The shine comes off the Vision Pro

27:54People share their iPads. Schools. There's some enterprise support for shared accounts on iOS devices if you're in a school or a business. But a regular person who spends $500,$600,$700 on an iPad that is not a family device by any stretch of the imagination is locked in one user. Because Apple wants you to buy multiple iPads. They want everyone in your family to have an iPad. Okay, there's some just raw, capitalistic user hostility there. Yeah. Fine, they're the richest company in the world. What a shock. I think with the Vision Pro, there's no expectation that a family of four is going to buy four Vision Pros.

28:27And I think that that's why I'm like not ready to call it. I think they just shipped the product that was done. I think it was hostile design. I don't think it's necessarily like Apple was set out to had a big vision here. I think it was just, well, we want to make this thing as cool as possible. And that means we need to make it as finicky as possible, regardless of what that means for like use cases for other people, because we want to make it as cool as possible. And that's hostile to the users because then they can't share it. They can't do anything with it. They have to, they do have to go buy another one or they have to go buy a$200 light seal if they want to have that experience.

29:03And like, I don't want to say the Quest Pro is a good product, but that part of it. Just to remind everyone, we gave the Quest Pro a four. Yeah. And the headline was, get me out of here. but could you put it on like when you put it on your head did it fit did you have to go buy a 200 light seal to make sure it worked oh no so i i i don't buy that premise at all honestly like if have you ever put on somebody else's headset and you spend 15 minutes screwing around with the lenses and the strap to get it to fit your head like it's there's just no world in which you have a good experience using these things ironically it's one of the reasons i think meta Ray-Ban strategy is closer to the right one because that's just a pair of glasses that is much closer to a thing you can just put on anyone's head and it will more or less work.

29:50You might look stupid in them, but it's just a pair of glasses. Whereas something like this is just by definition so individual user centric that I think for Apple to say, oh, share it with your friends, they're going to have a trash experience in it is actually a bad idea. No, I think it was a bad idea. What I'm saying is go further back. I think it was a bad idea to design a product. Well, you're just arguing it was a bad idea to ship the Vision Pro, which is fine. Yeah, like to ship it in the state to say, hey, we're going to charge you$200 for a light seal. Hey, we're going to make it so extraordinary for one person and no one else.

30:26I think that's just inherently hostile to design. I will say I do think an interesting question that is becoming more and more open is whether Apple overshot. And this is where we should get into Mark Zuckerberg's review of this thing, because it's part of the case that he made, which is that Apple basically came out and said, we are going to make the best, most impressive, most incredible thing possible. Every other consequence be damned. Right. And it did that by all accounts. Like, I don't I don't think it missed in terms of doing the best anyone possibly can at this moment in time on very many fronts.

31:02is doing that a better idea than making something that is 85 % as good and maybe half the weight don't know it like is it something that apple should have shipped that was much closer to just a screen and an entertainment device as opposed to trying to do all of this other stuff these i think this roadmap apple has set itself on where it made the best thing possible and it's just going to try to bring it down in all of those ways over time towards people is a strategy. But I think it's less and less obvious to me that it's the right one because it's like you want that to be the luxury thing that not everybody can afford, but everybody who can really loves.

31:43And even that is not what it's getting right now. It's not like the Tesla Roadster or the super expensive first luxury item you see from a lot of companies. It's not even working for those people. It's not the Samsung flip phones, right? Like that was the thing. It was like, okay, there's a lot of flaws in this. If you peel this part off, it will destroy it and then Samsung will not be happy. But like it still worked pretty well. And I mean, yeah, more than one person could use it, but it actually delivered on the promise. And this feels like it doesn't always - But the promise there was just, it unfolds.

32:18Yeah, it was a much simpler promise. The promise that Apple is making is we will intermediate reality for you. And that was perhaps too big a promise to make. I think David said this a couple weeks ago, which is with the Apple Watch. And so, so many people have compared the Vision Pro to the Apple Watch, which I'm just going to remind everyone I got right in that review, too. But the Apple Watch underwent drastic, drastic changes. But, David, I think it was you who said this a couple weeks ago. They got the form factor right. Everyone knew that this is how it should look. And all you're doing is refining the thing around the shape that it should be.

32:55And here it just seems obvious that the form factor isn't right. Right. That they shouldn't do pass through in this way. That what you want is all you want glasses. So I think that does bring it to the Zuckerberg review, which again, I think every CEO should just review their competitors. Like head on. 100%. David, you want to tell us what's going on with Mark? Sure. Okay. So let me, let me just briefly set the scene for you here. So Mark Zuckerberg and his newly long hair, which I'm shocked we have not talked about on this show yet, but we'll just leave that. Sitting on a couch in a dark long sleeve shirt, I think, with an immaculately fluffed pillow behind him.

33:34Lovely setup. Did a, I don't know, what, maybe five minutes or so, just kind of riff on his experience with the Vision Pro, how he feels about the Quest 3 compared to the Vision Pro. because there were a lot of people, remember, when this came out who were like, oh, the Quest is dead. Meta actually rushed to launch the Quest 3 ahead of the Vision Pro. These two things have been very closely pitted against each other as sort of opposite ends of this strategy for a very long time. And he sat down and basically, we should just play a clip here, but he basically said at the end of his experience, he thinks not only is the Quest 3 a better value, he thinks it is straight up a better product than the Vision Pro.

34:12Yeah. Pull over in your car and just look at this man's hair and then listen to his voice. I think the Quest is the better product, period. And, you know, the different companies made different design decisions for the headsets. They have different strengths. But overall, Quest is better for the vast majority of things that people use mixed reality for. And that's a good line, right? Beautiful hair, too. It's great hair. It is, like, lustrous. That's what punching other men in the face will get you. Just gets the follicles done. He's just rocking. Healthier than ever. By the way, you know, Mixed Martial Arts is listed in Meta's risk factors with investors.

34:48Yes. So good. Our CEO may deeply injure himself fighting other humans. Very good. Anyway, so the point there, right, is everyone thought, okay, does$500 get me 85 % of a Vision Pro? And honestly, in the review, we didn't talk about the quest a lot in our review because they feel very different. Yeah. Yeah. And I think now what Zuckerberg is trying to do is actually make them more competitors. See, I don't even know if I agree with that. I think part of his take, I think, is that they're actually very different things. That everybody wants them to be trying to do the same thing and sort of compete on what they can do for different people.

35:28And it's like, oh, I want to do X, Y, and Z. Should I buy a Quest or a Vision Pro? And his whole point is kind of, you can't do any of that stuff on the Vision Pro. like the the quest and i will say the single funniest thing about this whole video to me was the moment where the camera flips around and it becomes clear that he's filming this thing on a quest three which just means there is a person sitting there very still just staring at him with the headset on just like you do with the vision pro your child's birthday party yeah exactly like next time we make a video nila i'm just gonna stare into your eyes the whole time it's gonna to be incredible uh but he it's it's a big part of what he talks about and i think is the most compelling part of zuckerberg's case here is that for all the stuff people actually want to do in a headset like this right now we can talk about 10 years from now we can talk about the big far future of headsets for everybody but in terms of like right now what people want to do inside of a headset there's just more of that in the quest yeah there's more games there's more apps there There are, there is, you can do three Mac windows if you want to.

36:31Although setting that up is a Byzantine nightmare of like what I call software dongles. Oh yeah. You don't want, it's not great. You have to download a bunch of apps that just sound like malware in order to like it's bad. Yeah. And you're like, I'm sending my entire screen to meta? No thank you, sir. I don't care what your hair looks like today. No. You're not actually sending your entire screen to meta. But you understand what I'm saying. It's a nightmare of weird applications. And Mark actually calls it out. Like Apple's ecosystem is great. But if you want to play a bunch of games or you want to do fitness, if you want to control the thing, you have high resolution controllers, which he calls out very specifically.

37:12And the heart of what he's getting at, and I think this is really interesting because you rarely see CEOs acknowledge this. He's like, we made different tradeoffs than Apple. and we think our trade-offs make a better product period not just a cheaper product not just a better product at our price point and he comes back to that over and over again and you if you go listen to any CEO ever talk about their products I talk to a lot of CEOs and a lot of decoders like you made this trade-off how did you make that choice and they're like we didn't make any trade-offs at all all the time all the time especially Apple refuses to acknowledge that they made trade-offs right like in the review process we're like why is the battery over here and like yeah we want to save weight on your head and that is as much of a trade-off because it is meant to be over here it's like jesus wanted it that way and it's like there's that one you can't avoid but everything else they're like these are the best displays ever made yeah and then mark is everything like we've looked at these displays and they are oled displays and they have exactly the kind of motion blur that you would expect from oled displays our lenses are better that meta really believes the quest 3's pancake cleansers are better they have a wider field of view so we lose x from the displays the resolution that apple has in their displays but we gain x in the lenses i'm not saying these are the right trade-offs i'm not saying these are trade-offs that make you make you buy anything i'm saying a ceo acknowledging the trade-offs in a product category is wild like fully wild and i don't know if you saw this a lot of people were like this is Zuck's Balmer moment.

38:47Oh. Where Balmer was like, $500 fully unsubsidized of the plan. I like our phone better. And that's, there's an element of that to what Zuck was doing. Oh, no, I disagree. I thought, it felt more like a victory lap, like a legit victory lap. Wow, okay. That's how you took it. Yeah, because I, you know, V put up a story this week that I worked with her on about the visions of these two companies because they're both, the end game for both of them isn't VR, it's AR, right? Both of these companies are waiting. Eventually, the technology is going to get there, and they're going to do face computers, and that's what everybody wants.

39:21Spatial computing. After 15 days of the Vision Pro, can we say everyone wants a face computer? That's what everyone in Silicon Valley wants. That's what all the VCs want. But I think their strategy is a much smarter strategy. And I think when you think about how you have to normalize these products, because they are really big, really wild, and really insane, you have to normalize that. Like it's going to require a cultural shift. And Meta is moving with much smarter purpose in that direction than Apple, who is like face computer that looks like ski goggles. Put it on your face. It's way too heavy and you might throw up.

39:55It'll be fine. And Meta is like, OK, well, we've got like these glasses that just look like glasses and you can't do as much. But you can still do like you can still like scan photos and stuff like that, which is really, really cool. And they've got the VR headsets that actually like do VR well. Yeah. which like I think that's just a better strategy. I think he's right. And when I was watching it, I was like, oh, this is him just taking this victory lap and also making some egregious claims like meta is going to be the open ecosystem. Yeah, which is bananas. Yeah, are they going to let Lenovo build quests?

40:31I was like, oh, are you just announcing that everybody's going to be making headsets for meta OS? What they mean from what I understand is that you can sideload applications on a quest. No, what meta means is if you build something cool, we'll just buy your company. And that's an open model. Yeah, it's an open ecosystem because you get rich. They mean in every phase of computing, there's Apple being weird. And then there's everyone else being like, what if we work together? And then there's Apple being weird. Yeah, that part I was like, oh, I feel like you're like you had me this whole time. Your hair looks great.

41:02You're like you're speaking, you're saying the things that I really do think about this whole field. And now you've just lied. He does keep saying that they will be the open player in VR, and it's really unclear. I was like, I really want to sit him down with like a computer historian to explain to him computer history so that he understands that what he is saying is not true. Oh, I'm sure he has access to computer historians. He probably does. He probably, but he doesn't listen. I think there's just a way of positioning yourself up against the big bad of Apple that he's taking advantage of. But I think right now what they have is sideloading apps.

41:34Yeah. But I will say also, to your point, Alex, I think one thing I'm really starting to realize is how significant Meta's lead is just having been at this in public for a decade. Yep. Because, again, like me and I go back to the Apple Watch, you launch the thing and then you wait around for a couple of years for people to tell you what they want from it. And then it's your job to kind of chase that and figure it out. Right. And Apple is good at that generally and does it very quickly and relies on its developers to do it for them. And Meta has been at that for 10 years now. Like the thing where here's a thing on your face, it's kind of ugly and you'll probably throw up.

42:10Like, you know what that sounds like is the first three Oculus products. That's just what it was. And it turned off a lot of people. And we all, you know, hemmed and hawed about whether a whole generation was being turned off by their first experience in VR because it was so bad. But now it's been at this long enough that it's pretty good at it. And it has a pretty clear sense of what people want right now. And I think that's where things like the Meta Ray-Ban stuff come from. It's like, oh, people want super immersive and that's either like gaming or the fitness stuff. They want to be in another world or they want as little technology as possible.

42:42And so they've pushed to both ends of that and I think are able to do it. Whereas Apple very much just put out a tech demo and we're like, is this anything? Like it's starting at that road now. And Meta has been on it for a long time. I would say that there's a, I think there's a little bit of a danger of the bomber problem in that Apple is relentless. Yes. And they do stay focused. The difference – And they have all the money in the universe. Is that Mark Zuckerberg is not Steve Ballmer. Yes. Just an observation that I've made over time. I've studied these two men very carefully. I think Meta is more reactive to consumers and that Ballmer's Microsoft was much more reactive to enterprise.

43:22Yeah. That's 100%. And that version of Microsoft – not Microsoft now, but that version of Microsoft in particular was addicted to making the ugliest shit possible. Yes. They were just like, it's Windows Mobile 6.5. It's the same Windows Mobile that you've hated all this time, but now the stock launcher is a honeycomb. Also, that won't be there, and carriers can do whatever garbage they want. It's like, this isn't a good idea. We made the icons smaller. This is bad. And Apple was able to force. And so I think there are some meaningful differences here because they have been in market with a complete consumer product.

43:56I'm not saying I have a Quest 2. You have a Quest. Like, lots of Quest 2s out there, some Quest 3s. Apple's coming at this from a different direction. I'm not saying they won't succeed. But I think after two weeks with this thing, like, the barriers are just crystal clear. Yeah. In a way that the barriers to the Quest are also crystal clear. And they are going to converge more than they don't. But saying, like, Apple revitalized this market, I think is... Generous. yeah and with the watch they had a huge advantage which was no one else could make a watch well no I mean like literally like the iPhone does not allow other watches oh that's true yeah like Pebble existed I was just like Pebble was a great watch no but if you want to do the thing where you get a text message and you respond yes like Pebble was not allowed to do that yeah you'd be like oh okay let me pull my phone out so we'll see now we've talked enough about the Vision Pro I like that we just spent 40 minutes being like, everybody's returning this product.

44:59Let's talk about it. It is the most fascinating product. It is Apple's first big bet. I want to talk about it. I just want to end on this. I want everyone to do this homework and send me your evaluation. We've talked a lot about my theory of wearable bullshit. Whatever that is, where the chart is value on one axis and then like fiddliness and then a 10x multiplier if it's on your face. That's as far as I've gotten on this. So an Apple Watch started really fiddly with not a lot of value, eventually crossed the line. And now people really like Apple Watches. We all have one. Yeah. AirPods, not very fiddly at all.

45:39Super valuable. People really like them. Face computers, historically below the line. Very fiddly, enormous social cost, not a lot of value. Yeah. Where do you think the Vision Pro is on the graph? Send me your graph. We'll just go through them. I'm dying to know what you all think after this because that's fiddliness. No, it's a value on the values on the y-axis, fiddliness on the X, and then a 10X multiplier on your face. That's it. That's what I think it is. There's an entire episode where we go through this. So I'm just – go back and look at that one if you want more versions of the graph.

46:20But just send me your graphs. I'm dying to know what you think about the theory of wearable bullshit. All right, we have to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights.

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47:39Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

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50:16we're back as we've been recording vamping to fill time with the vision pro microsoft has been quietly making announcements in the background on a on a podcast i believe yes weirdest way ever to announce things we've been recording a podcast while they have been publishing a podcast and now our podcast will be about what they said on their podcast does it do Do we now directly compete with the Xbox? Yes. Download ours. Don't download the Xbox. Phil Spencer just went on a podcast and said, everything The Verge said is true and always has been. All right, Alex, what is going on in the news over there?

50:52Okay, so there's been rumors for the last few weeks that Microsoft was going to take a couple of games that are exclusive for the Xbox and make them not exclusive. Put them on the Switch. Put them on the PS5. Fans were not pleased about that. Can you explain that to me? Actually, I... I've realized in all of this chaos that I don't understand why people would be so up in arms about that. Well, I think if you go and you spend a lot of money on a product and you invest a lot of time and energy into it and like buying a lot of games for it. And then and you're like, yeah, I don't get like The Last of Us and I don't get Horizon Zero Dawn and I don't get all these cool PS5 games.

51:28But I get Starfield and I get Sea of Thieves. And then they say, OK, now Starfield is going to go off and be on on PS5. I would probably be a little biffed. So you're like, maybe I should have just bought a PlayStation and now I get all the games. Right. Why did I even buy an Xbox to begin with? I get that. Because they're like$500,$600. That's expensive. So Starfield is not coming to the PS5, but Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Hi-Fi Rush, and Pentamint are coming to the PS5 and the Switch. First, Hi-Fi Rush and Pentamint, then Sea of Thieves and Grounded. Sea of Thieves is like a really pretty popular Xbox game where you can like be a pirate and you go play with other pirates.

52:09It's cute. It's fun. It's a big like it's almost an MMORPG but not quite. These are pretty popular games for Xbox and now they're going to be on PS5 and Nintendo Switch. Wait, can I just say something about this? Microsoft has not actually officially confirmed those four games. What? Tom has reported and knows that it's those four games but Microsoft won't confirm that those are the four games they're just saying four games but they've pretty clearly said it's not going to be Starfield and it's not going to be the rumored Indiana Jones video game that's coming out so it's not any of the big games I mean like real is it like Microsoft has a handful of like gigantic things in its arsenal now and none of the games you just named are those games.

52:59Xbox fans, please don't come for me. But if you're not a big hardcore Xbox fan, these are probably not the biggest games in the world. It's nothing compared to The Last of Us or Uncharted or some of PlayStation's exclusives. I'm horrible at video games and all of these sound like fun names for thieves in a comic book. I'm Pentiment. I'm Sea of Thieves. Like rejected musketeers. Yeah, exactly. Oh, no, it's Hi-Fi Rush. But this has been a big deal for the community. Tom actually got to talk with Phil Spencer about it. There was a big interview. And I have definitely been maybe editing that little interview, looking at that stuff.

53:46I maybe knew a little ahead of the podcast what was coming or not coming. Spoilers. and I thought what was really interesting was he was very evasive in the interview with us about like what games were coming and what games weren't coming. He wasn't really commit to anything and when asked specifically about Starfield and Indiana Jones which are the ones I think fans are most concerned about losing that access to or losing that exclusive access to, he said you know I don't think we should as an industry ever rule out a game going to any other platform which is you know if you just want to be able to play any game like you neilai who's bad at games and probably doesn't want to own every system that's great news for you if you're really invested in one ecosystem that's less great news because like the console wars yeah so a really interesting thing here that i am hoping you can explain to me i have for years now assumed that the microsoft strategy is game streaming.

54:45Yes. Right. They're slowly moving to Xbox game streaming. They bought Activision. They want to be everywhere. And Phil Spencer has said to me, like, we are bad. We're the number three player in video games. In consoles. In consoles. And if you look broadly, all the action is on phones and we got to go there. And that has always felt like a hint of we're going to go do game streaming. Now there's the Digital Markets Act. Apple has to open up different stores. Apple has said they're going to allow game streaming. So you look at this shift and it is not that. They're not putting Xbox Game Pass on the PS5.

55:23They're just porting four titles to the PS5. Yeah. And people were that upset about it. But that's the part that I don't get. It's like, why? That's a lot of work. Like, isn't the point that we're going to stream the titles over there? It's not like given the architecture of these consoles now, it's not as hard of work as it used to be because they both run on the same like AMD kind of architecture. It's different enough that it's like it's not like just point and click and immediately transfer. But it's not as hard as it used to be. I think this is all kind of part of showing that they're friendly and that they're not going to create a monopoly in gaming.

56:01Because right now they own Activision Blizzard, which was like one of the largest game companies. They are effectively one of the largest game companies in the world right now, right? Like, I think Tencent and maybe Nintendo are the only thing that might even come close to them. So just absolutely enormous. And if they want to say, okay, no more Call of Duty on PS5, in 10 years they can do that. No, but they ran around the world promising any government official that they would ship Call of Duty for at least five more years, right? Ten. Yeah. So they're, like, committed for the next 10 years. I mean, there are like feudal lords in European countries that you've never heard of that have secured a 10-year commitment for Call of Duty.

56:39And like a feudal lord, they're trying to show how magnanimous they are, right? They're trying to show, yeah, yeah, we got you. We want to be everywhere all at once, but we also don't want to destroy all of our competition because we need them to sell games. Oh, man. That is so charitable and so wrong. Yeah. Oh, man. What's your read on it? So we should – you're probably right, honestly. I don't know. We should cut off here because I think we're going to have Tom on the show on Tuesday who knows clearly more about what's going on than anyone at Microsoft. So Tom's going to explain what's going on here.

57:11But Neil, I would just point you to the Xbox One and the thing where Microsoft said, hey, here's a console that plays all of your games, but we're doing it in a slightly new way. And also a different thing happens when you turn on your TV and gamers just about burned the buildings down at Microsoft. like this business is too big to screw up and if you're microsoft and you're out here saying game streaming is the future we're moving these three games you've never heard of and sea of thieves over and people lose their minds like microsoft is going to play this the slowest possible way because it is desperately afraid of losing this little bit of love that it has in the gaming community like i i do actually agree with alex that there are some reasons to be worried about the anti-trust ramifications of just running roughshod over the gaming industry, which in theory Microsoft could afford to do.

58:03But also, pissing off gamers goes real bad for everybody, and Microsoft knows that better than anybody. And so it is going to take this the slowest it feels like it can afford to take this. Which is why there's a lot of rumors. We wrote a piece this week. Like, Tom really thinks the handheld is coming. He'll talk more about it with David on next week. Sean also fully wants, he wants to manifest a handheld that's like a Steam Deck with Xbox built in. Like, I am rooting for Sean because I think that will be cool, too. But they did tease some, like, unique hardware coming. They've teased that some bigger hardware is coming down the line.

58:39Phil Spencer keeps liking tweets about Xbox. Yeah, he keeps liking tweets about handhelds. And in this conversation he had with Tom, he said, yes, unique stuff's coming. So, like. A handheld is coming. Yeah, a handheld is coming. Is it going to be like a good handheld or is it going to be more like what Sony like farted out? We'll see. All right. Yeah. Sorry. We'll come back. Tom will be on the show. We'll unpack all of it. Yeah. I'm legitimately confused about why port four games to another console. I'm going to like. If your strategy is to be everywhere and the problem is phones. We're going to throw you into the Xbox like Reddit and just I think the confusion will go away.

59:19Can I interest you in gamers? Oh, no, it's Hi-Fi Rush.

59:27They were mainly confirmed. I think they were more concerned about Starfield, which it sounds like is not going to be in this initial run. So to be fair, that was the one they were really passionate about because it just came out. They're like, don't do this like this. But I would bet you$10 that if Microsoft had its druthers and was not afraid of the ramifications, Starfield would be in this. Oh, 100 percent. Like Microsoft's strategy includes Starfield and Indiana Jones being available everywhere. It just does. It's coming. It's just they're going to be like six months from now. They'll be like, oh, it came out.

59:56Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Phil Spencer is just like quietly tiptoeing in slippers towards the future that he is promising. Like that's where we're at here. High up on the tippies. Exactly. Oh, my God. High heels on the tippies. Yep. Yep. I know. There we go. I said it all the way to work today. That's how I walked. It's the next line. That's the real problem. I'm not going to finish it. Let's just move on. We're good. We're good here. I love TikTok. All right. That's Microsoft. And again, Tom will be on the show and we'll try to figure out what all this means. We should talk about AI briefly before our lightning round.

1:00:31By the way, two more people have asked me how to sponsor lightning round. And the answer is that for all my jokes about taking your money, that's not my job. I don't know how. That's not what we do here. Just Venmo him. The influencers know how to take money. But we just do disclosures and other people take the money. So we'll figure it out. I promise someone else is going to take your money. But we should talk about AI quickly and then do a lightning round. We mentioned at the top of the show that Google's strategy is very much, we hope over time, this makes sense. I would say that my understanding of the Gemini product roadmap right now fits perfectly into over time.

1:01:10We hope this makes sense because they announced Gemini Ultra, which is 20 bucks a month. And then David, you just wrote about Gemini 1.5 Pro, which they're like is as good as Gemini Ultra. What is going on here? So Google, in case you've wondered if Google is good at naming things now because they decided to name everything Gemini and that seemed like it made sense. Don't worry, my friends. Google still sucks at naming stuff. There are, I think, four different product names between the Gemini product that you use and the Gemini subscription that you pay for. There are four different product names.

1:01:48But at any rate, so So Gemini 1.5 is basically Google's new next model. It makes sense. Everybody's always working on these next models. I was talking to Sunar Pichai, their CEO, about this yesterday. And one of the things that he told me was he thinks that over time, eventually, these numbers won't matter to people. And all of this stuff will just sort of happen in the background. He compared it to Google Search, where, like, search doesn't get new version names. It just kind of gets better over time. I want to point out that Sam Altman said that a million times before announcing GPT-4. Just saying.

1:02:23Oh, sure. There's 3.5 and there's 3.5 Turbo and there's GPT-4 and now GPT-5 is apparently a thing, even though he said it wouldn't matter. Like, all of this is insane. But we're going to get to that point eventually. But right now, we're very much in this arms race. And I think especially the way you have to understand the arms race is these two companies in particular, OpenAI and Google, are in a massive land grab for developer resources, right? Like if every company on earth is at some point going to have an AI strategy, and at this moment that's what it looks like, there are basically two players right now they can give a whole lot of money to.

1:02:59And there is a lot of money in winning that. Like think about what AWS did for Amazon, right? Because it was early to, we're very good at giving you developer resources in the cloud. There is now a belief that the market for AI is going to be even bigger and happen even faster. So these companies are just running as fast as they possibly can. And they honestly don't care all that much if the version numbers don't make any sense to us as users. But so Gemini 1.5 is coming out. And at some point, it will just sort of wholly replace Gemini 1.0. And there's the three sizes of it. There's Ultra, which is like the big full model, all the epic stuff.

1:03:34The Pro, which is the middle one, which is the one that most consumers see. And then there's Nano, which is specifically designed to run on people's devices. Google hasn't talked much about Nano yet on any of its Gemini stuff, but that's, I think, interesting piece of it. The big thing with Gemini 1.5 is that its context window is much bigger. And essentially what that means is you can just put a lot more stuff into it at a time. when you there's a bunch of like weird complicated math to do but typically they say it's like three quarters of a word is a token and google's context window for gemini 1.5 is a million tokens which is a lot of words you can do hours of video hours of audio all kinds of different stuff so you can just plug all this in and then ask questions about it do stuff with it uh and they have they They have big ideas about what people might do with this huge context window.

1:04:25And there's a lot coming. So we could put like the entire B movie in there and then find out like if we were supposed to really think there was a romance between a human woman. That is a great question. Ask a computer. Yeah. Do you detect love? I really want to let me up the difficult for you. If you do this, please, please email me. There's a great exchange in David's report on this where I think Sundar says you could fit the entire Lord of the Rings movie into the context window. And David's like, that means that's happened. He said it so without thinking that he was just like it was it was as if he had like left the Lord of the Rings meeting right before talking to me.

1:05:04It's just like this definitely happened. It's very good. What's fascinating to me about all of this is, yes, there's an arms race for developers. there are still I think we're hitting the same place with AI in a slightly longer time frame as people are hitting with the Vision Pro in a slightly shorter time frame where you're like it's really cool fastest consumer adoption history and now we've all just run into the limits. That's right. Yes. Right and I think developers love it because you can build new apps that can certainly go get funding from VCs you can write code with it which I think people really love to do and sort of everywhere else it's like what I can do is produce spam at a higher rate than spam has ever been produced before and turn the internet into a fetid swamp oh the the corporate folks love it yeah because they're like yeah i can just have it do all my emails when i have to do a memo i just have it write the first draft of my memo for me and you're like well you shouldn't do that don't you you should write that's important oh i i actually i think sending corporate emails with ai's i don't actually send a lot of emails i refuse to use enterprise software uh well not that part but uh but uh like the idea that some transactional email is better written by ai than fine but like that is a pretty small use case on the grand order of things yeah i'm wondering like david as you look to this model as you played with ultra as you've played with the other ones do you see that next set of big uses showing up no i think there's going to be an increasing kind of creative state of the art.

1:06:43Like one of the other things that happened this week was OpenAI launched Sora, which is its text-to-video model. And so I think the kind of state of the art of stuff you can make creatively, there's a just massive room left to go. And there's going to be all kinds of cool stuff on that front. But I think we've been talking about on the show for a while now, when is the sort of novelty of using these AI chatbots going to wear off? And we're there. I think it's happening. And one of the other things I'm starting to see all over social is a lot of people who started paying for Copilot from Microsoft and are now canceling it.

1:07:18And people are starting to sign up for Gemini Advanced with$20 a month. People are starting to goof around with it. And you look at it and it's like the thing so many people keep saying about the Vision Pro is like amazing technology. I took it off and kind of never had a reason to put it on again. And I think a lot of people are starting to feel that way, especially in the sort of one-to-one consumer use case about AI stuff. And also, I think that's why all these companies are going after companies, because if I'm already signed up for this stuff through my organization, like, yeah, I'll use it to make it easier to make charts or whatever.

1:07:55I mean, that was Microsoft's whole strategy, right? Like, get Copilot out. Yeah, but Copilot is 20 bucks a month to make charts easier. Yeah. Yeah, but you're like a IT guy with endless budget at a big company. The days of endless IT budgets are over. Who knows? Right. You can see all these companies are contracting. They're not spending lots of money. That to me is like this is the big gap. I will say that I recently set the action button on my iPhone 15 Pro to open the chat GPT voice assistant. Just the cheap one. 3.5, not 4, not the one you have to pay for. And it is like, oh, they should just make Siri this.

1:08:30They should throw Siri away and they should just make Siri this. It is revelatory. Like the other day, we had to reheat chicken wings from the Super Bowl. and I just asked my phone and it said an answer to me. Was that answer correct? Did it lie? Did it hallucinate the temperature and the time? It was fine because the stakes were so low. I asked it twice. Chica Wings is high stakes though. No, they're not reheating. It's true. Reheating, yeah, that's fair. Because I asked it twice and the first time it said 350 degrees, the second time I said 375 and I was like, this doesn't matter. The stakes are very low here.

1:09:10And I didn't have to trawl the SEO at internet. Yeah. And Siri, I asked Siri, and Siri was like, I don't know. If it is a 200, would you have been in there being like, this feels wrong, but I'll go with it. That's how I would describe the chatGPT use case. You know that old Stephen Colbert word truthiness? Yeah. If you're comfortable with something that just feels right, I really encourage you to set chatGPT to your action button. But actually, that's a really good example of the problem that all these companies are having, right? Google is essentially ripping and replacing Google Assistant with Gemini for the same reason.

1:09:47This stuff is going to be better at those things. Would you pay$20 a month for the thing that you just described? No, nobody would. And so there's going to be this mainstream use case for this stuff that no one will pay for. And then there's going to be a ton of money. At least that's what these companies are betting. in the business use cases. But to me, it feels like we are quickly hitting something like a ceiling of what people actually want to do with these things day in and day out. Like, a million token context window does not make you better at chicken wings. It just doesn't. And so I think that next thing for regular people is going to have to come from somewhere else.

1:10:27And there's a bunch of different ways these companies are trying to do it. OpenAI has been making a bunch of tweaks to like how it builds its models to try and make them sort of smarter and more efficient. It also launched a thing this week called memory where it can actually remember things about you and what you like and your preferences so that it should sort of interact with you in a more human and like friendly way over time. That's the stuff that I think is going to be interesting. Just building bigger models to do more high end stuff is like purely a business play. And I think you're right that$20 per person per month is more money than most companies have to spend at this moment in time.

1:11:01So I don't know which of those things is going to catch up first. Can you imagine spending$20 a month for like possibly right, possibly wrong chicken wings reheating instructions? I mean, I think if you just buy chicken wings at restaurants, it's always a gamble. Are they going to be good? Yeah. If your chicken wings budget is 20 bucks a month, it's a gamble every time. Yeah, that's true. Chicken wings are a big deal. They are. Very important. I want to talk about the other side of the AI debate real quick. David, you wrote about robots.txt this week. I did. Sarah Jong and I talked about the copyright battles that are facing all these AI companies on Decoder.

1:11:42There's something else here, right? These companies are forging ahead with ever bigger models, ever more use cases, higher prices. and the sort of underlying question of, is it okay to take all this stuff to make the models remains extraordinarily unresolved. The Sarah Silverman case, a group of authors, including Sarah Silverman, suing Okanai, they just had a setback in their case. All of the claims, except direct copyright infringement, which is a big deal, but all the other claims are thrown out. The judge seemed very skeptical. There are some specific concerns in there that are pretty wonky, so we don't have to go into them.

1:12:20but that case is getting whittled down i think the times case against open ai is a little bit stronger so we'll see but we don't know if these companies can even do it like whether this is copyright infringement such that the courts just shut down the entire notion of this to begin with or if the payments that they're required to make become so high that the business models don't work out all open questions and then david i want you to talk about robots.txt because there's this little handshake agreement of a text file on every website and that handshake agreement is like one hand is just crushing the other one and it's like this thing can't support the weight of it i don't think yeah so i got i got sort of obsessed with this years ago uh when i first started talking to people about google amp for a story i wrote which was basically like what is the value exchange on the internet right and it turns out that a lot of the sort of policing of the internet happens in that file you named robots.txt if you go to almost any website and then just put up slash robots.txt it'll pop up a text file that you can see that basically decides which crawlers from around the web are and are not allowed to go onto a website so crawlers exist for lots of reasons many of them are from search engines which are indexing the web in order to be able to send search results amazon has a crawler that checks for pricing around the web for what the government would say are extremely nefarious reasons and Amazon would say are for legitimate business reasons.

1:13:46You might run a crawler to check all the links on your own site to make sure that they're still live. Like there are a lot of reasons to run crawlers. And this is like a technology from the early 90s that basically a bunch of people on a mailing list, including like Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen and a bunch of like early internet optimists decided is like, okay, you're just going to put up this thing that says essentially who's in and who's out. and everyone else who makes one of these crawlers is gonna abide by those rules because we want the internet to work. We're all cool people. This is gonna be great.

1:14:16That worked pretty well for a surprisingly long time. And now what's happening is if you run an AI company and you wanna get a bunch of training data, you know what's full of training data is the internet. And so you just go, you crawl the whole internet, you pull all that stuff in, you dump it in and you train your model on it. That's how you get recipes. That's how you get all this stuff. You just base it on all the stuff that exists on the public internet. And so now, if you're a person who runs a website or a recipe blog or any number of other things on the internet, you have to go in and decide who's in and who's out.

1:14:49with a thousand new crawlers, a bunch of companies of varying levels of decency and sketchiness. OpenAI has been in a bunch of media coverage about this because it actually told people how to block GPTBot and promised to abide by it, and by all accounts is doing so. A huge portion of websites on the internet, including, I believe, all of Vox Media, blocked GPTBot. The New York Times did. A lot of publishers have. But there are a lot of things out there that are either too small for now to even be known to these publishers or just don't care they just don't have to respect this little tiny text file that has no legal or technical authority and so any ai that wants to come in just can and that's just where we are and we have just like broken this basic give and take that the internet ran on for so long and like i talked to tony stubblebine the CEO of Medium, who has been a big proponent of kicking out the bots in this particular way.

1:15:51And what he said is basically, like, we're getting nothing out of this exchange. They're just taking everything from us and telling us that, you know, it's for the good of society. And like, screw that. That's not how the internet works. That's not what we're after. And I think everyone on the internet now is starting to have to make that exact same set of decisions. and what's fascinating is open ai only made gpt bot blockable after they had scraped the internet and i i honestly think that they did that so that media organizations and i have i'm not privy to what vox media does at that level i don't know why they did that or didn't do that yeah but i'm pretty sure they did it so media organizations companies could block open ai and then and feel like they had some control and then open AI could go make a deal.

1:16:42Right. And be like, Oh no, we're, you took the control away from us. That is, I will say that is precisely why. I mean, I talked to the open AS chief strategy officer who said basically that exact thing that, that it is, this is a way to signal that you would like to make a commercial deal and let's do it. And that is a pretty wild way of, of backing into something like that. But yeah, it is, it's not an accident that open AI didn't tell people about GPT. bot until it had already been pretty far down the road. Yeah. Because without doing what it did, it GPT four and chat GPT wouldn't be as good as they are like that.

1:17:17That is the trade. But then the question is who experiences the downside of that? Like, is that bad for the internet? Is it bad for the world or is it just bad for open AI? It's like, that's the question now. Yeah. And I think individual creators are feeling the pain of this very deeply. Yeah. even when we just write about neat ai tools we get people who are sort of morally outraged that we would acknowledge that some of them are neat because it's built on something it's built on some taking and whether or not you think that taking is fair or not is sort of divorced from whether it's legal or not and i i don't know that anyone has quite figured that out right somebody needs to pop it into am i the asshole on reddit like it's that's what you need it's a perfect one right and then you enter all of that into the million token gemini field like is this correct yeah and then we we send it to the judges and we're like look we figured it out the robots figured it out they they talked to each other we got this we know who the asshole is that means who legally is right again i keep i keep coming back to what i i refer to as the end game post yeah which is a person who's like i love podcasts but i don't have time for them i just feed them into an AI and it's like dude you just want articles.

1:18:31Just go read those. What you want is articles. Just go read articles made by people who care about you. It's a very simple way of getting what you want from the internet. Read. People would like to read. It is amazing that the broad future of computing is more reading. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I think that the turn for these AI companies, for OpenAI for example, you can signal you want commercial deals, but they're being sued. So if you go out and make a bunch of deals, you're kind of admitting that you need the deals. And the New York Times is going to, or whoever else is suing OpenAI, Getty, Stewing Stability, is going to say, look, you know that you should pay money for this stuff.

1:19:13You didn't pay us to begin with. So you're on the, and that is a strategic nightmare for these companies. It is. And I think James Kwan, the chief strategy officer at OpenAI I was talking to, one of the things he said is, and this kind of goes back to what you were talking about before, is that OpenAI feels very strongly that chat GPT should be mostly free for most people for exactly that reason. Like that's the value they believe they deliver back to the world is that by giving to this system, you then get access to this system. And the increase in quality of this system is good for the world and you can have it and it will make your life better.

1:19:50And I think you can view that as like dystopian black mirror nonsense or you can view that as like a fair trade in the way that google search was a fair trade but like that is the dynamic that we're about to reckon with in a lot of really really messy ways yeah and what is the most fascinating about all this we can bring all the way back around to google no one is going to block the google bot yeah like no one thinks they should be invisible from search you can block sites probably would i don't know what those are Alex's Plex server continues to rock and roll in the background. No one's blocking Alex's Plex server.

1:20:26Use that. You can block Google with some gradations. You can block Google search, which no one will do. And then you can block the other stuff. You can block Google's AI training. But no one is willing to say, I'm so mad at Google for scraping all of our stuff that we're going to block search. And I think that's when that one flips and people are like, it is worth it to be invisible to Google. Like the architecture of the Internet changes. Yes. All right. We got to take a break. We're going to come back for the lightning round sponsored by you. Support for the show comes from Udacity. AI seems to be everywhere these days.

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1:24:04We're back. Do you remember when Time Magazine said the person of the year was you? Yeah. And it was the little mirror. It was in a real mirror. That was when print magazines had budget to put mirror on the cover of magazines in every grocery store in America and be like, the person of the year is you. It was like a foggy. People are like holding their carrots. Like what? It was all like curvy, warped looking. Oh, that's not me. I'm just here for milk, not conceptual print ideas. So you're saying y 'all didn't frame yours and put it up next to your other awards? Is that not what you did? That's weird.

1:24:39Donald Trump has like the fake one and then like, this one's real. It's me, you guys. He looks at it every time. It's like, it is me. I was for real that time. All right. I feel like all of my lightning round entries are just complaining about streaming the Super Bowl. So Kranz, do you want to go first? Mine is like, I just find it fascinating. The big, big turn in the whole DMA thing with the European Union. iMessage is not found to be a, what is it they call it? Gatekeeper. Yeah. iMessage is not found to be a core platform service. So they're not going to make it open up, which feels probably right given that no one in the EU.

1:25:23Well, this is the trade app. Yeah. They've notably made the trade of saying, we will support RCS, and I think this is what they got in return. Yeah. So they're free and clear, as are my personal favorite. Microsoft's Edge browser is not considered a core service, and Bing Search was found to not be a core service. I don't think anybody has ever found Bing Search to be a core service. I just – I really loved that it was like, okay, iMessage. Like, damn it. And then Edge. And then Bing. Not even the bureaucrats of the European Union to bring themselves to regulate Bing. I wonder if they just like chuckled.

1:26:00They're like, oh, no. One thing that is really interesting in the mix there is Apple broke web apps in the EU. So for a minute, it looked like Apple would support what's called progressive web apps on the iPhone, where you have a web app. You can save it to your home screen. You push the button. It loads up in a wrapper and it feels just like a normal app. this is great. I think this is like, in terms of out, like out. That's how I do the verge. Yeah, that's how I do the verge. That's how I do RCMS when I want to post a quick post really fast. Ooh, that's smart. A quick link that just opens up a web wrapper.

1:26:36It's not in Safari and Apple broke it two betas ago in iOS 17 and they didn't say anything about why. And then today they finally released a statement on their developer portal that's like, well, we have to support other browsers in iOS now with a browser. And as you know, they all have to be equal. So how could we We possibly re-architect all of iOS to support launching a web app and another browser engine from the home screen. So we just shut it off. And it's like, dude, stop doing malicious compliance. Yeah, like that was just like kicking and screaming. Like that's just a hissy fit. Like do you know what platform supports PWAs and allows other browser engines?

1:27:13Android. It's right there. You can just look at it. It's just whiny. It's the most popular operating system on earth. Meanwhile, the other browser makers have spent the last few weeks making very clear to everyone that Apple has actually, if anything, made it harder to be a browser maker in the EU now because you essentially have to run many different versions of your app inside your one app. And it's just going to make everyone's life impossible. Apple, come on. Great job, Apple. Look, we don't talk about this aspect of companies very often. We treat companies as sort of singular entities. There's a real split inside Apple right now between the suits, basically, the policy and the business folks and the very idealistic engineers who make the products.

1:27:57Yeah. And I think that this EU thing is really pushing on that split in a way that, you know, Apple is a very well-run company. They are mission-driven in their way. But I'm wondering how much of this stuff where it's like a bunch of pretty bad faith responses to a law that's designed to make computers feel more like computers. Yeah. You just wonder, you know, like someone had to like write the code to break all the web apps in the EU. Just like furiously. Yeah. Just like suits standing over their shoulder. Just like I hate you so much right now, but I'm going to write the really good code. Yeah.

1:28:34Some lawyer is like do the malicious compliance. Yeah. And they file the Jira ticket, and the Jira ticket is just labeled malicious compliance. That's kind of suck. That's all I'm saying. On Decoder, I'm always asking about how decisions are made, but how a decision actually gets implemented is equally interesting to me. It's like someone had to file the Jira ticket. It's like per DMA, break web apps. There are just three levers in Tim Cook's office. One of them says, ship the thing. The other one says, buy that company. And the third one just says, malicious compliance. and he just pulls it and just like lights start flashing all over apple park and that's how everybody knows yeah i don't know there's something weird there that i you know again we usually think of companies as like singular entities yeah like there's tim cook in arms you know like and like tim cook is in control of all the arms or sooner or try in arms and the arms are like who are you like you made a messaging app uh but these companies are tens of thousands of If not 100 ,000 people when they're at their biggest.

1:29:36Yeah. And they are not singular in that way. And this is the sort of thing that I think – I get that Apple is very mad at the Europeans. My caution is this is the sort of thing that breaks a very idealistic culture because you have to make everyone believe that you are totally right. Yeah. Yeah. And that this little move, which is not a very – which is a very cynical kind of move, is actually somehow idealistic. That's just complicated. Yeah. all right i basically did a lightning round under your lightning round it was great sub well yeah we have an aftershock there's like a sub lightning round under you can sponsor an aftershock i don't know i was just about to say that all right david what's yours uh mine well i'm gonna i'm gonna aftershock when we start complaining about the super bowl so i'll come back to that um mine was just there was this news this week from a wall street journal report that Walmart might buy Vizio, which I just find deeply fascinating.

1:30:35And also kind of to be a bummer, I feel like it wasn't that long ago that we thought Vizio had a chance to be a really interesting, forward-thinking player in TVs. Yeah, that was 2011. I wrote a profile of Vizio in 2011. Was that 2011? It was like when we launched. Yeah, I guess that's right. LaEcho was supposed to buy Vizio in what, 2017? Yeah. And then after that it just kind of started to slow. LaEcho. I totally forgot. remember that? They came, they were like TV and then they disappeared and then I could not get them to take the TV back. Didn't they make a car at one point? Yes. Yes. That was a truly weird, like, that was just a psyop.

1:31:08That was a Chinese government psyop. I loved that company. That was a good time. But anyway, but you remember that in 2011 I wrote the profile of Vizio. This guy Matt McRae was the CTO. He was a lot of fun. Do you remember they put out Windows laptops and he kept saying they were bone stock? Oh yeah. It was great. It was, all that was great and they, They kept on trying to expand by doing fan service, and the TV business was just their business. Matt is now the CEO of Arlo Cameras. And I think Vizio is just like really – they tried so many interesting things. Remember when the TVs were just Chromecast?

1:31:42Yep. Yeah. I have one of those. Oh, boy. But that's what everybody wanted. In practice, no. They had the Android tablet that was the remote, right? I know. Yeah. I don't know where it is. But this is what I mean about revealed preferences. It's going to cause a fire in my house one day. Everyone in our audience is like, I don't want a smart TV. I just want a panel. And then they ship the thing. But it had no remote. We wanted a remote. I still want to be able to turn up the volume without having to charge my damn remote. Everyone is like, I just want a dumb TV. I don't want that. And then they shipped it.

1:32:12And they're like, no, I don't want that. I want, give me a smart TV. The day the update came, it must have come months in advance. And I turned that TV on because it's like my bedroom TV, so it's never on. I turned it on. I was like, oh, my Vizio is smart now. And it was much more usable. And then I was very upset because I was like, that wasn't the promise. Yeah. I got bummed. It's revealed preferences, man. Everyone wants to run some weird data tracking smart TV operating system. So$2 billion Walmart wants to buy Vizio. Yeah, and it just feels like that's a lot of money also to basically improve its house brand of TVs, which is essentially what Walmart would be doing.

1:32:52I would remind you that its existing house brand is called On with two N's. So I would spend$2 billion to not have On with two N's as my house brand of anything. Vizio has kind of gotten embodied by TCL and Hisense in the last few years in the budget TV market. What a bleak statement, though. The fact that that is true and that is true, it's such a bummer to place the TV market is right now. I'm watching Vizio go from like, it was such a good company because, okay, you'd get the TV in and it wouldn't necessarily be like, you'd have to fiddle with it. You'd have to mess around. But then it could look really, really pretty and you'd be like, oh, holy crap.

1:33:30I spent like half of what I could have spent on an LG and I have a great looking TV. And now that's just not quite the case anymore. And now the whole TV business is collecting data on people who watch you while you put up your webcam into Eli's living room. Yeah, Vizio has been doing that. Yeah, Vizio was really a thought leader in that department for a while there. Unfortunate for all of us. Well, that's how they made the TVs cheap. I mean, this was... Yeah. They essentially subsidized it. And then Roku came in and was like, we can do it better because our operating system is actually usable.

1:34:10And that's why Roku partnered with Hisense. That's why they partnered with TCL. And now Roku is this really dominant force in advertising and in TVs. And Vizio is off in the corner being like, let go. I blame you for everything. Well, Roku also came to people and said, we have an advertising business that we'll give you a cut of. and that has become a business for Walmart that it thinks it can do more. Like it's just all, this is a lot of money being thrown around for big deals in big companies and none of it is about making good televisions and that just sucks. That sucks. You know it's a great television, it's a Sony A950.

1:34:45That watches you while you're trying to watch TV. I know, I unplugged the camera and I turned all this stuff off. Try to join another meeting with that TV. Tell us how great it is. It's not gonna happen. We're done messing with the features of the television. Did you have to go and put the webcam back in a box? The webcam was quickly discarded. I've got a drawer that I just think of as the e-waste drawer. And it's like, maybe one day I'll be like, where is that webcam? I'm going to open the e-waste drawer. It's going to be great. Speaking of, let's complain about the Super Bowl. All right. I have a lot to say about this whole situation.

1:35:21It is an embarrassment that in America, on the most watched Super Bowl ever. Oh, Lord. Where America's sweetheart did something with Travis Kelsey on that. She won the Super Bowl. She won the Super Bowl. Actually, can I just say this other, you know, there's a video clip of them running to each other after the Super Bowl and she like hug each other. And then finally the clip with audio came out because he was mic'd up. Yeah. And he's like, I love you. Thank you for coming. I appreciate you. Thank you for flying halfway out in the world. And then he says, was it electric? And she's like, it was unbelievable.

1:35:53I have asked Becky if shit was electric like 50 times a day since I've seen that clip I'm like pouring the coffee like was it electric easily the best thing to come out of the entire Taylor Swift Travis Kelsey storyline to me is just constantly asking Becky if things are and she's like no she's she does not think it was unbelievable shut down immediately anyway so Super Bowl not streamed in 4k but kind of streamed in 4k So Paramount Plus, I think, David, that's where you watched it. That is where I watched it. That's where I watched 30 minutes of it. They only gave a 4K stream to cable companies.

1:36:32So nothing direct from CBS. So if you had cable or DirecTV, you could switch to a 4K CBS channel, which was upscaled 1080p HDR. So it already looked weird. one of the most vibrant cable companies in America is YouTube. So YouTube TV you can pay for the 4K add-on which I churned off of ages ago because it was not worth it. So I paid the 10 bucks for 4K for the month and I go to watch it and the bitrate keeps crashing on YouTube TV. Just like I'm watching my router it starts you know like 15 or 20 or whatever the 4K stream would be at. Not even that high. It's like 8 and then it just just dropped like a stone.

1:37:18That's brutal. And I kept switching back to the 1080p feed on CBS, and it looked great. Why didn't you switch over? It's not my internet. Switch over to Nickelodeon. Everyone told me the Nickelodeon stream looked great. It looked beautiful. Dora the Explorer explained what illegal holding is. That's fantastic. And now I know. At the end, they slimed everyone, I believe, on the feed. Yeah, that was good. Just a disaster. And some people thought it was working great, but I post on threads, like, this bitrate keeps crashing, and too many people agreed with me that it was a bad experience for me to think that it was like my internet.

1:37:51I switched from the Apple TV, YouTube TV app to the Android app on the Sony TV assuming Google would look like a good gatekeeper would preference its own service on its own operating system. It worked for slightly longer. It worked for five minutes before it crashed but then it crashed. Well, we hope it will make sense over time. is max sports or whatever this new super sports streaming service called is that gonna save the super bowl once it wants to do does not need to be saved well you know like save it from bad streaming experiences i just think it is fundamentally embarrassing that we as a nation cannot figure this out like you go to watch soccer in in england and they're like it's 10 4K feeds anywhere you want to be.

1:38:38It's free. And also there's free health care. And like, what are we doing? As you said that, I saw like an American flag drop behind you. And I just like heard the American music. Oh, yeah. Someone's going to mad at me for not being sufficiently patriotic that we have to watch upscaled 1080p. No, no. I thought that was the most patriotic thing I've seen in a while. We have to figure this out. Vote Patel. I also, speaking of sports, I made a big gaffe last week because I mistakenly said that Fox sports channels are owned by Disney. And that is only true in, I believe, Argentina and some parts of South America.

1:39:13That's where all our listeners are. It's fine. Yeah. It is not owned by Disney in America where it is owned by Fox. Right. Rupert Murdoch. Yeah. It's still owned by Rupert. I forgot. But Disney does own it, just not in this country. I'm sorry. I would just like to say two things about that. One, we screwed that up and it was complicated. It was very embarrassing. I was annoyed. Two, it makes this whole thing even funnier because it now is even more like Hulu. It is three direct competitors being like, let's be best friends. We'll figure this out. Yeah. It's fantastic. It's so good. And it's also very funny if you go and look at Fox Sports on the Wikipedia page and it says current owners and there's a list of six current owners depending on what region you're in.

1:39:57I was like, help out. Come on, Fox. It's like just one company own the company, please. No, that's not. Rupert's breaking up his empire. Yeah. And by the way, you need Fox Sports because you have to have Fox Sports because of football. I mean, I don't. But the cable companies do. Yeah, that's true. And to get Fox Sports, you have to carry Fox News. Right. That's a real thing. They leverage each other. Fox News. I mean, I have a lot of feelings about Fox News. Fox News on its own popular, but they are a bundle deal. Yeah, they are unstoppable. You can't get football without taking the other thing.

1:40:30That's not a choice for you, which many cable operators have always sort of like been aware of. Yeah. That's America. Yeah. All I'm saying is we can stream it in 4K. How was Paramount Plus? I know you watched on Paramount Plus. Okay. I would just like to briefly complain about this. I try not to use The Verge as a place to be annoyed at customer service things, but Paramount Plus sucked for me during the Super Bowl, and I'm very upset about it. So for a while, it just didn't work at all. It would throw up like a mysterious, a bad thing happened. We don't know. Try again. And then I would try again and it wouldn't work.

1:41:01But eventually it worked and it actually streamed fine and looked fine. But this incredible thing kept happening, which is that the audio would get about eight seconds ahead of the video. And so literally every single time the play would have just finished before I saw the play. So Jim Nance would be like shouting about how Brandon Ayuk caught it for 20 yards right as they're snapping the ball. It made it so unpleasant to watch this game. It was like I literally stopped looking at it for a while. I was like, I'm going to listen to this like it's radio. And Tony Romo is just going to say nonsensical things at me.

1:41:36But it was just I kept I would like try to pause and you can't because it's live and it's illegal to pause things or something. I would go out of the app and come back in and it would work fine and then go back to being off by about the same amount. I rebooted my TV at one point. I did the whole Roku reboot at one point. That's bad. Oh, you were on a Roku. See, there was your problem. Those letters bouncing at you when you want to watch TV and it's like, oh my gosh. You got your food right in front of you. Nightmare. I'm telling you, watching those letters bounce and you reboot a Roku and you're just trying to get there.

1:42:08Was there anyone else in the room with you? It's like they're taunting you. I also think this was also a little bit like Paramount was getting back at David particularly because he makes fun of how much I enjoy Paramount+. I have said a lot of mean things about Paramount +, so I did deserve this. But we're square now, Paramount. Listen, Sherry Redstone. We're cool now. What heartened me was the number of people responding to my complaints about streaming sports on the internet by telling me to get an antenna. And I thought of you, Alex. Aw. I did not dig out an antenna with 15 people in my home.

1:42:41I've already switched operating systems. We're not doing antenna runs right now. It's great. It's a good time. We did watch the halftime show at the low bitrate because I couldn't switch it to the other stream in the middle. Did you watch the Apple TV version? Can I complain about another thing about Paramount Plus? Yeah. Yeah. So I, like the genius that I am, opened up Paramount Plus after one of my many reboots, clicked on the thing that said the football game, and it took me to a separate channel where they were talking about the football game. So I was like, oh, this is just the halftime show before the thing.

1:43:13And then Anna, my wife, gets a text from her friend being like, oh, are you watching Usher? He's sick. And I'm sitting there telling her that it must not have started yet. And it turns out that when I clicked on football, it didn't click on football. It clicked on something else for me. So I missed like three quarters of Usher because it didn't select the thing that it was supposed to select. You can watch it on the Apple TV app. You're doing great, David. I'm still angry. I feel like a lot of your choices are your fault. Usher took his shirt off, Nilay, and I missed it. I missed it. You did. I did see the roller skates, though, so it was okay.

1:43:45The roller skates were sick. Can I just say it was electric? Yeah.

1:43:57I want to just do a quick Atmos music update for everyone. We installed the big home theater in our house. It's done. If you've been listening to the virtual house since September when we moved into our new house, in the background has been construction sounds every time I record for my house because we've just been renovating. It's done now. Only two things need to be done. Who knows if they'll ever get done. But it's done. And the TVs are done. And we have a 5.1.4 Atmos system. it's cool. I like it. And so I texted a friend who believes in Atmos music more than I do. I said, this is as much of a chance as I can ever give this boondoggle.

1:44:36And he sent me a list of things to listen to. Random Access Memories by Def Punk, the Dua Lipa record, a bunch of other stuff. And so I listened to it. I was also told that Amazon Music is better. Their codec is better than Apple. I'm doing my best. Yeah. Really running into ground. Two things I've discovered. One, the only idea anyone has is putting percussion accents behind you. Like someone rings a cowbell and it's like behind you. It's like every song with anything like that. Like a Tom fill. That's going around you. And that's what we got. Yeah. And we've solved that problem. Like in the manual of how to remix a song for Atmos, it's like if there's any sort of percussion accent, get it back there.

1:45:32Two, and I've been joking about this for, I want to say over a year, in the Atmos remix of Come Together by the Beatles, George Harrison sneaks up behind you playing the guitar. This is your dream. You've been waiting for this. Was it a slow sneak? Was it? No, yeah. it's at the very end there's like little just like a little guitar happening come together and it starts behind you and then it comes in front of you it was like he was in the room with you like each successive one gets closer and closer and then it's in front of you at the end and you have to understand I'm like I'm listening to this at like 11.45pm alone just cracking up just losing my mind like this is the funniest thing that's ever happened it's just like me rewinding come together over and over again and be like, no, that's real.

1:46:24It's very good. I encourage everyone to listen to it. We're done here. Atmos has been completed. You've solved it. It actually happened. It's very funny. It's deeply meaningfully funny. If you know of any other songs where the guitar player sneaks up from you, please let me know. It is now my go-to demo song. Dare I say it's electric.

1:46:55All right. We've got to end this show. Tom will be on to talk about some actual news that happened with Microsoft soon. We are now on the main YouTube channel, so go listen there. I want to call out – we started the second episode of Decoder. So we have two every week now. On Mondays, we do the big interviews, CEOs and so on. And then on Thursdays, we run Explainer with Verge Reporters and other friends of the show just figuring out big topics. This week was AI and Copyright Law, which is why I'm bringing it up, with Sarah Jong, who is wonderful. It's a good one. And it's like anyone who has been listening to us rant and rave about that will enjoy that.

1:47:31You should go listen to that. Yeah, it's a good one. And then, David, you've got a big right to repair story on the Tuesday episode of Verge House this week, right? So Will Poor, our newest producer, has been running around basically trying to figure out what in the world all of this right to repair stuff actually means. And he's going to spend a bunch of time this year telling us sort of different stories from different parts of the right to repair world. And his first one is coming on Tuesday. So the episode is going to be that. And Tom, it's going to be a fun episode. Definitely stay tuned.

1:47:58Will's just going to fix stuff. So mail him your broken gashets. The end of this is definitely Will opens a repair shop. Like there's just no question that's not how this ends. it's gonna be amazing finally finally you're on one of those those kiosks in the mall that can change your bed it's always been our dream and then he'll sponsor the lightning round

1:48:19uh should we call them aftershocks or shockwaves let us know vergecast at theverge.com uh that's it that's vergecast rock and roll

1:48:29and that's it for the vergecast this week hey we'd love to hear from you give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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