Mark Zuckerberg’s big plans for AR glasses / Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter in takeover attempt

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Liz Lopatto, Alex Cranz, and Alex Heath discuss Elon Musk's offer to buy 100 percent of Twitter and what it could mean for the company. Senior reporter Adi Robertson joins the show to discuss Elon's limited thoughts on content moderation and Alex Heath's scoop on Meta's plans for their AR glasses. Further reading: Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter in takeover attempt Elon Musk’s new troll is buying Twitter — will it work? What else could Elon Musk buy for $43 billion? Twitter CEO tells employees the board is still evaluating an Elon Musk takeover The Twitter board is reportedly not interested in Elon’s takeover offer What Elon Musk’s Twitter ‘free speech’ promises miss Behind Mark Zuckerberg’s big plans for AR glasses Explaining crypto’s billion-dollar bridge problem Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet — is it? 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, Liz Lopato, Addie Robertson, and Alex Heath join the show. We talk about Elon Musk's offer to buy Twitter, what that means, what could happen, what he is talking about when he talks about free speech. Then Alex Heath had a big scoop on Meta's entire AR roadmap. We get into that. Let's come up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:17Speaker 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.

• 1:02Speaker 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.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the First Amendment. We're the only podcast that reads it. I've read it. I assure you that I've read the First Amendment and the associated case law. Look, I'm all about free speech here. And if anyone says I'm not, they're censoring me. Anyway, I'm Neil. I'm your friend Alex Krantz is here.

• 2:12Alex Cranz?

  I'm actually buying another social media network. So I too can be a champion of free speech.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  See, that's what you market competition.

• 2:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  Alex Heath is here.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Hi, I am your fire, your one desire. And it's been a long week.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  Last night I was talking to Alex, he goes, I think I almost passed out today. And I was like, what happened? He's like, I forgot to breathe, which is like a real thing you said to me. He's like, I was typing so fast, I forgot to breathe. Liz Lopatto is here.

• 2:38Speaker 04

  Hello, I bring with me tidings of Elon, as I think longtime listeners know.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  The winds of Elon have brought Liz back to us once again.

• 2:47Alex Cranz?

  The winds of Elon are changing.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  So we got to talk about it. And by it, I mean, Intel's next generation. I don't mean that at all. What I mean is that Elon Musk threatened to buy Twitter this week. He blew up our entire publishing schedule. We had so many great stories this week. And suddenly, our whole site, yesterday, I looked at the site, the entire top of it was Elon Musk stories. So if you will recall, I think I was not on the show the week this happened, but

• 3:10Alex Cranz?

  You were not.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  Many of you were here that week. I was trapped on a plane, I believe.

• 3:15Alex Cranz?

  Liz and I were just dropping curse words the whole time you were gone.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, dad's out, everybody party.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, trust me, the curse words are coming. Free speech. You can't, you can't shut me down. What's the FCC gonna do? Half of my personality is the movie Pump Up the Volume. You know that scene where he drives around in the Jeep Wrangler and the FCC tries to chase him down? That's

• 3:34Alex Cranz?

  That's you.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  Easily half of my personality. So Elon bought 9% of Twitter. He was offered a board seat. They thought he were tricking him from what we gather into like, having a fiduciary duty to the best interest of the shareholders and a lockup provision that said he couldn't buy more than like, almost 15% of the company. He declined this. He gets away from it. Everyone wonders, what's he gonna do? He filed, he sends out another letter saying, I offered to buy the whole thing for Liz's favorite number, 5420.

• 4:06Nilay Patel?

  Share his favorite number, all of our favorite number. Chaos ensues. He did an interview at TED, which was horrible. We'll talk about that later with Addy because it was all about content moderation. Let's just start at the start. Alex, walk me through like what this offer is. You reported right out of the Twitter all hands yesterday. You reported a little bit on what the board was thinking. What's going on here?

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Elon is offering about a forty three ish billion dollar and I guess cash. We don't really know. And that's the Elon of all this is that he says funding is secured. TBD, we'll see what that is. He says he has the assets to buy Twitter and take it private at a nice takeout premium, which is higher than when he started buying shares towards the beginning of the year. And he notified Twitter of this one evening this week. The next morning made it public in an SEC filing and a tweet, just saying like, I made an offer. Twitter quickly responded and was like, we're going to review this. Obviously,

• 5:13Speaker 03

  they have to. Twitter is not a founder controlled company like Facebook or Snap or Google. And they can't just have one person be like, nah, when stuff like this happens. So they had to respond. And then the chaos that is Elon continued to ensue throughout the day. And I forgot to breathe at some point after that.

• 5:34Alex Cranz?

  You're too busy. You couldn't breathe. You had to blog.

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  And what are you doing breathing? You don't breathe on my dime, Alex. You breathe on your own time. Are you taking breaths? There was actually a moment yesterday when Keith Raboy, who's like a high end VC was like, the woke Twitter employees are going to see what's coming to them. One time Elon threatened to fire all of the interns at Tesla because they were waiting in line for coffee. And it was like, what? Why are you turning heel so deeply right now? Just like, buy another coffee machine.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Well, it was really like, you know, the phrase like, "Reality is stranger than fiction," or something like that. Like, it was Focus Week for Twitter, so the employees had Monday off as a day of rest, and that was when a lot of this started. And then, for the week, they were supposed to take minimal meetings and be heads down on projects. And the CEO then scheduled an emergency all-hands that got pretty interesting. And, you know, had some Backstreet Boys playing. So, yeah, it was, and it was the CFO's birthday, I think, when Elon made the bid as well. So, you know, you can't write this stuff.

• 6:49Nilay Patel?

  The Backstreet Boys line, by the way, is real. They opened the meeting by playing Backstreet Boys, which is perfect. Like, someone had to choose. Like, that's, you have to, you don't just like hit the button in Zoom that's like, "Play some muzak." You're like, "No, let's go with Backstreet."

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. The first song was "I Say a Little Prayer," and then they jumped into "I Want It That Way."

• 7:11Nilay Patel?

  Amazing.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  I think we've all been saying little prayers ever since this, uh, this offer became public.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Liz, you are a noted Elon watcher. I believe you described yourself as a sicko yesterday. That might have been the exact phrase you used. Walk us through the Elon of this all.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Okay. Well, I just want to say, like, although he's got Morgan Stanley advising him, he says that funding is contingent on winning. And if this seems familiar, it's because he doesn't have funding lined up. And like, during his TED Talk, he was like, "Well, I don't, I don't, I could buy Twitter, but I don't wanna," which who could blame him? Because he'd have to sell a bunch of Tesla shares, and that would make the Tesla people very unhappy. So, the funding is TBD. And if this were anybody else, I would say this is not a serious offer, because serious offers have funding lined up. But in Elon's case, it's impossible to tell what's serious and what's some kind of joke, which is like, you know, Matt Levine has suggested Twitter come back to him with another price, which

• 8:11Speaker 04

  is, uh, the other fun internet number, $69 a share.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  Which, you know what, I like that. I like, I like how he's thinking here. But you know, if you, if you consider what he's doing, I, I gotta say, like, I kind of feel like he's just fucking with Twitter because the share price is, you know, it's, it's relatively low compared to where Twitter has been trading since like last year. Like, I think it was in the sixties in October and then the seventies, like a year ago. So like relatively recently, the, the share price was trading at more than, a lot more than what he's offering. Well, the other thing that I noticed about shares, because the secret of shares is like, they're just like feelings. Like, this is just people putting money on like their feelings. That's, that's all the market is. Now

• 8:57Speaker 04

  you're a trader. I noticed that the shares were trading well below where the offer was all of yesterday, which means that the market doesn't believe it's real. Now, if the market did believe it's real, it would be trading at the same price or around the price of the offer. And if they thought there was going to be somebody else jumping in, like for instance, Disney, they would be trading above the offer. So you can look at that and you can say, oh, these people are familiar with Elon Musk. They're aware that sometimes when he says he wants to take a company private, he's just kidding.

• 9:33Nilay Patel?

  Let's, we gotta talk about that specific line of Elon in a minute, but real quick, Liz, I think most people are vaguely aware that you can offer to buy a company, but there's like a lot of steps before the company is actually yours. So what's the process here that Elon would have to go through?

• 9:49Speaker 04

  So the first, this is a hostile bid. So that's, that in and of itself is unusual. Ordinarily, one works with companies management to like come together with a, a thing that will be acceptable to major shareholders. And this is not what's happening here. This is Elon's like, I got a bid. So Twitter has to think about it. They have like a whole fiduciary duty. The board's going to be thinking about it. But I, if I'm Elon right now, I'm out here pressuring shareholders to pressure the board. So I'm calling them. I'm saying things like in that script that we all saw that was filed with the SEC where it's like, this is my best and final offer. And I, you know what, I'm going to sell all my shares if it doesn't work, which in Elon's case is like a little bit like, hmm. Okay, this is, this is hardball. This is like some Carl Icahn shit we got going on here

• 10:34Speaker 04

  at Elon, because he created a premium by getting into the stock by having his ownership announced, which is the sort of thing that you associate actually with corporate raiders. Like, that's also what happens when Carl Icahn gets into a stock. So Twitter's board has to think this through. Like, just because I'm a, I'm a lady who is like, maybe not particularly privy to this stuff, I, I think it's gonna be like, I don't think that the board is gonna say yes to this. Just speaking as somebody who doesn't know anybody on the board or doesn't like, have any connections to the board, I feel like if I were on the board, I'd be like, no. But, what's interesting here is now the company is in play. So there could potentially be another bidder. The market doesn't totally believe it, but if I'm a tech company and I ever wanted to acquire Twitter, like, now's the moment, because one of the things

• 11:17Speaker 04

  that the board can do is come back with somebody else's better offer and say, sorry, Elon.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Alex, you were tracking a little bit of this yesterday. Twitter's management and board is kind of an interesting spot, right? Jack Dorsey left. He basically said, my hand-selected successor is Prag Agarwal as CEO, and my hand-selected chairman of the board is this guy Brett Taylor. And he's like, these are my guys. I picked them. I love them. They're Jack's guys. They were, I, you can't, like, if someone came to your job and was like, we think you've been doing a really bad job, so we're just gonna take it from here. Like, it's, I don't think it's instinctual for you to be like, I agree with you. And I, after having accepted this job, I will, in fact, recede into the distance and let you destroy whatever it is I was supposed to be in charge of. Like, especially

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  for a young CEO who has no name otherwise, like, that's just like, you're done, right? Like, you're, you might as well just ride off into the sunset. Like, your career kind of stops there. So what were you hearing yesterday, Alex?

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Well, I think every, I mean, obviously, I think Liz is right. The board doesn't want to do this. I think that was the tone of the, the all-hands with employees was, Prag was, you know, I think employees were, because Prag and the leadership had not directly addressed Elon, besides Prag tweeting when he decided not to join the board, and saying, distractions are ahead. foreboding kind of what was to come. Employees were expecting, I think, at this emergency all hands to kind of get some more clarity about where the company was leaning, what the timeline was going to look like here because this could be a protracted, messy thing, especially if they have to run an official bidding process and these large companies take time to review these deals.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  So, you know, that's not really what happened and Parag was like, look, for legal reasons, I can't really say, but I can just say that we're following a rigorous process, yada, yada, everything was obviously very lawyered. They knew it was going to leak like almost in real time. It wasn't quite in real time, but we got ours up like right when it ended. So our story on it. So, yeah, it was a, I would say a, um, there was a sense of resistance, but from Parag, he said something about how, you know, we're not going to be held hostage. And, you know, basically saying that like, it's too early to speculate about what it would look like if we were taken private because there's big implications for employees in that, you know, if that happens because what happens to their stock options, there

• 13:45Speaker 03

  were questions about layoffs, which is something I was actually hearing before this meeting was the moment Elon announced his interest, I had like three Twitter employees to be like, there's going to be layoffs. Like absolutely, like Twitter is fairly bloated relative to the money it makes and its tech peers. So those are the questions on people's minds, which to me says people think that this is, you know, the rank and file thinks this is probably happening no matter what, at least like there's going to be a messy, maybe bad outcome for them from this. And so in that way, you know, there's a maybe a fear that management at Twitter has kind of lost faith, you know, that the employees have lost faith in them to a degree a little bit. One was like, are we just going to be letting any billionaire who wants a board seat, give them a board seat?

• 14:30Speaker 03

  Are we going to just like do this for everyone now?

• 14:31Alex Cranz?

  I mean, yeah. They got enough money, right?

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's an interesting time for Elon to be doing this because Jack is on the board for like another month or so before the next board votes on the new board seats. And so, I don't know, you know, my favorite conspiracy theory here is that Jack and Elon are aligned on this, and this is Jack's sweet revenge on Elliott Management, which was the last active investor that came into Twitter and really kind of led to Jack stepping aside and naming Parag last November.

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  Walk us through that. There's a lot of detail to explore there.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Before you walk us through it, we need to have the succession theme play because this is like very, like this is a very succession theme moment here.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. I had a very senior former Twitter person be like, text me right before Elon walked out on stage at TED and be like, I have money on Jack walking out with him on stage at TED, which is like, yeah, that's, that's better than whatever the next.

• 15:29Alex Cranz?

  Jack wanted to take the company private a while ago, didn't he?

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I had done some reporting a couple of years ago that, you know, the last time Twitter ran a formal sales process was around 2016, and that was when Salesforce and Disney were the two kind of lead suitors, and Bob Iger and Marc Benioff have talked publicly about that. There were two other players who didn't get as far, Apple and Google, that were looking, Eddie Q at Apple and Sundar at Google. And there were also some offers informally to take the company private at the time. And this was when Twitter's valuation was like 10 billion, and it was just really almost struggling more than it has been since, which is like hard to think about. So I had heard from someone kind of directly involved in those talks that Jack was in favor of taking the company private

• 16:13Speaker 03

  at that time. And it makes sense because Twitter has just, when you have these quarterly expectations in the market and you're comped to Facebook, which has just been this unstoppable growth juggernaut for over a decade. And even like Snap, Snap has added like 100 more, 100 million more users than Twitter, and it's like four years younger as a company and been public way less. So Twitter's just really struggled relative to its peer set, and it could probably use the insulation that going private would provide. Provide it, right? Where like they can actually go heads down and focus on just not these near term quarterly benchmarks they need to meet, but like really, really, you know, reinvent the product.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  And Jack and Elon saw eye to eye on that. You know, they both talk about open sourcing the algorithm, which God, we gotta get into that because that makes absolutely no sense.

• 17:02Nilay Patel?

  None.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  You know, opening up the algorithms because that'll solve everything and you know, crypto decentralization, putting, making it a protocol again, going back to the Tweety days when like all these clients were sat on top of Twitter and invented, you know, the best parts of Twitter. And I could see there's an argument to be made that Jack maybe wants this in the background and the fact that Elon is doing this while Jack is still on the board and still has about 2% is like the timing of that's very interesting.

• 17:30Nilay Patel?

  So Jack had a tweet, what a couple of weeks ago now, where he was like, I now realize that centralizing all internet services was a mistake and I am to blame. And then someone was like, well, fix it. He was like, I'm working on it. And I've just been thinking about that, that little interaction in this context a lot because he, Twitter has this program called Blue Sky, which has been moving at an absolutely glacial pace, which is designed to decentralize Twitter and turn it into a protocol. But when I say glacial pace, I mean, every six months they're like, we've hired one more person. We're up to four, right?

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Like they recently announced, so it's actually a separate legal entity. It's like a nonprofit that Twitter funds. They're not the only funder and Jack is on the board of Blue Sky. And he's about to leave the board of Twitter and he just joined Blue Sky. Interesting note, but continuing, Eli.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just put the, it's, they haven't, you know how I feel about vaporware. You can tell me you're gonna do shit all day long, right? You have to do it. And they've, they've not shipped a single line of code. They've shipped a white paper and a bunch of press releases about people they've hired.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  Well, you know, Jack is very into crypto. So that's like kind of standard in that world. Although in fairness, I should say he is a Bitcoin maxi and not into crypto per se, so much as he's just into Bitcoin.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  Right. He's the one who's beefing with Chris Dixon about Andreessen Horowitz being just like another, like a VC front for web three. And he's like Bitcoin is the alpha and the omega. Web three is just another way for VCs to own the internet. Like that's Jack very publicly. Beefing with the people who are funding Web3, however you want to define it. Next to that is Elon, who who just loves Twitter, like the man just loves Twitter. Liz, you mentioned Matt Levine earlier in a, he's a columnist for Bloomberg. In one of his columns, I think earlier, like last week, maybe he was like, if you're really rich and you play a video game all the time, you're going to have ideas about the video game. And that is Elon and Twitter, right? Like, it's a video game that he constantly plays.

• 19:26Nilay Patel?

  And stuff like open up the algorithm, like, that's the sort of idea you might have about it. Like, I have a million ideas on how to fix Madden NFL. Like, I, every day, I could just generate a list and there's like what I think should happen and like reality of that game and how it is architected. And so if you think Elon can just buy it and open source Twitter, or buy it and turn it into a protocol, the technical effort to do that is extraordinarily high. The company is already trying to do some of that stuff and hasn't done any of it. And all the employees are pissed off and thinking about leaving or worried about being laid off. Like, I don't know how you go from here to there. And Elon hasn't really laid it out.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there was a pretty senior Twitter person who I saw tweet in response to someone saying like, what will you do if Elon takes over? And he's like, and she was like, well, you know, I hope he likes working at a company with no employees. And like, she was like the head of like machine learning or something. So, yeah, open sourcing the algorithm. Can we talk about this? Because, you know, I actually, I just did a story a couple of weeks ago about, you know, Facebook, it took them six months to try to figure out what went wrong with the newsfeed algorithm. This is the people who directly work on the newsfeed, literally did not know what broke for months, and they're still dissecting it. Like, I've heard from people who work on these kind of algorithms at these social media companies, they don't really know how they work fully.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  It's all, it's like a Pandora's box that once you open, these things have millions of signals. And the idea that like, it's this one algorithm that everyone can just like look at and dissect and know all of its inputs and outputs. The whole point of this is that it's different for every single person. These algorithms are really just like a reflection of like, your most carnal desires.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Like they are a distorted mirror of you and your worst impulses.

• 21:16Alex Cranz?

  Well, a lot of them, but I mean, it's Twitter's though, like Twitter, I always envisioned as having the most simplistic.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  That's what we envision about Twitter in every case.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, because.

• 21:27Alex Cranz?

  Like, this is not TikTok that like knows I like skiing before I did. This is like pretty simple.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  As someone who woke up this morning and was seeing tweets from 17 hours ago at the top of my feed and had to switch to chronological because I was like, I saw this yesterday and have that experience on a daily basis. You're right. The Twitter algorithm is not really that good at mind reading. But my point is just that the algorithm is different for every single person. And I think we're fooling ourselves to say that like millions of people care or want to know the innards of like the feed that is giving them information.

• 22:03Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I don't think millions, but one of these algorithms being open source is a fascinating thing because we don't really have one now to my knowledge. And, and, and having those researchers and those people in the open source community having access and starting to tweak with these things and, and deal with them is really interesting. I think for Twitter itself, it makes zero sense and is super stupid. But like, I think 90% of Twitter's business is kind of stupid. Like, it's not a company that's making a lot of money. It's not a company that's building subscribers. Everything about this is just like a billionaire kind of shitposting his way into notoriety with a company that he can afford to do it with.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  I also don't know that like the algorithm is the problem with Twitter. Like, I just, I just want to be super real about like what Twitter is. It's like an, an all versus all hostile zone where like, you know, roving gangs of people form and like it.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  So I'm going to compare it to 4chan in a very limited way, which is that it is this is getting good. It is a nexus of internet culture from which a lot of internet culture comes, but it is also a very hostile environment. And now the mechanics of it work differently from 4chan, like in ways that are like maybe not worth discussing right at this very moment. But in terms of like users, it's a relatively small base compared to like most of the other social media platforms. But it has this like outsized hold on the public's imagination. A of all, because every journalist is like addled by Twitter because we're all there because that's like what we do instead of like RSS feeds

• 23:50Speaker 04

  because Google Reader doesn't exist anymore. So Google, thank you. This is your fault.

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  RSS feeds, it would not be the vortice if I didn't remind that RSS feeds still exist. There are many independent RSS readers over there and counting on Google to be the sole trepper of the open internet was always a mistake. That's it. Just my little digression. The end.

• 24:08Speaker 04

  So there's that. But also, like, we have these 24 hour cable news networks that like need to like put stuff on television. And so what do they do? They open up Twitter, they read tweets out loud. And like, that's like a segment.

• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  As somebody who like has a cable news contract, I feel comfortable saying the majority of mainstream cable news is a podcast of people reading tweets.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 24:29Nilay Patel?

  And then like, and I'm not saying that's not our podcast. Like, it's not like the harshest criticism in the world. Like, we're talking about one guy who tweets a lot. We've been doing it for 26 minutes. So like, maybe that's all news now. But the point about like what Twitter is, whether it has a ranking algorithm or not, the problem is actually expressed in whether the ranking algorithm for Twitter is its product or not. Facebook's product is a ranking algorithm. TikTok's product is a ranking algorithm, right? Google's product is the world's most successful ranking algorithm. You express some interest to one of these platforms and they have a huge data set of all the other people. YouTube has a huge data set of all the other people who've contributed content, and then they show it to you.

• 25:15Nilay Patel?

  Twitter, you log in as a new user and it's like, the worst shit in the world is gonna immediately start happening to you. And maybe you will find NBA Twitter, or maybe you will distract yourself with media Twitter. Like, maybe you will find some pocket of film Twitter that's great. But at any moment, as Liz said, the angriest hordes of people might find you, or the worst possible thing that could happen to you, your tweet will go viral. And like, Fox News will write about you. Like, the worst possible things could happen to you at any moment on the Twitter platform.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  I had a tweet go viral about Elon, uh, in the day of, the week of focus and the day of rest, and the timing of it all. And it was just, it was that at person, it was just like, his bot farms and his, like, you know, people calling me an idiot and all these things, saying I don't understand things. Like, I got like, unsolicited, like, hate mail. Like, it's like, just for a tweet. And that was because it was about Elon, the guy trying to take Twitter. We should know, like, Elon has a, like, massive bot army that follows him on Twitter and amplifies, and it attacks his critics. And he said that he wants to get rid of bots, but like, it's just very ironic to me that that's the case, that like, this, this one individual has that.

• 26:32Alex Cranz?

  Well, like, I think a lot of people fail to understand that Elon's success at this point, his current success, is kind of based on Twitter, and this, like, this fandom he's created around himself, that's centralized on Twitter, right?

• 26:47Nilay Patel?

  I think Elon might feel that way, and I think we might feel that way. I'm not entirely, like, I don't know the conversion rate between having a bot army and lots of followers on Twitter to Tesla sales, right? And Tesla has apparently, like, inelastic demand. Like, you can price a Tesla at any number, or produce any number of Teslas, and all of them will sell. Like they can't, every Tesla they make at any price will sell out, right? What does that have to do with the Twitter army?

• 27:12Speaker 04

  I'm like dying here because like I have been covering Elon Musk for a very long time. And like, yeah, like, welcome to tweeting about Elon Musk. Like, those aren't all bots. Like, some of those are just people who can't spell very well, which you discover if you reply to them. So Tesla is the original meme stock. And like, one of the things that was going on with Tesla shares, you know, in 2016, 2017, 2018 is like, Elon Musk can make the shares go up by tweeting positive things about Tesla. And like, he's been disclosed in their company filings as being like a source of legitimate information. Like, his Twitter account is in there, a legitimate source of information about the stock. I take your point, Eli, about like being a little cautious about wanting to say that like,

• 27:57Speaker 04

  he's built his army on Twitter, but like, I kind of think he has. And like, he is maybe the most important financial influencer currently going. Like, he can send cryptocurrency up and down just by tweeting about it, you know? There was the brief period where Tesla was accepting Bitcoin and that made Bitcoin go up. And then Tesla like stopped accepting Bitcoin and Bitcoin went down. And like, he's tweeted about Doge and Doge has gone up. So I do think that there's something very real here and it's because so many finance people are on Twitter. Like, I don't, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta want to be on finance Twitter. I'll be real with you, because a lot of penny stock guys hate you. But like, there is a very real community, like tweets show up on the Bloomberg terminal. And so that's another reason why Twitter is so powerful.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  Like, all of these communities, like, it's just, it's like the most hardcore people in any given community are all on Twitter together. And so Elon Musk, like, Twitter is really a source of power for him because, again, he can, he can really move real world stocks by, by tweeting about them. And like, if you remember the GameStop thing in January 2020, there are a bunch of people who made a lot of money by realizing that an Elon Musk tweet was the top and immediately selling as soon as they saw it, you know?

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  Look, I'm not saying it's, I'm not saying it's zero. I'm saying it's not 100 and we don't, there's no way of knowing, right? Like, what is the conversion rate between an Elon tweet and people buying? Like, I don't know, that would be an amazing PhD thesis. Someone should do it and then we'll write about it.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:28Nilay Patel?

  I would love to know that information.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  If you're an economist.

• 29:32Nilay Patel?

  By the way, my during the GameStop, this reminds me, well, the next hour is just gonna be talking about tweets that went viral and how bad it was. Like, I did like the most Eli tweet during the whole GameStop fiasco and Robin Hood was stopping, uh, sales.

• 29:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, here's a screenshot of the terms of service. Like, this is what happens when everyone just hits agree without reading it. And then like, the hordes descended on me that I was not being sympathetic to the plight of the retail investor. And I was like, no, I'm just in my bag. Like, this is what I talked about like every day is terms of service agreements. Like, I had nothing to say to you. Anyhow, my broader point is like Elon loves the service. When Addy comes on, we're gonna talk about whether it's a town square or any of that anyways. But the core of the problem, like, we keep kind of dancing around, we should just say it out loud. Twitter needs to grow. In order to grow, it needs to be much more consumer friendly. It needs to be a much friendlier environment

• 30:30Nilay Patel?

  to just sign up for. You want to get a hundred million users, which is what Praghar Agarwal is supposed to do in his tenure as CEO. You cannot like, you cannot have this experience with Twitter for initiate a hundred million new people who want to use your service every day. That's not how TikTok grew. That's not how YouTube grew. That's not how Snap is growing. Those are friendly, meaningfully safer environments than Twitter. But then the thing that makes Twitter valuable is just like, the state of nature for nerds. Right? We're like, life is bloody and short on Twitter, but if you're a nerd, it's where you want to be. Right? And like, I don't know, man. Like, fucking, can you sell nature, red and tooth and claw to a hundred million more people? Like, I don't know the answer to that question.

• 31:13Alex Cranz?

  I don't think we can, because people keep comparing Twitter to, to Facebook, or to Snap, or whatever. But really, its main comparison is Tumblr. Like, it's a place, it's a place that's like, developing fans and fandoms. And whether that's an Elon fandom, or a TV show fandom, or movies, or, you know, tech, a lot of us are in that fandom. It, it's building like a fandom. It's building like a, a community of like weirdos who want to talk about this stuff. Facebook is not super great at that. Snap is not super great at that. Tumblr. Was, I guess, okay at it. Twitter is really good at it. And that's like, but that's also like a small market, those weird obsessives. I say that as one.

• 31:57Alex Cranz?

  Those weird obsessives, like, that's a small group of people. I don't think Twitter, like, unless it fundamentally changes its approach and how it operates, it's never gonna move out of that. And I don't think it necessarily should.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  Alex, I'm curious your view here, right? So you've got a company that had an activist investor that kicked out the founder CEO. They brought in the new CEO. He said, we're gonna grow it. There's one way to grow it, which is to make it friendlier and to expose more of the good things to more people and get them to sign up and engage. Then you've got Elon, who wants to quote, "open source the algorithm", which implies the algorithm is important, and we have all been talking about the algorithm. It's like, not what Twitter's power users care about, and it is bad. So you can open source it all day, right? Like, the ranking algorithm on Twitter shows you tweets from 17 hours ago or whatever. Like, the product isn't good. But somewhere in there is, I mean, that's the story of Twitter, whip sawing between not having a chronological feed

• 32:55Nilay Patel?

  or doing the home feed by default and making you hit 15 buttons to click back to chronological recently, and then walking that back because all the power users, like, that dynamic between the people who make Twitter what it is and the people it needs to attract to the service are radically different, have radically different needs. That's been the motivating dynamic of Twitter, I think, maybe the whole time. And I don't see, I don't actually know where the company is on that perspective now. And I don't know if Elon's gonna knock it off that path, whatever it is.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Funny you ask, Neil. I did an interview with Twitter's new product leadership team about three weeks ago, talking about this. And before Elon came in, they were addressing, hoping to address, under a full-time CEO for the first time in years. And we should note, like, the reason Twitter's been so stagnant as a product is because Jack let it run by committee, because he was part-time and only waited on things he cared about. And so it was just this, like, imagine a company like Twitter being run by, like, 12 executives who need to, like, figure out their little fiefdoms. No, it didn't get anywhere. Right now, they, they are trying to reignite it and also turn it back a little bit to the early days, which I think is the answer here. If we were, like, up until 2015, Twitter was...

• 34:08Speaker 03

  There was a VC fund that was literally just investing in Twitter clients. Like, there was a whole economy. People thought that Twitter was going to be this platform. And the best features of Twitter were invented by developers who were building on top of Twitter. And then we remember when they pulled the API out from everyone, when they realized, "We've got to bring everyone into our client because we need to sell advertising. We're going to start gating our new features to our client." And they slowly choked the life out of the Tweet Decks, the Tweeties, etc. I was just talking to their head of the guy, the lead guy, that's trying to bring the API back to those early days, like a few weeks ago. So they were wanting to, and then in the background, they eventually want to just put it on like a decentralized protocol,

• 34:51Speaker 03

  where Twitter is one of the platforms that then has clients on top of it, right? So they want to like really abstract this, and turn it into like a protocol for others to build on, similar to email, similar to RSS. And that's a unique point of view in the world. Facebook, Snap, all these other social media companies, they're becoming like their own silos, their own super apps, trying to pull all the interactions into their client. So that's the opportunity I think Twitter has to do something unique in the world. And also kind of it aligns with the public nature of Twitter. And also, they're finally starting to look into subscriptions, which has been like, everyone's been saying, and Elon was saying this, he would want the company to do subscriptions and to charge its highest users.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  I guess maybe not him, maybe he gets a special discount there. But, you know, charge these accounts that use these as their main marketing. You know, Tesla doesn't spend anything on marketing, because Elon has a Twitter account with 80 million users. Twitter to Elon is worth billions of dollars a year. And they could be charging for that kind of stuff. And, you know, like, I pay for Twitter Blue, because I want to change my app icon, and I'm like, it doesn't really do anything. They put Nuzzle in it, like, cool. Like, they're going to bring Edit Tweet to it, cool. But like, they just haven't really, they're starting to show signs of willingness to experiment again, but they haven't really leaned into it fully. But they were in the process before Elon came in. So it's like they didn't get the chance to really try.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  So it's like, it's just kind of sad in that way that now everyone's like been derailed by this because they were really trying to turn the ship around. And they had this gun to their head, which was this growth target that their activist investor gave them.

• 36:30Nilay Patel?

  I do feel bad for the new CEO, right? Like,

• 36:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:33Nilay Patel?

  Can you imagine getting that job and being all excited? And then he had a baby.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  He's supposed to be on parental leave.

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And he made, and he made this like, I think extremely cool public declaration that even after taking the new job as a CEO, he was going on leave to like, set an example that leave should be like, I love that. I love this dude. Come on decoder. He's not going to do it. I don't, I don't think I'm getting any Twitter executives for a while. But Elon Parag, you were invited. Come on decoder. Let's, let's talk. But I just, I feel bad for that guy in particular. Like, I don't know if his vision was right. I don't know if it was going to work. It seems very clear. He was never, he's never going to get the shot to do whatever he wanted for you interference.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree. And now, what is the best outcome of this? I mean, it's that Elon potentially backs out. I mean, I don't want to like, he backs out, the stock tanks, maybe they get some other passive investor in there and morale is destroyed and people's options are underwater. Or Elon does take it private and then people quit en masse. Like, those are kind of the two options right now, which is like, not a good sign.

• 37:33Alex Cranz?

  Would the stock tank if he backs out? Like, because it hasn't changed, it didn't change when he, he announced he was going to buy it.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Well, there's still his premium in there from when he first disclosed his stake. It would go, it would go 30 or below for sure.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. So Alex, I think that those are two possible outcomes. I do not think that they are the only possible outcomes. And again, the reason I don't think so is because now Twitter is in play. And it is an incredibly influential service for all that it is like all versus all fighting and like, very unpleasant if you have more than about 2,000 followers. Because whoever controls Twitter, controls a lot of what happens on cable news. And like, to some degree, you know, buying Twitter, like, there was this comparison that I saw on, on Twitter, but about, you know, Bezos buying the Washington Post and Musk buying

• 38:30Speaker 04

  Twitter. And like, they are actually pretty comparable. Like, the Washington Post, I think Bezos has been a great steward of. But with Twitter, what you're controlling is essentially the comments section for the entire internet, and that's really powerful. So, you know, if I'm at another tech company, I'm like calling my lawyers to see what I can buy without triggering antitrust.

• 38:52Nilay Patel?

  This was the Mark Cuban tweet.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, because like, that, like, that actually is a very, very powerful tool for marketing, for culture making, for all of those things. And I think that there are probably people out there who are interested in the, in it. And like, at this point, you know, if you're the board, maybe you're looking for a white knight. So like, we might see another player emerge.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  No, you're totally right.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  I would not discount the power of ego for some of this. Like, if you're one of those players, you get to put one over on Elon, like, there's more interest in that than I think you would imagine.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  No, I guarantee you, if, if the year was 2015, and antitrust scrutiny had not reached what it was, Mark Zuckerberg has a blank check right now. Like, absolutely. Like, what he did for WhatsApp, he put this like, like, Zuck multiple on it that made no sense, like he did for Instagram, like he's done for all the deals he cares about. He'd buy Twitter for $100 billion if he could get it right now.

• 39:45Nilay Patel?

  But he's also just a rich guy. Like, why isn't he just staking someone else to do it? There's like a lot of that out there, right? Like, you actually, do you know who doesn't, we never got to this, but you know who doesn't like have all the cash to this is Elon Musk.

• 39:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, he does not. No, he, he's, he's not liquid. And he's already got a bunch of loans against his shares.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  Tesla shares.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  Maybe he'll just like, I don't know, sell advertising on the side of SpaceX, rockets, like race funds. We've gone way over on this segment. Liz, thank you so much. I imagine you're going to be back to talk about this a few times over the next few weeks.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  Listen, I, you know, I got relaxed, right? Like, after 2018, like, things calmed down. And I was like, okay, okay. Like, I don't have to like, I don't have to constantly pay attention to Elon. I can take the alerts off his tweets. And now I regret it because the Elon cycle has started again. So I'm sure we're gonna be talking about this again.

• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  Liz, every now and again, I would get a text message from Liz, like, in the depths of early Elon cycles, she was like, he's Elon-ing again. And like, the Elon Musk war room would spin up in Slack, like, here we are. It's great. All right, we gotta take a break. Addie Robertson's gonna come and join us to talk about content moderation, because that's another whole side of this. Thank you, Liz. We'll be right back.

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• 42:17Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Eddie Robertson is here. Hey, Eddie. Hey. So, and Alex Heath is still here, and Alex Rans.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  So Eddie, we've been talking about Elon and Twitter, of course. We just had Liz on. We were mostly talking about the mechanics of the deal, what would happen to Twitter as a company. I wanted you on. You and I have spent an awful lot of time in our lives talking about content moderation and free speech and all the stuff. Elon seems very motivated to somehow change how Twitter moderates. And yesterday, I don't know if this was by coincidence or by design, or just the pure chaotic energy of the universe. He was onstage at TED. You might remember TED. TED, the once influential conference for big thoughts.

• 42:59Nilay Patel?

  We all signed up for a free stream of TED yesterday because Elon was going to be there. And we like sat through what appeared to be like a ninth grade social studies course on Emmanuel Kant and John Swartmill. Like, I literally read John Swartmill when I was in ninth grade. And Ted was like, have you heard? Have you heard of John Stuart Mill? Like, I don't know what's going on there. If you have, like, you should read it. It's foundations of Western liberalism were contained in John Stuart Mill. But I don't know why the TED audience needed to know that information. Anyway, so Chris Anderson, who's the head of TED, sat down for an interview with Elon. I would describe that interview as embarrassingly stupid, just on both ends. Like, it was just real bad. But we did learn some bits and bobs about what Elon thinks.

• 43:42Nilay Patel?

  And given just our history and cover it, I think there's some challenges. So, Eddie, you want to walk through what we think we learned about Elon's approach to content moderation on Twitter?

• 43:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, so there is a very long string of dumb things that were said that I'm sure that maybe we'll get into in more detail. But basically Elon Musk says, okay, we understand that we want this to be a platform for global free speech, but we know that you're going to have to follow laws. And we think basically Twitter should just follow the laws of countries, which implies sort of that there's supposed to be just like a First Amendment Twitter. But at the same time, he also is really mad about bots and spam. So he wants to get rid of bots because bots are not part of free speech, mostly because he's mad about cryptocurrency shilling, it seems like. And then, at the same time, he's very worried about the idea that there's an opaque algorithm

• 44:36Speaker 06

  that is demoting or promoting tweets in ways that are not visible, which is one of those things that it was a big meme in sort of conservative circles several years ago, that the idea that there was shadow banning, quote unquote, that was making it harder to search for things. But I'm not entirely certain what he's referring to in this particular case, because Twitter tends to be kind of upfront about telling people when they're banned and about telling people, like, they de-ranked Russian news outlet, like, state news outlet information and tweets. But they were just like, yes, we're going to do this. We're telling you about this thing proactively. So I'm, it feels like he's responding to a bunch of things that are a little bit...

• 45:18Speaker 06

  Weird and confusing and not actually the speech challenges that Twitter faces.

• 45:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, let's start with open source algorithm because we were just talking about it in the previous segment a little bit. All these platforms have done things to try to be more transparent. The thing that occurs to me in just listening to people blather on about open source algorithms and Elon was like, we'll just put it on GitHub and people can leave comments. That has no connection to being transparent about what happens to an individual tweet, right? Like if you are, if you think you can derive what happened to your tweet from the code being on GitHub, you are the single best computer scientist in the history of the world, right? Like, there's no way, like, I don't know how you would do that. What you want is a button on every tweet that says this was down ranked

• 46:07Nilay Patel?

  or up ranked, or your, I don't know, your army of Tesla people was busy watching a baseball game today. So they didn't see like, you want some of that information. Or like Jack was mad at you and he turned down the big knob in his office that said Elon's reach, right? Like, that's the thing you're actually after. The code might tell you that those buttons and knobs exist, but they will not actually tell you how they're used. So just like from the jump, there's this massive discrepancy in the outcome you want and the solution proposed.

• 46:35Speaker 06

  Yes, it also does not mention really how, I guess you leave a comment on GitHub and then there's just an army of moderators that will check and be like, okay, so all the tweets that we moderated based on this, turns out we should have done that differently. Like, it doesn't, the appeals process is also a huge part of how Twitter works and why it's frustrating when it's frustrating. And we didn't really learn much about that.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so that's open source algorithm, which I feel like we can just dispense with, although I will say that when pressed in this interview on any specific, Elon returned to the idea of open source algorithm as though it was like his happy place. Like, here's this very, I mean, just embarrassingly stupid exchange. Uh, this is my, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna end up repeating this until I die. So Chris Anderson is like, here's the challenge. I'm just quoting Chris Anderson. It's a nuanced difference between different things. There's incitement to violence. That's a no if it's illegal, which I would just say implies that there is some, some form of legal incitement to violence, which if you can discover, like, let me know. Cause is that just like, let's do swords. And like, it's like, I don't know.

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  I don't believe, whatever. So there's incitements to violence. That's a no if it's illegal. There's hate speech, which some forms of hate speech are fine. I hate spinach, which like, I just like echoing through my head, like, you didn't prepare. You don't know what you're talking about. All right. So then here's the example. Elon says spinach is delicious if it's sauteed in cream sauce. This is all hack actually happened. Then Chris Anderson says, let's say I tweet, I hate politician X. The next tweet is, I wish politician X wasn't alive. And then he qualifies this. Some of us have said this about Putin right now. So that's legitimate speech. Is that just like, like, if you're like, you know what, if it's about that guy, or some of us have said it, that's obvious,

• 48:26Nilay Patel?

  like, I said it. So that's obviously cool. Who knows? And then another tweet is, I wish politician X wasn't alive, alive with a picture of their head over with a gun sight over it, plus her address. At some point, someone has to make a decision as to which of those is not okay. Can an algorithm do that? The answer to that question is fucking of course not.

• 48:43Speaker 06

  I'd also like to point out, none of that is hate speech.

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:48Speaker 06

  Like, not even, forget whether it's legal or not. None of that actually is what people who hate, who are like upset about hate speech say is hate speech.

• 48:57Nilay Patel?

  I hate spinach. Some, some hate speeches, okay. I hate spinach.

• 49:02Speaker 06

  I hate spinach is actually closer to hate speech than I don't, I want this politician dead.

• 49:12Nilay Patel?

  So he says, an algorithm do that. I would just point out, if you asked any four people you know, like the four of us, or like four of your friends, to make determinations on how to rank those things as acceptable or unacceptable speech, we would all disagree. That is the nature of these debates. So can an algorithm do that? I was like, I don't know, man. Probably not. Just based on what I know about human nature. So he says, surely you need some human judgment at that point. Fine. He is minorly rescued himself. Elon's response to this is just, in my view, Twitter should match the laws of the country. That's it. That's his answer. And he's like, there's an obligation to that. But going beyond that, and having it be unclear as to who's making what changes to where, having tweets mysteriously

• 49:56Nilay Patel?

  promoted and demoted, having a black box algorithm promote some things, not other things, I think this can be quite dangerous. None of that is an answer to, I've given you three tweets, which one is unacceptable? By the way, what's the deal with spinach? And like, the whole conversation is, here's something that appears to be a hard question, and Elon's saying, "Open the algorithm up in some way." And I just don't see the connection between the two. Addy, I'm wondering if you do?

• 50:20Speaker 06

  I don't either. It feels, this is a thing that it feels like a bunch of people do in policy. I hear it mostly with antitrust and speech, where it's like, "Oh, well, okay, so what's the problem with moderation?" It's that these companies are too big. Which is like, okay, there, these are problems, but you can't just like, fix one thing in tech and platforms and everything else gets fixed with it. This all just seems, there's so many non-sequiturs in that interview. It really, it was extremely frustrating.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  Let me give you my favorite one. I'm sorry, this whole thing was so stupid. So Elon says, "Obviously Twitter, or any form, is bound by the laws of the country it operates in. So obviously, there are some limitations in free speech in the United States." He says, "Obviously, there's some limitations. And Twitter has to abide by those rules." And then Chris Anderson follows up, "So you can't incite people to violence, like, direct incitement to violence. You can't do the equivalent of crying fire in a movie theater, for example." And Elon responds with, "That is a crime. It should be a crime." Now, I will tell you that you can walk into any theater in America and yell "fire," and it is not a crime. It definitely should not be a crime. There's a long history of that. People who say that kind of immediately out themselves as having no idea what's going

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  on. Addy, you want to kind of explain? I could try, but I'll just start crying.

• 51:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. There are actually very, very good explanations online. The Atlantic did a really fantastic one. But the long story short is, there has never been a case about whether there was a crowded theater and some guy cried "fire." It was a metaphor that was used in a case, a Supreme Court case, that was, what was it about? It was about draft speech, right?

• 51:58Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it was World War I. A husband, or two people, I don't remember if it was a husband or wife, but two people were distributing leaflets in the run-up to World War I, saying "You should disobey the draft because war is bad." They were socialists. And the government arrested them, and the Supreme Court said, "That's cool. You can limit their speech in that way, because they're creating a clear and present danger to the United States of America."

• 52:18Speaker 06

  Which was like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.

• 52:21Nilay Patel?

  The metaphor is like, certainly there are some limits. And that was the metaphor.

• 52:26Speaker 06

  And then this was later overturned, if I remember correctly. And so not only was it not a thing that happened, it was a metaphor for a thing that wasn't even, that is at this point, no longer even current.

• 52:36Nilay Patel?

  Yes. So that Shank was overturned in part by, what's it, Brandenburg? Yeah, it's Brandenburg, Ohio. I don't remember what that case was about. Brandenburg was a guy, he talked, Ohio was mad at him. I don't know. But they threw out clear and present danger, which is where that phrase comes from. They threw out the whole case and they replaced it and said, "The government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it directly incites or produces imminent lawless action." And that's it. Like, that's the thing the government. So if you are like, "I want everyone to, let's do swords."

• 53:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  Right now against a guy, is like, you're directing people towards imminent lawless action. The government can stop that speech.

• 53:18Speaker 06

  Right.

• 53:19Nilay Patel?

  This had, that's the limit of the First Amendment. So all this other stuff is not, like Twitter would just have to let it go if they're going to be restricted by the First Amendment.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  Also, Clear and Present Danger is a great Harrison Ford film.

• 53:30Speaker 06

  Just wonderful movie.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  But, so, so the US-ness of this is fascinating because like most actual American-based social media companies, the vast majority of Twitter's users are not in the United States. And the promise of Twitter is that someone in one country can talk and tweet to someone in another. So either you're going to geolock Twitter and it's ad tech stack and it's everything to every country you operate in, or you have to pick some balance of the US Constitution, what the EU wants, what India wants, which is increasingly less democratic. And China's just like, "No, you can't be here." Right? So like, how do you navigate all that? And if you're going to abide by the laws of the country you operate

• 54:15Speaker 03

  in, this, every platform is tied up in this right now because you can't really do it. You can't like, like Facebook has this problem all the time. And I just don't see Elon really wrestling with that. In the interview, it wasn't brought up at all.

• 54:30Speaker 06

  So the funny thing is Twitter has done that, in that Twitter had to deal with this with hate speech in Germany and France around 2012, and its solution was withholding tweets, which is that you can like be a Nazi on Twitter and post Nazi stuff, but in Germany, you won't get to see the Nazi tweets. They will be, it basically is geolocked. And Elon seems to have given this much less thought than everyone at Twitter has given it.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  Shocker.

• 54:53Speaker 06

  I'm just kind of shocked that he announced, like, when he said he wanted to buy this company, it was to protect free speech. And then he immediately goes to this TED Talk and says, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll just listen to the, the, the laws of the whatever country." And like, okay, but those are not the same thing.

• 55:09Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so I sort of understand that argument. I, I will say I have a sympathy towards that argument.

• 55:14Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 55:14Nilay Patel?

  In this specific way. These companies are all pretty big. This is, I think, where the fuzziness with antitrust comes along. So if you're like, there's only four companies that really have a lock on social media. Their moderation, I don't know that I agree with all this, but this is my sympathy. Facebook's moderation decisions are opaque to me. There's no process. It doesn't feel fair. Twitter's moderate, whatever it is. It would be better if our elected representatives were voting on speech regulations, right? Like, that's, that's where you're going. You're saying, "I believe in free speech. I'd rather have the government issue speech regulations than these companies that I hate and are really big and I can't switch away from."

• 55:55Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 55:55Nilay Patel?

  I would put, I, I understand that argument. It is also crazy to be like, what I would like is for the United States to throw away the First Amendment and start issuing government speech regulations.

• 56:10Speaker 06

  It's also the very, the US-ness of it comes up again because there are just, there are a bunch of countries where if you value any kind of free expression, they are not following those rules. Like, you just, you cannot possibly say, "I value free expression and I believe that we need to operate according to these to like China's regulations."

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. So this is, I, I've been trying to describe the mental flip that you need to make if you're based in the United States. So in the United States, your baseline perspective is that you can say anything you want and the First Amendment prohibits the government from doing all but X, Y, and Z, right? So you're like in a permissive structure and all, like, let's do swords is illegal and that's, like, child pornography is illegal. You could make a tortured argument that the expansion of copyright law makes some kind of expression illegal and the government has created a private right, whatever. That's just me. I'm gonna leave that alone. Defamation law, right, is like, there's an explosion in defamation law cases. We're getting more letters than ever for our coverage. Okay,

• 57:09Nilay Patel?

  but that's still a permissive structure. There's a small list of things that might reasonably chill your speech. Otherwise, it's a free for all. You go to a company like Alex said, or you go to a country, like Alex said, like India. And it is actually the absolute flip where it's a restricted culture and there's a small list of things you are able to say. And that those countries have demanded that social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have offices there, have employees there. The Indian government has sent the police to Twitter's offices because Twitter was labeling tweets from the BJP party as manipulated information. They're calling out lies from the government and the police showed up at their office. That is a restrictive culture. So if you're based in the US and you're like,

• 57:52Nilay Patel?

  it should be the laws of the country. Your entire framework is the permissive framework of speech in the United States.

• 57:57Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 57:58Nilay Patel?

  And almost everywhere else, it is a restrictive culture where there's mostly, mostly you cannot do things. And I don't know that Elon has thought about it. Elon is not from this country. He grew up in another country with a different attitude towards speech, South Africa. He obviously has huge factories in China, in Germany. Like, it's just unclear why he hasn't thought any of that through.

• 58:18Alex Cranz?

  I think he did think it through. And I think he was saying one thing in his SEC filing to, like, drum up support from, from his, his base fandom. And then another thing in this TED Talk, like, I think he very is cognizant of the fact that he can't have it both ways, but he can say, I'm a champion of free speech. Because what's the, like, the SEC can just be like, no, you're not. Like, they're not gonna do that. Like, like, we're all sitting there being like, nobody, you, like, that doesn't make sense. And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I know. But I'm a champion of free speech. Like, that's just always his kind of like modest apparandy, right? Like, he's always kind of like-

• 58:53Speaker 06

  Twitter was always, also did this. Like, Dick Costolo was in 2012 or 2011 was like, Twitter's, we're the free speech wing of the free speech party. And at the same time, yes, we also know that we have to follow the laws of these countries and operate because we're a company. So it's totally not a unique thing. But the interview was just, and I'm to be clear, blaming Chris Anderson for this. It was an atrocious interview.

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it was, uh, it's just embarrassing. So let's end here, which I think is the hardest problem in the First Amendment debate, and this was handled very poorly. So we were talking about hate speech earlier. I will just tell everyone, hate speech is not illegal in the United States of America. Various states have tried to pass these laws. The Supreme Court has mostly struck them down. You can just do some hate speech. People think it's illegal because it feels right for it to be illegal because the social platforms themselves have decided they don't want hate speech on their platforms. You know what's really hard to do? Uh, if you have hate speech on your platform, sell advertising. So they have like a business imperative, they have a consumer imperative. So the social platforms have decided this is unacceptable. You know, norms in society have decided that being outright racist is

• 59:58Nilay Patel?

  unacceptable. But there's no law against hate speech in the United States. There's just a bunch of social conditioning. Then Elon going on and on about spam and spam bots, commercial speech is protected speech. So if you think about your physical mailbox where the United States Postal Service delivers you mail, the government cannot proactively filter out junk mail. It should. You might want it to. There are laws in the books that enable you to opt out of it, or to be on a do not mail list, or do not call list. But you, the individual citizen, have to like proactively say it. Right. The government cannot make that decision for you because it's a, it's a prior strand on speech, right? This is crazy. This also applies to email. There's a law called the

• 1:00:39Nilay Patel?

  CAN Spam Act. You can see if it was effective, but the government basically is like, commercial emailers have to provide these tags, they have to give you an opt out, they have to give you a button that says unsubscribe me, but they can't block it. And in fact, the thing that has blocked it most effectively is email monopoly. This is what Sarah John would tell you, that like Gmail is an email monopoly, and that has been more effective at spam than any government regulation. Take that for what you will. But that's because the First Amendment prohibits the government from doing it. So then Elon is like, the top priority I have is limiting spammers and scam bots and bot armies on Twitter. They make the product worse. I agree with him. But if you're limiting yourself to, I'm following the law of the country, you're kind of immediately in a pretzel of logic, right, Addie?

• 1:01:18Speaker 06

  Yes, and it's again, just one of those things where it feels like there is a specific thing that he just doesn't want the site to do. And then he's trying to build this consistent framework around it. And it's, that's very difficult to do when it seems like what he has is just sort of a hobby horse that he doesn't want Twitter to do a thing that feels like it's political censorship, but hasn't, can't just like come out and say the things that he's actually upset that they're doing. And so makes up this very broad, like it has to follow the law kind of framework.

• 1:01:49Alex Cranz?

  Wouldn't getting rid of all the bots also affect him because of his army of bots? Yeah, like, that seems bad for him.

• 1:01:57Speaker 06

  I mean, bot is also a weird term. Like, I assume that, like, there are a bunch of art bots on Twitter. There are a bunch of really fantastic things. I think he's just mad at the ones that pretend to be him and sell crypto.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like, how do you make that distinct distinction? Like, here's like, another problem no algorithm can solve. Like, how do you decide between one of the bots that sneaker heads use to know when there's a sneaker drop? That's like, obviously sending lots and lots of tweets to lots and lots of people at any given moment, and the crypto spam bots that reply to Elon every day? Like, maybe a person could do it, but like, the signals you actually get are very low. The Verge automatically tweets every story. That's a bot. Is that allowed? Like, these are very fine distinctions. And saying, I'm just gonna get rid of spam bots, I think is like, one of the more challenging aspects of Twitter. Because some of the best parts of Twitter are automated, or they're art projects. There's a bot that every time we change the tagline and image in our Masthead, there's actually

• 1:02:49Nilay Patel?

  two bots. Every time we change those things, it just tweets what they are. I love that bot. Someone just made it for us. Well, two people just made them for us. Are they illegal? Under Elon law? Like, I don't know the, you should know the answers to these questions before you propose these kinds of things.

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  We're just, I wish just all talk about our favorite Twitter bots now. I have a bot that tweets random words on Dark Souls You Died screens.

• 1:03:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good. My favorite bot is called Color Schemer. It just, it just comes up with color schemes and gives them insane names. It's great.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Students, next week, we need you to read chapter three of the free speech century. Come back with your question. I feel like we've, I feel like if we say free speech again, in this podcast, it will combust.

• 1:03:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we should take a break. This interview sucked, and everyone should feel bad.

• 1:03:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it is like directly as I, as I'm saying it like,

• 1:03:44Nilay Patel?

  as a person who interviews people about their big ideas every week, like, if your approach is, I think Twitter's moderation is bad such that it is a threat to civilization, which is more or less what Elon said yesterday, right? This is a civilizational catastrophe ahead of course. You gotta really interrogate that and you gotta really be prepared to answer those questions. And if you think that the First Amendment is the correct set of rules, like, you're gonna run into every other country in the world that thinks differently that you are trying to sell Teslas in. And that's just like a bad dynamic for you. All right, we're gonna take a break, we're gonna come back, we're gonna talk about gadgets.

• 1:04:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Nilay Patel?

  Gadgets for your face. We'll be right back.

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• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, we are back. Addy and Mr. Heath are still with us. Let's talk about gadgets. Alex, in the midst of all this, you published a huge scoop this week. You have the entire Meta AR roadmap. What the company formerly known as Facebook wants to do for computers on your face. It seems challenging. It does seem like bet the company. Walk us through it.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so everyone remembers that pretty wild video that Mark Zuckerberg shot last fall, October-ish, when he announced the rebrand to Meta. Here's a AR, you know, chess game on a table and you're playing with a hologram. You know, the classic stuff that we've seen in these, these demos.

• 1:06:12Alex Cranz?

  There was some fencing, right?

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, Mark fenced with a hologram.

• 1:06:16Nilay Patel?

  Let's do swords. See, it all comes back to doing swords.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  It's all connected.

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  What is, yeah, what is free speech in the metaverse? Oh, boy. And the holy grail device he's called around all this is AR glasses, which we've talked about a lot on this show. I imagine most of our listeners know the distinctions between VR and AR, so I won't explain that right now. But yeah, I set out to answer the question, how soon are these things actually coming? What are they going to look like? And what is the long-term commitment to this as a product category? Turns out it's a pretty long-term, big commitment. So they have three generations of these full AR glasses. They're called Nazaray. It's Zuckerberg's pet project and he's got thousands of people working on them, spending billions of dollars. And the first version is coming in 2024.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  It's going to be an early adopter developer gear device. They're going to sell like low tens of thousands of them. The bill of materials on these glasses is in the thousands of dollars. So they have to figure out how to subsidize that, which is going to be challenging. The battery life is like four hours, so they're mostly going to be used indoors. But a pretty impressive field of view, some pretty impressive specs, honestly. Custom silicone, custom wave guides, the best of the best. And, you know, no expense spared. And that's what we're getting from the company, literally investing the most with like a founder-led, just insane. Behind it. That's what's coming with that. And then they have another version two years later and another version two years later.

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  And there's another device coming in 2024, another pair of glasses that has like a smaller heads up display that's more Google Glass like. That's more kind of notifications. And the distinction, that one's called hypernova. They all have these like. The main air glasses are Orion, the smart glasses with the little display are hypernova. And the distinction is that hypernova will be, you know, still needing a phone to work. Uh, so, but it's, the idea is to lessen the dependence on the phone. And the main air glasses do not need a phone to work. They'll have a, a little phone like device. It's not a phone though, that will offload wirelessly, uh, some of the compute. So it doesn't literally burn your face.

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  Which we've also talked about on the show. That's what's coming. And what Meta has up its sleeve that I think a lot of people will be surprised by when the ships is. This, uh, neural interface, I guess we could call it mind reading technology. They don't want to call it that. Cause it's not reading your mind.

• 1:08:48Alex Cranz?

  It's not, it's not mind reading.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  I know, I know, I know. Addie will explain this because she's actually tried it. But, you know, everyone, they bought this company called Control Labs in 2019 for like a billion dollars. It was like. 12 people pre-product launch, one of those classic like huh, funny zuck multiple acquisitions. And that is kind of the, the key that unlocks all this from an input perspective, because how do you control glasses on your face? They obviously don't have a touchscreen. You're not going to have a mouse with you. You're not going to have a keyboard. You know, what, how do you do that? And so it's this armband, wristband. That lets you kind of have a phantom limb to type and control them. So that's at a high level, what is coming on the AR side for Meta.

• 1:09:32Alex Cranz?

  Is the idea here though, that like you can put on this wristband and not lift your hands up and look like a dillweed? While you're manipulating things that nobody else can see?

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  How do you want us to explain?

• 1:09:41Speaker 06

  Basically, yes.

• 1:09:42Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:09:43Speaker 06

  So there are Magic Leap and Hololens to different extents, but kind of similar. You use optical tracking. There's cameras in front of you and it can kind of pick up your hands and then you gesture and it's like Minority Report. And the Minority Report interface is both you look weird because you're gesturing to stuff nobody else can see, but also it's really tiring because you're lifting your hands constantly and you have to be in a situation where you know that you like it's inside your field of view. You also just it's tiring because you're moving your actual hands around a bunch and you have to use these graphical interfaces that rely on you grabbing and pulling if you want. But the way that this works is that you put on this wristband and it reads the signals

• 1:10:25Speaker 06

  that are going down your arm, like the neurons there that are telling your hands how to move, basically. So it can act like a hand tracker that just doesn't need a camera because it can kind of detect, okay, you want to move your index finger. But it can also detect intention. Like the way that they tell people to start learning how to do this is that you put the armband on and you move your finger like you make a fist and your virtual hand reflects this because you're telling your arm, I want to make a fist. Then you put your hand on something hard and flat where you can't move it, but you tell your arm to make a fist.

• 1:11:04Speaker 06

  And it does the same thing because you are sending the instructions through your neural system, through your arm, to say, I want to make a fist. And it doesn't matter that your actual hand isn't doing it.

• 1:11:17Alex Cranz?

  So this is like the same tech that you're seeing with like a lot of arm prosthetics, right?

• 1:11:25Speaker 06

  Yes. It's really, it's a thing that does a lot of the same work as brain interfaces like Neuralink. Okay, I shouldn't say Neuralink because Neuralink is like, I don't even know what's going on with it completely. But there are a bunch of brain interfaces and the idea is that they're supposed to mimic the way that your brain sends signals to your limbs. These are really good if you don't have a working limb there at all. There is not really a super great reason why if you have a functional limb, you should try to go straight to like jack into your brain to do a thing that you could just tell your arm to do. It's like, I can't remember if I'm stealing this analogy from

• 1:12:05Speaker 06

  the actual, from like Control Labs, but it's like saying, I want to write a command and instead of using JavaScript or something, you learn binary code and go and like write in binary code.

• 1:12:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I kind of understand why you'd want to do that for an AR interface, though. Right? You're seeing something no one else can see and you're just like, hit that button. And the button gets hit like that would rule.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Hypernova, the heads up display glasses that are more minimal and use a phone, that's the idea is like really fast texting, really like responding to notifications without needing to talk, without needing to gesture. That's potentially going to be pretty cool. And Addy, like everyone I've talked to who's tried the prototype that's kind of more recent that Meta has that's based on this says it's like one of the coolest tech demos they've ever tried and that it could be like pay for everything if it works at scale. What do you think? Cause you, you tried it. How do you, what do you agree there or not?

• 1:13:00Speaker 06

  I think literally the only thing I've ever tried tech wise that felt more cool and magical is the Oculus Rift, which ironically is also a Facebook thing now. I buy everything I like. No, I think it's incredible because the, yeah, the thing I'm getting at is that it feels like mind control to an extent. Like it's not putting a thing literally in your brain, but it's letting you just feel like you're gesturing using your hand, but your hand is not necessarily moving and your hand isn't necessarily using a thing where you have to have a one-to-one, I'm pressing this button. It's like to some extent, it can kind of learn from the way that you are thinking, that it can match up. When I make

• 1:13:43Speaker 06

  this brain pattern, I want this thing to happen. And if you blend that with a bunch of really advanced sort of predictive artificial intelligence systems, you can end up getting these really interesting, smart like control systems that are

• 1:13:59Speaker 06

  Super different from anything that you've tried ever in theory. Again, the thing I tried is a very, it was a 2019 demo. It was very early. It was basically playing pong, but it was super fun.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And like, so what's going to happen is Meta's going to Trojan horse this into a smartwatch that is coming first this year without this technology that I reported on last year. It'll have a detachable display with two cameras, like a little detachable GoPro on your wrist, which is I've

• 1:14:27Alex Cranz?

  Very dick crazy.

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's a classic Meta idea that's not going to succeed. So the idea is like, get people used to a smartwatch from Meta. By the way, like the name change, very much like motivated by all this hardware coming because they know that like the Facebook glasses people in the US are not going to buy, right? So like the Meta watch, and then by 2024, when the glasses come out, they ship one with Control Labs tech and it syncs with the glasses. And Apple, I don't like, Apple's scared of this, I've heard because of, they think it's going to have privacy concerns, obviously, and people are going to think it's weird and too intimate. And so Apple's very scared of this space. Snap, I just scooped, bought a similar, it wasn't doing EMG, it was doing a different

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  version of this that you wear on your head, but another BCI company called NextMind, and they want to hook that up to their spectacles down the road. So everyone's trying to like, with maybe the exception of Apple, come up with this brain BCI interface for these glasses.

• 1:15:24Alex Cranz?

  Is Apple scared of it because these other companies are relying on like algorithms and stuff? Because I mean, this technology itself is not new. We're seeing it a lot in the accessibility space. Like it's used for people who are paraplegic and need to control computers and stuff. It's used for people with residual limbs. Like it's not new technology and I don't think there's privacy concerns about people being able to pick up a can of soda in real life.

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Apple may come around to it. They've been hesitant. The Apple headset that's coming that I think they'll probably still announce by the end of the year has this ring that they've worked on that has like touch on it. That's like their input. So people are finding all these ways that they can try to control these glasses, but it sounds like Meta's cracked something with Control Labs that maybe will put them ahead there on input.

• 1:16:07Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's funny because Apple sort of like reverse engineered the Steve Jobs magic. If you like, whenever they do a new category, the watch was like the sterling example of this. They're like, what we invented was a new input device. First, it was the mouse, then it was the touchscreen, and then it was the digital crown. And you're like, what? What are you talking about? And so like, what?

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  Force touch.

• 1:16:29Nilay Patel?

  Crown? Yeah, force touch. Like, Apple, like, for a long time was all in on like, what you need to enter a new category is like, a big idea about input devices. So if they do glasses and they haven't like, they don't drop some big idea about input devices, it will actually be really out of form for them. Maybe, maybe it's this ring, but it's just strange that they wouldn't be chasing that as hard as anything.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  I mean, the continuum of these devices is that the glasses are coming later. Meta will probably be first with like, something that is like, at least consumer like usable. Like Snap's not even selling their AR spectacles because they're so expensive.

• 1:17:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Apple's is like a developer kit, right?

• 1:17:11Speaker 03

  No, the Apple headset's going to be consumer. I mean, it's going to cost a lot of money, but the glasses, Apple's not close on really. So like, the continuum will be these high-end mixed reality headsets that cheat into AR by mixing high-resolution video pass-through with AR effects. So that's what Meta's going to do with Cambria headset coming out later this year. Apple's going to do. And then later on that continuum, sooner for Meta, is glasses that are designed to not fully immerse you. And Zuck's thesis for this is like, presence. It's like, you know, holodeck, like holograms of people around you, which like, it's supposed to be meant in, mostly worn indoors. The battery life's like four hours. Nilay, does this sound appealing to you?

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  Would you spend, would you spend like $1,500, let's say conservatively, on something that, you know, needs a wireless thing in your pocket? An armband that reads your mind essentially, or control with your mind that you?

• 1:18:10Nilay Patel?

  So what gets me about all that, right? If it's primarily designed for indoors, like, I don't know why I need to strap a bunch of extra shit to my body to make that go?

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  Because of input. Because well, because of computing.

• 1:18:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, I don't need the processing on my body. I don't, you know, like, maybe the armband, but like, I don't need a battery pack. Like, if you're telling me this is mostly so I sit.

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  It's not battery.

• 1:18:29Nilay Patel?

  It's not battery. Okay. So this is mostly, I'm sitting in my chair in my office and like, you pop up in a hologram?

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:18:36Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's the whole game.

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Nilay Patel?

  I, I don't know, man.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  I mean, for V1, V2, maybe like you can take it outdoors with you and has more battery life and like it's going to have better optics, lighter design. The first version is going to weigh 100 grams, which is about 4X the weight of regular glasses. You're not going to want to want to wear these for long.

• 1:18:53Alex Cranz?

  People are going to have beefy ears.

• 1:18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. And what I wanted to suggest with the story is like, this is all very expensive. He's spending over 10 billion a year on this. He's literally bet the company on this and it's going to take like, they're, they're, they're modeling that they may be selling tens of millions of smart glasses collectively between the Ray-Bans, between the cheaper hypernova glasses, between the full AR glasses, that's all of them by like 2028, like maybe tens of millions. And I'm just like, I don't know how much leash they have.

• 1:19:23Alex Cranz?

  So I, we've, we've talked a lot about AR and, and the success of AR and there's like two big things. One, have they resolved the dillweed factor? Will you look like a dillweed wearing them? And two, have they resolved the fact that there is zero killer app? Because the best killer app is a privacy night wear.

• 1:19:40Speaker 03

  Well, they haven't been invented yet. Like there's not the problem, like the opening of this story is like these glasses that they showed in this video, like not based on any running code. It was all Unity prototypes. There's not a wearable prototype internally of V1 yet. It's like a stationary desk board. And like, they're hoping to have their wearable prototype internally by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Zuck has literally bet the company on this concept and they do not have a working wearable prototype. So like, the guts are incredible. I mean, I gotta get like, there's, there's no company that, that bets like that. Uh, and we can talk about the motivations. I mean, I put in the story, it's like Facebook and it's always like Apple and Google that are always over them. And this is their chance, Zuck thinks, to get out from under them. And also

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  just like be seen as innovative and cool again, you know, like, because the traditional social media stuff's not anymore. Then they can't buy stuff.

• 1:20:30Nilay Patel?

  Look, I am very sympathetic to the idea that Facebook will become, or Meta will become the next great hardware platform that will break the dominance of the two phone platform. Like, that sounds great, but the, you're saying the first one is going to connect to your phone and like, Apple's going to have a competitive product right next to it. And like, the idea that you're going to spend $10 million a year to turn into Pebble smartwatches because Apple will not let you send a text message in response to a notification on their phone is ridiculous. Like, I hear that story and it's like the first thing you're gonna do is quickly apply to notifications and it's connected to your phone. Like, Apple's just gonna turn off the notification API for everybody and be like, yeah, the watch can do it and our glasses can do it. Everything else is a security problem. We're very sorry.

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  I'm so fascinated by antitrust, like, potentially making Apple have to open up here, but they're not gonna want Meta to be anywhere near their glasses and like, their, and Meta's glasses to be anywhere near their phone, right? And so, how do you, you're right. How do you navigate that?

• 1:21:27Alex Cranz?

  I mean, this just sounds like a, a perfect setup for the usual kind of like, Apple playbook. Facebook, Meta, excuse me, will come in, they'll do this, we'll be like, this is really cool, but not super viable. They'll do it, what, till 2026 or whatever? And then Apple will be like, we figured out AR. Look at, look at what, now you can use your mind to control things from your Apple Watch on your new glasses that we sold you. Isn't it great? Like, they're just gonna let Facebook, excuse me, Meta, figure out all of the, like, hard parts.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Alex Cranz?

  And then swoop in.

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  This is classic Apple. It's classic Apple. They love to skip the messy middle of new computing, right? And like, Quest has been that up until Quest 2. And they've finally, like, there were more Quest 2s sold last year than Xboxes. So like, that thing is hitting meaningful scale. And the next version will have eye tracking, which will make the avatars like, super cool and immersive. So it's only gonna get like, dramatically better. Apple's watched all that. They've been secretly buying things. They've been building, experimenting prototypes. They're gonna come out with this super high-end, luxury, like, state-of-the-art with all their M2 chips, sensors, LiDAR, and skip a year, basically, of where Meta has been, techno, like, in, from the technology standpoint, and have like, not dealt with all that messy stuff that got up to now. And I think they're

• 1:22:43Speaker 03

  gonna do the same thing with glasses. I think Mark wants to be out there with them to show that they're the leader, but Apple's gonna wait and probably come out and like, I guess my thesis here is that if Meta's coming out with their first glasses by 2024, I wouldn't expect Apple's until at least 2026.

• 1:22:58Speaker 06

  It is bizarre that we have not mentioned Google in this because Google is the only one of these companies that is actually currently selling a commercialized AR headset. They also own the company that made the predecessor to Control Labs project, uh, which did not work very well, but was the same idea was a commercial product like five years before Control Labs existed. Um, and we are totally not talking about them because it seems like it's not even necessarily clear they're doing anything.

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  They probably forgot, like Sundar probably just forgot that he even has any of this, right?

• 1:23:28Speaker 06

  Of these three companies, Google has the worst track record for shipping hardware that people actually want to buy.

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  Well, the problem with Google is focus. It's focus and they have the resources. They have the money. They have the assets. They have the best machine learning. They have maps with like, which is such a key asset for glasses. They have like, they literally have the world mapped, which is like something Meta has to figure out. And they have assistant. They have the most impressive visual assistant that can like, just see something and identify it. It's incredible with classes, right? Like search on your face. They have that. The problem is, is that they don't have like a founder like Mark who is like pushing them to like focus everything on this and they have a million things going on. They have all this like regulatory scrutiny. They have all these big business lines, all this optionality. And I, you know, I did a story for us about their, they're doing this high end. They're also working on a high end mixed reality headset.

• 1:24:20Speaker 03

  They've all, they have all of the big tech guys have all kind of decided the high end mixed reality is like, that's the near term. They have a glasses project. They bought North, which was like making smart glasses. They're working on something up in Canada. Um, it'll work with a phone, I'm told. And, but like, I just don't see the passion there from Google yet. I don't see the focus and I see where talent goes and all the talent is either going to Meta or Apple right now and back and forth.

• 1:24:45Nilay Patel?

  The thing, you mentioned the founder thing. Um, yeah, Mark is a founder of Facebook. I think Tim Cook is very focused on his legacy at Apple and he has been saying for years that health and AR will be his twin legacies and you can see how he's going to combine all of that.

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  Yep. I repeat this all the time, but AR is literally the only thing that Apple and Meta agree on. Like the only thing that they agree that is going to be big. So, I mean, we'll see.

• 1:25:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, let's talk about the actual Meta glasses for a minute because Addy, you've tried on virtually every one of these products.

• 1:25:16Speaker 06

  I've not tried on their stuff. I've not tried on Snap's thing, but yeah, I tried.

• 1:25:20Speaker 03

  I tried those.

• 1:25:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But so he like between the two of you, there isn't a face computer in the world that we haven't, we haven't strapped on here. So these glasses, I'm just, here's Nazare, the full AR experience. Zuck wants three graphics, a large field of view, socially acceptable design, which by the way, Mark Zuckerberg is like, I need a socially acceptable design. That's a pretty broad remit coming out of Zuck, like full sunscreen face, like whatever you want socially acceptable design, but whatever. The team is hoping for a 70 degree field of view. Maybe that'll happen or won't. They look like the Superman glasses when he's Clark Kent is what Alex wrote here, and they are really heavy. Now, we have talked on the show a lot about just like the stack of problems for AR glasses, right? You've got a display problem. You've got a camera problem. You've got a processing problem.

• 1:26:06Nilay Patel?

  You've got a battery problem. Where is this sitting in the current state of the art? Do you think, Alex?

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  It's pretty advanced. You know, a lot of the people I talked to for the story was like, this is actually a pretty impressive like tech spec that is in search of a compelling use case because the software side of this is still being built. They actually just decided the OS route they want to take like in December, basically.

• 1:26:28Nilay Patel?

  Which is Fuchsia, which is hilarious.

• 1:26:29Speaker 03

  No, no, no. They so they killed, they killed the Fuchsia approach. So they were going to do Fuchsia. They were doing a micro kernel like.

• 1:26:36Nilay Patel?

  So they're still using Google OSs. They just went to Android.

• 1:26:38Speaker 03

  They're using the open source fork of Android and that's the same thing that powers the Quest. So they'll be able to share like app libraries and stuff. So they may be able to bring some of the developer ecosystem over, but they were wanting to do a micro kernel, like fully custom OS and they decided that won't ship in time for 2024, basically. So like, this is like do or die. And like, I just, the software side of it is the biggest question mark. They do not have the platform DNA, developer DNA that Apple does and developers are very wary of Facebook dating back to Farmville and when Facebook pulled the plug on all these developers.

• 1:27:13Nilay Patel?

  Oculus has sort of solved some of this problem, right?

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, they have. They have. They've, they've got very meaningful, you know, they're buying everything that's doing. Going really well, but yeah, they do have developers that are doing well there. But the software side is the biggest question mark by far. And like, how do you build a holographic codec to use with Messenger where it works where like on your phone, you can see the hologram, you know, or someone can like, because the idea is like they've got these social apps that like they could use with the glasses where like, I don't need the glasses to like call you on your glasses. Right. And like, that's the real unlock and that's, that's a hard problem that they're still very early on.

• 1:27:49Nilay Patel?

  Adding the displays here, Alex is reporting their costly custom wave guides and micro LED projectors. It's, I'm still just so skeptical of all of these display ideas.

• 1:28:00Speaker 06

  That just sounds like what every, like everybody has custom wave guides and everybody, okay, projection tech is like complicated, but it just depends on, it depends on how good the wave guides are.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, snaps were for the spectacles. They were custom, but they were working with wave optics on them. And then they just bought wave optics for half a billion dollars when they decided they wanted to own that. But Meta is like, they're, I mean, they, they're building everything fully like custom. Cause they've decided they have to go that route, which is what Apple has shown is the kind of the best way forward with like wearables.

• 1:28:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. But I'm saying you're like, everyone's in on high end mixed reality and right. And I think the reason for that is like, to really do the glasses, you have to invent a radically new kind of display tech. And costly custom wave guides and micro LED projectors, like maybe they're going to do the best job of that. But that's still, as near as like, that's still pretty much in the pocket of where everybody is, right, Addie?

• 1:28:51Speaker 06

  It's just a really broad term. You could, it's such a weird, messy new technology that there could be a really good version of that. That's very thin and very interesting and has really good optics. But it doesn't necessarily tell me a bunch about how good the system currently is. Like Magic Leap, I think Magic Leap two at this point has some of the best stuff that I've seen and tried with some limitations. And I don't know how this would stack up to that. They have at this point, a pretty solid field of view.

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  Magic Leap 2 is 70 field of view, isn't it? Magic Leap 2 is 70 diagonal degrees field of view.

• 1:29:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they've started shipping them to like, small partners. Are the Meta headsets gonna be, because you've mentioned in your piece that they were gonna be 70 field of view. Is that also diagonal? Are we talking like the same?

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  No, that's the hope that they had. That's the hope that they had, and I don't think they're gonna get there. Because they're probably going for like, a color richness and a resolution that's very... Mark wants very crisp, like, vivid holograms. Like, you to feel like you can, you're, someone's almost there.

• 1:29:52Alex Cranz?

  That you're looking at through a porthole on a boat.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, because like, these glasses have eye tracking.

• 1:29:57Speaker 06

  Magic Leap's holograms, at this point, are pretty, they're pretty solid, but also in the, a package that very much does not look normal. They have basically just acknowledged, yeah, look, there's gonna be weird, big sunglasses. That's what we're doing. Uh, this is what serves our user base. Um, so they have kind of different prerogatives and different requirements.

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  And the Meta glasses will have eye tracking, which we, consumers have not experienced yet. They will, starting later this year with the new Quest and Apple, but like, that, that changes the game. I did this demo of a contact lens where it used my eye movement to like, do the input and like, go around the dial and select the directions. And like, that stuff is wild. Like, eye tracking is going to be very cool, and it makes your avatar follow your face and where you're looking and all that. So, they will have that. Magic Leap 2 does not have that. So, I do think from a spec perspective, these will be the best when they come out, but um, they're gonna be expensive and they're gonna be for early adopters, and they're not gonna sell that much.

• 1:30:56Speaker 06

  I'm curious what the early adopter thing is gonna, is gonna do, because like, Glass tried that, and I think that's kind of one of the reasons why people hated Glass so much.

• 1:31:05Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:31:05Speaker 06

  Because it was seen as this thing that you had these very small groups of super-rich, early adopter guys trying out, and they looked like jerks, and you hated them.

• 1:31:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're glass holes. Like, what are we gonna call these? Are these guys also gonna be called glass holes?

• 1:31:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, the idea is that you won't know like glass was, I mean, this is my favorite. I've sold the Starbucks glass so many times. Glass looks so intense and it came with so much hype in that moment of hype that like I went to the Indy 500 wearing Google Glass and like, people were like falling out of trailers in the infield to be like, can you see through clothes? And like, that was the thing that would have sold what Google Glass looked like to people. Like, they were heartbroken when I was like, no, I cannot see through clothes. At best, it like lightly buzzes and takes a two megapixel photo. Like, reach up to like, that's what it does. But I think you have to make them look really normal. Right? That's like, that's where everyone is headed with these. They have to look very normal. And to be clear, the first version of these, there, there's gonna be no mistaking

• 1:32:05Nilay Patel?

  that you don't have normal glasses on your face. So, like, all right. Alex, this is a great story. We're obviously tracking this very closely. I'm, I mean, this is the next generation of gadgets, right? Like, yeah, it's like folding phones and this. And my, you know, one of my big theses is that display technology drives the generations of gadgets. Like, if you can predict, display technology can predict the shape of things and that will, like, folding phones is that thing. I imagine Apple's working on one of those too, right? Like, it's just about that time for that to hit the mainstream. And right next to it is, can we make the display that goes on your face? And I'm, I'm very curious to see how this plays out. But

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  Which will happen first, Elon making Twitter a bastion of free speech or really good displays for our face?

• 1:32:50Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna go face displays. I gotta be honest with you.

• 1:32:52Alex Cranz?

  Same.

• 1:32:53Nilay Patel?

  All right. We have gone spectacularly over time. I appreciate all of you. Appreciate all of you for listening to us. You can tweet at us. I'm very confident that Elon Bots will be tweeting at us this week. Alex is Alex H. Cranz. The other Alex is Alex E. Heath. It's good. It worked out. Addie is at the dextrarchy. Liz is MS Lopatto. I am reckless on Twitter. It was a fun week on the verge.com. Actually, Corin, our new senior security reporter, had a big story on why crypto bridges or where all the hacks are. So if you've been watching all these crypto hacks, like, he has a deep dive into like, why it's happening and the structure that creates it. And then on Decoder, we had more crypto. Chris Dixon, who is Forbes just called him the number one VC in the world. He's the big web three VC.

• 1:33:36Nilay Patel?

  He and I got into it and whether any of that stuff is real is really fun conversation. I'm just going to tell the Veritas audiences now. Next week on Decoder, on Tuesday, Alan Young, the guy who was in charge of the Foxconn project in Wisconsin, asked us to be on Decoder.

• 1:33:51Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 1:33:52Nilay Patel?

  And it was nuts. At one point, I was like, what's in the dome? And he's like, I gotta be honest with you. I think the dome should have been bigger. And it was like,

• 1:33:59Speaker 06

  Yes. When he's right, he's right.

• 1:34:02Nilay Patel?

  I was like, yeah, I agree with you. I can't, I find no fault in any, if anyone tells me a dome should be bigger, I'm in it. I agree. It was just a bonkers conversation. He has a book. I don't know why he has to be on the show, but he has a book. It's coming out. That's on Tuesday on Decoder. All right. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:34:37Speaker 08

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