit for is he has made a plan and stuck to it. Like I talked to him years ago at the very beginning and I was like, why on earth would anyone believe you that you're gonna care about this for a long time? And he's like, you shouldn't. I don't know why you would, but we are going to like, we're, we're, we're bought into this. And this feels like the first time that Google is like really truly playing hardware offense in like, it's, it's up there with everybody. We gave the TV streamer a nine. Chris gave the pixel buds pro two a nine. Like these are some of the best products you can buy in their class.

1:37:42And I don't think that has ever been true of Google products before. So I just think that's very cool. I haven't, I didn't put this in the iPhone review. because I think it's unfair to say this until Apple intelligence comes out and we can use the features. But I spent a lot of time using a Pixel 9 Pro camera stuff while I was doing that review to compare the cameras. And every time I picked up the Pixel, I was like, this phone is a lot more fun than iOS right now. It's just like bursting with ideas. The chaotic, weird, clippy-level ideas. Every time you breathe, it's like, Gemini? Should we Gemini?

1:38:13Do you want a Gemini? It's a little nuts. But it's fun because it's just like ideas. like new ideas for what a phone could do or should do or why it should do anything at all. And Apple is like, all the icons are Brown. Huh? You've been asking for big Brown icons and now you can have them. Can I say one more thing about the iPhone? And then I will do my lighting around item, uh, control center, total, total chaos, like a mess. And they should just let me edit it on my Mac. Hmm. I feel that way about my home screen. Let me do the home screen and control center on my Mac. I know you can do phone mirror and you can click on the screen.

1:38:53No, no, no. I want like full like old school Adobe page maker print layout. You know, like all the tools, the mirror, the rulers. And just let me just – this is – we're past being able to do this on a phone. Control center is like – once you get it set up, it's pretty great. But the thing is like – and I feel the same way about the home screen. Like if I drag an icon somewhere into a page that is already largely full of icons, it takes a PhD to figure out where all those icons are. Like it is just a mystery every single time. The fastest, most capable, most efficient processors humankind has ever created.

1:39:31And it's like, I don't know what's going on with these icons. Like too much for me, man. Yeah. All right, Neal, what's yours? We have to end here because we've been talking about AI gadgets the whole time. Only 5 ,000 people use the Rabbit R1 every day according to the scene. Is that how many people own it? He gave an interview at some conference and the number is 5 ,000 daily active users for the Rabbit. That's more than I thought. Yeah, I was like, I'm surprised that many people have found a good use for the Rabbit. The other thing to note is if you, you cannot recycle or resell a humane AI pin, but you can just return it to the company for full price.

1:40:07Which, kudos. Good for them. You just send it back. That is the correct thing to do. Just my bad. Wait, I am curious. I've spent a lot of time trying to decide. So it's 5 % of buyers. 5 ,000 people is 5 % of the Rabbit are one buyers. Well, 100 ,000 is the biggest number we heard. I actually think it's probably true that more people bought it than that. That's just the last number we heard. Is that higher or lower than you would have guessed? Like reasonably knowing that at least 100 ,000 people bought the thing. Most people buy gadgets intending to use them. You think 5 ,000 is higher than you would have expected?

1:40:40Do you use yours every day? No, it's sitting right here. The battery's been dead since, I don't know, April. I am going to fire it back up though. Do you podcast from like a pile of dead useless gadgets? I do everything from a pile of dead useless gadgets. Yes, that's what my job is. I live my life. Everything you can't see in this maybe fake background of mine is just a pile of dead useless gadgets. It's just slowly swelling batteries. I also, I have the humane pin right here. Oh, good. It's been six months since these things came out almost. I believe it was April 11th. were a couple weeks away from the six-month anniversary.

1:41:16And I promised when I did them that in six months I would come back. So God help me. I have to fire these devices back up and see how it's going. Yeah. I think it's substantially higher than I expected. I expected the people who work at the company to use this thing every day and everything else we'll see. I will say - Daily is a lot. I would guess the number was higher than this for people who still turn it on sometimes. Yeah. Daily is a lot. Jesse Lou, the CEO of Rabbit, has told us he's coming on Decoder. I will let you know when that happens but we're booked it's on my calendar I'm dying to ask him questions so let me know what your questions are and we'll see if we can get some answers I will say to Rabbit's credit they have like continued to post through it like they are not shy about the stuff they've been dealing with yeah he's out there I mean he's obviously on a media tour right he's at this conference he wants to be on Decoder we're gonna do it I'm very curious like many of the things we talked about with meta can you get past the phone operating system or do you have to build your own hardware rabbit is an answer to that question yep but then you have to do all the rest of it we'll see yeah um all right we're way over we gotta wrap this thing up does anybody else have any last minute zuckerberg style dunks on the whole industry to issue no all right let us know you can get a hold of us there's quite a lot to talk about so we welcome your feedback leave us your voicemails you can send david a text to his rabbit r1 i believe I'm trying to figure out what other dead gadgets I have around here.

1:42:44There's a lot. I also have an office. It's full of just slowly expanding lithium-ion batteries. I have a green flip phone that I couldn't tell you what it is or why I have it, but I have it. That's the Verge Cast, everybody. We'll be back next week. Rock and roll.

1:43:02And that's it for the Verge Cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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