Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 demo / Snap’s first AR Spectacles / Android games come to Windows in 2022

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Heath discuss Epic Games' Matrix experience in Unreal Engine 5, Snap’s first AR Spectacles, streaming news, and more. Stories discussed: Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss on making The Matrix Awakens with Epic Games Snap’s first AR Spectacles are an ambitious, impractical start How Snap is sidestepping the metaverse The Matrix Awakens is an interactive tech demo for PS5 and Xbox Series X / S Google is bringing Android games to Windows in 2022 Meta opens up access to its VR social platform Horizon Worlds Apple’s AR headset reportedly uses 3D sensors for hand tracking Your LG TV can now play Google Stadia if it’s running webOS 5.0 or later Matter could bring universal casting that actually works Roku settles YouTube dispute and locks down apps in ‘multi-year’ deal Spotify removes popular comedians’ content over royalties dispute Apple Music’s voice plan likely to launch with iOS 15.2 Sonos now supports Amazon Music’s Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos tracks Google Pixel’s lock screen Snapchat shortcut is here Google releases first Android 12L beta for large-screen devices Google Pixel mail-in repairs have allegedly twice resulted in leaked pics and a privacy nightmare 5G now means some flights won’t be able to land when pilots can’t see the runway Jessica Rosenworcel confirmed by Senate to lead the FCC Verizon might be collecting your browsing history and here’s how to stop it Sonos announces plans to make its products more efficient and repairable Instagram head says it’s bringing back the chronological feed The vice president should not be using Bluetooth headphones Kickstarter says it’s switching to crowdfunding via the blockchain Epic v. Apple ruling put on hold after appeals court grants a stay 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, Alex Heath joins the show. We talk about his interview with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, what else is going on in the metaverse, a bunch of streaming news, and then the lightning round to end all lightning rounds. It's coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 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.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of reality. See? See what it is? You gotta sit in that for a minute. Yeah. Really, just pull the car over now and just think about what the flagship podcast of reality would be. And it's this. It's where you listen, and then you can keep going. Hi, I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm the glitch in the matrix. Ooh, that's good. Alex Heath is here.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  I'm a cyberpunk mod.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  Very good. You'll understand why that's funny in a little bit. Heath is gonna be with us for the whole show. There's a lot to talk about you, but we'll just start with, you know, one of the more exciting things that has happened at the old verge.com in our 10 years of running around. You hung out with Keanu Reeves and Carrie Anne Moss this week.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, we talked about a lot of things. It was a very interesting interview. And the reason that we talked to them is because they are doing this new interactive playable tech demo by Epic Games showing off Unreal Engine 5. And it's a tie in with kind of teasing the next Matrix movie, which comes out later this month. So we talked about all that, kind of what is real, what is fake, the kind of blending of the virtual and the real, and how that's changing storytelling, and a lot of other random things. Keanu is very classic Keanu.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the video's up by the time you're listening to this, it's up. You should go watch it. It is very much like a Keanu Reeves experience. Carrie Anne Moss is great, too. Like, she's great, but like, Keanu, like, literally, you can just see him, like, he lights up over time. Yeah, it's just very, the whole thing is very, at one point, he's like, "We do this so that we can sell things." I mean, make art. I mean, sell things." And he just starts grinning. Like, it's very good.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  The hand gestures are wonderful as well. And yeah, Carrie Anne Moss, not really a fan of technology.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  At all, even a little.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  At all, which was interesting. But yeah, we talked about kind of digital likeness. You know, Keanu was one of the first actors ever, I found out in the process of doing this, to be, have, to have himself digitally rendered in the original Matrix trilogy. And so Warner Bros. actually found that footage in like, a vault buried in the ground in like Idaho or something like that, and gave it to Epic, and Epic re-rendered it with UE5 for this Matrix demo. And it's, it is fairly trippy. There's a couple times where they told me after, like, when it's real him versus fake him, and it actually, it got me, like, at least once. And yeah, the intro to this is written by Lana Wachowski, the main writer of the Matrix

• 4:22Speaker 02

  franchise. And then it's kind of an open world sandbox experience that kind of showcases how UE5 is basically just super scaling the ability to make like actual metaverse stuff. So yeah, it was, it was really interesting.

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  And Keanu was like, I'm almost ready to have a coherent thought about like the nature of reality and unreality and how that interacts with video games and cinema. I'm like, I'm like, I'm working my way towards it. And Carrie I'm asked was like, yeah, no, reality is cool. Everything. Like, why would you like, how about reality? How about I'm sitting at a table with my family? And he's like, but it could be a virtual table. She's like, yeah, but, but what about the real table? It was great, actually.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  The most shocking takeaway from this, Keanu Reeves does not play video games. Thought that was really interesting.

• 5:06Nilay Patel?

  I can, I can see that.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Well, he's, he's a character on Cyberpunk. And I did ask him about, you know, in Cyberpunk 2077, we covered this when this was happening. People were modding one of the characters that you have sex with in the game to be Keanu Reeves' character. And it got so bad that the game developer actually said, you can't do this. If we find out you're doing this, we will ban your account. And I asked Keanu about it and he loved it. He was like, you know, that's, he was like, hell yeah. And clearly was not consulted on that decision. Another thing that I think fans of the Matrix will love is that Keanu really wants there to be a modern day Matrix video game. And basically told me point blank that Warner

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Bros dropped the ball 15 years ago and he would do it. So there you go.

• 5:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, the Matrix franchise is, I don't know, I, I think I watched it like my first week of college in 1999. It was like a field trip that like my dorm took, you know, like, it was just like one of those eye opening moments. I hadn't really heard about it. And then it is like twisted and turned itself into all manner of things and memes. So it's wild that they actually never made the game. Is like the rest of the tech and gaming industry has done nothing but try to make the Matrix.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Yep. No, they did make a game. They made two and there was only one where you could play Neo. It was called Path of Neo. It was on the PS2. It was actually pretty good. The gameplay was like, I watched some YouTube videos of it. It looks fun for a PS2 game and they could just remake that. They could just like literally just do like you're fighting as Neo as a game. Like you don't even need to really do a story.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  No, now they would do it and you would end up, you would end up in that dojo with Morpheus and you would have to either grind for 60 hours to level up two points or like pay microtransaction fees to get a loot box that one of them would maybe have Kung Fu in it. Like you know exactly how that game would be designed now.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's fair. Another highlight of this interview, Keanu seems very interested in being the chief creative officer of a VR porn tech company. So if you're listening to this show and that's what you do, you should definitely reach out to his team.

• 7:21Nilay Patel?

  It's like you don't want to admit who the audience of your show is and sometimes you just know.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  It's like the Venn diagram, you know, it's like extremely Verge shit in one corner, Keanu Reeves, VR porn, and then it all just kinda meets in the middle. Yeah.

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  Did you get to see any, any of the movie at all? They preview the movie?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  No, I just, I've only seen the trailers. They were very cagey about it. Something surprising Carrie Anne said is that it's funny, um, which I wouldn't expect from a Matrix movie, but,

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, the first Matrix movie was kind of funny.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  I guess it had funny moments, but I think the tone of this is going to be a lot more funny than the, than the previous ones.

• 7:55Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I can see. I mean, the whole like red pill, like cultural association is such that I know the Wachowski sisters like want to break it.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:05Nilay Patel?

  Because it is now associated with the alt-right and all that. Like, I get why they'd want to change the tone about red pill, blue pill. We'll see. I'm excited to see this movie, but I'm burnt on the previous two. Like, they were so disappointing. Is the Unreal stuff better than Gemini Man? The movie in which Will Smith was famously?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Yeah, I mean, as a story, objectively, yes, but like literally anything.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  The tech is, I think the thing that impressed me the most is that, so you're in this giant kind of sandbox city that they built, that they're going to give to Unreal developers to build like their own Grand Theft Auto in, for example. And everything is rendered in real time everywhere persistently. So like anywhere you move, it's already there. It's already rendered down to the detail on like a chain link fence. So like we flew up and then we shot down into an alley and he was like, that didn't render as we moved down there. That was already there in full detail and I've never seen that at that scale in a game. So it's showing just kind of the power of the world building there. And then also the ability for, this is a little more geeky, but the lighting is actually pretty cool. You don't need to know really, apparently placing lights in games is a super expensive tedious process

• 9:17Speaker 02

  that really hinders the ability for it to look real. And a big breakthrough in UE5 is this kind of automatically AI powered lighting system that reflects naturally and like we, you could, you can change the sunlight, you know, with a dial in the game as you play and watch all the reflections against the skyscrapers change against the cars. And it's pretty cool, honestly. I mean, it's, the idea is that you'll be able to take like, you know, a car maker will make a car for a work, you know, simulation thing in UE5 and that same hyper realistic looking car could then be used in a racing game. It could then be used in the next Fast and Furious movie, all as the same asset in UE5, which is something that hasn't existed before.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  That's really cool. I've been playing the Grand Theft Auto remasters, which are very fun. And I was like reading about them and how they did them and they, one of the biggest pieces of that puzzle was lighting. So the original, they were just lit, like the game designers, like the scenes were just lit. Like it made no sense where the lights are coming from. We didn't have the technology. We updated the lighting design and we tried to naturally light the game. And we had to go through and like add streetlights to places. Because there wasn't, it made no sense where the light was coming from before. And that was like the work of remastering this game was just rejiggering all the lighting. That all that stuff is like the confluence of game engines, movie, special effects,

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  and then the metaverse stuff. It does feel like it will all just kind of be the same software in the end.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's this is honestly like Epic is the perfect company to make all this because their CTO Kim, who I also interviewed for the story, worked on the original Matrix trilogy. He has a film background and he did all the he was a effects supervisor on kind of bullet time and like all the kind of iconic Matrix stuff and knows the Chalkies. That's kind of how this whole project came together. And he was talking a lot about how he thinks it's going to change Hollywood and Epic is already so like in the Mandalorian in camera visual effects where there's a giant LED wall behind you instead of CGI in post with a green screen. That's being powered by Unreal and that technology, he thinks, is going to really just change how Hollywood runs. Or I think he hopes it will. So yeah, they're

• 11:29Speaker 02

  a very interesting company. Unreal is like this really fascinating, powerful thing that touches a lot of things, but consumers don't really see. So it's a little wonky. But I mean, if you're talking about like metaverse, like this is actually like the toolkit, right? This is actually the thing like Meta, the company does not have anything remotely like this. I just so I think it's interesting.

• 11:49Nilay Patel?

  Do we do we I don't know if we talked about this last week. Unity, the other big game studio, just bought Weta Digital, which was Peter Jackson's special effects house for $1.6 billion. And like, that's Lord of the Rings and Avatar and Shang-Chi. Like, you can just see where it's going. The game engines are now getting good enough to do the special effects everywhere.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. And that's why there was a story about Epic hiring a head of film and like scripted entertainment. And I kind of got at this with the CTO that they're going to start doing games that are also movies using Fortnite, using other things because UE5 allows them to just use these assets across mediums, which it's pretty cool. It's a new thing for sure.

• 12:32Nilay Patel?

  Now, I feel like a genius for telling people to watch Red versus Blue when I was like the early 2000s. Right? This, this is dumb sitcom that takes place in Halo is the future of entertainment. I said, to no effect at the bar, but I was right. It always comes back around.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  I'm just excited that all of this means that within the next, well, let's be, let's be realistic. Within the next 10 years, we'll get rid of quick time events that are just, you know, pre-rendered cutscenes where you hit a button at the right time.

• 13:01Nilay Patel?

  I didn't know this, but apparently all the Fortnite commercials are shot in Fortnite, like in real time. And, and so like, they're already doing this. He's like, we just stage it in the game and we shoot it. And like, we may like touch up things and make the characters look a little shinier, but like, they're already doing this. And like, part of this matrix thing is like, there's a car chase scene where the camera's like going under the car and around the car. And like, that was all done in the engine, right? They didn't like have cars out on the street that they then tracked and brought into UE5. Like, so it's, we're getting into weird, uncharted territory. So one of the, the reason I asked about Gemini Man, which by the way is a horrible movie. It's not even an airplane movie. It's like, It's not even an airplane. It's like unwatchably bad. Yeah.

• 13:42Nilay Patel?

  There, there are these really hilarious, like YouTube clips where people, I think Gemini Man was actually like shot in 120 frames per second and like released that way. But there are these YouTube channels that like upres things into higher frame rates. So you can go watch Gemini Man at like 120 frames per second on YouTube. And it looks, I mean, it looks like a bad video game. It's, there's no way to describe it. Just go watch it. It's like horrifying. But a big piece of that puzzle, that, a big piece of that story that movie came out was there is now a model of young Will Smith. And like, who is going to own the digital character model of young Will Smith? And what could that model be made to do?

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  And who owned it? And like, if the young Will Smith model acts in a new movie, does Will Smith get paid? Did you get into any of that with, with Keanu and Carrie Anne? Yes, we did. And apparently Keanu saw this coming like decades ago and has forever had in his contract where he has to approve any use or edits to his digital likeness in any format.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  And he's like, this is happening, like, we're having these conversations in Hollywood about like, it's almost like estate planning is like, what are you going to do with your digital likeness? And he's like, you know, Marilyn Monroe's in a Coke commercial and, you know, he was talking about how Marlon Brando is with Superman was talking about this already, like decades ago. And so, yeah, I, I do think it's something that's like on celebrities' minds is like, how do I license my likeness? And, you know, like, I asked him, so The Matrix did this NFT thing for the new movie. And the site like crashed after the first like hour. And there were 300,000 people in the queue for like 100,000 NFTs at 50 bucks a pop. And Keanu and Carrie Anne were not NFTs for this. So they obviously

• 15:28Speaker 02

  did not approve the use of their likeness. But yeah, they thought that was interesting. And Keanu was like, do we get a cut of that? It's like, oh, probably not. But he was like, it's all capitalism, man. You know, like,

• 15:42Nilay Patel?

  That's all I want. If that's, if that's what you got out of your time with them, then mission accomplished. One of my favorite copyright cases I ever read in law school was Vanna White v. Samsung Electronics. I think that's the case caption. Samsung had an ad for like washing machines where a robot like turned letters, like Wheel of Fortune.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:04Nilay Patel?

  And Vanna White was like, that robot looks is too much like me. You're using my likeness. And that's an unauthorized use of me, Vanna White. It's like a robot. And she won.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 16:14Nilay Patel?

  And my law professor was like, yeah, it's a California case, like California, like the California courts are always in the side with Hollywood. Like, it was like, open, in his mind, it was open and shut.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  Like, the corrupt California courts have once again taken the side of big Hollywood. But it's like, that was ages ago. And now we're all the way to, there's a digital Keanu Reeves that is contractually obligated to only do what Keanu Reeves wants. It's pretty good. You had some other, I mean, you're a senior metaverse reporter, Alex He. That's your, that's your title, right? You also, I mean, you had a big week. You also saw Snap's AR spec goals. You got to try them on.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're, they seem very prototype-y to me.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Oh, very prototypy. I mean, the battery lasts for 30 minutes. The first pair they gave me overheated after less than 10. They had like four on site that they tried to like seamlessly swap out as I tried different lenses. You know, which are Snap's AR effects so that I never noticed the battery. Definitely the best software on the AR glasses I've used. You can tell they've thought a lot about the interface. There's like this carousel you see through your eyes and it's a touch thing and there's voice. The thing that is the most promising on these that I think probably won't be cool for several more years is a scan button. I did another video thing on our site about a month or two ago about this in the Snapchat app. It's like visual search, right? Google Lens.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  It's their staff at this and they're working with a lot of other developers right now, but I scanned a plant, you know, with my glasses and it recommended some plant-based lenses. And like you expand that out a few years and you're walking around and you can just search anything. I mean, it's, it's going to be wild. And they also like, they're doing like mapping to your clothing where like a AR jacket will drape like it would naturally. Imagine putting that on someone, you know, through your glasses or making them your emoji, right? Like there's just so many ways that this is going to get trippy. But yeah, definitely a prototype, but they're being like oddly humble about it, especially considering like the way that the first spectacles were hyped beyond belief.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  And they ended up sitting on 40 million in unsold inventory that they had to write off. They're just not selling these. They're giving them to hundreds of AR creators just to try and play with. And it's, it's really a learning thing for them. And I think that's really smart because if these things were sold to the public, they'd probably cost thousands of dollars. And everyone would be like, what the hell? This thing dies after 30 minutes. What, what's the field of view like? It's so narrow. That's the thing. Like they optimized for brightness and for color. And so, you know, maybe half of the frame is the wave guide is what you can actually see. And so I found that the lenses looked better in post on my phone.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Seeing what I was seeing through the glasses than they did in the glasses because I had that full wide field of view. So once that gets there, once it fills that full kind of. This thing looks like a Cybertruck on your face. So like, once it feels that wide kind of lens, it's gonna be wild. I mean, it's, um, it's gonna take years, though, to get there. This really showed that battery and display are the two things that I don't know are gonna be cracked for a while.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, the, let's talk about the display for just a couple more minutes. I mean, I know the field of view is narrow, but was it good? I mean, them doing this outdoors is kind of a flex? Like, I've done Hololens stuff. Disclosure, my wife works for Meta, uh, what's the division that is maybe called Oculus, maybe not, I don't know, over there. Um, but like, was it good? Like, if you were to just take the display that you had and give it a proper field of view?

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Would you have been like, this is it? It's there? Or does it still feel like weird and pixelated and whatever?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  No, it wasn't pixelated. It was, they have 2000 nits of brightness in this thing, so it works in black sunlight, um, which is why the battery dies and it overheats after 10 minutes. But they're optimizing for visual richness so that people can make compelling AR experiences, so that when the tech catches up, the software kind of pipeline's already there. Which is another piece of this, they're being, I think, very smart about kind of seeding the developer ecosystem very early. Meta is not doing this, which I think is curious. But yeah, no, the display was probably the most impressive I've used on a standalone device. Again, this thing isn't tethered to anything for, for compete. And the glasses were light. Like, I didn't feel, um, like they were heavy on my face, or like I wanted to take them off after a few minutes.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Like, you could theoretically wear these all day and be fine. You'd look really weird, but you could.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  So yeah, I think there's a lot of promise there. And, you know, Snap is this kind of silent dark horse in these AR glasses metaverse wars, where they were actually kind of the first to like, think about this in a serious way. And they're just kind of quietly iterating now a little bit in public, which I think is interesting because they've been so secretive. But yeah, I mean, the display apparently is so good that they bought the supplier. That was one of our first scoops that I did. Wave Optics, their largest deal ever for half a billion dollars, just to get the kind of display tech locked for them. So yeah, man, this is all, it's all starting to come together. I mean, it's definitely not compelling for consumers, but this was the first time doing one of these demos where it was like in a few years, I can see this being really compelling and it's going to kind of flip how we think about computing, I think.

• 21:27Nilay Patel?

  I have a big, I agree with you. Like the, the part where you can see the software applications are way ahead of the hardware is utterly fascinating. That hasn't really happened in many other places. Like you just like throw a dart at the board and think about some other hyped future hardware, like 3D TVs or like interactive TVs as a whole, right? Like you're going to be shopping on your TV or you're going to be watching all the live cameras from a foot. Like, none of that has come to pass. It's all just streams. Like the software, even though the hardware and the service ecosystems are there, the software is just kind of where it always was. In this case, the hardware is nowhere near close, but everyone

• 22:10Nilay Patel?

  already has a pretty clear picture of what it should be. And the basics of like, we're going to point a camera at a thing and then do some computer stuff and then layer some information or experiences over that thing. That picture is really clear. So you can already, like Apple's already doing it. Snap is already doing it. Snap's already doing it on Apple's phones. Like you can see, but the hardware is really far away.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  And these lenses though, these lenses are getting smart. So you can have links in lenses now for the first time that kick out to like a store. So if a creator makes like a, something for their shoe, you can just go buy it in the lens. There's music from all the labels in there. They're bringing in outside apps for the first time. So you can have like FTX crypto trading in a lens or AccuWeather. You can pump in like the temperature into a lens. So they're starting to become interactive in real time where before they were these static kind of more artsy things. Yeah. It's like they were saying someone has spent two years making a lens that can measure anything like, and there's another one that can tell you if your surfboard is a good surfboard based on its contours and.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  So they're just coming up with all these wild things that once we have these glasses, like it's, it's gonna be cool.

• 23:21Nilay Patel?

  I won't give too much away because it won't be out by the time you listen to this, but Niantic CEO John Hanke is on Decoder next week. Niantic makes Pokemon Go. They have a big partnership with Qualcomm to make smart glasses. I've got a reference design floating around. I fell down an absolute research rabbit hole of how these displays work before I talked to him. They're all kind of the same, right? You get like, there's two tiny LCD displays in the stems of the glasses, and then there's a reflector, and there's a bunch of mirrors, or not mirrors, there's a bunch of coatings or etchings on layers.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Wave guides, yeah.

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, to bounce that display onto your eyes. And so I, you know, I just pushed him. I was like, is this it? Is like, can I go, am I gonna go from here to here? I see the first ever LCD display on a primitive smartphone, and I know in my mind, this technology is really important. Soon LCDs will take over every display in the world with some OLEDs on the side, right? Like, is this the technology bet? Or is it, this is the best we got, and maybe something else will come up? And he was like, this is it. Like, this waveguide technology will, it will get to where we want it to go. Which, I guess if you're like in the partnership with Qualcomm, you're shipping waveguide, like, maybe that's what you say, but Snap made that big investment and bought that company. It makes waveguides.

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  Their HoloLens is wave, like, it's magically was supposed to make something else, and they ended up at waveguides. It's what we got.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  I don't know. Because, again, HoloLens has been around, and like, it's wacky waveguides. With an LCD, you're like, okay, get better at the manufacturing process. The LCD gets bigger and more responsive. Like, there's like a hardware improvement arc there. And I don't, I am not smart enough to know is, what the hardware improvement arc for a waveguide is. Is it just like, we get better and better at etching until we can finally make them big enough? My understanding is these things are constrained by size and battery, and like thermodynamics, more than anything. Like, these waveguides can power, there's a reason magically raised $2 billion. It's because they had people look into a thing called the Beast that was the size of a closet.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  That had all the computing it needed to power this thing appropriately. So when they have that, they can do incredible things already. It's just getting it into a form factor. This is what Zuckerberg is talking about with me and Casey. Like getting that form factor is the hard part. Right.

• 25:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but but the beast, it's just like the best quote ever. The sea of Magic Leap was like, we're hacking the GPU of your brain. And what he meant was they're going to send light into your eyes in a way that mimics reality that isn't just an emissive flat plane. Wave guys are just a flat plane of light. Right? It's just all the electronics are in the stems of the glasses and it's bouncing the light through the. So Dieter, your question, like if you watch, there's like lots of like trade industry presentations from wave guide suppliers. And I'm telling you, I fell deep into a hole. And like all their presentations are like, here's our process. Here's where the cost is. Here's where the cost is coming down. And they're trying to convince you basically that they're using standard glass making,

• 26:28Nilay Patel?

  screen making techniques to make this next generation of wave guide pieces of glass. The actual display is still just like a tiny little LCD in the stems of the glasses.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:39Nilay Patel?

  They're just bouncing it in front of your eyes with these wave guides. That they're still expensive. So like they're trying to make that cheaper, but they haven't. I don't know. I don't know that it's the bet. Like it feels like it's the resistive touchscreen of the AR world. You know, they can get you there. And then someday Steve Jobs is going to show up with like the capacitive touchscreen iPhone and everyone's going to be like, oh, that's what we should have done.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  This is a good segue to Apple because there is a continuum here where the wave guys and the AR glasses are happening on one side of this. That's definitely several years out at minimum till we have that at scale. What's happening in the near term, and I think 2022 will be the year of, is pass through mixed reality, proper LCD, whatever it's going to be, no wave guides, but basically tricking you by piping in video of the outside world and mixing it with the graphics. And that's what Apple's going to do. It's what Meta's got with Cambria, which is this headset they're working on for next year. And I think that's going to really show people that there is something, there's like a stopgap before we get to AR glasses and it's that mixed reality pass through experience.

• 27:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think that's like the reason that Apple's doing pass through video and a VR headset and potentially why Meta's doing it too. Is because Apple cannot ship glasses with a teeny tiny field of view that get really hot. They've got to ship a finit- like their brand is finished consumer products. And that core technology of a piece of a display that you can look through is just like, what we got is waveguide. I'm like, I encourage everyone, like if you're a huge nerd, you'll see the shit, like, go look at how waveguides work. It's neat. It's super cool. But at the end of the day, it's like, you're wearing the entire hollow lens on your head and you've got like, a posted stamp in the middle of your field of vision. It's like, put the spark plug in the ATV. Like, this is not that great.

• 28:29Nilay Patel?

  I think it's really neat. Like, we're just in a place now, I think it's fascinating that every software developer is like, ready for this. And the hardware is just like, years, like, five at least out, from what I can tell. The other thing, the other little decoder preview I'll give you, you were talking about how Snap has filters and like, everyone can be wearing different clothes. So I was like, how are you gonna govern reality? Like, and John, he was like, I don't know, everyone can just pick and choose. Like, what if we all just like, it's like, I don't govern what song you listen to when you walk down the street. Why should I, why should I govern what you're looking at? And he was just like, there's gonna be a marketplace of realities. This is my new phrase. It's gonna be terrifying. Put that on a shirt. Yeah. This is gonna be great. All right, we should take a break, and we should come back. There's, there's like, a lot of streaming to talk about. We'll be right back.

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• 30:16Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. There is like a lot of, how would you describe this? Low stakes streaming drama?

• 30:22Speaker 03

  Low stakes streaming drama and like news that seems unimportant, but actually could be massively important.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like, it's that. It's like, we're gonna have to convince you that a lot of these things are important. Buckle up. Let's start the Keanu Reeves, Carrie and Moss video app because of the Game Awards, they're announcing the Unreal stuff there, but Google's announcing some stuff at Game Awards too, which is, by the way, we are recording this before the Game Awards happen, but you're listening to it after they've happened.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Right. So imagine there, we're just assuming there's like huge game streaming news and we're reacting to that. It's amazing. It's gonna change everything. We don't know.

• 30:58Nilay Patel?

  But there's some like Google news coming.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, this isn't streaming, but apparently Google Play Games is gonna be available on Windows. So it's like Android apps and Windows, here we go. And it's interesting, instead of just bringing the whole of Google Play Android apps, they're bringing Google Play Games, which is a fascinating decision.

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  Are they bringing that into Microsoft's weird Android app universe?

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Unclear. What do you mean by that?

• 31:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, Microsoft's starting to deal with Amazon to use the Amazon App Store to get Android apps on Windows.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  But then they were also like, you can use any app store you want. So are they building like a special Windows, Google Play Games?

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're making Google Play Games, a Google Play Games store, where you can download and install Android games for Windows.

• 31:42Nilay Patel?

  And that's running inside of the Windows Android app compatibility, not some weird new Google layer?

• 31:48Speaker 03

  Well, so that is a little bit unclear because it's like, Google isn't like partnering with Microsoft to make this happen. They're just doing it.

• 32:00Nilay Patel?

  This is gonna go great.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so that's one thing. We'll see how that goes. You can see how Google just needs to diversify its revenue base as all of the App Store drama continues. To go like, getting more of its game stuff out in the world is, I think, good for Google. Like, Apple would love this to be happening on the Mac. I just don't think they're ever gonna convince any game developer to take the Mac seriously. Even the game developers on the iPhone are like, why? Maybe with like, is M1 chips become more widespread? Game developers will make the easy jump to games on the Mac, but it just kinda hasn't happened yet.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, the whole question with games right now is, like, what is the future of, like, the platforms that you're gonna be thinking about, like, what the games run on? Because they keep making Android games. That seems to like, you know, I now believe that Android gaming phones exist and have a purpose. I've been convinced.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  By who?

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Just looking at the world, looking at the market, looking at the Chinese market. Like, they don't, they're not making them for no reason.

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Uh, so there's that. There's, of course, the various streaming platforms. Uh, there's Windows, there's Xbox, there's PlayStation, there's like, the various versions of Xbox and its streaming.

• 33:09Nilay Patel?

  Stadia now runs on LG TVs.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Yes. So the thing that's interesting about that to me is, well, of course it does. It's just a, like, it's just a video stream. So when I'm like, the, it's potentially a big deal. It's like, the, the rules of how you think about what your screen can do are changing, like, they were changing slowly and now they're changing really quickly. So whether or not you can just play console quality games on your LG TV was just a matter of, when did they get around to creating the, you know, casting endpoint app for WebOS? It's actually not that difficult. And I just, I don't know, like, where that's gonna shake out. Uh, are you going to care where your game comes from? Are you gonna care if it's local or streaming?

• 33:56Speaker 03

  And the, the fact that it's, it's just a question of like, who's gotten around to building a client for the thing? This even applies to like, Google Play games on Windows is really interesting. Uh, so like, honestly, this kind of leads us up to talking about the Roku YouTube drama a little bit, I think.

• 34:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, although they did settle it this week. So Roku and Google were... About to sue each other like they had to each other. It hasn't gotten very far. They were who was gonna kick YouTube off its platform. Google had done some shady stuff on other platforms. They'd built YouTube TV into the YouTube app because you can't get rid of the YouTube app. But they were at the kind of the brinksmanship point. They were gonna walk.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  They were gonna pull YouTube from Roku.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  They were gonna pull YouTube from Roku. And I gotta say, the arguments were dumb. Like if you read, like Roku put all these blog posts and like whatever, like the arguments they were having were when you push the Roku voice search button and the YouTube app is open, what voice search should you go to?

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:57Nilay Patel?

  And Google was like, Google, like ours. And Roku was like, no, the operating systems.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. By the way, they won that front like Samsung on like my Samsung Frame TV. The microphone button, like it's a Google button. It's a Google assistant button. But when you're in the YouTube app, it ceases to be a Google assistant button and it becomes a YouTube search button.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I, these arguments are like, they're very Vergecast arguments. Like, what do you think the, should the native control supersede the application's control?

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  And like, there were other ones where if you had the YouTube app open and you search for a movie using Roku voice search, the native Roku voice search would pull movies from the applications that supported its library.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:43Nilay Patel?

  And so like Google's big complaint was like, this movie is available for free on YouTube. You should be showing users that, which sounds great, but also if you're in the YouTube app, like you should just use, like it, none of it made sense where like how actual people use their software. But it all just seemed like little corner cases of what the buttons on your remote did if the YouTube app was open. And yeah, like, it just seems like Google believes that people open the YouTube app and live in it 24 hours a day when they watch TV. Which maybe people do, but does not seem that likely when you're searching for like a Disney movie.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  I gotta say, hearing you guys talk about all this makes me think there should just be some good old fashioned consolidation in this industry.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  Hasn't there been enough? And then there's like, there's like ad money in the background, right?

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Right. Well, and so this is like, there's this like great inversion where you, you tweet about this, Neil, I'm stealing your idea, but like, it used to be that like what you could play on your screen, whether it's a game or a video, whatever, was like really dependent on who your service provider was, what the screen's capabilities was, you know, what platform you picked, et cetera. And now it's completely dependent on have some deals been made and has someone like done some engineering work to make an app or not?

• 37:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it is utterly, no one knows what the terms of this new deal are. It is a multi-year deal. YouTube and YouTube TV will like stay on the Roku platform. It's funny, Roku is calling Google an unchecked monopolist throughout all of this. Because when, when they like threaten to kick YouTube TV off, the whole like money dispute is that Roku hardware is extraordinarily cheap. Right? It's like 30 bucks, 20 bucks. They don't, they're not making any money on that hardware. All they make money on is when you sign up, just like in any other app store, when you sign up for Disney Plus, they get a cut, right? They get a bounty of that, of that sign up. When Hulu runs an ad on the Roku,

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  like either those ads are served by Roku Ad Services or Roku gets a cut. Like those, that's just like the app store itself. When, when any commerce happens in an app, Apple wants a cut. When any advertising or subscription happens on a Roku, Roku gets a cut. And that's how they subsidize all the hardware. This is the economics of every TV, by the way. Like LG, the reasons TVs are cheap is because all the money is made through ongoing transactions. Like the story of adding a chip to things and then making them connected is so that they can just like charge you for the rest of your life. That's, that's really what's happening. But that's totally backwards, right? You used to pay your cable company and then the cable company would pay ESPN.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:21Nilay Patel?

  Now you're paying Disney and Disney is paying Roku.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  And like, I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's, it's clear what Roku sees itself is like, you're not going to get another TV box or have 50 TV boxes. You're going to have one. And that one should have all the apps you want. And if you want to be on that one, you have to meet their terms to show up in the interface in front of other people. And the one thing they can't get rid of is YouTube. So when they kick YouTube TV off, they're like, screw it, you're gone. But then Google can add YouTube TV to YouTube because they can't kick YouTube off. Like, aren't they, they're like both monopolists in that way. Like Roku controls most of the streaming platform business in the country.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 38:59Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Anyway, it's over. We have no idea what this deal is. A bunch of people, I don't know, smoked cigars on Zoom. And they came to terms. It's shady. We'll see.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  But they're back.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  But so in theory, a couple of years from now, all this is gonna get shaken up again. So Jennifer Patterson Tuohy on our site basically broke the news that there is a part of a standard for Matter. So Matter is a connected home over IP standard. We're gonna have a whole Vergecast about this on Tuesday. So buckle up for that. We're gonna talk about this. But because Jennifer published this story today, I wanted to talk about it briefly. So there's a part of the spec called Matter TV that I don't think most people realize was gonna be part of the smart home standard. And it's basically just universal casting, either from app to app or app to TVs once they're there. That all of these big companies have agreed, oh yeah, if you want to tell your screen to play a video, this standard will be supported.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  So it can replace AirPlay, it can replace Google Cast, it can replace whatever weird stuff Samsung does. Amazon is like written the spec because they really need it because people have Echo devices, but they don't necessarily have Fire TVs. But it's like part of the spec. And so like casting might actually not suck next year or beginning next year.

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I don't think. Doubt it. Apple or Google are walking away from their standards.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Well, no, but they're not walking away from their standards, but this standard will also be supported. And they are part, they like signed off on the spec. So if you have a TV that supports Matter, it will support having this casting standard hit it.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's fair. I just don't think, I don't think this casting standard will run up in iOS for years to come.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  No, this is gonna fail for sure.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  I mean, it could, probably, but why do you think it'll fail?

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Because no, like we, everything you all were just saying, like this entire, there's so much infighting right now in this space. Everyone wants to own their layer and their, their system and their substrate of the TV experience.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Some startup or whatever, there's no way, there's no way.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, so but we're gonna get into this next week, but like, they have walked away from that walled garden fight in the smart home. Everyone's like, we have hit the ceiling, we can't make any more money, we can't grow this platform. I'm telling you, the Matter shit, just, everything is like, interoperating. And it's gonna work locally, it's based on like, equal parts from all of these big tech companies, and they're all, you know, it'll fall, it's a standard, it'll probably fall apart, but like, it seems like, you're, like, your doorbell's just gonna work, and it's not gonna be locked into a walled garden anymore if it supports Matter, and you're gonna want it to support Matter, because then, you know, it's easier to buy stuff. And if the Matter TV thing gets like, brought in with that spec as like, a Trojan horse, that could be interesting.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  All I wanna do is go to a hotel and be able to cast my phone to the TV, and, and not have to worry about, is it a Chromecast, is it an Apple TV? Usually I can't stream my iPhone, because it's like, Chromecast, and it's just, something that fixes all that, yeah, that's, that's gonna be a trillion dollar company, for sure.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  That's the, I mean, that's the Matter spec, is they, if, if the thing supports it, and it will see it locally, and it will either cast it locally from your phone, or it'll like, just tell it the URL that it needs to go grab from the internet. The promise is that it'll all work, we'll see what it actually turns out to be, but I am very optimistic about the smart home side of it, and the fact that there's like, a TV side being like, brought in alongside that, is fascinating.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, that's interesting, so Apple didn't make a TV, which they should, instead of a car. Just putting that out there, continue to put that energy out in the world, make a TV, not a car, seems, seems more in your lane, you get it?

• 42:40Speaker 03

  No, that's terrible, that's, that's my line, come on.

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  I apologize to everyone. But when they put the Apple TV app everywhere, they gave everybody AirPlay, it came along for the ride. So now every TV has AirPlay and Chromecast. So now you got a third one. If they don't get like, Samsung and LG, which are like, Vizio, right, like, I don't think Vizio is part of Matter, but Samsung, TCL, Panasonic, and LG are all in Matter. That's a lot of TVs that might support this thing.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:10Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. I, I have high hopes. What I didn't see here anywhere was like, we're gonna make remote controls better.

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  No one seems at all like interested in doing.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  There's only so many problems technology can solve, Eli.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Okay. Can I, can I, can I go down my rabbit hole of my streaming revenue rabbit hole?

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Oh, is this a Spotify comedian thing?

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So there's this, uh, there's this group that represents a bunch of comedians called, uh, spoken giants, which is a great name.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  And so they have this new theory that they're arguing with Spotify about that resulted in Spotify removing a bunch of tracks from comedians like Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish, Sean Malaney, Jim Gaffigan, all off Spotify. So they've got this idea that the written jokes now constitute one work and the performance of the jokes are another work. And they should get paid. Right. So it's like songwriters get one royalty stream and performers get another often. The songwriters and the performers are the same person that get paid twice. This is like, there's like inventing a new, a new revenue stream. Cause streaming revenue is so low that everyone's like trying to find new money. So comedians have like come up with this new lobbying group, spoken giants, to say that they're not only just like telling jokes,

• 44:23Nilay Patel?

  but they're writing jokes and then performing the jokes. And so the, they should get the streaming revenue for the audio recording and the publishing revenue for the jokes themselves, which is just a wild way of thinking about comedians telling jokes. Because for example, songwriters assume multiple people will perform their songs over time. Comedians do not, like, no one does like cover joke albums. Like it's like not a thing that happens.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Pretty good.

• 44:49Nilay Patel?

  Oh, hang on though. Doing like an entire John Mulaney cover album.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Wait, like Tik Tok is full of cover jokes of just people lip syncing comedy routines.

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  But they're doing it to the audio.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Sure. But like, it's a performance.

• 45:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't, I don't actually have any idea how the Tik Tok licensing works.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:08Nilay Patel?

  I've always been fascinated by that. I just think it's the pressure on the people who make the content for Spotify. The revenue pressure on everybody is so high because the payouts are so low that like they're inventing this new concept, which would imply that you should be able to like do an album of joke covers.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Put it on the blockchain.

• 45:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. I think it's fascinating. Uh, Ashley, who writes Hot Pod, she and I are just like staring at this being like, is this gonna work? Like Spotify just was like, no, and she like kicked him off.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:39Nilay Patel?

  Cause Spotify doesn't need a bunch of joke albums.

• 45:43Nilay Patel?

  But it's like fascinating to me to see like all of these ways because the money has gotten so bad.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:51Nilay Patel?

  That artists are creating new, that's NFTs, that's why every artist is doing NFTs. But it's also like, we're going to create a new royalty structure for comedy out of nothing.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  I think we should do this for the Vergecast. We should get paid once for performing it and paid and oh wait, we don't write it. Never mind.

• 46:08Nilay Patel?

  We're writing it. We're writing it. There you go. We're contemporaneously writing this.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  What is IP but?

• 46:13Nilay Patel?

  What is IP?

• 46:14Speaker 02

  What is IP but what we say?

• 46:16Nilay Patel?

  If someone wants to do a full cover of this episode of the Vergecast, you have to call us. I'll write you a contract.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  On the blockchain.

• 46:24Nilay Patel?

  It'll be cheap. It won't cost a lot of money, but it'll be ironclad that you have to perform this Vergecast word for word. It'd be like 10 bucks. If you want to, we'll figure it out.

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  Like a screenplay of this Vergecast. Last little things, Apple Music is, they got that weird voice plan for the HomePods.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  This is what I mean, that like the capabilities of your device are dictated by weird ass backroom contracts, not by what the capabilities of the device are. This voice plan is dumb and annoying and I hate it.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  And it's just because the record labels gave the same plan to Amazon.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's like what enables your smart speaker, right? You want to say, play some music to a smart speaker that can't be, and you don't want to do a deal with Spotify.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  So you like make your own deal for like cheap streaming just for the smart speaker. It's like five bucks a month, like four bucks a month.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's super cheap.

• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  It's weird. And then Sonos is now supporting Amazon Music Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos on the new beam that supports Atmos and the Ark.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  I gotta, I just want to say, I got a piece of physical mail from Amazon asking me if I want to try Amazon Music.

• 47:31Nilay Patel?

  Amazing.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  The other day and I was like, that says a lot about Amazon Music. Yeah, that's my only thought there.

• 47:37Nilay Patel?

  We're quickly getting to a place, by the way, where the combination of the service you subscribe to and the headphones you have has meaningful implications for what music you listen to. Like you've got to have an Atmos service and Sonos speakers to listen to Atmos music from Amazon. But your Apple AirPods, which supports spatial audio, there's no way to listen to Atmos music from Amazon. It's just like, it's nuts. Like it happened. The bad thing happened.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  I don't know what to tell you.

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  It could be a lot worse. We could be paying gas fees every time we listen to a song.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  I mean, don't put that energy into the world, man. What are you doing?

• 48:17Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be happening. There's a New York Times article this week, like a choice, the New York Times is on it article about how wired headphones are trendy again.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:26Nilay Patel?

  Do you see it? I was like, I did it. This was me. Like, the number of people who are like, you got your wish. And I was like, they're still lightning headphones.

• 48:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break and we got just the lightning round to end all lightning rounds coming up. We'll be right back.

• 48:47Speaker 04

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• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. We got, there's like a chunk of Android Lightning Rodney's. You guys wanna go through it, Teeter?

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Google has a big update for Pixel for Android 12 that it's got a bug fix list that is just three miles long, just super, super. And like, you know, there's always like the like patch after the release where it's kind of big, but this one in particular is like, oh, the Pixel as reviewed is not the one that they were hoping to get out the door. Like, there's so many fixes in this thing. It also includes the launch feature where you're going to be able to tap to snap, where you can double tap the thing and use the snap camera even though you're still on the lock screen. And then immediately on the heels of that, there's

• 50:53Speaker 03

  an Android 12L beta, L for large screens, I guess. You can install it on a Pixel if you want to for some reason.

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  Wait, you can?

• 51:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, cuz. But it's meant for emulators. There's like a Lenovo tablet that you can install it on if you want to see what it looks like, but it's clearly designed for folding phones, right? And maybe they'll make another go at tablets, because they did the thing they should have done, which is like, put a proper dock on it, make rearranging windows via drag and drop part of the system level thing and not a hack that Microsoft and Samsung have to create. You know, like, fix the notification dropdown, control panel dropdown thing, so it actually fills the screen instead of being ridiculous like the phone. They've made Android not terrible on big screens, or at least they're taking a couple of steps in that direction. But there's

• 51:43Speaker 03

  just, there's no big screens to put it on. Like, there's the Kindles, there's like some random Samsung tablets, Huawei makes some stuff, but like, it's not here. And then there's like, the one Lenovo tablet that is, I think, really only selling like the UK, so. I think it's interesting. I'm glad they're doing the thing that they should have done a while ago to normalize the UI on Microsoft's two-screen thing and Samsung's folding and whatever else is coming. But it's also like a pretty clear sign that, yeah, they're still working on a Pixel Fold. Yeah, I mean, isn't everybody? Yeah, I feel like we talked about like wave guides in AR, but like also in the background, everybody is trying to make a folding phone work. Right? I'm sure Apple has like dozens of folding phone prototypes. Why? Literally, who wants this?

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Because it's awesome. I want this. It's great. It's the best. I've been carrying around an iPad mini at home lately instead of just my phone, like a tiny phone, an iPad mini. And it's lovely to have a little, a little device with a big screen. And, you know, I bought a Fold, bought a Fold 2, but used that for a while. I'm telling you, man, like, big screens are great. Yeah, like, big screens are great. No, I get that. Get a big screen in your pocket, that's great. I love the Pro Max, and I guess you're saying folding makes that also compact, right? That's the promise of it? Makes it a little bit smaller. Yeah, yeah.

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I also just think everybody knows that new form factors sell. And so you can deliver an actual folding phone that works without any of the compromises. You know, Samsung's already iterated its way through some of the compromises.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  A lot of the compromises they've been iterating on.

• 53:14Nilay Patel?

  You just get to like make that ad and be like, look, this iPhone folds in half. And like, people will just instinctively buy it.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:21Nilay Patel?

  I don't think they're trying to solve a huge problem. I think that they can just see a, they can just see a product that people will instinctively understand.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  The other Pixel news is apparently the mail-in repair warehouse that they were using. Yo, this is crazy. Was like people were mailing their Pixels in to get repaired and then like their nudes leaked.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  So that's horrible. And I want to tell you that like PSA, never send your phone in for repair without wiping it first. But like if the thing is broken and you can't like use the screen to wipe it, then like you kind of have no choice to send it in before you wipe your data in a lot of cases. So. Yeah, not cool. That's all it's like, what other advice can there be except to say not cool?

• 54:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, this is, I mean, we talk about the Pixel. I'm like, what it, what Google needs to do like they need to market it. They need to sell a lot of them. The back half of the story about these devices is like service and support.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Right. And this is why we always recommended Samsung phones over pixels for many years, even though we tend to prefer using pixels more ourselves. Because for the average person, you can walk to a, you know, Sprint store, if you use Sprint and be like, fix my Samsung. And they'll be like, okay.

• 54:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Or more likely, they'll be like, your contract is up in three months. Would you like a new Samsung? But like.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Also, what is, how sad is it that I still in my, in my, in my world, Sprint still exists? Just occurred to me.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  TMO is running those ads for free phones and they keep mentioning Sprint customers too. I don't know if you've seen these ads. They're like, everyone gets a free phone, including Sprint customers. I'm like, you own Sprint. Like you shut it down. Who are you talking to? It's gone. It went away. Did you see this Microsoft bug on? I can't tell. I don't know if it's a Microsoft bug or a Google bug, but if you had Teams installed on Android phone, it would occasionally prevent you from calling 911.

• 55:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so the, the phone app lets other apps plug into it. The iPhone does this too, right? And so there must be something where the Teams app wants to show up in your call log and that messed with that. But that should, this should never happen. Like that, that needs to be like the phone app, there should be like an iron clad, you know, secure enclave around that sort of functionality. It's ridiculous.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  So you, you wait, you, you think that they were trying to call 911 and it was routing it through Teams? And so like the, the 911 dispatcher was like getting a message. It was like, please install Microsoft Teams.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  All, all I'm saying is that.

• 55:46Nilay Patel?

  It's growth hacking at its finest.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  That, that the Microsoft software could have touched Google's software. So like something there went wrong.

• 55:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Other phone stuff, uh, this 5G story with the FAA is getting more and more complicated by the day. So now the FAA, the FAA was unhappy with the FCC and with the telecom companies. So AT&T and Verizon agreed to delay some of their 5G rollout on certain bands to solve these FAA problems. And now the FAA is saying some flights in some weather conditions should not land using instruments alone. If the pilots can see the runway.

• 56:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  Because of 5G interference.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  But then AT&T and Verizon also promised, I think, the lower power around airports or something. And these like, these rules only apply to like, certain equipment that a lot of people want replaced anyway. It's like, bleh.

• 56:40Nilay Patel?

  I will just say this, the, this is, I mean, it's, you know, we usually see this with like, the FTC and the DOJ, like, fighting over who's gonna sue a big company.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:48Nilay Patel?

  The FCC and the FAA have like, clearly not talked. Like, the FCC's entire job is to manage spectrum in this country.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:57Nilay Patel?

  And yes, like, they only just got a chair when Jessica Rosen Porcell was officially confirmed by the Senate, like, two days ago.

• 57:04Speaker 03

  But they're still, they're still deadlocked. They don't, there's not the fifth.

• 57:07Nilay Patel?

  But they don't need a vote for this stuff. Like, the votes that we care about, that we pay attention to are like, net, like, big policy stuff.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:13Nilay Patel?

  Like, mostly, the FCC is full of engineers and lawyers whose job it is to just figure this stuff out.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  And it's nuts that it's, we're this far into the 5G cycle, and the FAA is like, oh, there's gonna be a problem with planes? So like, maybe thousands of flights can't land.

• 57:28Speaker 03

  Look, Neelai, sometimes, when you're in a race, some people get left behind.

• 57:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyway, the telecom lobbyists are out of control mad about this. And sort of like, the FCC people are, are like, why don't you tell us about this earlier? So we'll see what happens. But it's, I don't know, there's something wacky here, where like, maybe it was just the race. But, in effect, what is happening is the big AT&T and Verizon mid-band rollouts are being affected by the FAA.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:57Nilay Patel?

  And we'll just see where that goes. Um, did you see this Verizon story?

• 58:01Speaker 03

  So, yes. And it's like, this, this is my PSA moment. So, there's this thing where Verizon has, they, Verizon already had this program called like, Verizon, like, Up or something, where it was really obvious that signing up for this to get a deal is definitely gonna sign you up to have them collect more data. But they're doing it an even skeezer way now with Verizon Custom Experience and Custom Experience Plus.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  It seems really obvious.

• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  House is shaking his head.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, come on. I mean Verizon, you know, famous inventor of the super cookie, right?

• 58:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  What I believe is happening here is Verizon and a bunch of other companies are turn. There was a story about the second, or was, are they turning the knob up on all of their like customer loyalty programs and all of their like, you know, sign up and give us some piece of information program to as high as they can go right now in case the stuff with app tracking on iPhones and, you know, Chrome decides it's going to finally do something with Flock, although my money is on they're going to waffle for an extra two, two years. You know, if the cookiepocalypse happens, or if, you know, something with app tracking gets shut down, there was a weird story where like, Apple was maybe letting people collect data on, you know, iPhone apps, blah, blah, blah.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  All of this stuff is really frothy right now, but like, just don't sign up for anything. That's my advice to you.

• 59:26Nilay Patel?

  So this specific thing Dieter was talking about was for the Verizon super cookie ages ago was Verizon at the network level would just track everything you did on the web.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:36Nilay Patel?

  Using something called the super cookie and you couldn't get rid of it. And if you had a Verizon phone, they were just building this profile of you. Everyone got mad, they turned it off. I'm telling you that this is evidence that they're bringing it back.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, for sure.

• 59:47Nilay Patel?

  Like Verizon's entire media strategy, remember they bought AOL and Yahoo and they merged them into a company called, they spun off. And now Yahoo, Yahoo got spun off again and they just renamed Verizon Media, the company that was known as Verizon Media is now just known as Yahoo Ad Tech. Like no, no hiding the ball, like the corporate entity that owns like TechCrunch and Gadget, which are great sites and run by great people, but like that corporate entity is now just known as Yahoo Ad Tech, like zero hiding the ball, what they're doing. So now, because apps can't track their data on the phone, Verizon can track your data on the network.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:00:31Nilay Patel?

  And you've opted in because it's your carrier. Right, you just sign whatever contract, you got a free phone. So Verizon has all this data about where you are, what your traffic is doing, what your interests are, what websites are going to, and then they can then. Flip that into ad tracking profiles.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:00:48Nilay Patel?

  And bypass all of the Apple stuff.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  The thing that throws a wrench in this is private relay is is iCloud's VPN type thing. It's not a VPN, but we'll call it that. And it's almost like Apple saw this coming. This is like fighting at what? How low in the stack of like, the ability to block data tracking? Can you get? Apple's pretty down there, but then there's Verizon that's like, well, actually, we can just sniff all your packets. And then Apple's like, well, hold on, we're going to put a wall up so you can't. So I have a feeling this won't work is a roundabout way of saying that.

• 1:01:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I mean, carrier software ideas, it's a good bet.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Nilay Patel?

  But like both, this is what AT&T wanted to do with Warner Media. Like their stated purpose for buying Warner Brothers.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Which is just ridiculous to think about.

• 1:01:34Nilay Patel?

  Ad tracking and advertising.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  There is just a study, like there is a bunch of FCC noise lately because of Rosenbaum, Simon, Gigi Stone is up for the other commissioner spot to break the two, two tie. And I think we talked about this with Russell last week. I don't know, I'll just recapitulate it. So Gigi Stone is up for the last spot in the FCC.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:01:55Nilay Patel?

  And Fox News and the Wall Street Journal don't want her to be in the FCC, but OAN and Newsmax do. Because she supports competition, just like as a principle, and they're the competitors, which is very funny. But so there's all this noise about the FCC, but if you look at investment in networks themselves, capital expenditure networks. When they got rid of net neutrality, the actual investment in networks went down because all of the broadband companies started buying media. They went and bought Warner Media and they went and bought AOL. And they did all this stuff because they were like, we're going to monetize what happens on the networks because we can see the networks. And then all those ideas were inevitably bad.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  So I don't know, I would just say like this, you can see what's happening. Like, Apple turned off the cookie stuff. They turned off tracking. And now everyone else who has the ability to track is like lit this idea back up. Alex, you cover like a bunch, you know, like Snap had like bad earnings. Like, this is like hitting these companies in serious ways.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, what's effectively happening is it's, it's, a lot of it is Apple in the, in the private sector. A lot of it is actually coming from the EU in the public sector. So between Apple and the EU and then Google, whatever the hell they're gonna do. You effectively, you could think of the internet today, it is like a, a, a big series of interlocking webs, right? Where it was pretty easy for X company to sell, sell data to another, or even just tell them, hey, like, we think this person is this. And they corroborate. What's happening is Apple and the EU with this Digital Market Service Act that's coming out sometime are just taking scissors and cutting all those webs. And so everything is becoming siloed.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  And we're in this like kind of adjustment, painful adjustment period, mostly brought on by Apple right now. But like the things that Facebook is doing where it's, you know, getting rid of ad targeting options, you know, where you can't, you no longer can target somebody by, based on their social orientation. That's actually motivated by laws that are coming in the EU that are just clamping down on targeting from a legal perspective. And so, yeah, everyone's building these, um, there's a guy named Eric Sufrat, who's like a super smart ad tech guy who calls them content fortresses. But every app, and I, I wrote this in a 10 year kind of package, like every app is going to become a super app. Where like, instead of you going off app to purchase something, Facebook wants you to do shopping on Instagram.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  Because when you shop on Instagram, they know you bought it. Whereas if they kick you off to a website, there's no more cookie for them to say, oh, they came from our ad, therefore our ad worked. And so, um, this is gonna reshape big parts of the internet, for sure. And it already is starting to do that.

• 1:04:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm just gonna put an idea out there. If you're, um, if you're an Apple engineer, just want you to pull over in your car. Think about this problem of these super apps and everyone trying to keep people inside their apps. Take a deep breath and realize in your heart that allowing in-app browsers was a mistake? And you should turn them off on your platform. In-app browsers are the worst. Give me my tabs, give me my browser, give me my extensions, give me...

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  My own space where I'm in control of where I visit on the web and don't make me bounce from the Twitter browser to Safari. Don't make me re-log in to the New York Times so I can read an article 15 times in every single app that happens to link to the New York Times. Just send them all to Safari. This isn't a problem on Chrome because they share cookies with the in-app browsers, but still, I'm just saying, ban in-app browsers and you will go a long way towards solving this super app-tracking problem. They will end up back in court tomorrow.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  It's like, it's like the death now. Okay, other lightning round stuff. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, was in front of Congress. Facebook should just set up shop in DC at this point, move all their executives there. Or Meta, I'm sorry, Meta. It's the first time for Adam in front of Congress. He said they're bringing back the chronological feed. What did you think of this hearing?

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. I mean, how many more of these are we gonna have? It's like, Casey had a great tweet about how, you know, it's like they just legislate through hearings, right? Like, nothing actually happens. And it's all just a bunch of grandstanding. I mean, I think I tuned out of this hearing after like, half of it, because it was just, it's just incomprehensible and it's like, you can just tell that this is all, it's all politically motivated, like, all of a sudden, all the senators care about our kids. And it's like, you know, it's all Meta's fault. And obviously, there are problems here. I'm not trying to absolve them of all responsibility, but I just wish there was actual more. I come back to like, the fact that like, the Honest Ads Act, which is a response to

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  2016, like, literally never happened. And it was like, the only thing that managed to even like, get some kind of interest in Congress. And, yeah, I just, I don't know, I don't think the American public really thinks these hearings are interesting or are working. Like, I would be shocked. I just don't really know who they're for, except for donors and the media. And then when Mosseri says we're bringing chronological feedback, that's the actual news out of the entire, whatever, two or three-hour hearing. It was like, Instagram bringing back this thing they killed for no reason. I mean, it wasn't no reason, but that people hated that they killed years ago, so.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  But it's good, it's next year. I'm sorry, Twitter moved faster than Twitter. If you can't move as fast as Twitter, what are you doing?

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Well, you know, they're going through a lot over there, okay? You know, they got a lot of people in the Metaverse.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  It's funny because like that's Frances Haugen, you know, the Facebook whistleblower. That was her whole thing that her stump speech when she came out was like ban algorithms. Like the chronological feed will fix integrity on the internet. And we're gonna see if that works. Um, and I would not be shocked if like most people don't even use this when it comes out. Um, I don't think Twitter's chronological feed is heavily used.

• 1:07:54Nilay Patel?

  That's what I use.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  So you use?

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. Man, I used to be a Twitter completionist too.

• 1:07:59Nilay Patel?

  So I mean, my entire thing is that Twitter poisons your brain and we should all quit. Uh, so I intentionally make my Twitter experience as broken as possible.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  That's fair. I mean, I remember being a tweetbot stan and like having to read every single tweet in my feed because it would show you the counter before you could refresh. And I'm really glad those days are behind me. But yeah, I don't know, this whole like, should we all be chronological feeds? Or should we be algorithms? And I just, I don't know, they're doing this to appease the, the, the angry senators who, who care about our children. So.

• 1:08:30Nilay Patel?

  I think that the angry senators, uh, you're correct about donors, but I think it does get them voters. Yelling at Meta or Facebook or Instagram is like, it works for both parties.

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  Because Republicans need like suburban women or what's, what's the?

• 1:08:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I, I think there's that, like, I think this next year, you know, Haugen is testifying. There's assuming this next chunk of the Biden plan passes, which who knows if it will. The next set of attention is going to be back onto 230 and social media regulation. Like we've heard both parties say they want to do it. And there, there's going to be some meaningful, oh shit, the first amendment's in our way. It's just coming for them.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  Don't we say this every year though, that it's coming? Like, again, I come back to like the Honest Ads Act, which was like a smart piece of like detailed niche focused legislation about like political ads. Like that went nowhere. So, I mean, you really think we're going to get to like meaningful section 230 reform in a divided Congress?

• 1:09:29Nilay Patel?

  I think what's going to happen is the, the Florida social media bill will work its way through the courts. Right? It got stayed. The Texas social media bill got stayed. Like as those things move their way through the courts, you're gonna. And Congress like turns this election year, they're all gonna start yelling about it. Like, it's just easy money for a politician to be like, Facebook is bad. Sure. It's, it's just like, it's easy to be like, YouTube is poisoning your kids. We gotta do something about it. If you reelect me to the United States Congress, my bill will make YouTube not censor conservatives. Like, I, I could probably win a seat in upstate New York right tomorrow if I just like ran around saying that. Like, it's convincing to a lot of people for reasons that make sense.

• 1:10:12Nilay Patel?

  Like, people do not have great relationships with these platforms. Or didn't our, didn't our survey say that, say that a little differently? They said they like the utility platforms. Yeah. So, Google, Facebook, YouTube, which is, not Facebook. So, Google and Amazon really, really highly rated, right? They provide an ongoing utility. It was like 98% approval in our survey. YouTube way up there because, look, my refrigerator just broke. I watched a lot of YouTube yesterday trying to fix it. I failed. So now my opinion of YouTube is very low.

• 1:10:46Nilay Patel?

  Did you break it further? Uh, my father-in-law is here and he has spent the entire day just like tearing this thing to shreds. Oh, boy. Just because it's something to do. It's, it's 15 years old. The thing is, it's, it's not gonna happen. Supply chain crunch is real though. Buying a new refrigerator right now is a real problem. Anyhow, those are all the top and then you get to Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and they're all way, people like them way less. And I, I just think that's like easy money for politicians. I think it's coming. Something is, some conversation is coming and right at the center of it is. A theme park? A theme park. Either our government is gonna tell, tell itself that the First Amendment keeps it from regulating social networks, which is what the judicial branch is currently telling legislative branches, or that's gonna change.

• 1:11:31Nilay Patel?

  Like, those are the only two options. Or we're going to change the Constitution. Yeah.

• 1:11:38Nilay Patel?

  I think that conversation is coming this year, this way next year. I do. And not in the, they'll pass a law, but in the, two states have now made a run at it and run directly into the First Amendment. And they're gonna, those lawsuits are gonna wind their way through the courts next year. Last few things, uh, speaking of lawsuits, Epic v. Apple, the deadline for Apple to allow links to external payments. And what about, what about Meta buttons? Meta buttons. The deadline for Apple to allow metaverse buttons to to other payments was gonna come, but the appeals court, which is unusual, the appeals court granted a stay saying it, Apple had raised serious issues about the ruling in the district court. That's on hold.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  What I will remind you is that skipping to the end of a legal process is not correct. Like, like, they issued the stay, that doesn't mean Apple won, it means they have to appeal, and it means when that's done, you know, there's an Epic v. Google exists too. So then there are going to be two cases that get appealed, which usually means you get another appeal, and that might mean you get a Supreme Court case.

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:49Nilay Patel?

  And Epic's law firm famously represented Amex against a bunch of retailers, lost at every level until they got the Supreme Court in one, in an antitrust case about merchant payments. So I'm not saying Apple's gonna win, I'm not saying Epic's gonna lose, I'm just saying don't skip to the end.

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  The one important thing, the stay does not appear to apply to apps being allowed to admit that payment systems outside the App Store exist, so they can't link to it, but like.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  And Apple, I think Apple's already bent on this, right? They bent on it in Japan. They're not interested in fighting that.

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So like, that to me was always one of the most egregious things, so I hope that goes away with a quickness.

• 1:13:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Nilay Patel?

  Samsung, I didn't realize this had already happened, they've merged their mobile and consumer electronics businesses.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I see this as a function of the mobile business as a hurting unit, like, like, literally, the business unit is hurting.

• 1:13:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's just funny, every Samsung product is like, is an Android phone. Like, what's a, what's a, what's a TV? It's a giant Android phone.

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  But like, the TV, people are in charge.

• 1:13:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  So like, this is either just not a big deal, or it's like. I don't know, the Sonyfication of the way Samsung makes phones, which is like a scary thought, because Sony's not been great at phones. Anyway, I don't think we can read too much into it yet. It might just be crazy Samsung company politics. But I do think that it may mean some like changes to the way that like they've been cranking out phones. I think that there might be, in theory, maybe if we're lucky, some more coherency there, but who knows?

• 1:14:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. As a person who's in the market for a refrigerator, I'll say that I played with the Samsung Smart Fridge.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:31Nilay Patel?

  At the store yesterday. Man, putting a slow mid-range Android tablet on the front of a refrigerator is not the compelling idea that you thought it was.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Eli, you need a high-tech refrigerator, so you are going to come to CES.

• 1:14:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  I know. I'm pretty sad that I won't be doing the refrigerator tour at CES. Do they make a one with like a curved screen of with the Android tablet so you can get a curved TV refrigerator in your house?

• 1:14:55Nilay Patel?

  Do you want to do an hour on refrigerator? Since I'm in it right now, I'm deep in the game. Do you know where the antitrust regulators in this country need to turn their attention? There's like three appliance manufacturers.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  Kenmore, Samsung, LG.

• 1:15:08Nilay Patel?

  There's Samsung and LG, and then there's Hire, which owns GE, and there's Whirlpool, which owns everything else.

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  Gotcha. Okay.

• 1:15:15Nilay Patel?

  It's a real, it's a real mess. Also, appliance forums, just a hotbed of internet activity. There's a whole world here we're not paying attention to.

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  Running on V-Bolt.

• 1:15:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, man, you want to, you want to see misinformation at work, you ask people about LG's refrigerator compressors and whether they're reliable or not. All right. Last two things. There was the really dumb story about the Vice President and her wired headphones. Just you should, Corin Fave is our new senior security reporter. He wrote a great post about it. Go read that. But long story short, it's okay if the most powerful people in the government don't have wireless radios that intrinsically serve as location beacons turned on. But go read that. And then Sonos announced a plan to make its products more repairable, which is interesting that that is becoming a thing. Microsoft announced a plan, Sonos announced a plan, like Apple just did that big right to repair stuff.

• 1:16:10Nilay Patel?

  That movement is regardless of the legislation, there's proposed legislation, Alex, I know it might not ever happen.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:16Nilay Patel?

  Regardless of that, the market is demanding repairability and the companies are starting to realize they can sell it.

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, especially if you're Apple and you already made your products unrepairable, why not just give someone a iFixit kit and say, go for it, kid.

• 1:16:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  So I was spiky about this on Twitter. I said it was a right to repair equivalent of greenwashing because they didn't have any details about repair manuals or offering to sell replacement parts or whatever. Sonos has emailed me and they're not happy with my spiky tweet.

• 1:16:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh oh.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  Even a little. So I just, for the record, want to say that spokesperson Tom Lodge lets me know that, want to assure you, this is a real plan with significant work already undertaken on products we will release and that we continue to work through the details of how we're going to manage the software aspect and as we move closer to launch, we're committed to consulting with organizations active in this space. For example, iFixit and Fairphone to ensure our offering is as meaningful as possible. He admits that the proof will only come when they release their products, but Sonos pinky swears is my new phrase.

• 1:17:20Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I feel like this is the second time Sonos has announced a big thing and then everyone misinterpreted it and they're like, no, we should have said more. Just a lesson for all of us. Finish your plan, then release the plan. All right. That's it. That's the Vergecast. You can tweet at us. Alex is Alex E Heath. I'm at Reckless. Dieter's at Backlon. Tuesday, Dieter, which one was it?

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  Matter.

• 1:17:41Nilay Patel?

  Matter?

• 1:17:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43Nilay Patel?

  That's a good one. The holiday spectaculars continue with Matter. By the way, Jen, our new smart home reviewer, has been working on that Matter piece for a long time.

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  They're coming out together, like the Matter podcast, which features Jennifer quite a lot, is put into her big Matter explainer. It's a huge, huge splash that you will understand what's coming.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  And what's coming is actually a lot. It's a spectacular.

• 1:18:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think Tony Fadell makes an appearance in the Jones matter piece. It's good.

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  We talk about thread just a little, actually a hell of a lot.

• 1:18:17Nilay Patel?

  It's good. And then, as I mentioned earlier, John Hanke, CEO of Niantic on Decoder next Tuesday. These last two decoders, by the way, they're not CEOs, right? It was Miss Excel, which is on track to be our most popular episode of Decoder ever. People love Excel Influencer as a concept, which I should have expected because when I heard about it, I was like, oh, we gotta do that. And then Jonah Erlich from Constitution Dow, he talked about blockchain. That was a good one. And I will say the response to it is like, people being like, this is all the problems with blockchain. Or people being like, look at how awesome blockchains are. There's no in-between.

• 1:18:56Nilay Patel?

  Which is, I think, a sign of a good episode of Decoder. That's it. We'll be back next week. That's Richast Rockwell.

• 1:19:01Speaker 03

  Get a boost.

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