Meta Quest Pro review, Taylor Swift crashed Ticketmaster, and more

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Piece, Alex Cranz, and Adi Robertson discuss the Meta Quest Pro review. Later, the crew discuss Ticketmaster crashing after Taylor Swift fans try to buy concert tickets. Also: Elon Musk's Twitter saga continues and some weekly gadget news. Further reading: Meta Quest Pro review: get me out of here Taylor Swift crashed Ticketmaster following 'historically unprecedented demand' for tickets Elon Musk ignored Twitter’s internal warnings about paid verification Elon Musk says he fired engineer who corrected him on Twitter Elon Musk is firing Twitter employees even when they criticize him in private Elon Musk says he doesn’t want to be CEO of Twitter, or any company Elon Musk demands Twitter employees commit to ‘extremely hardcore’ culture or leave Amazon’s Alexa Voice Remote Pro is the best streaming clicker of them all Elgato’s new Stream Deck Plus joins the knob mob Sonos plans to enter four new product categories — and the first is coming next year Apple and Major League Soccer will launch MLS Season Pass on February 1st Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 leans into AI Razer is upgrading the 2022 Blade 14’s two USB-C ports to USB 4 Canon’s new ‘Pro’ webcam software subscription charges $50 annually The 20-year boondoggle The unbearable lightness of BuzzFeed The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Nilay Patel?

  Today on The Vergecast, MetaQuest Pro, Ticketmaster, Elon Musk, mistakes were made. We'll get into all of it. That's all coming up right after this.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Ticketmaster Monopoly, which will crush your fucking spirit until you're dead. Sorry, teenage girls, you're dead now. And also, Neelai. I got through, man. Okay. I won. I assure you, we will talk about Ticketmaster on this episode of The Vergecast. It's software, it's monopolies, there's a lack of competition, and there's Tay. This is the most Vergecast keywords.

• 2:18Alex Cranz?

  This is the most Vergecast you can be.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  You add them all up, that's the Vergecast.

• 2:21Alex Cranz?

  Nothing more Vergecast than Taylor Swift.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  Competition issues and software and a major cultural figure, that's our whole show.

• 2:27Alex Cranz?

  It's the whole show.

• 2:27Nilay Patel?

  All she needs is Bluetooth.

• 2:30Alex Cranz?

  It's there. That's how you get the tickets.

• 2:34David Pierce?

  What kind of headphones do you think Taylor Swift listens to her own music on?

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's a good question.

• 2:38Alex Cranz?

  She doesn't.

• 2:43Alex Cranz?

  She like, and if she does, she has a very nice audio system. She has other people like.

• 2:48David Pierce?

  No, see, I go straight to like wired AirPods. Just like buy, buy a fancy coffee and walk down the street with your wired AirPods, listening to your new album. Like that's, that's.

• 2:56Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's what she would wear, like in the Diet Coke commercial. Remember that one that would always play in the movies?

• 3:01David Pierce?

  Yes, exactly.

• 3:02Alex Cranz?

  Singing to herself. She'd always wear the wired ones. That's right. That's true.

• 3:05Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Well, two things. I've got thoughts. Two things. One, there was the phenomenon of hot girl wired AirPods. It took place over last summer.

• 3:15Alex Cranz?

  There was a whole thing.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  I could see her fitting into that.

• 3:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Nilay Patel?

  Second, unrelated, my favorite Bruno Mars fact in the entire world is that he masters all of his records in an old Cadillac Escalade that he leaves parked in his driveway.

• 3:28Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  Just because he says that's where his music sounds the best.

• 3:30David Pierce?

  Amazing.

• 3:31Alex Cranz?

  Incredible.

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  It's a great, it's a Rolling Stone profile, Bruno Mars from ages ago. He just has it. He doesn't go anywhere. He's like, this slate is where the magic happens.

• 3:40Alex Cranz?

  You spent 10,000 on your speaker? Stupid.

• 3:43Nilay Patel?

  So if it doesn't sound good in the slate, it doesn't sound good. I have to imagine Taylor has a similar superstitious audio situation.

• 3:51Alex Cranz?

  And it's the AirPods.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but she's got like a pair.

• 3:54Alex Cranz?

  Wired, sorry. EarPods.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  Like wired AirPods. She's got a pair of those like old Koss headphones with like the, you know, the foam is getting all rotted out. Like those are her special ones that everything sounds good on. Yeah.

• 4:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:04Nilay Patel?

  Like she's bringing that to the National Guys studio. You're like, I need to plug these in. They're port of prose. Like, I feel it. That's just my theory. If you know, I would, I'm dying to know. Cause it can't just be AirPods.

• 4:15Alex Cranz?

  What if she burns it to a CD and plays it on her old Discman?

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's like her thing.

• 4:21Alex Cranz?

  Her thing.

• 4:21Nilay Patel?

  If it doesn't.

• 4:22Alex Cranz?

  Cause she's from that era. So she's like, okay, I gotta put it on my Discman that I've had since 2000. See how I sound. I sound great. Ship it. We're done here.

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  How do we always end up talking about burning optical media with you?

• 4:34Alex Cranz?

  I just love it.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  On this show.

• 4:36Alex Cranz?

  So often.

• 4:38Nilay Patel?

  All right. Hi, it's The Vergecast. I'm your friend Eli. That's Alex Cranz.

• 4:41Alex Cranz?

  Hi, I'm your friend that's really sorry Reckless Patel has been quiet this week. He's trying to get those T-Swift tickets.

• 4:49Nilay Patel?

  If only my clone, I can't wait to talk about this experience. David Pierce is here.

• 4:52David Pierce?

  I have no interest in Taylor Swift tickets. I'm over.

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  Addie Robertson is joining us.

• 4:56Alex Cranz?

  Hi.

• 4:57Nilay Patel?

  You, okay. David, when I first, when I knew you as a young man, you cared about Taylor Swift tickets more than any other young man.

• 5:04David Pierce?

  Oh, I still do. There was, there was a day at The Verge office where I had fully half of the staff online just to buy me Taylor Swift tickets, which is how I know I was early to Taylor Swift, because this was before everyone else was online buying Taylor Swift tickets. No, if I wasn't about to have a child and thus never going out to do anything fun ever again for the rest of my life, as far as I can tell, I would have been in the Ticketmaster offices yelling at them about Taylor Swift this week.

• 5:32Alex Cranz?

  Just bring the baby.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the shows are in like June.

• 5:34David Pierce?

  Could have like been college by then.

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  You'll leave the kid home alone by June?

• 5:38Alex Cranz?

  It'll be fine.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  All right, there is a lot to talk about. We will return to the subject of Taylor Swift, I assure you. Ticketmaster just put out an explainer blog post. It starts with, "We knew people would want to buy these tickets," which is, I feel like if you are trying to explain your behavior, starting with, "We were aware of the problem that we made," you're already on your back foot. But we have been teasing our MetaQuest Pro review for weeks on the show. In many ways, the written review is up on the website. You should read it. Addie did a great job writing that review. The video review, I think next week, early next week, it's, it's like, it's a hard edit, is what I would say.

• 6:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Nilay Patel?

  Because it takes place not only in reality, but also the metaverse.

• 6:24Alex Cranz?

  Virtual reality.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  Virtual reality, which is not a predictable, stable, or even an easy to enter environment.

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  In any way, shape or form.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  Just logging into the metaverse. Very challenging. And I mean, this is like the crux of your review is like, the software is horrible.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's the thing that really disappoints me is that Meta is typically really, really good at software because it takes software in earlier generations to mean games. And it's really good at buying games. And then, yeah, you come out with this thing. This thing is all about Horizon. It's metaverse platform and it's miserable.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So let's start, let's actually start with the Quest 2 because you mentioned games. The Quest 2 is basically a games console. It is, I think Meta itself has referred to it as a Nintendo Switch.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, for your face.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a mid-range Android phone for your face. And it is very much geared around, it's an appliance. It's a game console. You put it on, you pick a game, you play the game, you're done.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Right. There are people who don't use it that way, but if you get it, then they have this thing just ready for you to go, which is like, hey, do you want to play Beat Saber?

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And they have bought up most of the popular games and apps on the Quest 2.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  Like all of them.

• 7:39Nilay Patel?

  All of them. They are. And under FTC review for buying within the company makes Supernatural, right? And by the way, Meta put out their answer to that lawsuit this week. I mean, I don't know if you listened to Phil Spencer on Decoder this week, but like any company that is in the middle of a competitor review starts just self-flagellating itself about how much they suck. So Phil Spencer's on Decoder, he's like, we suck at video games.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  We're in third place.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  We're horrible at, no one likes us. And mobile crap, garbage. I'm a bad man. Like the whole thing because they want to buy Activision. Meta is in this FTC review, put out their answer to the FTC's complaint. And they're like, we've never made a successful VR software product ever. We've had to buy them all.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  I mean, not, not wrong. Very true. Yeah, that's both self-flagellation. You could probably cut VR out of that and it was still motion.

• 8:27Nilay Patel?

  It's just a very funny legal document. They're like, we should be allowed to buy this company because we actually can't do it on our own. So this would be cool if we could buy the successful company. But the Quest 2, Addy, I think you share this opinion with me, is a great product. Like, it's self-contained. It was, until recently, relatively inexpensive. It over-delivers on the core promise, which is you will experience virtual reality in a convenient, self-contained way, and you will mostly have a good time.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it compensates. That there are things that VR headsets still just, they're always gonna be kinda heavy. They're always gonna be kinda bulky. There are still just things that we haven't figured out with them. But they do a very good job of trying to streamline those things and emphasizing the positives of it.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I just wanna start there. That's the foundation for this conversation. It's the Quest 2, Meta's second mainstream VR headset, is a good product that like, over-delivers.

• 9:26David Pierce?

  But also, one thing Addy just said that like, is, I think, a useful construct for me, even, I guess I just went back and reread your review, and now, what you just said makes a lot of this make a ton of sense to me, which is like, the Quest is a thing you like, put on, use for a few minutes, and then take off. And it's like, even the games are very short. Like, all the bad reviews of the games in the Quest Store are people being like, "This is super fun, and it cost me $19 and it ended after 25 minutes." And, like, that's perfectly fair criticism, but it's also like, this is not a thing you're meant to wear for hours at a time. It's like, put it on, do your 30-minute workout, take it off, go do something else. Like, it is, it's a, it's an episodic thing.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Although ironically, I've spent way more time in single sessions with the Quest 2 than I have been able to in the Quest Pro, which was one of my problems.

• 10:07David Pierce?

  Fair. Yeah, okay, let's get into that.

• 10:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I just wanna start there. It's not that I, I don't think any of us think virtual reality is a hopelessly broken concept. I don't think that this is like, dumb to chase after. There's an example from Meta of a successful product that over-delivers, especially for its previous price. The Quest Pro is supposed to do far, far more than the Quest 2, right? Addy, like, the entire premise is you're gonna wear it all day at work.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  I mean, I hesitate to say what the entire premise is because I am still convinced that Meta doesn't know what the premise is and they just had to come up with a pitch. And the pitch they came up with, yes, is that you're going to have meetings in this thing. You're going to wear it for all for using, I don't know, Microsoft Office. Yeah, it's supposed to be the professional, the computer that you use. It's like a laptop.

• 10:55Nilay Patel?

  Especially because it's priced like a laptop at $14.99 before you even add the full light blocker, which I think is absolutely needed on this. So that the first thing I would say about the Quest 2 is the hardware, when you pull out of the box, is physically far superior to the Quest 2.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:13Nilay Patel?

  Right? It is just a nicer thing until you try to use it and then it is immediately revealed to be a much worse thing.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  Oh, I think it sneaks up on you. I think my first, my first half hour when I wear it, I'm like, oh, this is nice. It's so much more convenient to put on like it doesn't have this overhead strap. It's really like bad. It's really nice that I could see outside because it has, you know, less light blocking. And then like it just, it devolves.

• 11:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because that was your complaint, right? Both of you is, is that it doesn't block the light on the sides. And so you're seeing a lot more of the world. So your, your brain is basically like, what is reality? Vomit.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, so it depends.

• 11:52Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 11:53Nilay Patel?

  And this is where this, to agree with Addy, they didn't decide what it was for. So it's trying to be several things.

• 12:00Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 12:01Nilay Patel?

  So if you want to use it as a VR headset, out of the box, this thing will make you vomit because of the light issue, right? Because the wings it comes with to block the light aren't on by default. So you put it on and like do VR stuff and that without the wings.

• 12:16Alex Cranz?

  Because the wings are additional. They cost.

• 12:18Nilay Patel?

  No, no, the wings come in the box, but they're like magnetic.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  No, the wings are included. There is a separate thing that you can buy that's $50 that blocks out even more light.

• 12:26Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 12:26David Pierce?

  Can you just explain to me how this feels on your face? Because I have now read your review a bunch of times and talked to you both about it. And I still cannot get a mental image of why on earth you would put this thing on. And they're like, look, it's a headset, but you can also have peripheral vision. Like, is this like leaky light? Is it like you can see?

• 12:43Nilay Patel?

  It's, there's a big gap. Just look at pictures of it, like pictures of Addie in it or picture their own marketing materials. There are two rubber wings that can magnetically attach to the side that will block out your peripheral vision.

• 12:56David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 12:56Nilay Patel?

  They are not always on. You are meant to take them off. You can take them off. In many of the marketing materials, they're not there. That's for, I think, when you're trying to do the mixed reality stuff.

• 13:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:07Nilay Patel?

  Right? When you're, when you're doing augmented reality and you're looking through a video feed in the headset and you're looking at the world around you. And like basically the only demo that works is now you're a DJ and it's like, man, I did this in my twenties. Oh, look, it's just me DJing to no one, just like my twenties, right? Like the, that's like the mixed reality.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:29Nilay Patel?

  So you want the light because you're in your environment.

• 13:31David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 13:32Nilay Patel?

  So you want your peripheral vision a little bit because you're in the mixed reality world. You're in the room that you're in.

• 13:38David Pierce?

  Which is where the pass through video also comes in. So you're like, okay, I get it.

• 13:42Nilay Patel?

  Right? And then you can put the wings on. I'm not sure what for.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  For VR. I think the wings are actually completely adequate. I think the wings, the wings stop me from having motion sickness. They're perfect.

• 13:53Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So that's, so maybe that's for some people it's fine. For me, you put the wings on, you try to do VR stuff and I just like got sick. And I think that the pancake lenses, which make the thing thinner are harder to look through than the Fresno lenses on the Quest 2.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Do you have to like relax your eyes? Is it like magic eye?

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  It's not like magic. There's just something weird about.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  It's just unsettling.

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  It's just unsettling. Like there, I just, I, it's less comfortable.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  I've heard from people who's, who actually say the opposite, who say like, this thing is so much better. I like the way that it has this sort of depth of field. But that kind of makes me ultimately think it is subjective, that it is not like this is this necessarily incredible leap forward for everyone. And I think that's still just resolution. It's not, you know, Meta's fault here. Resolution is hard, but it is not a huge leap in resolution.

• 14:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And again, I'm someone who like works out in supernatural consistently. So I have, I spend a lot of time in a Quest 2. So I put this thing on, I was expecting a leap.

• 14:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  And instead it was just like inherently more uncomfortable. And then you can put the full face blocker on. And then Addie and I both had this experience where it wants to all this eye tracking. It has a camera for your face. It wants to help you adjust it to look good. And there's a little dial on the top.

• 15:08Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  That's like move the spacing of the lenses to match your eyes. And the Quest 2 is just fixed.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  To be clear, not the problem. And then, no, that also it adjusts the distance for your eyes. If you want to adjust the spacing, you have to reach inside it and press them together physically, which is not my favorite thing.

• 15:23Alex Cranz?

  Which is your pupillary.

• 15:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, your PD, your pupillary distance. So in the Quest 2, there's like three detents. You get three choices. The Quest Pro is like 500 choices.

• 15:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  But there's lots of little stops and you have to reach up, up through your nose and like bonk it around. And the whole time it's like farther, closer, farther. And it's like, I hate you. Then you can adjust the.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  It does it every time I launch an app. It's just, I understand you're trying to give me the optimal experience. I am never going to get that experience.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  And then there's the depth of the lenses from your eyes.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  Which is the wheel.

• 15:55Nilay Patel?

  Which is the wheel on top. And it just doesn't believe that you have reached the farthest point of the wheel. It's like, keep going, keep going to the left. And both Addie and I had the same reaction, which was like, shut up, Mark. It's all the way to the left. Like it's, it's so annoying.

• 16:10Alex Cranz?

  Well, you guys have 2020 vision, like.

• 16:12Nilay Patel?

  No, absolutely not.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  No.

• 16:14Alex Cranz?

  Addie, all right. So you guys are like wearing contacts?

• 16:16Nilay Patel?

  I'm wearing contacts, yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  No, I just, I have one eye that works, that has really good vision and one eye that's like 2040, 2060, and I compensate.

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  I'm a cyborg.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  No, I just live with it.

• 16:27Alex Cranz?

  I do wonder if that's part of it because, you know, they were saying if you wear glasses, you're going to have to go get special lenses for it to see through it. Or you're going to have to go for contacts. And I think there's a lot of stuff here oriented towards perfect vision, perfect.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of stuff here that's oriented towards, Addie, I think, described the Quest 2 as compensating.

• 16:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  The Quest 2 is an average experience.

• 16:47Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  Everyone has the same level of average experience, right? Like you put the thing on, you see VR, there's a dinosaur, great. Grandma screamed. Everyone got their views on YouTube today. We're moving on, right? This thing is trying to make you have a great experience. So it actually has all these more fine adjustments for you and your eyes. And it is measuring things and. And all of that is-

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Although it's, most of its adjustments are doing things that other headsets have done. It's value add is that it will, like, it will detect where things are and it will tell you how to adjust it, which I'm convinced that the reason it has all these annoying things is because it's gonna do that automatically in the next generation, that they've filed patents that do automatic, like, interpupillary distance adjustments. So I think this is a midpoint, but it's an annoying midpoint.

• 17:30Alex Cranz?

  Is it like Clippy? Like, is that the level of annoyance?

• 17:33Nilay Patel?

  No, at least Clippy had your best interest. This is very much like, I need you to stop talking, Mark. It's as far to the left as it can go. Stop it. Stop it right now.

• 17:43David Pierce?

  The, the middle point thing seems right to me, cause like, this seems like, directionally clearly the right thing for Meta to be trying to do, because the whole, you're never gonna get to a point where it just, one idea works for everybody. And I think, you can either do the sort of lowest denominator thing, which is gonna make some large portion of people physically ill, because VR is cool and fun like that, or you can eventually build towards this thing where there is a magical solution for everybody. And I'm super suspicious of the idea that a lot of dials and knobs is the right answer, but maybe someday in the future, if it does work automatically, that feels like a good answer.

• 18:17Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, we've paid $1,500 and we, we're 15 minutes into this conversation, we haven't even finished putting it on.

• 18:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, it is just, we're already deeply annoyed at the thing that costs $1,500. This is supposed to be the future of all computing and human experience. And I'm like, I can't turn this dial anymore to the left than it is.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  I would also just like to add, it puts all my weight on my forehead on like a one inch strip. And, look, again, VR headset straps, often they kinda suck. This is just, it's bad in a really specific way that makes it really hard for me to wear.

• 18:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and it's supposed to be more balanced.

• 18:52Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's bad in that it's $1,500, cause I did see some like complaints being like, well, you could just go get another strap. And it's like, for $1,500, I should not have to buy additional things to make this thing usable.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  Yes. So just like, out the gate, that, that's the problem that sneaks up on you. I've worn this thing for a while, I'm a little bit more nauseous than I was in the other one, and my forehead hurts.

• 19:14Alex Cranz?

  Great.

• 19:14Nilay Patel?

  Like, this is the future of work.

• 19:16Alex Cranz?

  Supernatural. God.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's all bad. Then, I think Addy has mentioned the display resolution several times. I was just not impressed by it. It has a wilder, a wider field of view. But it actually-

• 19:28Speaker 04

  I don't actually even think it has a significantly wider field of view. Looking up the numbers, the numbers are relatively similar. You see, you still see pixels, right? Like, you still see-

• 19:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, everyone- And not to call anyone out, but Meta did a lot of influencer stuff where they did the AR. Everyone has three screens on a monitor, looking through the lens. It's great, that's what influencer marketing is for. And then you actually try it, and you're like, oh, these three screens are 640 by 40. Like, there's not enough pixels here to play the game.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, because you have to go, like, way, way, way, way, way, way, way higher than you actually think you do. Because you're not just being, like, resolution. You have to be, like, resolution under little magnifying glasses. Because that's what makes this VR.

• 20:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  That's just, yeah, I was, I was always kind of-

• 20:11Nilay Patel?

  It's all grainy, and there's a little, um-

• 20:14Speaker 04

  Text is just, it's hard. Like, I guess I, maybe dark mode would help, but I still just don't even think it really does. And I also should not have to activate dark mode to, like, read things on Google.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  Right, yeah, you bring up a browser window, and what you're gonna see is that the border of the window is gonna have- You know that, like, old-school anti-alias thing-

• 20:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  That's marching shimmer?

• 20:35Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 20:36Nilay Patel?

  It's all over the place.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  Gross.

• 20:37Nilay Patel?

  And then the text in the browser window is, like, not very high resolution.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Do all your spreadsheets in this.

• 20:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so, like, just from the jump, like, this basic thing. I'm gonna put this on, and I'm gonna have three screens for my laptop, which is what they marketed. I've no, no, absolutely not. I can't think of a reason I want to do this.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  And if you are already, if you have to use VR for your job, and you have, like, a workflow, then this is not materially worse. But it's also, if you do not use VR for your job, you should not do this. Do not do this, it is not a good experience.

• 21:10Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so that's just putting it on and using it like they want you to.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  And none of that's good, and I think the Quest 2 is superior.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  Then there's Horizon, which also runs on Quest 2, which is just an unmitigated disaster. And the worst part-

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Let's be specific about which Horizon we're talking about. It is a cornucopia of bad.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  There's Horizon Workrooms, which is the, like, conferencing solution.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  And there's Horizon Worlds, which is like the hangout and play games and be cool with your friends one.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Right, sure. Be cool. It's basically Roblox by Facebook.

• 21:46Nilay Patel?

  What I can tell.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  This is not even flipping. This is the best way to describe it from what I can tell.

• 21:50Alex Cranz?

  I was like, that seems to explain everything.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  The lines around the corner to buy Roblox by Facebook. No one could foretell. So we tried workrooms and the, the big feature here is it does the face tracking. So you can see expressions.

• 22:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  Addy, this was basically a disaster from the jump. Like even just trying to get into.

• 22:08Alex Cranz?

  Workrooms is bad.

• 22:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't know how to, we couldn't make it, first of all, we just like couldn't make it work. Like, why is this video delayed for so long? It's because days of frustration like transpire.

• 22:23Alex Cranz?

  Just Addy's review. It's bad.

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is some of the worst software that I've ever used.

• 22:29David Pierce?

  This part is so surprising to me because like Horizon Worlds is like a very hard thing to get right. It's like a persistent space that you have to get a lot of people in and find fun, interesting things to do with them. Horizon Workrooms is, is conference rooms for your avatars where no one has legs. This is like not hard software. This is like, like the idea of how to make this work is so, so, so straightforward. And it's kind of amazing to me that they seem to have botched it as badly as it seems like they did.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  It's just that they spread this thing out across desktop and VR in the most confusing way possible. While not taking advantage of, you know, the social networking thing that they have been pushing into VR headsets for like three years. Like you, so you, the entire thing is virtual rooms that you go and meet in. You can't create a meeting in VR, like unless you hook up a separate computer. And then go into a browser and then login through this login system. I still don't know what it attaches to, what account I put in an email address. It seems to work. And then you have to invite people through email and then maybe they get an invite. If you hook it up to a calendar and then they click a link and then ideally they get into the meeting.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Unless they don't get into the meeting.

• 23:45Nilay Patel?

  I just want to point out that the way you're supposed to do this, it's true. You're supposed to do all this in a computer. You are supposed to install screen mirroring software on your laptop.

• 23:55Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:56Nilay Patel?

  It sends your screen into the headset and then the cameras in the headset are supposed to detect your laptop and put a VR keyboard where your keyboard would be.

• 24:06Alex Cranz?

  Did that happen?

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  Because they have not, they don't yet support this 16 inch.

• 24:12Alex Cranz?

  So did you like take the wing off and just kind of like look out the side of your eye to type?

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you kind of look under your nose, you know?

• 24:19Speaker 04

  Finally, all my Mavis B can paid off. I can touch type.

• 24:22David Pierce?

  This means at some point, there was a meeting where somebody was like, we made a prototype where you're in a workroom and you can just hit a button that says invite people and then you can invite them by their phone numbers or their meta accounts or just have a link that you can share with people. And somebody presumably Mark Zuckerberg goes, no, they have to install companion software on their laptop.

• 24:43Speaker 04

  And like the companion software, the idea is a lot of it is you have this private workroom and you can do your three screens thing, which we obviously have our own problems with. But it is bizarre to me that you cannot just like log into a meeting and like go into the metaverse on your headset. There's just not any reason to have to use a desktop for that.

• 25:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So like, say Addy, you start the meeting. You want Neelai to come to the meeting and he's in there doing supernatural. He's having a great time.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  That's a different app.

• 25:12Alex Cranz?

  But you, so you won't get like a notification being like, Addy wants, it's meeting time.

• 25:17Nilay Patel?

  There is that stuff at the base layer of the Quest headset.

• 25:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  You can see if your friends, it's a game console. You can see if your friends are online. It is not, and this is like a very virtuous thing to say, it is not a computer.

• 25:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but like right now, if I put on the supernatural, I have it paired. So like, if I get a slack in the middle of my workout, I can be like, oh, I should pause this and go do that.

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  You're a monster.

• 25:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, what?

• 25:41Nilay Patel?

  Like whatever, whatever, what's?

• 25:43Alex Cranz?

  But I can do that.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  That is monstrous. Just stay focused.

• 25:46Alex Cranz?

  If you're getting email alerts, then in theory, you should get it.

• 25:49Nilay Patel?

  You know what I mean? Like?

• 25:51Alex Cranz?

  Got to get in that zone five.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  It's just like, this is not how you imagine a thing works. Like this is not how you imagine a service from a company that is entirely known for connecting people.

• 26:03Nilay Patel?

  All right, let me just describe our first attempt to meet in Horizon Workrooms.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 26:07Nilay Patel?

  I was at home, Addie was at her house, Heath, I believe, was at his house.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:12Nilay Patel?

  He may have been in our office.

• 26:13Speaker 04

  He was actually in the Twitter bathroom, waiting for the next audience.

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm like, I'm getting in this meeting. I sent Addie a link. No one got in the meeting. This is just what happened. And so we were just like talking, like no one, nothing's working.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Technically, I got into the meeting several times, just not very far.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Addie entered a meeting at one point and her avatar was just stuck in a wall. Just stuck in a wall. I got into a different meeting, stuck into a different wall. That's it. That was our first five hours of screwing with Horizon Workrooms. Just stuck in a corner.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  We have yet to get Alex Heath into a meeting.

• 26:45Nilay Patel?

  That's true. So then we try again. Alex is like, I'm gonna join the meeting. He's just like, I'm not in this meeting. The frustration level coming through Slack, which has been screen mirrored into VR for me, is like, I'm not in the meeting. Did you guys start without me? I want to be in this meeting.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Where is everybody?

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  Addie and I are just like sitting at a table. Vera, our video director, is like on Zoom, not on Zoom, like on a video conference. And we're just like waving our arms at each other.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  So he's a real person, looking down at your cartoons.

• 27:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because you can, people can video conference in. The jealousy I felt looking at Vera, who is a fully rendered human being.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  He's got legs.

• 27:21Nilay Patel?

  In control of his emotions and what his face looked like was off the charts. Because Addie and I are just like, are you winking? Because it looks like you're winking. The cameras-

• 27:31Speaker 04

  It seems to think my eyes are half closed all the time. I can't figure it out.

• 27:35Nilay Patel?

  Like, Addie, you're asleep. You just look asleep every time I look at you. You look mad or asleep or you're winking at me. And I was like, I don't trust what her face looks like. So there's no way I can trust what my face looks like. I am now just talking like my grandpa, just waving the hands around. Just, and I'm waving them so fast, the headset loses track of them. At one point, I knocked into one of the controllers on my real desk. And it was like, you're holding controllers now. So then I had like weird, outstretched, broken hands. And I'm just like waving my hands. I need you to find my hands.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  I would say hand tracking has gotten quite good. I don't think that the hand tracking, I did not have materially better results, but like in general, just Meta's hand tracking has gotten quite good.

• 28:17Alex Cranz?

  Better than Neolas.

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it just didn't like me. So I was like, okay, so we have our little meeting. You can see part of it in the video. It's just not, the idea that we're all going to meet together in that space and have more empathy for each other.

• 28:29Alex Cranz?

  Well, Verin, lords over you. Perfectly rendered.

• 28:33Nilay Patel?

  I felt that Verin was a real boy and not a cartoon was so immense.

• 28:37Alex Cranz?

  He had arms.

• 28:38Speaker 04

  And let me tell you, it is hard to make people jealous of video conferencing.

• 28:42David Pierce?

  Yes. But that's the thing. Like, I just can't get past this idea that like, if you want to have a video conference with someone in a Meta product, there are 100,000 ways inside of Meta products to talk to someone on video. And they just decided that this one, which is the one that they ostensibly care the most about and are making you buy specialized hardware for, is just a heaping pile of garbage. It's like, great job.

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's so bad.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  And all I can figure is that they need this to work with, I don't know, a bunch of enterprise software and it's gonna, eventually it's gonna hook into Teams and Zoom, but A, that's not like, that's not there yet. And B, I just don't see how it gets better when you hook it into even more software.

• 29:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I promise this Zoom integration that just doesn't exist.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:25Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, you're like, how do I integrate? And it's like, nothing. There's press releases.

• 29:29David Pierce?

  Sure. This is all really validating my like overarching thesis about the Quest Pro, which is that Meta absolutely did not make it to be an enterprise device and then made it and it sucked. And they were like, okay, no actual person is going to buy this. Can we get IT people to buy it so that their companies think they're cool? Maybe. And then it became an enterprise device.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Which is what makes me kind of mad, because if they had actually been honest enough to just say, this is not for most people to like use as a computer, this is for businesses that want to do business things. And then they scrapped all of the Meta-y stuff. Like, you don't have to create a dumb Meta account to use it. You can just use it like you can use an HTC headset. It's a piece of hardware. If they sold it as hardware, I would be much more positive on it. They're just trying to create this, like, sweet. And trying to sell it to people who do not have a preexisting need for a VR headset. And it's really frustrating.

• 30:19David Pierce?

  Right. It's like the thing Google did with Google Glass is like, I think exactly what you're talking about, where they were just like, here's like a small handful of things that this thing does. It's great if you like, want to see an instruction manual while you're working on a thing. It's like, there are a small number of things that enterprise VR is like, good and real and useful for. And if you just lean into that, that's fine. But Meta instead was like, this is the future of everything. This is a glimpse at the metaverse that we're betting billions of dollars on. And also, none of it works.

• 30:48Alex Cranz?

  When you spend billions of dollars.

• 30:50Nilay Patel?

  10, 10 billion dollars.

• 30:51Alex Cranz?

  10 billion dollars.

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  10 billion dollars.

• 30:54Alex Cranz?

  And you know that you're not actually going to make money for at least 10 years. You gotta, you gotta do something.

• 31:00David Pierce?

  But, I don't know, he's not getting fired.

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  I want to, I want to wrap, I want to come to that at the end of this.

• 31:04Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  Because we're not yet through the experience.

• 31:06Alex Cranz?

  Oh, sorry.

• 31:07Nilay Patel?

  I agree with Addie, that if they were just like, here's our interim point of a high-end headset, it's more of a developer kit situation.

• 31:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Nilay Patel?

  But they, I think Zuckerberg had, needed to show something for the name change for the massive amount of dollars, right? Like, this is the thing. He's betting his entire reputation on the metaverse. And it can't be like, another year of the Quest 2.

• 31:29Speaker 04

  They're also just, they're obsessed with locking people into an ecosystem, that they're, they want to own the next iOS. And so they can't just offer this as enterprise hardware, the way that Google did with Glass, or the way that HTC does with its headsets. Like, they have to own this whole software ecosystem, and they're bad at software like this.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  You know, Meta has never successfully made a VR app by itself.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  Well, they actually.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if you're aware of this, Meta itself will tell the court. Can I just, before, we, this is like, we're concluding, right? These are the wrap-up thoughts. But I just want to point out, we have not yet talked about Horizon Worlds at all, which is just another kind of disaster. Like, another creeping body horror disaster that can befall you. So.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Mind experience was delightfully surreal. I hear it wasn't actually that, but I don't know because that wasn't my experience because I have no idea how this system works.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  All right. So he can't get into any of our meetings. By the way, the idea that you would, I host an entire broadcast about decisions. If your CEO is like, I made this decision in a VR workspace, you're run from that company.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  Don't work there.

• 32:34Nilay Patel?

  Just get out.

• 32:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  Just be like, you know what, Elon, I'm not, I'm not coming to the office somehow. I'm not hardcore enough for this joint. Like get out of there. So he can't get into this meeting. So we're like, all right, let's go in Horizon Worlds. Maybe the corporate network will block Horizon Worlds. By the way, our corporate network not blocking the consumer playtime VR, but blocking the conferencing solution is a perfect encapsulation of corporate network.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  Seems scammy.

• 32:58Nilay Patel?

  So we click the button, we drop into Horizon Worlds. We're trying to like go to Addie's house.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have a house in this scenario.

• 33:06Nilay Patel?

  She, she has a house in the metaverse.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  It's very nice.

• 33:08Nilay Patel?

  It's full of shapes.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  It's full of shapes.

• 33:10Nilay Patel?

  Just endless shapes. There's a dark board and then there's, for some reason, there's a shooting gallery on the balcony.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  On the balcony.

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  It's very confusing. It's, you know, Addie, Addie's like, what do I want in my house? Shooting range, of course.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  Not incorrect.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so that is Mark Zuckerberg's entire bet on the future of his company and his reputation. Look, I, there's a great piece in the New York Times by Kashmir Hill, who's a great reporter about the people who spend all kinds of days of their lives in Horizon Worlds and they love it and they sleep with the headsets on plugged into the wall.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 33:46Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's very much the matrix. They are just brains and vats, but they love it. And you know what? It's America. Do you want to be a brain in a vat? Godspeed. I hope your crypto investments pay off.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  This is where we get to, like, the problem is Meta. Like, there are services that do this similar, a thing like this, and people love it. There is VR chat. There is Roblox. There is, I mean Fortnite, depending on how you define it. It's that Meta is, in a lot of ways, just uniquely bad at trying to get people to the places where they would have fun.

• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I just like, you started out by saying this, they don't know what this thing is for. So it's not designed to make you have one good experience. It was designed to prove the point that Meta has spent a lot of money making a headset.

• 34:29Alex Cranz?

  Just here it is.

• 34:29David Pierce?

  And I think if we had come out of this and it was like, okay, the software sucks, the thing sucks, but like some of the new tech that Meta put into here, like face tracking and the improved pass through. And it's like, if there was some semblance of progress here, that it was like, we're not even close to there yet, which I don't think any of us thought we would be, but at least we're in a useful or interesting direction. I would at least feel like, okay, this is like a deeply hilarious failure, but at least is like some small step in the right direction. But it even seems like all of the tech that they built that in theory should have at least been like a good demo, isn't. Like the fact that the face tracking doesn't really seem to work at all in any sort of meaningful, useful way, to me is way more damning than like any of the rest of this for the Quest Pro.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh, but we should mention the video pass through is very grainy. Like it is not usable all the time.

• 35:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. If you can't read texts, you have nothing. Like that's so simple.

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  When you turn on the cameras and you're passing through reality, so you're doing like fake augmented reality, it's unusually grainy.

• 35:31Alex Cranz?

  Is it the same as the Quest 2? Cause the Quest 2 is like super grainy and...

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  The Quest 2 is black and white. So this is basically that but color.

• 35:37Alex Cranz?

  Oh, cool.

• 35:38David Pierce?

  That's not better.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's just like, there's a part of me and I can't, you know, there's two ways to look at this. One, if this is the absolute state of the art, then Apple is not releasing a product for five years.

• 35:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:51Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like if this is the absolute state of the art, there's no way that Apple releases a product like this. It is just not ready. Even if the software is great, the thing the hardware can do where they're passing through the video pasture part of it, they're five years away. Or Apple is way better and they've been hinting that they're gonna do it just to troll Facebook into releasing this thing. Right? Like, I can't tell, but if this is the state of the art, there's no way that the Apple that we know is anywhere close to releasing a product because there's, it's not good enough to be a consumer product, especially at this price point. And I think you're right. Like the Quest 2 is a superior product to this. If you want to like play around in VR, even if you want to do like the thing where you have two or three screens off your laptop.

• 36:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Nilay Patel?

  Quest 2 is better because you'll get close enough to the same experience.

• 36:37Alex Cranz?

  For a fraction of the price.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  For a fraction. And the Quest 3, they already said is coming out next year. So it'll probably be cheap too.

• 36:43David Pierce?

  That is super damning because that means Meta is not making quick, real, meaningful progress towards this thing that it's claims is right around the corner. Like that's if if things have not gotten better since the Quest 2, that is scary news for Meta and the whole idea of the Metaverse.

• 36:58Alex Cranz?

  I think there's like a lot of technological challenges that are just holding this back. There's the displays, there's the cameras that can do all the spatial stuff while also being able to be good at pass through. There's just a lot of stuff where it's like, where, you know, is, has anybody actually solved this problem even in like a lab somewhere? Are there actually really good ones, cameras out there that can do the spatial audio and do the good pass through?

• 37:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, you've used most of the products on the market. You've seen Facebook's next generation tech for control. I mean, is anyone ready?

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Control Labs, yeah. The thing that I'm mainly curious about how third-party developers are going to use this, because I think that the tracking cameras, it is possible, a lot of like the face tracking, it's possible a lot of the shortcomings there are software related. That there are things where, you know, six months down the line, they release an update and suddenly it gets way better. And they release, they have a like API that's accessible enough that this gets into VR Chat, which is in a lot of ways, much more sophisticated than Horizon Worlds, that you have all of these potential breakthroughs that I really, the thing I'm still really, I think that the pass through is not viable as a good product. But the face tracking, I think, has a lot of potential and could be really interesting. And I'm very disappointed that they did not find a good showcase for it.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  And I think it speaks badly of them that they did not like communicate with developers in a way that would have something ready.

• 38:23Nilay Patel?

  Even the the main thing that should be helpful to everyone, which is FOVated rendering, where they de-res the parts of the display that you're not looking at and put all of the GPU power into the part of the display where you are looking.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:38Nilay Patel?

  Which is a very cool idea.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  Like next generation sci-fi level idea, like how do we get the most out of GPU in a super constrained mobile package?

• 38:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:50Nilay Patel?

  We figure out where your eyes are and we put more polygons there, basically. It's just a cool idea. Doesn't seem to be doing anything. There's, I think, but one game that uses it, Addy?

• 39:00Speaker 04

  I haven't gotten an official confirmation from Meta on it, but there, we know there is a game.

• 39:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  So, yeah.

• 39:06Nilay Patel?

  It's like, even like, the core promise of the thing is like, not happening.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:12Nilay Patel?

  That you're gonna get high.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  Well, because this isn't for games, that they're like, they're just not trying to get developers, game developers onto this.

• 39:18David Pierce?

  I mean, it's, it's for nothing, is where it lands, basically, right? Like, this is, this is for nothing.

• 39:23Speaker 04

  I think that there are probably cases where this works really well for people with extremely specific needs in the enterprise VR space. Like, if you have a thing and you really want to do a particular kind of FOVIA'd rendering, or you really want to do a certain kind of mixed reality, or you just really need a, I don't know, high-resolution-ish headset that you can wear, that's pretty mobile. Like, I don't necessarily think that this is a bad choice, but I am also not convinced that it has any really amazing use cases that make it a must-buy over the competition there.

• 39:57Nilay Patel?

  And, again, the competition is their own headset.

• 40:00Speaker 04

  The competition is also things like the HTC Vive Focus 3, like, there's Vario, this company that does actually have just incredible resolution in the primary eye area. Like, there are other enterprise headsets, and, I mean, I have no doubt that there are areas where this is definitely the best choice. It does not seem obvious to me that it's the best choice.

• 40:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, it's on sale, we'll see how people do. My, my, I keep thinking like, a 1920s newspaper editor, whenever we think about summing this up, and I'm like, it's Zuckerberg's folly. Like, like, he staked his reputation on this idea, and this is as far as he's gotten. And I, if I were Meta, I would have kept this one in the lab. Like, fundamentally, I would have been like, we're working on some stuff, we've got some great demos.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Quest 3 is coming.

• 40:48Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna have the, you know, they, they, some of the stuff they did, right? They had influencers and reporters come in and put on the headset, and be on rails for 10 minutes, and you don't quite realize that, like, you can't turn the knob all the way, like, in a very controlled environment, this thing feels great, and then the second it encounters reality, it just falls apart. And like, I think they had to show it. I think they had to release something to prove that all this investment was worth something, especially as they're laying off 11,000 people and that the cuts are not focused on reality labs.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  They're everywhere.

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  I think they had to have a-

• 41:20Speaker 04

  Although they have apparently canceled their smartwatches, which is really disappointing to me.

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they canceled the portal devices and the smartwatches that hadn't come out. So what they've got left is this headset. And if I like, ooh, I don't know. It's, it's something. It's something else. The video comes out next week. All right, we gotta take a break. Addy, thank you so much. When we come back, we gotta talk about Elon. We gotta talk about Taylor Swift, Chris Gadgetz. There's much more of a chance coming. We'll grab it.

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• 42:52Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Now to talk about the two biggest celebrities on the planet, Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, who I think vibe-wise-

• 42:59David Pierce?

  Oh my god, that's, wait, hold on. Real quick, pause.

• 43:01Alex Cranz?

  I don't like that.

• 43:02David Pierce?

  That's true, isn't it? Like, at this moment in our world, that is literally true.

• 43:07Alex Cranz?

  I hate it.

• 43:07David Pierce?

  That sucks.

• 43:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, 50% of it sucks.

• 43:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, 50% of it I'm fine with.

• 43:13Alex Cranz?

  Like, Gillian Anderson's just out there and y'all are just calling her trash. This is terrible.

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, there's not a world in which Gillian Anderson, it's a bigger celebrity than that.

• 43:22Alex Cranz?

  Somebody called her the lady from X-Files. So upsetting.

• 43:25Nilay Patel?

  Where that curve goes up and down.

• 43:27Alex Cranz?

  Oh yeah, no, she was definitely 1998. It was Gillian Anderson. Taylor Swift was in like 7th grade.

• 43:36Alex Cranz?

  She wasn't famous.

• 43:37Nilay Patel?

  The Y axis on that scale is deeply suspect. Yeah, that's, that's an apple chart right there. All right, we're gonna start with Elon or Taylor.

• 43:44Alex Cranz?

  Let's talk about Taylor. I want to talk about T. Swift.

• 43:46Nilay Patel?

  Let's do Taylor. Okay. So Taylor Swift, American recording artist. Have you heard of Scooter Braun?

• 43:54Alex Cranz?

  She will destroy him.

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  Scooter Braun, by the way, invited himself on Decoder and then uninvited himself from Decoder.

• 44:00Alex Cranz?

  Well, he saw, he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, how much did he, how much T. Swift does he listen to? No, never mind.

• 44:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was not gonna happen. Anyway, Taylor is on tour, the Eras Tour. She hasn't been on tour in three years. Lots of people want to go to the show.

• 44:12Alex Cranz?

  She's got to bang her new album out.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Alex Cranz?

  People want to see her sing.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  People excited. I have niece and nephew who are seniors in high school. The show in Chicago is the day before they graduate. One of the shows is the day before high school graduation. My sister, I'm like, all right, this is a graduation. We're gonna do this. It's gonna be fun. I bought, I bought Midnight Sun vinyl.

• 44:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Nilay Patel?

  As I'm wanting to do. Oh, oh my God, physical media.

• 44:33Alex Cranz?

  It's great.

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  I want it. I have it.

• 44:36Alex Cranz?

  Burn it.

• 44:37Nilay Patel?

  My niece bought it on vinyl, too. She bought all the, I mean, she's a hardcore fan.

• 44:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  She did not get the verified fan.

• 44:44Alex Cranz?

  That's the only way.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  And she's on like, on a class trip. She's not even home. So my sister and my brother-in-law were like designated to buy the tickets. But they, they got waitlisted. I got in. So like, everyone's already kind of mad at me.

• 44:57Alex Cranz?

  But you had to be verified, right?

• 44:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I bought the, I mean, I've purchased from Ticketmaster before. And then I signed, I was instructed to sign up for the pre-sale.

• 45:05Alex Cranz?

  So you were a verified Taylor Swift fan?

• 45:07Nilay Patel?

  And I had purchased the record.

• 45:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  So I got the boost. I was verified.

• 45:11Alex Cranz?

  You're ready.

• 45:12Nilay Patel?

  I was like, in it.

• 45:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Nilay Patel?

  They were in the waitlist.

• 45:15Alex Cranz?

  Sucks.

• 45:15Nilay Patel?

  I was in it. Everyone, like, already, everyone's like, sort of irritated at me, right? All of our hopes and dreams are on me. And I'm like, do, do, do, like, right?

• 45:24Alex Cranz?

  With your bad internet.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  Internet in the woods. I'm looking at my calendar and I got, you gotta, you gotta show up on the website a half an hour on Ticketmaster.com, a half an hour to enter a waiting room. And the waiting room will dump you into the queue and all this stuff. And I'm thinking, like everyone in the world, well, this will just be an ordinary software experience that I have.

• 45:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  Where I push a button and something happens and something happens and I push another button. It takes my credit card and I've accomplished my task for the day.

• 45:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Nilay Patel?

  And I'm looking at my calendar. I'm like, oh, this is gonna be weird. Cause I'll be on the radio talking about Elon Musk while all of this clicking is occurring.

• 45:58Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 45:59Nilay Patel?

  And the other guest on NPR at that time is Senator Ed Markey. So it's me, the Senator, Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster. We're all just gonna do this at the same time. And I was like, you know what? Whatever. It's NPR. My mouth can run about Elon and autopilot. He's a politician. He won't shut up. Like, I'll be able to handle this. Yeah.

• 46:19David Pierce?

  There was also like a 60% chance that Ed Markey was buying Taylor Swift tickets. Right? Like, if you think about that moment, like, he for sure had another

• 46:25Nilay Patel?

  NPR host also doing it. So like everyone, I, you know, I go to buy the tickets. We're all excited because I got waitlisted for the right day. There's like a real chance that, because you had to tell them what shows you wanted. Yeah.

• 46:38David Pierce?

  Do you know how many layers deep into like weird, insane filters you are right now? Like, again, to go back to the Quest thing, we haven't even talked about the buying tickets. This is all like the run up to the buying.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  So I'm like, I'm like worried I'm gonna end up getting tickets for their actual graduation. Yeah. And my family is gonna have to make a very important decision.

• 46:55David Pierce?

  You skip graduation. That's easy.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, 100%. We were gonna skip graduation. But we, what, we got the right day, the day before graduation, it's all good. So I'm like in line, on the phone, I'm like, First Amendment, that, that, the Neel I stuff. The Neel I stuff. What do you think? You gotta listen to, I think I did a good job. I don't think you would know that I was like in a dead flop sweat looking at like Chrome while this was happening. The thing is just immediately a disaster, crashing all over the place. It drops you in the queue, the queue says 2,000 plus. The queue in Chicago does not move for hours. Oh. Meanwhile, all their queues are moving, other people are getting booted. People are just lying all over the internet like, I got in the queue, there's no tickets left. All of you should drop out, like I would do that. Uh, and like various big tech engineers are making Chrome extensions to show you your actual place in the queue.

• 47:41Nilay Patel?

  In like live? Live. That's incredible. Because in the, in the page source, there's actually the number of people in front of you. Uh huh.

• 47:49David Pierce?

  Oh.

• 47:50Nilay Patel?

  So like, I'm watching TikToks of like teenage Taylor Swift fans. It's like, here's what you do. You open Ed Markey is just You hit view source, you scroll down to line 220 of the source code, and then it will show you the key of how many people in front of you that it's using to render the thing. And I'm like doing all this. It's just over there being like, yeah, government. Yeah. So the queue's not moving. AOC's tweeting Ticketmaster's a monopoly. This is all bad. Six and a half hours later. The Chicago queue moves. You were on the radio for so long. I was only on the radio for now. I canceled like all of my meetings, like many of my meetings. I have most of my meetings on a Tuesday. Yeah, I can't today. And I was just like openly telling people like, I'm trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets. And people, yeah.

• 48:32Nilay Patel?

  Vox Media, the company that it is, the team that we have, everyone's like, I understand that's a high priority.

• 48:37David Pierce?

  But also, this was like a cultural moment in that way, that it was like, everyone could have used that excuse on Tuesday, right? It's like, no matter what you were doing or what your responsibilities were, if you're just like, ah, Taylor Swift tickets, everyone would have been like, I understand. Please let me know if I can assist you in any way.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:51David Pierce?

  It's like, we were all united in fighting Ticketmaster that day.

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  I was in more than one meeting where somebody was like, I'm here, I'm paying attention, but I'm also trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets. Yeah, I was in those roles.

• 48:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, which means I'm not here and I'm not paying attention.

• 49:02Nilay Patel?

  I wasn't at my regular computer. I was at the, because I was on the radio. I was at my podcasting setup. So like. For like 2015. It was just like, everything was great. I was on my 2015 iPad.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  The whole thing is ridiculous. It's finally come through. It's six o'clock at night. It lets me through and it immediately crashes and puts me in the back of the queue. This happens three times. I would. So now it's 6:45.

• 49:22David Pierce?

  So it gives you the page that it's like, you have tickets. Do you want to buy them? And you say, yes. And it says, haha, just kidding.

• 49:28Nilay Patel?

  And it dumps you out. So then you finally get in.

• 49:29David Pierce?

  Oh, my God.

• 49:30Nilay Patel?

  And it's Ticketmaster. So you're looking at it like a picture of Soldier Field. And it's like, and then here's the part that, again, I got through, I managed to buy tickets. I feel very lucky. I'm going to complain about the process of winning. Just like, bear with me. It's fine. This is the worst fucking video game I have ever played in my entire life. Cause they're just lighting up seats on a giant picture of Soldier Field and then they're fading out. And you have to decide. So you have to, it's like, I need six tickets. I need them all together. There's like clumps of two and four everywhere. There's packages. All the tickets are being like bought by the 17,000 other people that are trying to buy tickets. And you're like, okay, I'm gonna hit refresh. The sections around where I want to sit are lit up.

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna double click on those and it's gonna zoom very slowly. And while the zooming is happening. Sold out. I'm gonna watch the seats that have been available disappear. Hmm. So then it was, I'm gonna refresh. Okay. I'm only gonna zoom halfway. Yeah. I have one of those Logitech mice where you can undo the wheel detents and you can smooth scroll. So I'm gonna figure out how to roll it exactly halfway. And so I get click targets are not huge. They're just some click targets. Yeah. And then I'm gonna try to click six times as fast as I can. When I say it's the worst video game ever made, like I did this for a half an hour.

• 50:53David Pierce?

  Oh, my God.

• 50:54Nilay Patel?

  The whole time I was like, this is so stupid. You know, I want six tickets. Like dinner's ready. How much I'm willing to pay. Just like, it's a computer.

• 51:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  They just.

• 51:02David Pierce?

  Instead, you're playing like scroll wheel arbitrage.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  Just like find six tickets near each other that with this total number. Yeah. And then be like, these are your tickets. And I'd be like, thank you, sir. No. And instead, it's like, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna refresh a picture of a stadium. Some parts of the stadium will be blue. You're gonna try to scroll in on the zoom on the blue parts to find little orange circles with stars in them, then click on six of those. If you don't click on all six at once, someone can take them from you. Then you have to start over. Half an hour. Get all the way. You're not good at this game.

• 51:35David Pierce?

  This sounds like a Mario Party mini game that I would have like hated on the Nintendo.

• 51:39Nilay Patel?

  It was the worst video game I've ever played. I called my sister in the middle of this and I was like, I'm gonna cry. And she's like, are you in? I'm like, I'm in, but it's worse than that. This isn't even over yet. There's actually, there's one more layer of software chaos. Okay. They get in, I get the six tickets. They're in the card. They're all together. I got four and two. I feel great. Hit the button. Save payment information. Put in the three digit CVVM on the card. Yeah. Doesn't go through. What the fuck? Try it again. Doesn't go through. What the fuck? Enter the card over again. Start from scratch. Put the card in. Doesn't go through. You've tried to pay with this card too many times. Dumps me back out. This is a real thing happened. Right as it dumps me back out, I get a text message from my credit card. Fraud alert. Were you trying to buy tickets when ticket asked? I was like, yes. I literally wrote, yes, fuck you.

• 52:27Nilay Patel?

  And it was like, go ahead and try again. I was like, no, I can't. Did it all again, played the video game for another four or five minutes, got the tickets in the end, played the video game. I was good at the video game the second time around.

• 52:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:36Nilay Patel?

  You know how you're like playing old school Mario?

• 52:38Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:38Nilay Patel?

  And you're like,

• 52:39Alex Cranz?

  You kind of suck and then you get into it.

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  You kind of suck and like, I don't know if this has ever happened to you. It was happening when I was a kid. Like there'd be like a power blip or the game would crash right at the end. You're like, I've got to do it again. And then the second time you really get at it.

• 52:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  Okay, is that?

• 52:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, perfect. All intended, actually. Ticketmaster, that's like,

• 52:53Nilay Patel?

  Finally, at 7:30, I played the video games, paid with a different credit card.

• 52:57Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  Sent my sister Victoria's screenshot and she called me. She's like, how do you feel? And I was like, I hate you. Like, this has been one of the worst days of my life.

• 53:05David Pierce?

  That was literally your day. Like,

• 53:07Nilay Patel?

  That was what I did that day.

• 53:08Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  Now, the parts of this, right? And I've seen other ticket vendors, like, there are ways to do this better.

• 53:17Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:17Nilay Patel?

  But it does not create the cultural moments that all the artists want.

• 53:21Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 53:21Nilay Patel?

  You want Ticketmaster to crash. That is a sign of success. You want there to be more demand than you have sales for.

• 53:28Alex Cranz?

  You want all your customers furious.

• 53:30Nilay Patel?

  You want, you want, in some cases, you want the secondary market because Ticketmaster owns the secondary market and they get a cut of all those.

• 53:36Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that was like the whole thing with the PS5 and the Xbox Series X where it's like, okay, you want to be in the grind. I don't actually. I hate the grind.

• 53:45David Pierce?

  I mostly agree with that premise, but I think it turns on you eventually, right? And it's like, it has clearly turned on Ticketmaster in this moment, which we should talk about. But I think one of the interesting things to me is when people do and don't get mad at the artists involved. Because there have been times where, like, this just recently happened with Blink 182, where everybody got really mad at Blink 182 for charging like many hundreds of dollars for basically every ticket to every one of its concerts. And then that became this whole story about actually how Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing works, which is more like airlines where it's all about supply and demand. And they essentially surge price since now everything is really expensive so that they get the secondary market out of it. And it's like, this whole system sucks and is opaque.

• 54:27David Pierce?

  And who we decide to be mad at seems to vary kind of based on the day. And of course, Taylor Swift has never done anything wrong in her life, so we can't be mad at Taylor Swift.

• 54:37Nilay Patel?

  So it's starting to come for her, right? People are like, why haven't you said anything? Why haven't you apologized? Why are you excusing this? Starting to come, but a lot of the early anger was pointed at Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster did put out their explainer blog post today. By the way, they canceled the actual public sale. So they said they sold out, which is not

• 54:54David Pierce?

  I mean, literally Ticketmaster's whole excuse has been like, did you guys know that Taylor Swift is this popular? And we're all like, yes, it's Taylor Swift. It's everything Ticketmaster has said is basically like, we are bad at our jobs.

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  So the thing that's really just on the tech level. So their whole thing was they were overwhelmed by demand, as David was saying. They're expecting 1.5 million verified pre-sale people. They 14 million people showed up and they got three and a half billion requests. Okay, I believe you that that is a crazy number is more than you thought.

• 55:26David Pierce?

  But that's also even that itself is is a technological failure on Ticketmaster's part, right? The fact that 14 million people needed to generate three and a half billion requests to their servers to buy tickets is already a failure of Ticketmaster's technology.

• 55:38Nilay Patel?

  And there's like some bots in there, but it's like, you know how many people because of how this all this whole system worked, where you have to be a verified fan and some people are on a waitlist and some people weren't. You know, the total number of people who are eligible to buy tickets. Those people should go into a system that can manage that demand. And then the other 12 and a half million people in bots can go to a YouTube video. They're like, whatever. You can just send them somewhere else. That's the thing that does not add up in this explanation and this blog post and all these other things they've said is somehow, even though we were in control of gating this demand, we let through these other 12 and a half million people in bots

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  who generated three and a half billion requests. And then we sold out of tickets.

• 56:26Alex Cranz?

  And they put the other 2 million verified fans, including your sister

• 56:30Nilay Patel?

  On a waitlist.

• 56:31Alex Cranz?

  On a waitlist. So they didn't even like, so there's like 14 million people being like, I'm gonna get in. And your sister's like, I can't.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's just a procedural step here that doesn't add up. That's like, you're not in control of your software. And then you can zoom that out, right? So Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation. Actually, the chain of corporate ownership here is great. Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation. Because Live Nation is a big concert promoter. They own a lot of venues. They bought Ticketmaster in a deal that many people, including AOC and your friendly local podcast host, You Know I Tell, things should not have gone through because of clear vertical merger. Now the now tick, if you want. To play, if you're an artist, you want to play in a city, you have to like go deal with the mob.

• 57:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  Like they own the venues, they own the ticketing, you're paying some money to this corporation.

• 57:14Alex Cranz?

  Totally vertically.

• 57:14David Pierce?

  They also, Live Nation also manages a lot of artists.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 57:17David Pierce?

  Like directly.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:18David Pierce?

  So it's even more like literally from, from the building down to the person working the building, they own every single part of the whole stack.

• 57:25Nilay Patel?

  30% of Live Nation is owned by Liberty Media, which also owns F1, which is great.

• 57:31Alex Cranz?

  Cool.

• 57:32Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Liberty, Liberty is a huge investor in Warner Brothers Discovery. It's just like, it's just a big consolidated situation.

• 57:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Nilay Patel?

  That's not to say that Liberty CEO John Malone is not kind of like a straight shooting genius. He's like, here's what I do. I buy everything and then I make money. I appreciate that about him, but it's just this big stack of consolidation.

• 57:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:50Nilay Patel?

  Taylor Swift, not a Live Nation artist. Taylor Swift's tour is run by AEG, which is the only other big monopoly. They put on Coachella and all this other stuff. And so Ticketmaster's defense is you don't think we're a monopoly, but even AEG chose Ticketmaster.

• 58:04Alex Cranz?

  Cause you're all that exists.

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, yeah, because anyone else who tries is crushed by your monopoly.

• 58:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:11Nilay Patel?

  Like that's the actual problem here. No other ticket vendor can reach scale because they can't go to Live Nation venues and they can't service Live Nation artists. So everyone else is small. So when an artist at the scale of Taylor Swift has to go buy the service, her options on the market are risk it with companies that cannot operate at the scale.

• 58:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  Or you.

• 58:32Alex Cranz?

  Bob's ticket sales.

• 58:33Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like, if your choice was AWS or your Plex server, like those are Taylor's choices.

• 58:40Alex Cranz?

  Come on, Taylor. It's gonna be great.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  And like, that's like the fundamental thing that people are talking about here is because Live Nation owns Ticketmaster, no other ticketing service can address those venues and achieve the appropriate scale. And Ticketmaster is a monopoly and they can concoct these like ultimately unsatisfying explanations. And that's all you can do.

• 59:00Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think it's more than that too. It's also, they don't have to do a good job. They never have to do a good job and they never have done a good job. Name a time where Ticketmaster, like using Ticketmaster was a pleasant experience.

• 59:13Nilay Patel?

  Okay. 1987.

• 59:15Alex Cranz?

  Were you high?

• 59:16Nilay Patel?

  When I bought the tickets from the back room of the Kohl's department store.

• 59:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  Had the Ticketmaster computer.

• 59:22Alex Cranz?

  That was, that was it.

• 59:23Nilay Patel?

  That was it.

• 59:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And then-

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  That was like a real thing. That was their, by the way, that was the innovation, was they put computers in like department stores around the country on a-

• 59:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because you had to go-

• 59:33Nilay Patel?

  Ticketmaster network.

• 59:34Alex Cranz?

  You had to go to the stadium where it's being sold and my sister would do this, like, stand outside and wait a day or two in advance and go through and do it. It's kind of like when you go to buy a PS-

• 59:45Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 59:45Alex Cranz?

  Three.

• 59:48David Pierce?

  Alex, are you just explaining how buying tickets works?

• 59:50Alex Cranz?

  You know what?

• 59:51David Pierce?

  That's happening right now.

• 59:52Alex Cranz?

  Yes. We have young audience-

• 59:53David Pierce?

  I appreciate that.

• 59:54Alex Cranz?

  We had like, there are young Vergecast people who are like, "What was it like before Papa?"

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  We'll just, we'll just go back. So, The Movie Days and Confused, like a huge plot, like, the plot of this movie is the next day they're gonna go buy tickets.

• 1:00:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05David Pierce?

  That is true. Yeah.

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  It's, you don't think that that's the plot of the movie. That's the plot of the movie, is that they have to make it through the night and not be so stoned they can't go buy tickets.

• 1:00:15Alex Cranz?

  Which would be more fun, getting really stoned and barely making it in time to buy your tickets by lining up, or what you did on Tuesday?

• 1:00:23Nilay Patel?

  The worst video game in, in American history. I'm gonna go with the other thing. That movie seemed rad. But so there's like this middle ground.

• 1:00:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:29Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm saying. There's the middle ground of you have to physically go and buy tickets in the seventies with your friends.

• 1:00:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  Great.

• 1:00:36Alex Cranz?

  You can do the computer in Kohl's.

• 1:00:38Nilay Patel?

  Matthew McConaughey is there, right? Then there's the eighties and early nineties, where Ticketmaster is like, "Here's what we're gonna do. Sears is gonna sign up for a phone line. We're gonna give them a 20 baud modem and a weird mainframe and train someone to use it, and we're gonna consolidate ticketing on our, our client server system."

• 1:00:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Nilay Patel?

  This is legitimately the Ticketmaster innovation.

• 1:01:02Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:01:02Nilay Patel?

  They like built a weird network on the phone lines, which by the way, the government broke up AT&T and required the phone companies to allow things to connect to their phone lines. Just a side note. It's a Carter phone decision. We think about it a lot here at the Vergecast. It enabled Ticketmaster to exist. Then they moved that onto the internet, got rid of the, the checkout staff at Kohl's department store.

• 1:01:20Alex Cranz?

  Don't need them.

• 1:01:21Nilay Patel?

  And then, "You're gonna do it yourself."

• 1:01:22Alex Cranz?

  Self-checkout. Yes.

• 1:01:24Nilay Patel?

  So, the, the thing they're doing is still this network. It's just you're doing self-checkout.

• 1:01:28Alex Cranz?

  And it sucks.

• 1:01:29Nilay Patel?

  And it sucks, but they own, they still own the network. They still control the venues and how they control the artists. And you would think that any big company, the number of tweets I saw, our friend Mark has tweeted, "Taylor should just start her own ticketing company." It's like, yeah, now you're all the way at the point where it's like, oh, I could just set up a server.

• 1:01:47Alex Cranz?

  Oh, you get your Plex server.

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Alex Cranz?

  Also does tickets now.

• 1:01:50Nilay Patel?

  Here's, I don't know if you know this, an Nvidia shield, a single Nvidia shield can run all of Ticketmaster.

• 1:01:56Alex Cranz?

  It's true.

• 1:01:57Nilay Patel?

  Right, but what you don't have is the, the four decades of venue contracts that you need. And four decades of being mobbed up in the music industry and then being owned by Live Nation and then being owned by, like, on and on and on. So at the end of the day, it's not, the technology has been commodified out, even though that was a thing that enabled the business in the eighties. Now it's just a bunch of contracts that you can't break through.

• 1:02:16Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:02:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, there are plenty of other ticketing platforms on the internet. Like, if, if you just wanna, like, Taylor Swift could have gone to Eventbrite and been like, hey, I'm gonna sell all my tickets through Eventbrite, right? Like, there's a million of these out there. It's just that none of them can sell interesting tickets because of this actual monopoly that exists, right? It's like, the only way to take down Ticketmaster is to build a bunch of concert venues. Like, that's literally what it is.

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  And to sign Jay-Z to a 360 deal.

• 1:02:41David Pierce?

  Right, exactly. And, yeah, and so it's like, you just, you can't, you can't beat Ticketmaster without essentially taking on the entire live music industry, which no one is able to do because it's impossible at this moment in time.

• 1:02:55Nilay Patel?

  We have a granite ideas for how to make a combination YouTube video decoder episode about this, so I'm gonna put a pin in this, we'll come back to it. There's a great John Oliver segment about this. Also, you could just go back to the nineties and watch Pearl Jam testify to Congress about the Ticketmaster monopoly. That's a real thing you can do with your time while you're waiting for your Taylor Swift tickets to look.

• 1:03:12Alex Cranz?

  No, they're sold out.

• 1:03:13David Pierce?

  That's the video that Ticketmaster should have sent the other 12 and a half million people to. That would have been a cool move.

• 1:03:18Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's quickly talk about Elon, then we'll take a break and we'll, we'll do gadgets.

• 1:03:22David Pierce?

  Sounds good.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  We'll do a gadget lightning round. Elon, David, what's going on?

• 1:03:26David Pierce?

  So, we're kind of out of the, like, brief, bonkers, chaotic product phase and into the, like, Elon Musk blows up the org chart phase, I would say. So I think right around now, as we're recording this, is the set deadline for all Twitter employees to literally fill out a form on the internet, as far as I can tell, that says either I am committed to being, uh, what was the, what was the quote? Extremely hardcore in building the next phase of Twitter. Or if you check yes, welcome to hardcore Twitter. If you check no, that is you have resigned from the company. This cannot possibly be legal. I am not a lawyer. I don't know anything. There's just no way that this is how any of this actually works. But so that's happening.

• 1:04:11David Pierce?

  He's like, he's very clearly trying to weed a lot of people out of the company as fast as he possibly could. Right? He's been firing anyone who criticized him on Twitter. He's been firing people who criticized him in Slack. He is out there saying he doesn't want to be the CEO of Twitter or any company, which is something he said before. I think he said that during a deposition about Tesla. And so he's just now at this place where he's like, okay, Twitter blew. We rolled it out. It went horribly. We're rolling it back. That's now set to come out November 29th. And it's, it's very clear that he is in full like burn Twitter, the company to the ground and build it back up phase. And whether that's going to be possible, I think is the next thing to see. But like, that's the distinct vibe I get is that he's really, really hoping a lot of people check no on that box tonight. Right?

• 1:04:53Nilay Patel?

  Except too many people check now already. Here's a problem. This, this is happening while we have been recording.

• 1:04:58David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:04:58Nilay Patel?

  So the deadline is arriving. There's newsletter called the pragmatic engineer that's been reporting on this, that authorized Twitter account. He's been putting a lot of stuff there. Basically like teams of 50, 40 people are like, I'll quit. So Elon is now holding meetings where he's like,

• 1:05:15David Pierce?

  Cause they get severance.

• 1:05:16Nilay Patel?

  Cause they get severance, although the terms of the severance agreement are not, they haven't been released. So you have to basically say, I leave, I agree to a contract that I haven't read, which is,

• 1:05:26David Pierce?

  I wouldn't do that.

• 1:05:27Nilay Patel?

  I wouldn't do that. They're already being sued over that. It's like the lawsuit got filed while we were talking.

• 1:05:32David Pierce?

  When he fired half the company two weeks ago, he promised severance that at least as far as we've heard so far, has not yet materialized. So I think there's a lot of reason to believe this is not up and up.

• 1:05:40Nilay Patel?

  Right. So he's, he's already in labor lawsuit, number one, but then too many people are leaving. So he's asking to come back. He's already relaxed his work from home rules. So initially he said, you can either work in this office or it's resignation accepted.

• 1:05:53David Pierce?

  Got a lawsuit for that one.

• 1:05:54Nilay Patel?

  Got a lawsuit for that one. Cause you have to have an office that's inclusive and accessible.

• 1:06:01David Pierce?

  Accommodations for people who need it. And he's not the dude.

• 1:06:04Nilay Patel?

  Alex is the person who handles all this stuff on the verge.

• 1:06:08Nilay Patel?

  Can you tell the managing editor is a good manager? Sorry, sorry.

• 1:06:13Nilay Patel?

  There was a time when I knew this stuff, but now. You don't have to. I got Alex Cranz, everybody. It's great. Highly recommended. He hasn't made reasonable accommodations for people. He's relaxed the work from home rules into this sort of ransom situation. Yeah. Where if your manager vouches for you that you're extraordinary, then you can work from home. He's cool, man. And if they're wrong, they're fired. And it's like, I would not do that. Yeah. It's just another bet I would make, because who knows what the criteria are and whether they will change. What is the definition of cool, man? Also, you've already fired half of everyone. Why would I be like, they're great.

• 1:06:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm putting my job on the line for it when no one knows how you make decisions. Yeah. That's another lawsuit that's waiting to come. And so he's having it all hands, I believe, right now. The reason Alex Heath is not with us on this episode is because there is an all hands happening while we record, where he's basically saying, please stay at Twitter, even though I have asked most of you to leave if you're not hardcore enough. Is that about the summary of it?

• 1:07:15David Pierce?

  That's about right. And this is, this is perfectly in keeping with what the last several weeks have been like, right? It's just like, all the Elon Musk era of Twitter has been is just whip sawing back and forth between these like, grand proclamations and really quick shipping of something. Oh, God, that didn't work. We have to undo that. And then like 15 minutes later, some crazy grand proclamation slash new feature in a different direction. Like this is what blue was. This is what verification was. Remember the official badge that was there and gone and there and gone and there? And now I think it's gone again.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  The verge keeps getting the official badge and it keeps going away.

• 1:07:47David Pierce?

  Like over and over, this keeps happening. It's like, it honestly is like, the, the company is just absolutely spinning out of control in all directions at all times now. And there has been a lot of people saying essentially that this is on purpose, that this is how you do a cultural reset and that he is trying to blow up the company. And you've got to figure that there's going to come a time where he looks around and goes, oh, God, I need some employees. I just keep thinking about the thing he says about WhatsApp, right? Where he's like, WhatsApp got to 2 billion users with 50 engineers. Like, does he just want 50 people to work at Twitter? Because like, he's well on the way to that.

• 1:08:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think that's the entire thing. You know, a lot of people have been saying, oh, he's gonna blow it up because he wants to blow up Twitter because he's mad because he had to pay 5420 a share for it.

• 1:08:27David Pierce?

  I don't believe in that.

• 1:08:28Alex Cranz?

  And I don't think that at all.

• 1:08:29David Pierce?

  I think the idea that he's gonna destroy it out of spite, I think, is wrong. I just don't like that.

• 1:08:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think he is aggressively saying, like, think about it. His companies, he maybe didn't create those companies, SpaceX and Tesla, even though he's technically a founder. He didn't create those companies, but he created the culture there. And he created a culture that is very like, we work hard, that's it. We just work hard, we go as hard as we can. Sometimes sexual harassment happens, and that is a price we pay for doing really cool rocket ships and stuff. And Twitter is from a very different culture of like, we care about our employees. We believe in work-life balance. We believe that like, people shouldn't die just to make a weird app on the internet.

• 1:09:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Alex Cranz?

  And, and so he has to reset that culture. And he can either do that like the slow and gentle, long-term way, which would take years, or he can be like, everybody get out, and I'm gonna take the wreckage, I'm gonna save a bunch of money because I'm not having to pay all of these people. And if I can weather the storm of the shit show that I've created, then on the other side of this, I'm gonna be fine. And it seems very clear that that's the decision he's made, even though it's a bad one. Gross.

• 1:09:34David Pierce?

  I agree 100%. And I think the thing that he's doing is thinking that Twitter is the same as Tesla and SpaceX, right? And this has been sort of talked about to death, that like, you know, oh, he runs Tesla and SpaceX, he must know how to run Twitter. Why are all of you people on Twitter mad at this? And I think, like, what seems to be true is that working at Tesla and SpaceX largely sucks, but there are a lot of people who work there believing that it is in service of something really good, right? Like, we are either going to space, or we are like, saving the planet, like.

• 1:10:03Alex Cranz?

  Or we really like Elon Musk. Like, the entire point of a Tesla AI day is to like, inoculate people, get the, or not inoculate, but I wish, but like, like, bring them in.

• 1:10:14David Pierce?

  It's like, everyone, here's a guy in a suit, everyone's got an mRNA shot.

• 1:10:21Alex Cranz?

  But it is about like making, like finding these people who will put up with all of his, his bullshit, who will see a dude in a suit dressed as a robot and be like, that's the future I want. Indoctrinate, there's a word. That's the one I meant to say. But, so he, he really is out, like Tesla AI Day is there to indoctrinate these people.

• 1:10:40Nilay Patel?

  Totally.

• 1:10:41Alex Cranz?

  And he's got to do that at Twitter now. And that's like, that's kind of his plan. He's like, I'm gonna get out everybody who doesn't want to be a part of my vision.

• 1:10:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, so here, the problem is that his vision does not make any sense and is actually not really well articulated.

• 1:10:55Alex Cranz?

  Well, because his vision is what Elon wants Elon gets. That's the vision. He's really out there saying, do you want to be a part of an Elon Musk enterprise? If not, get out.

• 1:11:06Nilay Patel?

  No, I'll be more charitable. And I've been very rude to Elon on Twitter because I know that he's reading all the tweets and that he reads The Verge every day. It's great when you know that you have that feedback loop.

• 1:11:14Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:11:14Nilay Patel?

  With SpaceX and with Tesla, the vision is crystal clear. The steps to the vision are obvious and the challenges are crystalline, right? SpaceX is, we want humanity to be an interplanetary species. I need to put people on Mars. To get there, we have to launch rockets and land them because the first problem is cutting the cost of a launch down.

• 1:11:35Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:11:36Nilay Patel?

  And they went and they solved the first engineering problem, which is launch the rockets, land them, make the rockets reusable.

• 1:11:41Alex Cranz?

  Very impressive.

• 1:11:42Nilay Patel?

  Very impressive, but like, there's a big goal, right? There's all the goals underneath it. And then there's the first goal, which is land the rocket stage and reuse it to lower the cost of getting to orbit. And they went and accomplished that.

• 1:11:54Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:55Nilay Patel?

  And then that won in the market, as it should have.

• 1:11:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Nilay Patel?

  Now our rocket launches are cheaper than everyone else's. We're the market leader. Let's go.

• 1:12:03Alex Cranz?

  We win.

• 1:12:03Nilay Patel?

  Right? Okay. Then we're, then, then his goals are like hilarious, like space suits look cool. So kids want to go to space. Like this is a thing he said, I thought it was like one of the raddest things he's ever said.

• 1:12:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Nilay Patel?

  Right? They, it should look cool. It should be inspiring and awesome. Okay, we're gonna totally computerize the capsule so that when we send astronauts the ISS, they're not really doing anything. They're just looking at screens. Because computers are better at this. They did it.

• 1:12:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So like you see, like they're solving these really hard engineering challenges that are all baby steps to the big goal.

• 1:12:33Alex Cranz?

  Hmm. Yes.

• 1:12:34Nilay Patel?

  Tesla, I think, is the same way, right? We want to reduce the amount of emissions on the planet. Everybody who works on autonomous driving knows that computers are better drivers than people. You want to decrease the rate of fatalities. You can argue about whether that will ever come true. You know,

• 1:12:50Alex Cranz?

  But it's a noble mission.

• 1:12:51Nilay Patel?

  It's a more challenging AI problem than almost anything. We're, I would say we're not much farther along the autonomous driving curve than we were five years ago.

• 1:12:59David Pierce?

  Well, and that's actually a good like counter example of what you're talking about, right? Where like, I would actually argue that Tesla's vision for self-driving is incredibly like murky and unclear. And in the way that its vision for like, you know, curbing emissions and electrifying the entire vehicle industry is like crystal clear. And to your point, it's like, it has steps towards it and we kind of know what the end game looks like. Self-driving is just this like messy thing that nobody kind of knows what it's going to be at the end.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's proving so much harder to do. And so even Elon's vision, some of his pronouncements have assumed that he will solve this hardest of all engineering problems.

• 1:13:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:36Nilay Patel?

  We'll have robot, we'll have a million robot taxis in a year is a thing that he has said on the assumption that they will solve self-driving.

• 1:13:43Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:13:43Nilay Patel?

  And so they just have to keep doing it. But like, he assumes he will solve the engineering problems and he won't do the thing. The problem with Twitter is even the big pronouncements, the pronouncements at the level of we will go to Mars or we will have a million robot taxis in a year or whatever it is. His big pronouncements are like, shit, the online news association was talking about in 2007.

• 1:14:02David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:14:03Nilay Patel?

  Bloggers will compete with journalists. Citizens will make the news.

• 1:14:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he was tweeting a lot about that.

• 1:14:08Nilay Patel?

  We will, we will crowdsource truth. And it's like, you guys, like, I lived through this. It was boring the first time. Like, do you want to, can I just like do a search about bloggers versus journalists and show you some crap from 2001? Like, we did this already and we know what it looks like. And it is true that social media has like changed the dynamics of the news and like, my God, man. Like, we cannot do, like, the best journalists, the most relevant journalists you can think of, all came up as hardcore bloggers and social media personnel. Like, down the line, you pick a field in journalism and you're like, who's at the top? And it's like, that person had a blog spot.

• 1:14:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Nilay Patel?

  And they blogged their face off. That's where we all came, like, it's just true. Like, the thing that he is describing is happening on Twitter already happened.

• 1:14:57Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:14:57Nilay Patel?

  It happened at scale. It reorganized the shape of the world.

• 1:15:01Alex Cranz?

  It's happening as we speak sometimes.

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  It's happening on TikTok right now. So you just, you can't get to this vision without, A, engaging with the fact that the conversation's already like been had at massive scale with, in a way that reorganized the shape of the culture. Like black Twitter exists. You guys remember we spent like several years of our life just talking about the words on fleek?

• 1:15:24Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:15:25Nilay Patel?

  And who should get paid for the words on? That's Twitter. That's black Twitter creating culture.

• 1:15:30Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:15:30Nilay Patel?

  And having it cycled out into the mainstream. And there was, I mean, to this day, I think there's a reasonable discussion and debate over where the money should flow. That cycled into TikTok dances. Like, we've just done this a thousand times. Ferguson is a, Casey Newton and I both have T-shirts that Jack Dorsey and Duran Keston gave us. After Ferguson, after black Twitter, like, used Ferguson to create awareness of police brutality.

• 1:15:59Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:00Nilay Patel?

  They handed us T-shirts at a conference that said, Stay woke with a Twitter bird on them. I can't find my, I know Casey, like, we did this already.

• 1:16:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:08Nilay Patel?

  And you cannot destroy a company and say, my vision is what this company was already doing.

• 1:16:14Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:16:14Nilay Patel?

  You have to engage the very squishy problem of what do you mean by a town square? A digital town square?

• 1:16:21Alex Cranz?

  You have to engage with reality.

• 1:16:23Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's, and I just think like, yeah, maybe he's got a vision for Tesla that you can understand. And I think that's a great vision. And I honestly think SpaceX is the more impressive company because the challenge was harder.

• 1:16:34Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:35Nilay Patel?

  And the, the idea that you could actually reinvent a government-run business in a market dri- like, that's so cool.

• 1:16:43Alex Cranz?

  And notably, he doesn't run that, the day to day there.

• 1:16:45Nilay Patel?

  Gwen Shotwell runs that company.

• 1:16:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, SpaceX got sued today.

• 1:16:48Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:49Nilay Patel?

  By a number, by nine employees. Uh, we, this is following on a great piece that Lauren Gresh wrote for us. They wrote, several employees at SpaceX wrote a letter saying this company basically tolerates sexual harassment.

• 1:16:59Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:16:59Nilay Patel?

  They all got fired. They were dragged into a meeting where they were told, this is Elon's company. Either you're with Elon or you're against him.

• 1:17:05Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:17:05Nilay Patel?

  Follow the lawsuit. So even SpaceX, someone insulated from the chaos because of the person of Gwen Shotwell, maybe not so insulated.

• 1:17:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Nilay Patel?

  I just think there's no vision for Twitter. So you cannot

• 1:17:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:15Nilay Patel?

  blow up the company.

• 1:17:17Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:17:17Nilay Patel?

  Right? And say, I've got a vision and it's these platitudes that are like 2001, 2003 level. What does it mean for journalists to use the internet platitudes? Because obviously, we're all just gonna dunk in you all day and night.

• 1:17:32David Pierce?

  But that's the thing. It's like, it would be one thing if he was basically trying to recreate Twitter from the ground up, which would be like a very funny outcome. Because he is, he's tweeting all the things. Like, I'm just looking at his Twitter now. His most recent tweet says, "Twitter is like open sourcing the news," which like I guarantee you Jack Dorsey has tweeted at some point in the mid 2000s. I guarantee it.

• 1:17:52Nilay Patel?

  Dude, do you remember when Reddit tried to figure out who the Boston Marathon bombers were and then got it wrong? That's what happens when you open source the news.

• 1:18:01David Pierce?

  Yeah. So, and then, but he says that on the one hand, and then he talks about, you know, making the X the everything app, which nobody knows what the hell that means, but it has something to do with payments. And apparently Casey and the platform crew, they got a thing that says he's bringing long tweets back, so he wants to invent blogging. It's like Twitter has always been this like weird sort of amorphous thing. Apparently Vine might come back. Like, there is no plan.

• 1:18:27Nilay Patel?

  I just want to read you a headline. Here's a headline that we wrote in 2013. Reddit apologizes for online witch hunts. Asks community to be sensitive of its own power. This is after they open sourced the news and they tried to figure out who the Boston Marathon bombers were, until they found the wrong person and an online mob descended upon them. We have been through the cycle before. So these platitudes that are ignorant of all of the history of these ideas are not going to motivate anyone at Twitter who is deeply aware of, like, again, I would need to say this every single time. Criticism of Musk running Twitter is not praise of Twitter under previous administrations. Poorly run company.

• 1:19:09Nilay Patel?

  A badly run company, but one of the reasons it's run so badly is because it has always been paralyzed by its own, like its own overwhelming power, right? Twitter's influence is disproportionate to its size and its revenue. And because they've always been so aware of it, they're paralyzed into not doing anything. Whereas Facebook. Hilariously, influence is directly proportional to its size and revenue. And they're like, screw it. Let's do a genocide, right? Like, like Mark Zuckerberg is like, screw it. We're so important. I need to set up a Supreme Court that will issue four decisions a year.

• 1:19:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Nilay Patel?

  Twitter is like, what if we are just paralyzed? And I just think like, I'm looking at all this Musk stuff. And again, he, he told his staff Twitter is at heart, a software and servers company. And it's like, no, it's not, dude. You are a social sciences company.

• 1:19:54David Pierce?

  You're a content moderation company.

• 1:19:55Nilay Patel?

  You run a small country and you're the king of that country. And the most important thing about that country is if the citizens of that country can pull your pants down, they will. That's Twitter. You're the king of the, of a country whose sole purpose is to pants you. Good luck. Like, it's not software and servers.

• 1:20:16Alex Cranz?

  But he thinks it's like, I genuinely think a lot of his stuff about making it the town square, doing all of this is platitudes to explain the fact that like, what he really wants, he wants to do the big X everything app. That's, that's like his end game. He said it repeatedly. And I think everything in between that is just, how do I get people to abide by the cult personality that is Elon Musk?

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  If you want to do the, so the X, David, you've written about these apps before, right? In China and other countries, WeChat is like a dominant social fabric app. Everything happens on this.

• 1:20:47Alex Cranz?

  And he wants to do that. Like he said repeatedly, I want to do that here. And with his current team, he's not going to do that because that's not what Twitter is.

• 1:20:56David Pierce?

  But you just need more than 50 engineers.

• 1:20:58Nilay Patel?

  It's, you need more than 15 engineers. You need more than 229 million users.

• 1:21:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:21:03Alex Cranz?

  You need a lot.

• 1:21:04Nilay Patel?

  Like, one of the reasons WeChat works is there's like a 1.5 billion people in China and they all use it.

• 1:21:09David Pierce?

  Well, and the, I mean, this is like, WeChat had a hook, right? Like WeChat, WeChat was first a like massively successful messaging app. And that, that was the thing it had going for it. And then, once you have that, you have this big captive audience, you can bake all kinds of stuff into. And for a million cultural reasons, this is impossible to do in the United States. Like, I would bet anything you asked me to bet that no one, including Elon Musk, will ever pull this off in the United States because it is just not how our ecosystem works and how we do life in technology. But. It all requires more than 50 engineers and it requires a thing people want to use, which is being systematically destroyed on both ends every single day by Elon Musk right now.

• 1:21:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. So we've wrapped up Elon. We'll see how this goes. Every day is chaos. I will tell you, once a week, the Verge editorial team gathers and I say, are we over covering Elon? And we all kind of look at each other and we say, not yet. So we have received a request for a button on our homepage that will turn Elon stories off. We've taken-

• 1:22:08David Pierce?

  That's a good idea.

• 1:22:10Nilay Patel?

  It's just a straight Elon filter. There's other stuff happening. The tech industry is in turmoil. There's new gadgets, which we should talk about, but this thing that is happening at Twitter, I feel like is the biggest story in the world because for, I mean, what was my thesis? And welcome to how Twitter will destroy your reputation and potentially cause grievous damage to other companies. And it's happened so much faster than I expected. So we'll see how this goes. If you ask to sell more Tesla stock, whoo, it's not great. Okay, we're going to take a break. When I come back, we're going to talk about gadgets on this, the Verge cast.

• 1:22:41David Pierce?

  I love a gadget.

• 1:22:42Nilay Patel?

  It took us an hour and 40 minutes to get there. We're in an hour 40. All right. This is going to be a lightning round of all lightning rounds. We'll be right back.

• 1:22:54Speaker 05

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• 1:23:38Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:23:59Speaker 07

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later, in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 1:24:24Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:24:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. We are just way over, just ridiculously over.

• 1:24:47Alex Cranz?

  Forty-five more minutes of Elon. Let's go.

• 1:24:49Nilay Patel?

  Let's go. This is gonna be fun. We're talking about gadgets. Alex, run the lightning round.

• 1:24:55Alex Cranz?

  It's barely on here, but what I really want to talk about is that Qualcomm announced a whole new brand for Windows CPUs, because this time, this time Qualcomm is serious about Windows CPUs.

• 1:25:08Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I cannot, for the life of me, remember this word. I looked at it a lot last night, and I was like, oxymoron? Ouroboros? Like, what is...

• 1:25:16Alex Cranz?

  Or, Orion.

• 1:25:18Nilay Patel?

  Orion. Orion.

• 1:25:20Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it's a Y. Or, Y. No?

• 1:25:24Nilay Patel?

  Or, I.

• 1:25:26Alex Cranz?

  Or, I.

• 1:25:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Ryan.

• 1:25:28Alex Cranz?

  Orion. It's poorly spelled. O-R-Y-O-N. I'm gonna call it Orion.

• 1:25:34Nilay Patel?

  Orion.

• 1:25:35David Pierce?

  It's Orion. I will hear no other answer. It's Orion forever. Qualcomm did this to themselves. It's definitely Orion, but it is Orion.

• 1:25:42Nilay Patel?

  So there are no details about the CPU?

• 1:25:44Alex Cranz?

  No details. It'll be released in 2023. What is interesting is that this is using part of a company called Nuvia that Qualcomm acquired a couple of years ago, that's made up a bunch of engineers who worked on Apple's chips back in the day, and those eventually became the M1, which is a very, very good CPU. So theoretically, the same could happen for Qualcomm. But given that Qualcomm's been trying to do this for how many years? I'm not super optimistic.

• 1:26:10David Pierce?

  Qualcomm chips to me are like, are like the LG display screens that you see every once in a while. Where they're just like, here's a neat thing we made and then you never see it again. Like, the number of times Qualcomm has been like, oh, there's a problem that you have with your headphones, slash car, slash tablets, slash television, slash wearables, slash PC. We'll fix it. And then they put out a chip and you're like, is this, is this the one that you said was gonna fix it? And they're like, yeah, it's slow, but next generation, we're gonna fix it.

• 1:26:39Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be great.

• 1:26:39David Pierce?

  And this is just what we do. It's like, we are kicking the football and Qualcomm is, is Lucy just jerking away its chip every time we try to get it. It's driving me crazy.

• 1:26:50Nilay Patel?

  So I want two things. One, Qualcomm announces that their yearly junket in Hawaii.

• 1:26:55Alex Cranz?

  We did not attend.

• 1:26:56Nilay Patel?

  Which we won't take, we won't let companies pay for junkets.

• 1:27:00Alex Cranz?

  And I don't want to send anybody to Hawaii unless it's me.

• 1:27:03Nilay Patel?

  We're just not paying the money to go to Hawaii.

• 1:27:04Alex Cranz?

  You're like, can I go to Hawaii?

• 1:27:05Nilay Patel?

  To watch them be like, here's a spelling of the word Orion that you've not seen before. No further details.

• 1:27:11Alex Cranz?

  Perfect use.

• 1:27:11Nilay Patel?

  So this happens like, this happened late at night Hawaii time. We're just like, what is this? No details.

• 1:27:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16Nilay Patel?

  But know that there is a very fancy Qualcomm junket going on in the background. There are, by the way, entire industries that are basically like junket driven. Like, I love cars. I'd love to cover cars more. We have to overcome the ethical barrier of the junket driven car media, which I, we cannot do.

• 1:27:32Alex Cranz?

  Like 90% of entertainment media is like, do you want to just go hang out with Chris Evans? You can for 30 minutes. Come to Budapest.

• 1:27:41David Pierce?

  I do. I do. I will. Thank you for asking. Yes.

• 1:27:45Nilay Patel?

  I know that the disclosures are a joke for us across the board, but it's like, oh man, I can't do that many disclosures.

• 1:27:50Alex Cranz?

  Too many. That's just the, that's the Vergecast, folks.

• 1:27:55Nilay Patel?

  We took a trip to Hawaii. We went to Budapest. Chris Evans was there. Then I drove a Cadillac across the mountains. That was also, like, it's all like that. Whatever. It's fine. We do our best. We pay for one. It's important. But there's this big Qualcomm event going on. So there's a bunch of news on the Qualcomm event. Second thing, Nuvia is really fascinating, right? It's a bunch of ex Apple engineers. They got sued by Apple. Qualcomm bought Nuvia. So ARM has sued Qualcomm. So you can't make these trips. Apple's mad at Nuvia. So you took some stuff from us. And Qualcomm is up there being like, Orion. We're doing it.

• 1:28:25Alex Cranz?

  Orion.

• 1:28:27Nilay Patel?

  So it's just like these chips, this name, lot of baggage underneath this collection of letters.

• 1:28:33Alex Cranz?

  And what if it just sucks on top of all of that? It finally comes out and you're like.

• 1:28:37David Pierce?

  It's going to.

• 1:28:40Alex Cranz?

  I three.

• 1:28:40David Pierce?

  It's going to.

• 1:28:41Alex Cranz?

  I three level.

• 1:28:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's just, I don't know. Are we, are we at a point now where Qualcomm like made one really good thing 20 years ago? And we just forgot that they never made me.

• 1:28:50Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I need to, I need to, I need to be, um, I need to make clear. Hold on. Apple did not file a lawsuit against Nuvia. They filed the lawsuit against Gerard Williams III, who is the chief architect. He was a chief architect of the M series and he left a certain, so they filed against him, not Nuvia itself. This is important, but not important because presumably he's architecting the chips.

• 1:29:17Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, Apple's got a lawsuit against some of the things that happened in Nuvia. Arm has a lawsuit against Qualcomm. And you're right, David, they've got to actually make the chips. They've got to be good. Theoretically, they bought this company to get ahead of the curve.

• 1:29:29Alex Cranz?

  So.

• 1:29:29Nilay Patel?

  Lawsuits.

• 1:29:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:30Nilay Patel?

  Orion.

• 1:29:32Alex Cranz?

  Orion.

• 1:29:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, what's next on the online era?

• 1:29:36Alex Cranz?

  All right, next up is, I mean, this one's for me. I'm very excited about it. The Elgata's new stream deck. It's the stream deck plus, and it's got knobs. That's it.

• 1:29:44Nilay Patel?

  I will say this is one of our best headlines ever. And, uh, Alice wrote it. Elgata's new stream deck joins the knob mob.

• 1:29:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:52Nilay Patel?

  This definitely sounds like a hip hop crew. Uh, it's very pretty. I want one. I have no idea what I would use it for.

• 1:29:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, same that like it's perfect. I just, I don't know what I'll do with it, but I'm going to have a great time. It's got a bunch of knobs. We've been seeing that a lot in like the keyboard space. Everybody's like, you know what your keyboard needs? Big ol' knob. And it's nice that Stream Deck was like, you know what? Yes.

• 1:30:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11Alex Cranz?

  Let's do it.

• 1:30:12David Pierce?

  This just makes me happy. Like the verge believes in buttons. This is like a thing I feel very strongly. It's like the we, we, the verge, we believe in buttons. And this has a lot of buttons.

• 1:30:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:20David Pierce?

  And it has a little tiny touch bar-y thing, but you don't have to touch that because you can just control it with the knobs. And the knobs look nice. They have a little like reflective thing on them for, for when the light shines. It's lovely. It makes me happy.

• 1:30:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, everything about this.

• 1:30:34David Pierce?

  Put them all to my volume so that I can spin all of them at the same time, just to make the volume go up really fast. It's going to be sick.

• 1:30:39Alex Cranz?

  It's going to be really, really cool.

• 1:30:41Nilay Patel?

  Every button is an emotional adventure that you can take. It's true. Any button you see in your life, someone put it there and someone pushes it and those are all decisions. A lot of feelings got, get tied up in all those decisions.

• 1:30:52David Pierce?

  Uh huh. I love it.

• 1:30:53Alex Cranz?

  And then Sonos had their earnings call this week and they confirmed that they plan to enter four new product categories starting next year. One of those is likely going to be some Sonos headphones, which I don't personally think makes sense, but I feel like David has, has contested this before on the Vergecast with me. So.

• 1:31:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, I, I just feel like if you're Sonos, you have to make headphones at some point. Like it's just, it's, it's taken them too long. Like just make headphones. Like we're, we get it. You're Sonos. I kind of thought them getting into the whole portable speaker thing was a weird idea that it's like, if you want to invest in the home, invest in the home, but they need to do other stuff. So just, just buy all the way in. Make your AirPods Max competitor, make your AirPods competitor and just try to be the real full audio company that runs your whole life. Like for all I know, they're going to start making like third-party speakers to put into your car. Like Nilay's going to swap out the CarPlay thing in his Jeep for a Sonos thing in his Jeep and that's where this is going to be.

• 1:31:52Alex Cranz?

  It could happen. It could happen. But like, I think what was really interesting is they said new categories. So we know that a bunch of, Chris Welch has done a lot of reporting and shown that they're, we're getting a new like sub. I think we're getting a new kind of replacement for the Sonos Play 5.

• 1:32:06Nilay Patel?

  The Optimo.

• 1:32:07Alex Cranz?

  The Optimo.

• 1:32:07Nilay Patel?

  It's good.

• 1:32:08Alex Cranz?

  It's great. But these are new categories. One of them may be a home theater box or your dream.

• 1:32:15Nilay Patel?

  They've got to make a receiver. I'm telling you the thing they should make. Patrick, if you're listening to this, and I know you are, make a receiver and make the lights really big on the front.

• 1:32:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:24Nilay Patel?

  Right? Just a big Atmos light, big Dolby Vision light, one light for every speaker channel. Boom. Just big lights.

• 1:32:30Alex Cranz?

  Just look at a glance.

• 1:32:32Nilay Patel?

  It's all I want in the world.

• 1:32:33Alex Cranz?

  Just see everything.

• 1:32:34David Pierce?

  Yeah. The home theater thing seems like it's definitely going to happen. Like that, that's another one where it's just like Sonos, just finish the job, right? Like you, they've, they've been sort of trending towards this for a while. It's like, either make a TV or make a set top box. Just do it. I'm bored of dealing with your nonsense. Just make the tampons.

• 1:32:51Nilay Patel?

  But gigantic LED indicators for Atmos, for Vision, for every channel of speakers.

• 1:32:56David Pierce?

  That's all I want. Really? Like I imagine now that if, if I were to like walk into your house, there would just be like a glowing neon Dolby Atmos sign above your television.

• 1:33:05Nilay Patel?

  You know, we actually don't watch movies. We just watch that one Atmos cliff. We're here in a forest and it's raining. Like, come, let's go watch a movie. I'm like, you're in this forest again. All right, what else you got?

• 1:33:16Alex Cranz?

  And then, Chris, this is also from Chris. He really, really, really liked Amazon Alexa's Voice Remote Pro.

• 1:33:24Nilay Patel?

  Is that the one with the big buttons?

• 1:33:26Alex Cranz?

  It's got the big buttons. It's got backlight, so you can like see the big buttons. It's still got buttons that are like Netflix, Hulu, but they're buttons you'd actually use. No Blockbuster in sight. So Netflix, Prime Video, Disney Plus, and Hulu paid.

• 1:33:40Nilay Patel?

  Did they pay the money?

• 1:33:41Alex Cranz?

  They paid and like, okay, I'm glad you took their money and not what's Walmart's thing called?

• 1:33:45Nilay Patel?

  Voodoo.

• 1:33:46Alex Cranz?

  Voodoo. I don't want voodoo ever. It's never gonna happen.

• 1:33:49Nilay Patel?

  I used voodoo for a while because it had a higher bitrate than anyone else. And then Walmart bought it. And now I don't know.

• 1:33:54Alex Cranz?

  It's garbage. Don't use it.

• 1:33:55Nilay Patel?

  No, there's like one voodoo fan here. You're like a Plex person.

• 1:33:59Alex Cranz?

  I love Plex, but I don't love voodoo. I do like that they-

• 1:34:02Nilay Patel?

  All heads were deep on voodoo for a while.

• 1:34:04Alex Cranz?

  It's fine. I didn't have good internet then.

• 1:34:07Nilay Patel?

  That's why.

• 1:34:07Alex Cranz?

  I literally hate it.

• 1:34:09Nilay Patel?

  We're off the rails. It's a remote.

• 1:34:10Alex Cranz?

  Off the rails.

• 1:34:10Nilay Patel?

  Welch gave it an eight. It's got good buttons.

• 1:34:12Alex Cranz?

  He really, really liked it. It was great. We're starting to see a lot of stuff coming from Matter. So Gen 2 was in Amsterdam for the big Matter announcement two weeks ago. And so we're starting to see some of that stuff start to come out. TP Link has got a huge router that's gonna have Matter in it, but also is doing Wi-Fi 7. You cannot currently, I think, buy anything that uses Wi-Fi 7. So that's some real future-proofing.

• 1:34:38Nilay Patel?

  But it also is, it looks like a cross between a gaming PC and a UPS.

• 1:34:43Alex Cranz?

  You can like, the lights on it are customizable, so you can make like a little smiley face or a little sad, like angry little face.

• 1:34:49Nilay Patel?

  What I want my router to do, it's wink at me with LEDs.

• 1:34:53Alex Cranz?

  Only when like, when you're like, is the internet being slow because my computer or the router? And you look at it and the router winks. That would be like, choice. And then Wise is getting into the mesh router business. I don't know if I would use a router from Wise, but it's happening.

• 1:35:10Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's like matter time. And then there's like the one plug that you can buy.

• 1:35:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So a lot of news, a lot of it's really great. It's on the site. You should all go read it. A lot of really great stuff.

• 1:35:19David Pierce?

  The one other cool thing that was announced this week, which is actually the, the like, one of the early 2023 stories I am most curious about is that Apple announced that the Major League Soccer streaming service it's been working on is launching, I think, February 1st. And it's going to be a hundred bucks for the whole Major League Soccer season. I'm not even really an MLS fan, but like,

• 1:35:39Alex Cranz?

  No blackouts?

• 1:35:39David Pierce?

  What it looks like when Apple builds a streaming service from scratch for sports. I think it's going to be fascinating. Yeah, they've said no blackouts. You get all the live games for a hundred bucks a season. They're going to do a like red zone style whip around show. Apple has, I would not say done like a super great job of broadcasting sports so far. Like it, it, it felt like it like hired a bunch of people who had never watched baseball to do its baseball show. But it's going to be really interesting to see like these two like really tied together and like from the ground up, we're going to build a new thing. And I think it's going to be fascinating.

• 1:36:10Nilay Patel?

  Can you do a whip around show for soccer?

• 1:36:14Alex Cranz?

  What's a whip around show?

• 1:36:15Nilay Patel?

  So like NFL red zone is like a whip around show where it jumps from game to game to game.

• 1:36:19Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:36:19Nilay Patel?

  But like,

• 1:36:19David Pierce?

  As interesting stuff happens.

• 1:36:21Nilay Patel?

  No, but like it has a very, like football is a very organized sport. Right? They're like, it's called red zone because if you're inside the 20 yard line, you're in the red zone.

• 1:36:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:31Nilay Patel?

  So whenever any team is in the red zone, red zone cuts to that team. And they're like, they're going to score a touchdown or a field goal or not. This is the exciting part of the game. We're going to show it to you.

• 1:36:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Nilay Patel?

  And all the games happen at the same time, mostly.

• 1:36:44Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:36:44David Pierce?

  That's the key. There's so much going on simultaneously that it's really easy to do that. Where if you're cutting between three basketball games in a night, like it's just, it doesn't work the same way.

• 1:36:53Nilay Patel?

  And then it's not as structured because you're like,

• 1:36:55David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:36:56Nilay Patel?

  The soccer ball is near the goal. It's like usually nothing happens.

• 1:37:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:02Alex Cranz?

  I feel like soccer does not lend itself.

• 1:37:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like soccer.

• 1:37:05Alex Cranz?

  To the red zone.

• 1:37:06Nilay Patel?

  The beauty and elegance of these kicks and runs.

• 1:37:09Alex Cranz?

  The beauty and elegance of dudes falling and pretending they're hurt.

• 1:37:13David Pierce?

  There is going to be a lot of the whip around show that says, look at this awesome pass that accidentally went out of bounds. Like, there's going to be a lot of that.

• 1:37:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying.

• 1:37:20David Pierce?

  And I'm ready for it.

• 1:37:21Nilay Patel?

  Maybe there is somewhere internationally, there's like a football whip around show and I'm just not aware of it. Please let me know if you've heard it because I'm just thinking structurally, how would you produce it?

• 1:37:30David Pierce?

  And it's like, it's, it's, it's literally, it's going to be a lot of like beautiful runs and beautiful passes and almost goals. Like, that's what highlights are now, right? Like, I watch, I'm a big Arsenal fan, and so I watch the like 16 minute long highlights of an Arsenal game if I miss it. And it's like a one, nothing game that they get 16 minutes of highlights out of. So it's like, they're gonna do it. It'll, it'll be there. They'll just be like, look at this great kick that no one got to on the other end of it. And you have to appreciate that, Neelai. It's the beautiful game.

• 1:37:58Nilay Patel?

  I did. That's what I'm saying. Like, look at the power and elegance of this long pass that it's a nil-nil. Like, all right. Yeah. That's fine. I'm very excited for Apple to try this out. I just like, this is the lead up to Apple trying to get Sunday Ticket, which is like the big prize.

• 1:38:13Alex Cranz?

  To get a sport that people actually watch.

• 1:38:16David Pierce?

  And that's why, like this, just as a product, that's why I'm fascinated by this. For that exact reason, because there are bigger prizes out there that this is going to be what they try to get.

• 1:38:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And Eddie Q has very publicly been like, we're not going to just take rights and rebroadcast things. We want to do it our own way. And this is their own way. And it's like, all right, this is their attempt to make something that looks like Red Zone, because if you take it, you gotta make Red Zone.

• 1:38:39Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it sounds way better than everything. My brother tries to watch football games, and then I have to deal with the phone calls because he can't watch the football games. So this already, I wish he was into this kind of football, because this seems like it's going to save me a lot of phone calls.

• 1:38:54Nilay Patel?

  Because because you're gonna buy the one thing from Apple.

• 1:38:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:56Nilay Patel?

  And you're still gonna get the phone calls.

• 1:38:58Alex Cranz?

  I hate it.

• 1:38:59Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to wrap this show up. There's some more stuff. I think it's very funny that Canon is trying to charge people $50 a year to for their webcam software.

• 1:39:08Alex Cranz?

  Don't do it. Please don't.

• 1:39:09Nilay Patel?

  Just buy a capture card.

• 1:39:11Alex Cranz?

  Please.

• 1:39:11Nilay Patel?

  For $50.

• 1:39:13Alex Cranz?

  Go buy another webcam. Just don't don't give them your money.

• 1:39:16Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:39:16Alex Cranz?

  This is terrible.

• 1:39:17Nilay Patel?

  But some good news. Razer is upgrading the USB-C ports on the 2022 Blade 14 to USB 4, which is cool.

• 1:39:24Alex Cranz?

  And they're doing it through software.

• 1:39:26Nilay Patel?

  Through software. That's awesome. Good job, Razer.

• 1:39:28Alex Cranz?

  Good job.

• 1:39:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay, some stuff on the site you should read. Miyazato had a great piece about BuzzFeed, which BuzzFeed is a public company now. They just had some earnings.

• 1:39:37Alex Cranz?

  Not great.

• 1:39:37Nilay Patel?

  BuzzFeed, pretty weird. The it's like a bittersweet. It's like a poignant.

• 1:39:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Nilay Patel?

  It's a good like, at the end of the day, with a cup of tea, wistful, or like, early in the morning. You know, like, when the dawn breaks, you can just feel like the beginning of a day. You if you want like a sad Sunday, read the story. Some people want a sad Sunday. Packers fans.

• 1:40:00Nilay Patel?

  If you if you want to like, you know, be like, if you want to be like, I was young once, like, read this story.

• 1:40:06Alex Cranz?

  Wistful.

• 1:40:07Nilay Patel?

  We got a great piece from a man at Chicago Lewis about the Department of Homeland Security. 20 years. This is a big package for the year. It's called Homeland. Quite frankly, it's a word debate. If you're a Pulitzer voter and you're listening to this, first of all, what are you doing? Second of all, give this a Pulitzer. Vote for us.

• 1:40:21Alex Cranz?

  We were great.

• 1:40:22Nilay Patel?

  Do that. I don't know if that's in the rules.

• 1:40:24Alex Cranz?

  It's probably fine. It's probably fine.

• 1:40:27Nilay Patel?

  It's probably fine. Department of Homeland Security is a boondoggle, like a pure boondoggle. Nobody wanted to create it. They bunched all this stuff together. Corporate structure, you know how I feel about corporate structures. It's just a mess. Read the story. Everyone quoted in the story is like, this thing's a mess and it sucks. You just got to read it. It's great. And then lastly, James Ensign has a great piece about AI copyright, which no one knows what's going to happen with this generative AI copyright stuff. Very complicated, very vergy. Love the story. Two more things. One, by the time you listen to this, we will have our first set of tweaks to the redesign coming out. So you got a new hero, the new top of the page will be, we're gonna have a top five stories, and the stories will move down. We think people are gonna like it. We've got some big ideas for that on mobile, which the thing that happens, you're watching this, everyone clicks on everything.

• 1:41:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:12Nilay Patel?

  So your ability to measure and see what's working and not is like, just goes to hell.

• 1:41:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:17Nilay Patel?

  So, yes, we waited. We waited for the clicks to calm down. We figured out what people wanted. We think this is gonna be great.

• 1:41:23Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be fun.

• 1:41:24Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna switch the river eventually to light mode because people have asked for that and we're gonna add a toggle so you can switch back and forth.

• 1:41:30Alex Cranz?

  Please.

• 1:41:31Nilay Patel?

  And we're adding comments to quick posts. That's coming later.

• 1:41:33Alex Cranz?

  That's the thing I'm most excited about.

• 1:41:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's gonna be good.

• 1:41:36Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be great.

• 1:41:36Nilay Patel?

  With all that's happening, let's have a listen to this new hero. Go check it out to let us know what you think. That's gonna be very cool. And then these fools will be back on Wednesday. David, Alex, Russell Brandim, Jen Tuohy, doing some calls.

• 1:41:49Speaker 08

  We have some fun, we have some fun Friendsgiving-y stuff we're gonna do. I think we're gonna, we're basically gonna try to get Jen to blow up her house with smart kitchen gadgets. So assuming we all survive, it's gonna be really fun.

• 1:42:01Nilay Patel?

  That's great. All right. That's it. We are way over. We'll see you in the metaverse. That's the Vergecast. Wait, again, you can tweet at us for however long that lasts. David's at Pierce, Alex is Alex H. Trans, Addie is at The Dextrarchy, I'm at Reckless. We'll see you in the metaverse. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:42:24Speaker 08

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at [email protected]. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter's and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:42:58Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:43:20Speaker 07

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 1:43:44Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:44:00Speaker 09

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