The James Bond Cinematic Universe

27:11Yeah. Yeah. There's no way that we can recoup that. Right. You spend a lot of money and it's just gone because you're going to have to start over somewhere else. That's exactly right. So let's talk about where you go from here, because I think you told Sean at one point that you weren't just a laptop company. We're not. We've got a desktop now. I know. Does that count? Like, have you satisfied the brief now? No, not really. Is that what she meant? Or are you going beyond PCs eventually? No, no. Yeah. What I meant is we're going beyond PCs. And part of this, it goes back to the efficiency thing.

27:41It goes in some ways, even back to the fundraising thing of like part of what made the framework desktop really obvious for us was that we could identify that mission and product philosophy and market opportunity for us. But we could also identify that, oh, we can leverage essentially all of our existing supply base and partnerships, including the really strong partnership we have with AMD to do this really quickly and do this really efficiently. Whereas if we think about like a total leap into an entire different space, that's us building an entire new supply base, which then demands a lot of confidence and a lot of investment to basically make that confidence make sense.

28:21As you think through something like a phone, which I know everyone has asked you about, a phone strikes me as a particularly interesting one because as you talk about, you know, repairability and e-waste and upgradability. There's no place to be more effective than with a smartphone, I think, right now. But that's also like an incredibly mature, incredibly hard market to break. So like, I'm not asking you to say if you're building a phone because I know that you are. But like, how do you think through a market like that one and whether it makes sense for framework to be part of it? Yeah, definitely.

29:01That's a great question. I mean, one of the things for really any category that we pick goes back to this idea that that first iteration is such a massive investment that we have to be fairly sure that we're going to be able to succeed and win in that category. And one of the things about phones specifically is that that initial investment is orders of magnitude larger than it is for any category that we've been in to date. And so for us to build a phone, we have to be in a financial position or a fundraising position where if we're not able to win, obviously we want to win, we want to be able to make sure that we're able to win in that category.

29:38But if winning takes longer than we anticipated or takes more iterations than we anticipated, we don't want to put the entire company at risk around that. And so, like, you know, obviously phones are hard from a design and engineering perspective, especially as we think about modularization, repairability, and upgradability. But they're also extremely difficult from a go-to-market standpoint. And so, like, as we look at both ends of that, we want to make sure that we as a company are in a position where no matter what happens on phone, we're going to continue to be able to drive and succeed on our mission across framework.

30:12That's when we're doing a phone. if Framework were to theoretically do a phone, what we get in the comments... Which it is. According to David Pierce. You've heard it here on The Verge. David Pierce, who is not part of Framework, believes Framework's doing your phone. That's correct. If Framework were to do a phone... We get this comment all the time on any story where we compliment the battery of a phone or we hate on the battery of a phone. People say, I miss those days when you could open a compartment on the back of your phone and remove the battery and put a different battery in there. Should a framework ever do a phone?

30:47Is that something that you think would be a feature of a phone? We do have some very interesting ideas. We have ideas around a lot of different categories. We do have some ideas specifically around batteries and phones that I'm not going to pre-commit anything around, given the unknown time in the future, at which point there may or may not be a framework phone. Fair enough. And let's talk through a very different category, Because I think I think about like, I don't know, headsets is probably a good one right now where I think we're at a point now where there's a lot of energy behind it. There are a lot of people who think this is going to be the next big thing, but nobody has yet agreed on anything.

31:27What they're supposed to do, what they're going to look like, how they're going to work like. We don't know any of that yet. And so I think based on what you've said, that strikes me as this is a moment that is just objectively too early for you to want to be in it. Because if that's right, you just can't you literally and figuratively can't afford to be wrong four times until we all figure this out. Is that am I thinking about that the right way? That's right. Yeah. So like as we look at like VR, our headsets against something like laptops, the reason we did laptops to start our first product was a laptop is that we saw that for 10 years running the use cases and the core user experience of laptops had stabilized in a way that we could take what we had there.

32:07look at things like silicon roadmaps and module roadmaps from different technology providers and have fairly high confidence we could build a long-lived upgradable product within a form factor that we hold constant as we look at ar-vr not only are the form factors like wildly in flux like the core use case and value proposition is still wide open and those things of course go very very tightly together especially in something that has such ergonomic constraints like a like a headset and so for us to look at a vr headset and say you know with reasonable confidence that not even 10 years and five years from now that thing's still going to make sense we keep we just can't do that um so it wouldn't make sense for us as a company with our product philosophy to go and build a vr headset an ar headset until that industry matures and stabilize stabilizes and the interesting thing is like the way our business model works we we want that to happen and that But as these product categories mature, replacement cycles inherently lengthen, which we're even seeing in smartphones already over the last five years.

33:11And the companies that are in the space invest less in innovation necessarily in a form factor perspective, a use case perspective, because there's no juice left to squeeze out of that lemon. and instead you end up with this world like we're seeing maybe with iPhones today and the reviews that folks like you at The Verge are doing on iPhones reviews of like, oh, actually you can skip this year, wait for next year because there isn't a lot worth picking up this year. That's like our signal for like, oh, okay, we see those reviews. That means it's time for us to enter that product category. So, all right, we need to let you go here in a minute, but before we do, I believe Sean has a lightning round of things he wants to throw at you.

33:52I do. I'm sure I can anticipate a few of them. It won't have the question that I asked you the other day, though. Oh, okay. So I've already asked it. 240-watt charger. We're starting to see some out in the market, which is great. It actually took much, much longer than we thought it would. We expect—actually, we were surprised that we ended up being the first 180-watt out there. We expected 240s to be out before we even shipped our first 180. so it's great to see that the market is finally like moving and catching up and that's nice it's nice for everyone and obviously you can you know any of our laptops you don't have to purchase with a power adapter you can purchase it without and then pick up any anyone that you'd like cam memory we know it's not going to be in the desktop because it reduced the bandwidth significantly to have it not be soldered on the board for that for that stricts halo chip but in general we're going to get some of that flat memory in the future maybe yeah one of the things to to like understand about this i think maybe is lost and that we have maybe haven't communicated as clearly as we needed to around the framework desktop but also really around like any product at all is that for technologies like that that go deep into signal integrity that go deep into io that go deep into like even how the processor is packaged and the ball out works of signals these are things that the silicon vendor has to have planned out and designed for from the start like us as a as the end device maker we can't like hack around it and like create a thing that wasn't designed for from the silicon to begin with like so for let's say cam on something like ryzen ai max that's something that amd would have needed to have designed for all the way from you I don't even know how many years ago they started the development of the architecture and design of that thing as a design goal from the beginning, which actually, based on our understanding of it, may not have even been possible given how wide the memory bus was on that thing, even if they had thought that that was the goal from the beginning.

35:55But there are technologies like this that just can't work. So for us, it's not can we add CAM to something that wasn't designed for CAM. It's when is there a platform that was designed from the beginning for CAM that we're then going to intercept one of our products. Gaming handheld. this isn't i would put this in the category of similarly but differently mature-ish maturing-ish category with good products that we also can't identify a clear path to making business sense and part of the challenge there is just valve is so dominant with steam deck we can't afford to play the kinds of games that maybe a lenovo or an asus can likely not making money for an extended period of time entering a new category.

36:45For us, we have to be able to recoup our investment relatively quickly within the first or second generation of entering a category. And so that's something where, similar, even though we know we could build a great gaming handheld, we see the demand from customers to have an upgradable, repairable gaming handheld. It's hard for us to see a path, at least right now, where we can compete with Valve in that space and not get destroyed financially. Framework Battery Bank. Framework Battery Bank, meaning for Framework Laptop 16 or for just generally as a product? Yeah, this is the one that would take one of your existing battery, laptop batteries, would stick it in a case.

37:24I think you showed off like a prototype of a prototype or something. Yeah, we showed a proof of concept actually two years ago at the Framework Next Level event. And there are actually a number of proof of concepts that we showed then, including an eGPU concept. And part of this was showing and flagging to electronics makers, like peripheral makers especially, that these things were technically possible with the goal of then starting to seed some third-party development. We haven't seen a lot. Actually, we haven't seen those specific things pan out. Instead, actually, we ended up seeing as a third-party RISC-V mainboard.

37:58We actually didn't anticipate that at all. So instead, we instead ended up getting that. But basically, whenever we do these types of proofs of concept, it's oftentimes to show technical feasibility to enable third parties to go and run with it or even enable the community to go and run with it. And so for BatteryPack, that is still one that we would love to see a third party or even a community member start to design on their own. And it's also something that like for us in framework, as we have a larger team over time, as we have more resources over time, is the sort of thing that potentially we would also go and start to address.

38:31But the reason we showed it so early was more the technical proof of feasibility. E-paper screens. yeah this is this is also an interesting one it kind of goes back to this idea of like us being able to invest and be in control of our own destiny display development aside for you know there's the second most expensive part of consumer electronics beyond silicon investment doing custom silicon and so for us being very selective about where we do semi-customization or custom development of displays because of the upfront cost required there and so to do something like an e-ink display and the proper form factor for any of our laptops would be an enormous sum of money we'd have to pay.

39:13So if a display vendor creates something that happens to be close and we can semi-customize, if that becomes more feasible, the investment to do a fully custom display is just, at least for us today, still pretty far out of reach. The framework Kindle is a thing I want to exist. I just want you to know that. Okay, there we go. That's another, we can put that on the quadrant somewhere. And lastly, NVIDIA. Sure, it's a company. It sure is. Sure is. That's a Vergecast. All right, Nirav, we've kept you long enough. Thank you for doing this with us. Thanks, David. Thanks, Sean. Always good to chat.

39:50Thanks so much. All right, we got to take a break, and then we're going to come back and talk about James Bond. We'll be right back.

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42:13Welcome back. A couple of weeks ago, the big news in the entertainment world was that Amazon had struck a deal to give it full creative control over James Bond. Basically, for decades, the way that James Bond has worked, that whole franchise has been controlled by one family, the Broccolis. You may have heard of these people before. Barbara Broccoli, for many, many years, has been the person overseeing the James Bond franchise. Other people distribute the movies. Other people do a lot of the work to make the movies, obviously. But no one does anything with James Bond without the Broccolis Say So.

42:46And they've been, to their credit, very precious about that. But then Amazon bought MGM for$8.5 billion a couple of years ago, and a big part of what MGM had to offer was James Bond. Since then, there has been no James Bond. So Amazon, by all accounts, made a deal to have the Broccoli's relinquished creative control so that what happens to James Bond now is fully up to Amazon. And that made a lot of people, including really anyone who likes and cares about James Bond stuff and wants James Bond stuff to be good, feel a lot of feelings. I would not say the overall reaction to this was like great enthusiasm for the future of James Bond.

43:26It was people worrying about what will happen when Amazon does what Disney did to Marvel or to Star Wars and just floods the zone with stuff because that's what the business demands until it kind of ruins the vibe. I have been trying to figure out how to sort through all of this myself and figured that the best person to talk to about this is the person I know who knows the most about James Bond, and that is John Gruber from Daring Fireball. So he is going to come on and he's going to explain how he feels, why James Bond is special, and where it goes from here under the control of Amazon. Let's get into it.

44:03John Gruber, welcome to the Vergecast. Nice to be here, David. Okay, so the news, I think, at this point is a couple of weeks old, but basically where Here we are. And you, I think, have more context on this than I do. But basically, the way I understand it is that after a bunch of interpersonal shenanigans, Amazon wrote a very large check, the number which at least I do not know yet, to the Broccolis and now have creative control over the James Bond franchise for the first time. Is that a reasonable summary of where we are? I think so, yes. I guess the part that I'm still confused on and maybe everybody is other than the broccolis and Amazon's top executives is exactly where they were before last week's news that, okay, we're going to write a check and just take control.

44:51It was like, you know, like what amount of control did MGM have that gave Amazon power to, you know, that left them at a logger jam? You know, it seemed like basically MGM has the rights to some aspect of the franchise. You know what I mean? Like the Broccoli's couldn't make movies without MGM, but MGM couldn't make the movies without the Broccoli's having complete control over the creative element, something like that. Yeah, it's a very odd setup. And I think I was going back and reading some of the coverage of the MGM acquisition in the first place. So Amazon bought MGM for eight and a half billion dollars.

45:31That deal closed, I think, early 2022. And even back then, the read was that like the crown jewel of the empire here is James Bond, right? Like there's a lot of content. Amazon wants a lot of stuff. They want the studio. They want the library. But like the thing that you're buying, the IP at the top of all of this. is James Bond. And since then, precisely nothing has happened, which is so strange. And I think just speaks to the weirdness of all of this. Yeah. Other than stories coming out that nothing was happening, right? And that it was sort of conspicuous that nothing was happening. It wasn't just secrecy behind the scenes.

46:09It was, hey, something's broken behind the scenes, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So what was your feeling when this news dropped? Like, how do you, what's your immediate reaction to the change that came out a couple of weeks ago? Uh, I get my heart sunk, I guess, because I think, I don't think it's impossible that, that, that, that in hindsight, we can look back and say, you know what, this wasn't so bad or something good came out of it. And I'll, I'll put a pin in that and we can come back to what I think might be the best case scenario. But I think the most likely scenario is that, uh, this is just not going to be good.

46:49And I'll compare it directly to Disney buying Lucasfilm from George Lucas. Another franchise you care very much about, if I'm not mistaken. I do care. Well, certainly Star Wars. Yes, definitely. Very, very meaningful and important to me. And similarly, Lucasfilm, there was a lot more than just Star Wars. There was the Indiana jones franchise there's the whole industrial light and magic uh everything else lucasfilm does ilm in particular you know is is just a you know verge listeners don't need to be told what they do or their role in the industry but overall i just feel like what we've seen disney do with the star wars franchise is what we'll see amazon do with the james bond franchise which is diluted you know with spinoffs and shows and cartoons and, and, you know, for some fans, you know, there are, I'm sure you can dig up some fans who think Disney's done nothing but a bang up job with Star Wars or more positive than negative, but it's definitely a change.

47:58It's a definite, you know, and this whole idea of calling it content, you know, or whatever else you want to call it, which is what the major big tech streamer corporations who are making these deals and writing these checks, the way they tend to look at it, as opposed to an artistic endeavor. And I will compare. One difference with James Bond and Star Wars is that when Disney bought Star Wars, there had only been six movies made. And yes, there were like comic books and there was somewhat of an expanded empire, but nothing like what we've seen since. and the James Bond franchise is different because it goes back so much further to the 60s.

48:37And, you know, at this point, there've been, I guess, 25 movies. You'd think I'd know that before I came in the show. But it's just a longer stretch of time. And there was a similarity where the franchises were defined by theatrical major motion pictures that were events, right? Like, holy crap, George Lucas is finally going to make those prequels that he was, you know, rumored to be working on even when he was working on the original trilogy back in the 70s and 80s. Wow. Or wow, they've announced a new James Bond. It's a guy named Daniel Craig, and he's got blonde hair, not dark hair, and people are upset about that.

49:18Or here, Daniel Craig's coming back for a fifth movie, and it's definitely going to be the last one. It's an event. And here's a series about young Moneypenny. Here's 10-episode series about Felix Leiter in the CIA. Here's the young James Bond cartoon, which I know sort of exists, you know, but it's going to be more of it. So this is the thing I'm sort of torn on. And I think one of the challenge I have in thinking through all of this is, on the one hand, it's not like every James Bond movie ever has been perfect and fabulous. And this is like a beautiful, pristine thing. cannot be touched right like there have been bad bond movies there i love them all if i'm honest but some of them are very bad right uh and and even there there have been sort of spin-off things over the years like golden eye on the n64 obviously a like classic iconic video games but there have been other james bond video games that i don't remember the name of because they're not any good and so they've they've experimented with this over time and i think there is definitely an extent to which I think the broccoli is in this sort of unusual setup where basically a couple of people had creative control over whether things happened or didn't has probably avoided bad things, but it hasn't avoided all of the bad things.

50:41Right. And so maybe it's like the part of me that is optimistic is like, OK, maybe nobody's perfect and maybe maybe there will be good stuff and maybe I can just watch the good stuff and ignore the bad stuff. But that's also the Star Wars play. And I I have basically been run out of the Star Wars franchise by the way it has run over the last decade. So I don't know. I'm torn between these two feelings. Yeah. And, you know, I say that as a real big fan of I mean, that's why I'm here. And a long time ago in the first run of my podcast, the talk show, when I was co-hosting it with Dan Benjamin, this is like, oh, man, like 2008, 2009.

51:17Early. I mean, literally like early days of podcasting. we had the idea to at the tail you know the the topic was typically apple and the usual stuff i talk about on the talk show and we had the idea for i forget how many movies had been out at that point but let's say it was like 19 bond movies had been made to date let's take the next 19 episodes and in chronological order we'll talk about each one at the end of the show like the last 20 minutes of each show. We'll talk about each of the Bond movies in order, and we'll watch them in order again. And you listeners following along, you'll know, because we're going in chronological order, your homework, if you don't want this spoiled will be to do it.

52:00And it was a lot of fun. But re-watching them all in order, and we talked about it week to week, they're uneven, right? Some of them are not great. Some of them don't hold up. And it's Kind of interesting watching them again. But I don't think it's for lack of effort, right? It's the, and I think that's the difference, is that when, like with Disney's current stewardship of Star Wars, or the Avengers too, the Marvel Universe, right? With the amount that they're putting out, there's no intention to try to make everything great, right? That's, it's like, that's the difference, is that when you know you're putting out, all of these hours of content, and they call it content each year, you know that the overall quality is trying to be like, I don't know, good at best.

52:58It's not trying to make everything great. And, you know, and we can talk about a lot of people, especially people of our generation, have very, a lot of people have very negative feelings about George Lucas's own second trilogy in the Star Wars movie. I personally, I don't love it like I do the first ones, but I actually don't hate it like most people of my generation do. I actually like the movies overall, and I like their weirdness. And I like that they're not just trying to redo what the first trilogy felt like. And I really noticed with my son's generation, my son's 21 now, but he was a little kid when those movies were new, his generation didn't really see a difference between the old trilogy and the new trilogy.

53:39They just loved Star Wars, you know? So, yeah. Yeah. So much of that stuff is is tied to sort of time and moments in your life in a way that's always really hard to peel apart that like, right. Whichever part of it you saw when you were 12 is probably your favorite. Yeah, definitely. That's just a hard thing to undo. And, you know, that just came up recently with SNL's 50, right? 50th anniversary where so many people and there's so many cool documentaries that came out about that. But over and over again, and I think this is one of those things that we can debate what the best eras of SNL were.

54:11But one thing that's almost undebatable is that most people feel that the quote unquote best years and the best cast were the ones when they were like a teenager and they first started getting late night adult sarcasm and humor. And so no matter how old you are, you kind of have this sweet spot in your head. And I think the James Bond movies are like that, right? Everybody has a sweet spot for the, a sweet place in their heart for the James Bond of their youth, of the new movie, you know, whatever were the new Bond movies when they were young and they first fell in love with the franchise. You know, and then you get older and you get more of an appreciation for going back in time and sort of putting things in perspective.

54:49But that's, to me, the difference, is that the broccolis for 20-some movies were always trying to make each one a great Bond movie. And they fell short sometimes. I think you make 25 movies, you know, and you try to take risks and you're trying not to repeat yourself and you're trying to keep Bond. And I think they did this remarkably so, like keep Bond current through the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. I mean, it's a long time to keep a character current through dramatic changes in culture, history, world geopolitics, things that affect a spy movie. You know, some were great, some not so great, but they were always trying.

55:33Yeah. To that end, actually, why do you think this character in this franchise has been this enduring? Because it's kind of unparalleled in that sense. That, like, James Bond is, I think, very different as a character from first movie to, you know, No Time to Die. But it's also pretty recognizably the same the whole way through. And for that to happen and still even have the possibility of being any good is pretty unusual with any kind of franchise like that. Just the fact that it hasn't run out of steam yet is kind of wild. What is your sense of why that is? How much time do we have, right? I mean, that's sort of what makes me obsessed with the franchise, is trying to answer that question and sort of the impossibility of really buttonholing it very neatly into a very succinct, ah, yes, that's exactly how they've done it argument.

56:30Like, you're not going to get there. And that's what makes it endlessly fascinating and fun to discuss. If I had to try to encapsulate it, though, I think the things that they did that really made this built to last. and it sounds cynical, but I mean this in an endearing way that they established a brand for James Bond, right? And right out of the gate, they had the theme song in the first one, Dr. No. The theme song was cool when it was new in 1962 and it's sort of timeless now, right? Star Wars got that right too, right? With the great John Williams score, right? Like, and the logo for Star Wars, the logo for James Bond with the OO and the seven that shaped like a Luger or something, which isn't even a gun James Bond used.

57:21Right. And he, you know, and that ties into other aspects of the brand, like the fact that James Bond is persnickety and very picky about certain things. He wants to use a certain gun. Like that's his favorite gun. You know, the Walter PPK for most of the run and he wants his martini famously prepared just right you know and that sort of pickiness of the character becomes part of the brand and i think that they managed it over the years to sort of keep that fundamental brand timeless and then they could decorate around it with each decade and with each actor as they as they move it forward but that that core brand resonates with people.

58:08I totally agree with that. And I think part of the reason I'm thinking about this is because I have to assume that if you're Amazon, that is the big question to try and figure out, right? It's like, what about this can we not change? Because I think what I assume to be true, and I'm curious if you feel differently, but what I assume is true is that every imaginable branch of the James Bond cinematic universe is about to come true. we're gonna get more bond movies we're gonna get a q spinoff that's gonna be like a tech show we're gonna get the we're gonna get a money penny thing they're gonna do a whole thing about you know minor characters we're gonna we're gonna spin this thing in every single direction and i feel like if i'm the person in charge of james bond at amazon the question now is what what do you have to have inside of one of these to make it work to make it james bond and in a weird way the answer to that question seems to both be like scarcity you actually can't do too much that's like a part of the whole james bond thing that i think if we had done 50 movies by now instead of 25 it might actually be really different but that also even that thing you're describing is hard to you can't just have him say shaken not stirred once an episode and get away with it being a bond show you know what i mean i feel like that's a hard thing to define with bond in a way that even star wars you just start with like galaxy far far away permission to kind of do whatever we want and I think that was the wrong approach but you can at least see how you start from that James Bond is harder to define that way yeah and it's Because there is no one central character of Star Wars, right?

59:44That's different, right? It's not the Luke Skywalker cinematic universe. I think they decided it was the Force. They were like, that is the unifying theme, and it just didn't work. Yeah. And like, what is the greater James Bond cinematic universe? It's just the world, right? It's the modern world, right? And that's where it just seems more worrisome to me, even than Star Wars, right? Like where, like the, to me, clearly better parts of the Disney era Star Wars and or, which itself is sort of a spinoff from my favorite movie they've made since then, the Rogue One, you know, which isn't about the main characters, you know, it parlays into the story of them and it takes place in their era.

1:00:34but it's like, ah, but here's the thing that's happening over on the side. But what's happening in the James Bond universe when we're not paying attention to that, him and himself, Agent 007 for MI6, it's just the world, right? So... That's so true. Yeah. They're going to end up having to make a movie about the financial crisis that is like, just James Bond appears one time. And they're like, I guess this is a James Bond And so what are the odds when they do a Felix Leiter spinoff about the American CIA agents in the world fighting, you know, the same agents of evil of Spectre or whatever they do when they reboot it?

1:01:17You know, how is that going to be any different than just any random CIA show that Amazon puts on Prime? Right. And and that this is the other part to go back to your question from 10 minutes ago about why my heart sunk. The other thing that really, really has me bummed about this is I think of the major streamers, Amazon Prime's original content is the worst. I was going to ask you about this. If you were more upset that it was Amazon in particular than anybody else, why? I like Mr. and Mrs. Smith is my only quibble with that statement. But otherwise, I think I largely agree with you. I haven't watched the Mr.

1:01:51and Mrs. Smith yet. You know, and one show that when I mentioned this on Daring Cross, and also I'll add that to my list. And I, you know, I like, I like spy stuff. I like spy shows. I just, it's spy shows, heist shows, spy movies that are, you know, more heisty is sort of the sweet spot. You know, I like that sort of plot. You know, it's a very middle-aged white guy thing to like, but that's what I like.

1:02:22um but i i don't know i i was when i mentioned that i just don't think prime's original content is is good uh people pointed to a show called patriot that was on as like a sort of somewhat comedy and i i'd never even heard of it it was on like 2015 it was on for two seasons and then they canceled it so it sounds like amazon yeah and i did my my favorite show on amazon but i can't recommend it was a show called the peripheral from a few years ago uh based on a william gibson novel and with a it was really well done but they canceled it after one season and it's one of those shows where that's why i can't recommend it it was a very good season but it clearly stopped at a point that it you know they were really it wasn't a satisfying conclusion it was meant to keep going for at least another season or two and it didn't so it's like so it's the best show that they made good production values, good cast.

1:03:19I thought it was pretty smart because, you know, I hadn't read Gibson's original book, but it seemed smart enough that they surely seemed to use the source material well to make an intelligent show. So much else that I've seen on Prime is just sort of like, it looks bad and it's sort of dumb. Yeah. Well, and I think I'm now thinking about how many of these sort of generic, kind of anonymous-seeming spy shows there are out there. And a lot of them were big hits, like The Night Agent on Netflix is the most forgettable show of all time, but is a giant hit. And then there's The Recruit, which I thought was The Night Agent, but is actually a different thing.

1:04:01And there's just a million of these, right? And I think, like, I probably watch more of them than most, but I just keep thinking, like, you take all of that stuff and you rename it James Bond. And maybe that's where we're headed is we're just going to have a million generic things with this name that isn't generic. And that's how Amazon feels like it can win, which is a real bummer of a way to go. And you've got to go back to the word branding. You've got this brand that, you know, like a way to style the logos of whatever you call the show, you know, a way to style that. I don't know what it would be.

1:04:34I'm not a logo designer, but a way to style young Moneypenny in a way that looks James Bond branded, you know, musical scores, you know, and Disney does, if you like the proliferation of cinematic universe content, I mean, Disney does a good job with stuff like the music for its various Star Wars shows, you know, and you can tell from, if you didn't know what was playing, you could just listen and say, oh, this seems like it must be a Star Wars show, right? And I guess they'll do that with the Bond, greater Bond. And they haven't said they're going to do a greater Bond cinematic universe. Like I said before, maybe they'll do the right thing and sort of keep it rare or special, but I doubt it.

1:05:23What is the right thing in your mind? What feels like the best case plausible scenario here? I would say I would like to see them acknowledged because I think, and again, it sounds so simple, but obviously all of these companies with all this money, they get caught up in it. Like who thinks it sounds like a good idea to run a creative artistic franchise by committee? who thinks a committee of executives in the streaming company should be the ones making the artistic decisions of casting and writing and plotting and pacing and and stuff like that nobody right you want filmmakers and creative people making those decisions so they could nip this in the bud and sort of acknowledge all of our fears by by writing a big check.

1:06:17And the name that comes to mind is Christopher Nolan, right? Who famously at one point wanted to do a Bond movie. Right. And the problem that they ran into was that the Barber Broccoli ultimately always had final cut of the Bond movies. And Nolan, you know, it was sort of irresistible force meets an immovable object, right? That Nolan doesn't do anything anymore unless he gets contractual, you know not just a handshake but in the contract final cut um but if they just said you know call him up and say you know let's make a deal for a three let's do three movies you're in control you cast it you're in charge of the writing uh we'll give you the money we trust you to do a great job just do three great new you know reboot the franchise with a new new actor you're in control Christopher Nolan.

1:07:10That would be perfect for me. Or, you know, there are other people other than Christopher Nolan who could get that role, but it has to be a filmmaker slash creative person. Someone who, like, if Christopher Nolan passes or they choose somebody else, but Christopher Nolan hears who's in charge, he'd be like, oh, well, I kind of wish it was me, but that sounds good to me that they're in charge. Right. Real, like, Dark Knight trilogy, but with James Bond kind of situation. And that went, I would say, very well for everyone involved. But it does seem like that dynamic just doesn't seem to exist anywhere anymore.

1:07:46I think there was a while where there were folks out there writing big checks and giving creative control. Like that was the House of Cards story at the very beginning, a million years ago. I think Apple was doing that for a while at the beginning. But we've seen this real retrenchment back from we're going to write big checks to great people to make great things and that's going to make it all work because the theater business has died, because the streaming business has gotten more complicated, because it's ads. The thing that worries me the most is it feels like every business incentive is going to be, we want to make infinity, 10-episode long miniseries about James Bond and not a great movie every three years.

1:08:25And that's just the business now for these companies. Right. And I'm sure inside Amazon in particular that having numbers and spreadsheets and, you know, two-page memos or whatever their famous memo length is, to back it up with facts actually works, or at least works politically inside the company. I don't know that it works to produce— It works when you're selling cloud computing. Right. Certainly, yeah. And I think it's about short-term thinking versus long-term thinking, right? They're not people who are invested like the Broccoli's were in thinking, hey, we're spending all this money. We have a$400 million budget to make a fifth movie with Daniel Craig as James Bond, whatever the budget is.

1:09:16and they're of course interested in the box office of that movie when it drops and when it comes out and what the critical response will be and the fact that it's concluding a run in in the role for craig that they want it to feel like a capstone to a great reboot of the franchise but they're also thinking about the fact that bond movies get watched 10 20 30 years from now right like after Barbara Broccoli's gone, you know, like just the way that her dad is dead, but the movies he made still stand up on her beloved. And to have somebody who has both those goals in mind, you know, I'm sure there is a short-term financial logic to it, you know?

1:09:59And I'm sure there was with Disney, with Star Wars, right? That they're selling more toys continuously by keeping it in the air. There's always new Star Wars stuff. There's always new Marvel cinematic stuff. like and it in some ways you know there is an upside to it it's not all downside but it's just different and it's so much more like everything else as opposed to being something special right that star wars is no longer special james bond movies are still special they really are yeah it's true and i think it's it's been it's an interesting moment in the bond franchise because I think part of the reason this happened is because by all accounts and reporting, the franchise was in total disarray.

1:10:43They don't have an ex-bond. There's apparently not a script for a movie. Nobody had agreed on anything. The last one came out in, what, 2021? Like three and a half years ago? Yeah, and I remember the timing because it was sort of like one of the big blockbusters to sort of reopen theaters after COVID. That's right. Right. I remember that. That was like, that was the post-COVID movie. Tenant was the mid-COVID movie and No Time to Die was the post-COVID movie. Right. Quote unquote, post-COVID. And yeah, I think the part that gives me hope, I guess, is that maybe now we can be out of impasse. Right.

1:11:26I would rather have something than nothing. I guess if those are the two choices you're going to give me, I would rather have meh James Bond than nothing, I suppose. But then I wonder if that's the thinking that leads us down this road of progress. I guess the way I would put it, and I often come back to this in my writing, that it really matters what – it doesn't just matter what your top priorities are as an unordered list. It matters what order they're in. And if you want to – there's a Walt Disney quote that they put up at Disney World when you're walking around and they always cover – you know, if there's a ride that's under construction.

1:12:00and they cover it up so you don't see the construction and they put inspirational quotes from Walt Disney. And my favorite one is, I guess I'm paraphrasing here, but I think I can get it really close. We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies. And yes, you want your movies to be profitable and you want your IP to be profitable. And you want the investment you've made in it to pay off over time. But the most important thing is to keep the art as high as possible and make it popular enough to make money, not to maximize your money and secondarily make the content as good as we possibly can, because of course, that'll keep it going.

1:12:44But if the most important thing is how do we make the most money from this in the next few years, it's going to hurt the artistic quality of the output. It's inevitable. Yeah. Yeah. And that is the way that most people seem to be thinking in this particular long time. And there's this whole misnomer. We see it in tech all the time. I mean, in people. But it really isn't true. It's a philosophy that some people have. But there's no bearing in law. I wish Neelai were here. He could probably, maybe he'd tell me to go bugger off and it is in law. But I'm pretty sure it's not. I've looked into this.

1:13:17But this notion that publicly held corporations are under a legal obligation to, quote, maximize profits for shareholders, right? And that, oh, well, if they make this decision, it's sort of bad for the product. But clearly, you can see how it's going to make the money that people who want to excuse them say, well, they had to because they're under a legal obligation to maximize profit for the shareholders. That's not true. Well, and Amazon famously, for like 15 years, Jeff Bezos was like, I am going to actively make less money than possible in order to continue to make this company a success and more valuable.

1:13:58Amazon is definitely not that company anymore, but it is certainly true that that is a thing you can do if you choose to. You can do the right thing if you want to. You know, and Tim Cook has talked about that at Apple. There was a thing like 10 years ago, in the early years of his CEO ship after Steve Jobs had passed, where somebody had asked somebody at their shareholders meeting had questioned the amount of money the company was spending on accessibility. And he was like, I don't care about the bloody ROI. And you can just say, like, why Tim Cook used the word bloody is because I think our actual American curse word was on the tip of his tongue.

1:14:34And he caught himself and somehow shifted to the very unusual for an Alabaman bloody. I don't think he's running around saying that in his day-to-day. But by all accounts of that shareholders meeting, it was very angry in that not every decision they make is going to be about the return on investment, that there's a long-term view that will ultimately – and that long-term view will maximize long-term profits, right? And I think people looking back at 15 years of Tim Cook would say, yeah, maybe the guy knows what he's doing in terms of profits at Apple. And I think the long-term value of owning the James Bond franchise isn't about what they're going to do in the next three years.

1:15:17It's about what they do for the next 30 years and about how what they do in the next three years, how it holds up. Yeah, I agree. All right. Well, Andy Jassy, if you're listening, get at us. We have thoughts for you. Or at least give Christopher Nolan a call, right? Yeah, right. That solves a lot of problems. I'm good with that. John thank you for doing this let's see this again sometime yes very fun hopefully under better circumstances I would love to come back on if they make a great movie and be like yes we were wrong we had no reason to fear thank you I would love to be wrong that will be a great day on the Verge cast I very much look forward to it I think it's more likely I come on and we talk about how terrible the young money penny the 16 part miniseries alright well until then thank you John alright we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna come back and take a question from the VertiCast hotline.

1:16:07We'll be right back.

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1:17:42All right, we're back. Let's get to a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, you can email VergeCast at theverge.com. You can call 866-VERGE-11. You can, like, I don't know, BlueSky. We're not that hard to get a hold of. If you have questions, I want to hear all of your questions. Thank you, as always, to everybody who reaches out. This week, we have a question about face computers. Hey, it's Mark. I got, I don't know, I'm using a laptop on a computer table on a desk and I am just unhappy. The laptop screen is so low. I feel like I'm just cranking my neck down and I'm sick of it. And while external monitors exist and they're great for desks, I want to be able to move around, travel, go different places, be in the living room, wherever I need to be, office.

1:18:26I don't care what I look like. Can you help me find something I could put on my face? some type of glasses that I can connect my MacBook Pro to and use as a monitor. And obviously the Apple Vision Pro exists, but it seems that the value is not there. The value is not there. I'm not paying that much for all those features that I don't need when all I need is a really good screen that plugs in to my face. So please help me, please. All right, V song is here. Hi, V. Hi. I have never wanted to help anyone as much as I want to help Mark. Oh, my God. Mark. I feel for you so much. Yeah, Mark's going through it.

1:19:08So what do you think? Where does your head immediately... I have an immediate reaction to this. Where do you go? I have one answer for Mark, and it is the X-Real One glasses. This is where I went to. Okay, good. This is the answer for you, Mark. This is actually, I think, the only answer for you, Mark. Because so what the X-Real One look like, they just look like a normal pair of glasses from afar, sunglasses. and then it has USB-C. You plug it into anything that can output video by USB-C so it can be your phone, it can be your laptop and then bada bing bada boom, we've got an extra screen in front of you and people will just think you're a jabroni indoors wearing sunglasses.

1:19:48But in front of you, you get to see an ultra wide screen if you so choose to enable the ultra wide or you get to see a very large screen in front of you that it's actually surprisingly really good quality. Um, so yeah, I've been testing the X-Real One, uh, which is their newest series of glasses. They also unveiled the X-Real One Pro. What makes it pro off the top of my head? Uh, you get, you know, you know, when like someone smacks pro at the end of something and you get just a little bit extra, it's that, um, I'm using the regular X-Real Ones and I think they're great as is. Uh, I think they're about$500.

1:20:27So, you know, a seventh of the price of a Vision Pro. Yeah. And it basically is going to extend your screen for you. It's not going to hide your screen. Your laptop screen is still going to be on. But you can just look up and not have to crane your neck down. You can look up and type. So, yeah. Just crank your font up. My eyes are, like, really bad. So whenever I'm typing in it, like, I was slacking a message to you, David, earlier, in the X-Real ones. And I was like, oh, Jesus, I can't read this. Because my eyes are notoriously bad. So I had to just like be a really old lady and crank up the font to like 150.

1:21:06I was like, oh, now I can read this comfortably. And you can like adjust the distance of like the virtual monitor. So you can put it further back if you have better vision or put it real up close like me because I'm blind. So yeah, X-Real one. Okay, so I think you're right. But I just want to talk this out a little bit. I went to exactly the same place that you did, which I think suggests that this is probably the right answer. I think we can dispense with the Vision Pro immediately because it's$3 ,500 and it's really heavy. And it's just like for this thing that you want, it is wildly overkill and also like not ideal because it's really heavy on your face and it's$3 ,500.

1:21:45And just not portable because Mark says he wants it to be portable. So I'm assuming that he occasionally wants to go to a coffee shop. And if you want to go to a coffee shop, please don't. bring your vision pro i just yeah it's the travel case is not that portable is it possible though that a meta quest could be the answer uh it's possible i have tried doing work in a meta quest before and come across similar issues not in the sense that um it's more comfortable but i just find it just disorienting because i don't know you don't really have peripheral vision in a quest So if you are out in public, Mark says he doesn't care what he looks like.

1:22:29And I love that for Mark. But I think you will care even less if people aren't staring at you because I feel the stares when people stare at me. I just feel like you'll be more comfortable and honestly a little safer because you never know who's a whack job out there just taking pictures of you. Or stealing your laptop while you're not looking at it. Or stealing your laptop while you're not looking at it because you're in a headset. I don't think really we're at a place where the headsets make sense for productivity, no matter what the big tech people say. Like, gaming, sure. Like, I think the MetaQuest is great in terms of, like, how lightweight it is.

1:23:09It's much more comfortable than the Vision Pro. So I find it looks really grainy in there anyway, though, so that's not my favorite thing. So I think in terms of screen resolution, listen, I watched Stray Kids videos in the X-Rail to test, and I was like, oh, my boys, my sons, my K-pop sons, they're in such high resolution. I love this. Okay. Yeah. So and then the other thing I'm trying to figure out is there are basically two ways to do a screen in front of your face, right? One is the like standard X-Real thing where it's just it's just a display in front of your eyes. And when your eyes move, the display moves with your eyes.

1:23:48Right. Like that's very straightforwardly. This is the thing that X-Real and a couple of others have been doing for a while. The other one, and I think this is the difference when you get into like the pro universe, is you get the sort of three degrees of freedom where I can like leave the screen over there. Yeah. or kind of have it exist in, like, anchored in physical space around me, even though it's a virtual screen. And I'm trying to think, if I'm just a person trying to use my computer, which of those is better? Because on the one hand, like, my screen exists in a space, and if I move my head, my screen stays over here.

1:24:22So that sort of tracks with real world. But also, if I'm wearing these glasses so that I can look at my screen, actually being able to turn my head and still be looking at my screen might be a good thing. Yeah, I mean, that is a good thing. I do appreciate that about the X-Ray. There's a button you can press that will just turn them into normal glasses in case you have to see what actually is going on around you. So that's not so bad. My thing is, is if you're actually working, typing in the headsets is a bitch. There's no way around it unless you have your peripherals with you. And I mean, if you're connecting to a laptop, you can just use the laptop's keyboard.

1:24:58That's totally fine. But it's just not a comfortable experience is what I would say. So if you're doing long-term work, I find a pair of glasses easier to wear for a longer period of time if you're trying to do deep work. The one thing I do find that the pro headsets have an advantage over is you could make that screen so big. If you ever really want to feel existential dread in a draft, just make the screen the size of your wall. Stare at it and just go like, why won't the words come? Have you ever done that? That is like sadistic. I'm going to look at every word that I have written for this story six feet across.

1:25:36That sounds awful. I have done that. It is awful. I will tell you I've done that. I've just like full screened a full screen CMS, stared at it and just gone like, wow, I've made a life choice. And wow, I really don't like the structure of this graph. What if we just delete it? So I have done that. Not frequently, mostly when I was testing just to like torture myself, because why not? Why not? I will say that if you're doing a lot of writing, though, you really got to crank up the font in the X-reels. and it's not my favorite to write in. It is a lot better if you're doing just casual media viewing, but you can do it.

1:26:20And as long as you're not looking at 40 ,000 Excel cells, I think you should be fine. Like if you're just making a deck, blow the deck up. You'll be fine. It's great. If you're doing like a draft where there's hundreds of tiny little words, just crank it up to 180 and then you can read comfortably instead of squinting in your glasses and going like, yeah, that's the only thing I'll say. You do make an interesting point about the resolution, though, because there is a certain kind of number-crunching, spreadsheeting work that I would say no one should do in a headset of any resolution. Correct.

1:26:57Because it'll just destroy your eyes and brain trying to make sense of all of it. Also your soul. Also your soul. Also your soul. Yeah, nothing like if you want to see the Excel numbers bigger, you're in real trouble. But I think, yeah, yeah, there's like part of me hears Mark and is like, Mark, what you need is not glasses. What you need is one of those cool foldy stands that just moves your laptop up higher. Also going to suggest that I was like, Mark, Mark, what if we what if we I think Welch took a picture of the guy one time in a coffee shop who just had like seven books stacked on top of each other and the laptop on top of it and was just happy as a clam working.

1:27:35I will say you probably have seven books in your bookcase, Mark, if you want to try that. Then before you shell out five hundred dollars for a pair of smart glasses, face computers. but if you are going to go the face computer route I really do think the Xreal one is probably your only option there might be like other competitors that I just haven't tried yet but as far as one that I have gotten my hands on, put on my face and feel comfortable recommending I would say the Xreal they have multiple options in multiple price ranges but the ones that I have used and can say has a pretty good screen resolution is the Xreal one Yeah.

1:28:15And I think in a case like this, if you're serious, like I was just looking at Exgeron's website because I've tried a few of these and it's like you can get the thing that you're describing, which is screen in front of your face for less than the price of the one. But I also think if you're going to use this thing as hard as it sounds like our buddy Mark is going to use it, you should pay for the extra resolution. Like it's your your eyes will thank you if you just spend a little bit more to get the one that looks the best you possibly can. That and especially if you like want to watch a video privately on the way back.

1:28:48True. Commuting like that's I'm telling you the Stray Kids the makeup resolution was really great. And I was just like they're so beautiful. I love this. I love watching my effeminate sons from a different country dance complicated choreography and technicolor. It's great. And they're doing it just for you because that's the glasses. They're doing it just for me because they're on the glasses. No one can see me watch a million TikToks of the Justin Baldoni Blake Lively case. It's just for me. And now for all of us. That's on top of that. And now for all of us. But it's just we won't tell anybody.

1:29:23Don't worry. I've watched way too many TikToks about that case. So I'm glad that it's private. It's for the best. It's for the best. V, thank you. Mark, I hope that helps. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about. Lots of great Sean coverage of all of the framework stuff. I'll link to John's stuff on James Bond and Amazon and all that stuff. We'll put some stuff on the X-Real glasses in the show notes. All of that in the show notes. Keep an eye on everything, but also keep it locked on the verge.

1:30:00As far as I can tell, this surprisingly early gadget season is not going to stop anytime soon. So keep an eye out. Anyway, as always, if you have questions, thoughts, feelings, James Bond pitches you want to get out to somebody, you can always email us at vergecast at verge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We honestly love hearing from you. It remains my very favorite thing about doing this show is hearing from all of you. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Will Poore. Nilai and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news, all of the politics, all of the gadgets, all of the everything that just keeps happening.

1:30:41We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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