(Preview) Meta Doubles Down on Smart Glasses, Nvidia Partners with Intel, Notes on the Hidden YouTube Colossus

Andrew and Ben react to the Meta Ray-Ban Display and the progress of the Meta Neural Band, including keynote FOMO, debating the value of handwriting words in the air, the strategic logic of shipping these products now, an incredible price point, and lots more. From there: A look at the Intel-Nvidia partnership that was announced Thursday morning, and Ben's thoughts on YouTube after a visit to New York City for an afternoon with creators and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. At the end: Positive buzz on liquid glass, the dangers of CFOs as CEOs, innovations from incumbent companies, Ben's repatriation takeaways, life advice for moving, and the five CEOs who have contributed most to the Stratechery bundle.

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

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:08Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?

• 0:19Ben Thompson?

  Doing well. Glad you decided to show up again after we kicked your Commander's rear end last week.

• 0:26Andrew Sharp?

  A very humbling night last week in Lambeau Field. Yes, this is why I'm not a Commander's fan. I'm a liberated NFL fan, not bound to any team, and it's a much better way to experience that sport and probably any sport, I would say.

• 0:41Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, living a life without commitment. It's very sad. But I'm glad you've rationalized that to yourself.

• 0:47Andrew Sharp?

  Indeed. Well, you're in Wisconsin now and not in Menlo Park. You don't have a pair of smart glasses on. How are you holding up in this time of FOMO?

• 1:00Ben Thompson?

  Very disappointed in myself. It's, I just kind of dropped the ball on multiple angles here. I committed to go to New York, do this YouTube thing, which I don't regret. I think we'll get to that in a little bit. And I'm like, oh, how am I going to make it to the West Coast for a Wednesday? By the way, Meta, can we do keynotes earlier in the week? This whole, they always do them on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Very difficult for me personally.

• 1:24Andrew Sharp?

  Inconvenient for the Stratechory publishing schedule.

• 1:26Ben Thompson?

  Right. Apple does it on Mondays and Tuesdays. Okay. Yes. Come on. But then I like, so I'm like, oh, I'll have to make sure to watch it. 5:00 PM Pacific? What a weird time to have a keynote. I guess, you know, you could sit around the, you know, your living room as your evening entertainment and watch, watch Mark Zuckerberg on stage.

• 1:45Andrew Sharp?

  Well, they're trying to make this cool, Ben. They're trying to make these glasses cool. So start it later in the day, have sort of a festival atmosphere for people. I mean, I understand the thinking. That's part of the deal here.

• 1:58Ben Thompson?

  Well, I'm just annoyed because I realized I could have made it there and I could have tried them out. But I did not, I have not tried them. I can only view from afar, drawing my experience with Orion. Which was sort of my thinking. I'm like, I, they're not going to watch, you know, something like this for a while. It's fine. I, I, I kind of know what's going on. Anyhow, yeah, I do have FOMO. I have not tried them out, but, um, but.

• 2:20Andrew Sharp?

  But we're gonna talk about them.

• 2:21Ben Thompson?

  It's cool. It's cool. They exist.

• 2:22Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, indeed. So for anybody who missed it, on Wednesday evening in Menlo Park, Meta unveiled its first version of smart glasses with a built-in screen. The Meta Ray-Ban Display will be in stores September 30th and will sell for $799. This is the first version of smart glasses with a built-in screen that will be available for any of us to purchase beginning September 30th. The right lens.

• 2:50Ben Thompson?

  Google Glass.

• 2:50Andrew Sharp?

  What's that?

• 2:51Ben Thompson?

  But yes, unless you count Google Glass back in the day.

• 2:54Andrew Sharp?

  Hmm. Yes. Um, I miss the Google Glass era, but Google Glass was sort of the forefather to all of this. The right lens on the glasses features a screen that can show text messages, video calls, turn-by-turn directions in maps, and visual results from queries to Meta's AI service. And per a rundown from Mark German at Bloomberg, the glasses also introduce a new control system. While users can still swipe along the frame as with previous models, the primary interface is now hand gestures detected by a neural wristband strapped around the wearer's dominant hand. The user can select items by pinching their thumb and index finger, swipe through items by sliding a thumb across their gripped hand,

• 3:40Andrew Sharp?

  double-tap their thumb to invoke Meta's AI voice assistant, or twist their hand mid-air to adjust music volume and other controls. In addition to app interactions and the ability to handle AI queries, the glasses include a live caption feature that displays spoken words in real time, including translations similar to closed captions on a TV. The video calling function lets wearers see the person they're speaking with while sharing their own point of view. Users can reply to texts by setting an audio recording or dictating a response. Later this year, the wristband will add another option, handwriting words in the air.

• 4:21Andrew Sharp?

  That last feature sounds incredibly useless, but I guess potentially cool.

• 4:28Ben Thompson?

  What are you talking about?

• 4:29Andrew Sharp?

  Handwriting words in the air?

• 4:32Ben Thompson?

  No, you, okay, I don't think you grasp why this is a big deal and why it's very exciting.

• 4:39Andrew Sharp?

  I clearly don't because I read it. I was like, why'd they even include that in the rundown? But sure, tell me.

• 4:45Ben Thompson?

  So in this world, assume you're wearing a pair of smart glasses, which I'm sure you'll be doing on day one.

• 4:51Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:52Ben Thompson?

  How do you, how do you expect to communicate while wearing them?

• 4:57Andrew Sharp?

  Uh, using my words.

• 5:00Ben Thompson?

  So you're gonna be on the subway, uh, responding to a message, mumbling like a crazy fan?

• 5:06Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, I see. So if I'm in mixed company, I can't be talking and dictating text messages like a psychopath. Um, I still feel like you would look as ridiculous if you're handwriting words in the air with the glasses on.

• 5:24Ben Thompson?

  Why are you writing words in the air? No, why are you handing, this, this is, no, this is the key thing. Sorry, I'll stop, I'll stop stringing you along. The key thing about this announcement, beyond just the fact that they ship something with a screen, is the Neuralink bracelet.

• 5:39Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 5:39Ben Thompson?

  You can have your hand in your pocket. And you can be writing letters. No one knows what you're doing. This is not, you should not be anchored on the Vision Pro, where the Vision Pro has incredible gesture control, but that is a function of the cameras seeing your hands. So the two options to date have been, number one, you have cameras that view your hands, the Vision Pro does it very well, Oculus does it as well, the, the latest models. Or you have a controller where you actually have a physical item in your hand that you're manipulating.

• 6:10Andrew Sharp?

  Right.

• 6:10Ben Thompson?

  So that, that's been the two options for input to date. The Neuralink bracelet detects the electrical signals in your wrist to determine what you're doing. And it works. I, I used, I actually used it a few years ago. It didn't work for me. And they were sort of saying at the time, yeah, there's just different wrist types that sometimes it's harder to do. I used it again last year, worked perfectly. So I have 100 confidence that this is going to work. I actually, I think they might've had the handwriting working last year. I feel like I tried it. But regardless.

• 6:43Andrew Sharp?

  And when you tried it, it was something that you could envision yourself doing on a regular basis?

• 6:48Ben Thompson?

  I you I I think you you're you're skeptic. I I really don't think you're grasping like this.

• 6:55Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 6:55Ben Thompson?

  No, like you can envision someone waving their hands in front of them, but you can't envision someone just standing in the subway with their hands in their pockets.

• 7:05Andrew Sharp?

  Hmm. If they had put that in the copy or in this German story from Bloomberg, I still probably would have looked at it as useless, but less useless than handwriting words in the air the way I was imagining when I read the story.

• 7:19Ben Thompson?

  No, this is the the Neuralink bracelet is the big deal here. Every new paradigm needs a new user interface. And one of the challenges with the whole sort of glasses paradigm is and one of the challenges for Apple with Vision Pro, it actually one of the reasons why Mike Rockwell, who led the Vision Pro, was very eager to fix Siri is because he felt very limited and constrained by the fact that Vision Pro was dependent on Siri for input in a major way, and it sucked. And so like, like, from what I've heard, he was very frustrated with the team, had tons and tons of feedback. And that's one of the reasons why he's now in charge of the team, even though he's not like a voice,

• 8:01Ben Thompson?

  like he he's an executive that gets stuff done. And also, he was an executive at Apple who had a very real interest and frustration and a deep tangible sense of understanding of why Siri sucking was a problem for other products.

• 8:16Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Ben Thompson?

  With the phone Siri sucking, it was whatever you just type on the phone. If you have the Vision Pro, the alternative is pecking on a virtual keyboard in the air, which sucks. So so there's there's a real issue with the lack of Siri on the Vision Pro. And and the the issue, but the issue isn't just how well it works. It could work perfectly, and you're still going to have the idea of of the allure of something like this is you can use it when you're out and about. It it is augmented reality. You can be looking at the real world and be getting information. As you go, the problem is what's the input method?

• 8:55Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 8:55Ben Thompson?

  And all new paradigms come up with a new input method. The, the, you know, Steve Jobs like walked through this, like the original iPhone event. He's like, well, you know, the PC, you had the mouse and the keyboard and the iPod, you had the wheel. And I think the iPod probably a little elevated past its purse in there, but to Apple is very important. It is certainly a very important thing in terms of the iPhone. The iPhone was multi-touch. The idea that you use your fingers, you don't, you go back to the smartphones before. You had two alternatives. You had a keyboard that you pecked away at. You're a big BlackBerry fan, so I don't know you get that one.

• 9:28Andrew Sharp?

  Absolutely.

• 9:29Ben Thompson?

  Or you had a stylus. And he's like, why do we need a stylus when we have a stylus built in?

• 9:37Andrew Sharp?

  Our fingers.

• 9:38Ben Thompson?

  Right. And so the, that was critical to the entire smartphone paradigm. And so you can make the whole thing a screen, get all that functionality, but still get all the input methods that you need. And, and to defend you, there were a lot of skeptics at the time about people are going to touch a screen to type. When they can just use a keyboard, right? You and Steve Ballmer just really, really not seeing the vision.

• 10:02Andrew Sharp?

  Well, listen, I hear you. And honestly, when you were describing it, I was, I was thinking to myself, well, maybe that's just muscle memory that will all develop. And everybody's going to be sitting together on the subway, drawing letters in their pockets. And that's how we'll communicate. At the same time, a phone is just better at that right now. And so I would say unless this is a standalone device that replaces the phone, I can't imagine very many people using this sorts of technology.

• 10:30Ben Thompson?

  You're such a hater. Just like you're out here taking like V1.

• 10:34Andrew Sharp?

  Just asking fair questions.

• 10:36Ben Thompson?

  No, you, you have to start somewhere. And the, the reason why this is momentous and the reason why I found the price shocking is I did not realize that the Neuralink bracelet, there's, there's, you can actually go buy glasses that project your phone onto your vision. Like, that's actually not a new thing. To do it in the way that they've done it where I, I talked to someone that was there. They said it's actually is dramatically smaller and much. More sort of socially acceptable than the Orion glasses were, which I thought were actually fairly impressive. They weren't as bad as, as like I sort of.

• 11:09Andrew Sharp?

  I mean, they blew your mind last year, but they were also what like $3,000 or something crazy?

• 11:14Ben Thompson?

  No, probably more than that. And they were, well, they were years out. I mean, I think the, the current thought is 2027. And that was good. That's why I didn't fly out there. I'm like, well, I've already seen what's coming and it's not here yet. Yeah. And so like, so I'm very interested to, to compare what this is like compared to that, but the, the key is the input method. And the Neuralink bracelet was clearly.

• 11:33Andrew Sharp?

  The neural band, the meta neural brand, a band is what they're calling it.

• 11:37Ben Thompson?

  A few times. Yeah. They acquired this company called Control Labs, like, like four or five years ago, that, that had actually developed this core technology. And I'm telling you, it works and the, it's not, it's augmented input. Which is a key component of augmented reality. The idea is you're, you have a display that is additive to your real world experience. The problem with voice input is it's, it's disruptive. It's a modal like sort of situation where you're just walking along the street or you're out and about and you just start talking to yourself.

• 12:14Andrew Sharp?

  Who's that guy talking to himself? Yeah.

• 12:16Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. And so that's always been a problem and a hang up. And this idea that you can be looking at something and no one knows. And you can also be interacting with something and no one knows. I think it's pretty critical to making this category work. And what shocked me and surprised me is that this aspect of it was deemed ready to ship. And ready to ship at a $799 price point.

• 12:43Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah. $800 is unbelievable. Like, how are they making that happen?

• 12:48Ben Thompson?

  They might be taking a bath on it, which I don't mind. Like, I think this is interesting and compelling. And if you're gonna just like, look, they've, they've spent $100 billion on Reality Labs. What's a few billion dollars more to actually start getting this out there and, and start, starting to sort of, sort of build something out to get that core user base. And this input method is what they have that no. Has. Apple hasn't shown anything like this. Now, Apple doesn't show stuff until they're ready to be very, you know, so who knows, maybe they have something similar. Google hasn't shown this, but it, but I, I like it. I love the aggressiveness. I don't mind if they're taking a bath. I don't know what, what their bill materials in. But by the way, another way to get the bill materials down is to start shipping stuff, to start sort of getting it, getting it out there.

• 13:33Ben Thompson?

  And the like, and there's, th- these are very limited, like Orion was like a full on phone replacement. Like it, it ran a whole, it has its own computer. That's why it had the external brick and it had cellular and all those sorts of things. You could use Orion and not need a phone. But actually the parts of the Orion experience that I found compelling as a demo, but not interesting in terms of the long term. Were the parts of the experience that ached the iPhone. Like they had an Instagram app on there. I'm like, I could just look at Instagram on my, like, do, and there's a bit where.

• 14:13Ben Thompson?

  It, it's not augmented reality. It's like taking over too much of my face. Like, like the whole point is to. Experience the real world. Right. Exactly. And I think there's a bit where these are very limited. They, they require. They connect to your smartphone, uh, iOS and Android. The number of apps are, they're all Facebook apps, even the maps app in here. It's not Google Maps. It's not Waze. Uh, I have a ways aside, by the way, we could get to.

• 14:40Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, boy. Can't wait.

• 14:41Ben Thompson?

  It's like they're using the open source street maps or whatever. It's only doing walking directions. It's not doing driving directions. Uh, you know, so it's. And all, they're all like Facebook specific built apps that tie into the Facebook app and they can use. The limited sort of bandwidth and capabilities. Apple allows sort of background apps and, and AdRed allows background apps. It's very, very constrained. I think that's a good thing. Why? Like, I actually think that's an advantage because.

• 15:13Ben Thompson?

  I think you're gonna make progress on this front, not by trying to rebuild a phone on your face. I think that's a trap. And it's a trap that I think Apple and Google are liable to fall into. I think Apple fell into that with the Vision Pro, with supporting iPad apps. Like, I see the allure on day one, when you don't have any developers, you have a bunch of app experiences.

• 15:35Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Ben Thompson?

  Right, but the problem is, it's sort of a shortcut that you're building in for people, for everyone, into the experience, that's not fully optimized for what it is. Facebook has to start from zero, and they're, they have to deliver experiences that are constrained, that make sense for the user interface, and nothing more. And I think in the long run, the core of any experience like this has to be AI-denominated, where AI is figuring out, showing you what you need, when you need it. And it's not a nav, it's not a navigation paradigm.

• 16:12Andrew Sharp?

  Right.

• 16:12Ben Thompson?

  It's not going to an app and doing XYZ.

• 16:14Andrew Sharp?

  In other words, the future of this product is, you walk outside your house, and the AI senses where you are and asks, "Do you want directions to where you're going?" That sort of thing.

• 16:25Ben Thompson?

  Right.

• 16:25Andrew Sharp?

  So you don't even have to use the neural band in that scenario.

• 16:29Ben Thompson?

  Or already knows where you're going, and it sort of just pops up and it's there, and it's like, "Go XYZ." Yeah, for sure. And, and, you know, Apple's moving to this with like, say, the Siri Watch Faces. This is the idea, is it sort of brings stuff up contextually, that this, it's not a new idea. It's not even a new idea, like, to your watch, in sort of like, an augmented sort of fashion. But I do think there's something compelling about it being on your face, and it's seeing what you see, and all, all the sorts of things that Meta talks about. And again, having the input method, I think, is key. And it's, like...

• 17:01Andrew Sharp?

  Are you shocked that it's come this far in the last couple of years here?

• 17:05Ben Thompson?

  I'm shocked that it's ready to ship, and ready to ship at this price point. Like, I, like, when I realized that, when they were talking about it, and they were saying it was going to include the Neural Link band, I immediately assumed we're in the four figures, somewhere. And I figured somewhat high in that regard. And I was like, you know, but I'm like, I already was thinking about my update in my head. Well, you know, it's good that they're shipping, you know, they're at the, you know, this will help get the price down, dah dah dah dah dah. Like, my jaw literally dropped when he said $7.99.

• 17:35Andrew Sharp?

  When you say "get the price down by shipping," how exactly does that work in practice?

• 17:41Ben Thompson?

  Because by building stuff, it gets cheaper. You learn how to build it more efficiently. You figure out the things. You optimize your processes. Like, obviously, there's the components that go into it. But the more of a component that's made, the cheaper it gets.

• 17:54Andrew Sharp?

  It's easier to reproduce.

• 17:55Ben Thompson?

  The tooling. Well, you need all the tooling or whatever that goes into it. So if you invest a million dollars in tooling and you make a million devices, you need to recoup a dollar per device just to pay for the tooling.

• 18:08Andrew Sharp?

  Right.

• 18:09Ben Thompson?

  If you sell 10 million devices, you only need to recoup 10 cents per device. Like, so it like, just the leverage on your cost is better, but your yields get better because you figure out how to make it more efficiently. So you're throwing away fewer sort of finished items.

• 18:25Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Ben Thompson?

  So this is just the learning curve that is a critical piece of manufacturing in general. And making stuff makes it cheaper. This is just a general rule of basically any physical good.

• 18:38Andrew Sharp?

  That makes sense. Yeah, I mean, the price is pretty incredible. It's a footnote to the conversation about what these glasses are and what it means for Meta. But the FT had a story this week. Meta's reliance on a Chinese supplier called Gore Tech to make these products. And I was just reminded that a huge benefit of the reliance on PRC manufacturing expertise has been the ability to disperse like cutting edge innovations at a reasonable price point for consumers. And if that sort of dynamic goes away, it will definitely hurt the ability to push the envelope on price the way Meta is doing here.

• 19:17Ben Thompson?

  And just not just price, but also sort of what you build. Like, this is the positive side of, you know, the critique of Apple of building up China's manufacturing is Apple built up this entire ecosystem of capability that every electronics manufacturer benefits from.

• 19:33Andrew Sharp?

  Totally, totally. And you look back at some of the ways that Apple pushed the leading edge innovations to mass consumers. That just would not have been possible if China didn't exist. And clearly Meta is now as reliant as Apple is, at least in this area. Thing that you wrote when you covered this keynote that I really identify with is I like the idea of just pushing this to consumers and letting them determine what the killer use cases are like that's the other benefit of shipping before you have a great idea of how exactly people want to use this.

• 20:08Ben Thompson?

  For sure. And again, even though it's fairly limited, they'll get lots of data on like what's actually used, what isn't, which consumers stick with it. Like people will buy it and then never wear them. The ones that wear them, what are they actually using? And I think they are, they already got this to a certain extent with them shipping the Ray-Ban glasses, right? Like the, they sold, I think better than

• 20:32Andrew Sharp?

  They did pretty well. Yup.

• 20:33Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. And now it seems like there seems to be a real sports focus. They watched their first version of Oakley's over the summer. The new one is like very explicitly focused on this. The center view camera is cool. Like the, you know, maybe it ends up being this is like a killer sports accessory. Sort of like how Apple ended up being the sort of health and fitness.

• 20:53Andrew Sharp?

  I was gonna say, it's exactly like the Apple Watch trajectory. Yeah. Like Apple launches the Apple Watch. They don't really know what the area is going to be and it's carved out, it's turned into a nice little niche for them over the last 15 years.

• 21:05Ben Thompson?

  Which is great. You're dealing with the smartphone sort of, everyone got lazy, not lazy, but like the smartphone was so easy. Because everyone, oh wait, here's the deal. You already have a phone. How about I give you a phone that is 10,000 times more capable and entertaining and engrossing? Does that sound like a good deal to you? Will you pay an extra $300 for that?

• 21:25Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 21:25Ben Thompson?

  Like who's not gonna take that deal, right? It was, and this is, I think a challenge, I've talked about this, the mechanics of the Vision Pro, where Apple sort of didn't have the muscle of having to create a new product category because the iPhone was trivial. And then doing the AirPods, like, well, imagine if you had headphones, but way better.

• 21:42Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Ben Thompson?

  You don't understand this, but you could just imagine it being the case.

• 21:46Andrew Sharp?

  Listen, I take John Gruber's word for it. The best tech product in the history of civilization, AirPods 3. I might have to check him out based on his endorsement.

• 21:56Ben Thompson?

  Doesn't get, yeah, doesn't get, that was, that was wild. But the, but yeah, so, so whereas all these categories, you have to, it's not just that you have to build a better one. You have to convince people why they should buy one at all.

• 22:09Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Ben Thompson?

  And that's where for the watch, the, the health and fitness thing has ended up being, I think, a, a, a home run for Apple. Is it a grand slam? Now maybe more of a home run, but a home run is still pretty solid. That, that's really sort of moving, moving the score along, moving the runner along. How many metaphors can I fit into this example? And so maybe it's like a sports thing, makes sense for, for these Ray-Ban glasses. Which by the way, if you're just sort of passively recording and not interacting, well, you're sports, you're busy. You're not, you don't have time to interact and sort of do lots of other things. So that, but you, even there, shipping the Ray-Ban glasses established the foundation for these, this display one to come out.

• 22:50Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Ben Thompson?

  And there was, actually the, the Mark Gurman article was really good because he had a, a extended interview with, with Andrew Bosworth and another Facebook vice president. And one of the things Bosworth was talking about was, you know, what's their luxottica? I can't remember the exact, the, the full name. They were, they were a little skeptical about putting the Ray-Ban name on these. And so they were not necessarily going to be labeled that. But there was a bit where number one, they got it small enough and approaching aesthetically pleasing enough that they were willing to lend their name to it.

• 23:26Andrew Sharp?

  Interesting.

• 23:26Ben Thompson?

  But also, but also the fact that they're happy with the products to date, right? They, and they're happy to lend their names to those. So why not sort of extend it just a tad? It probably also helps that Facebook put several billion dollars into the company. That, that doesn't hurt either, but.

• 23:42Andrew Sharp?

  So do you like the name? Because the name feels pretty dry to me and the code name for this project was apparently hypernova. Meta Ray-Ban hypernova sounds much cooler to me and conjures the futuristic nature of this project better than the Meta Ray-Ban display.

• 24:01Ben Thompson?

  I like the name because I think it's a name that under promises with the potential to over deliver. It like, they have the Ray-Ban sort of smart glasses. These are the same ones with the display. They're not, it's, it's like, it's not. At some point, this will be a hypernova product. I doubt it is today. But, you know, the, the goal is what's out there in five years, in 10 years. That's right. And, and so, under promise, potentially, hopefully, over deliver. I went, no, because I didn't try them. And then, then, you know.

• 24:34Andrew Sharp?

  Well, they release in two weeks. You're gonna have your opportunity. I can't believe how quickly these are gonna be in stores.

• 24:39Ben Thompson?

  Well, yeah, you have to. The closest place to try them is in Chicago, which is not ideal. And then every, it's like booked out for like two months.

• 24:48Andrew Sharp?

  Here we go.

• 24:49Ben Thompson?

  No, so that's the whole thing. Like, to actually go and try them is gonna be about as much trouble as it would have been just fly to San Francisco. So I really screwed this one up.

• 24:56Andrew Sharp?

  Yes. Well, Zuckerberg appeared on the T B P N podcast in Medlow Park. T B P N made the trip. After the keynote, one of the things he said was augmented reality is the future of phones. And virtual reality is the future of TVs. What do you think of that framing?

• 25:15Ben Thompson?

  I mean, in a rather stark departure from under promise and over deliver. The, I don't know, it's, it's interesting. Like, the, I did feel like, oh, there's a lot of cribbing from charade in some aspects of this presentation. One was the discussion of just in time UI and stuff coming up when you want it. That's obviously a thing I've been big on. Suddenly, after like skipping it in my interview with him last year, I'd like remind him about it. Zuckerberg is back on the, oh, actually, generative AI is going to solve the asset creation problem for virtual reality. Which, duh, that has seemed obvious to me for years. I'm not sure what sort of happened there.

• 25:54Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 25:55Ben Thompson?

  So I do think all that is interesting and compelling. I think a world where VR is better or preferable TV. It, it, it does feel like a little bit of a Bug Man world. Like, I'm in my little hovel and I can put like my VR glasses on.

• 26:10Andrew Sharp?

  I have a problem with it. I really hope he's not right about that because virtual reality is personalized with individuals.

• 26:17Ben Thompson?

  With a big couch in a big basement. That's a.

• 26:19Andrew Sharp?

  With friends coming over to watch the Packers every Sunday, you know? Not everybody is sitting there in. Their individual headsets. That's not how I want to watch TV in the future. He may well be right about that, but I hope he's wrong. Augmented reality, though, the phone, it really depends on how you define augmented reality. But the phone already is sort of an augmented reality device, which I think we've talked about in the past.

• 26:44Ben Thompson?

  It's interesting because there is this sort of, I've written about, and I think it's very interesting to incorporate like physicality into your analysis of computing. So you go back to the initial computers, these mainframes. You had to travel to the building with the mainframe. You would go in to the control center, put in your punch cards, run some computations, get them out, and then you would sort of go back and could digest them and figure out what they were. It was batch processing and it was like a physical destination. You had to go somewhere to do it. And that progressed to you could go to like a terminal, like that was wired in and maybe it was in another building even, amazing.

• 27:29Ben Thompson?

  Like this is where I was doing programming in college. Like you'd go to the terminal with all these Munich stations and you would get access to the central computer, whatever it might be.

• 27:37Andrew Sharp?

  19 year old Ben, just living the dream out there in Madison.

• 27:40Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, well, you could, you could install, was it Telnet or something on your like Windows PC? But it kind of sucked. It was just easier to be there, the bandwidth. So anyhow. Then you sort of progress to, but even then you're, it's sort of like this, you progress to the PC. The PC, it's in your home or it's on your desk in your office. There's still a physical aspect of you have to go and sit down at the desk and use the PC. It's more convenient, but there's still sort of a batchability aspect where you go there and you do stuff and then you leave and you don't do stuff. Mobile, it's with you all the time. You know, so you can compute wherever you are. You can compute in the bathroom.

• 28:22Andrew Sharp?

  So I'm on the subway, talking to you for years when you were in Taiwan on the other side of the world. And I'm like, that's what I mean is you're sort of immersed. You're not in your own physical space as you're computing.

• 28:34Ben Thompson?

  That's right. But the, the, the question is like, is that the end state? Or is there a step beyond, which is actually, there is a difference between pulling something out of your pocket and no longer looking up at the world, but looking down at the thing in your hand and conversing. And is that a meaningful break in that there's value beyond that? Where it's just sort of with you. And it's a shift of the eyes as opposed to a hand in the pocket and a bending of the head. Now, again, you say, oh, that's, yo, that's silly. Like, like that, what difference is there really? Maybe that's right. That might be the case.

• 29:15Ben Thompson?

  I think in reality, to go back to the limited nature of these glasses and why it doesn't bother me. And I actually don't think there's a huge pressure to get a developer story out here.

• 29:26Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 29:27Ben Thompson?

  I think the phone is the ultimate in the app platform. It is like, it, it, it has sufficient processing power, sufficient connectivity, sufficiently large screen space that you can kind of do anything on.

• 29:40Andrew Sharp?

  It's hard to compete with a killer computer that you can walk around with wherever you go. Like that's, I, it's hard to imagine that any pair of glasses is going to supplant that at some point.

• 29:50Ben Thompson?

  I mean, or, and if they do, we're like, we're a ways away, like, you know, a long time away. So I, I think there's, so I, I like this approach of, yeah, this is in addition to your phone. We're not replacing the phone here. We're, we're delivering some unique experiences that are actually better. And the idea is you buy this not so you can get a worse version of a phone that happens to strap to your face. You buy this in.

• 30:19Ben Thompson?

  There's a way that when I first started doing the pay version of Shrekery, the one guy that really done this before was, I think Andrew Solvin. And we had a weird thing, like he posted like crazy and then like after like 30 posts, like then you had to like pay or something like that. But even then people would gripe, but I think in newspapers weren't using paywalls more and more. And every time someone did a paywall, people got upset.

• 30:41Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Ben Thompson?

  Because it's like you used to have this stuff and now you're cutting it off and making people pay. And I'm like, so when I started Shrekery, I started it with the idea, I'm going to monetize this via subscriptions. I felt like this was the future business model. I thought it was viable. Thousand true fans.

• 30:59Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:59Ben Thompson?

  Et cetera, et cetera. Stripe had just launched sort of this billing product. I'm like, that is so much better than the PayPal alternative. I think this is going to work, but I had to build an audience first. But as I built the audience, as demonstrated the fact I'm still dropping takes 12 years later. I have a surfeit of takes. I have takes on everything. Okay? So like we have wife advice, right?

• 31:21Andrew Sharp?

  We're gonna talk movies.

• 31:21Ben Thompson?

  Wife, so I have a take, I have a take on every, I have a take on literally everything. Okay?

• 31:25Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Ben Thompson?

  So I've never had an issue with coming up with content. But when I started Shrekery, I purposely only wrote twice a week. And the reason was, my idea was when I add a subscription component, I'm going to say, you enjoy twice a week, what if you got it every day? And so it was like, wow, people would be excited and sort of like, oh, I can get more of something that I enjoy and that I'm wanting. I didn't want to do more and then cut you off and then yeah, people would have a negative feeling. Now, maybe they'd overcome that negative feeling and still pay. But I'm like, wouldn't it be better if in the user's mind, it was like, oh, I'm still getting what I wanted,

• 32:09Ben Thompson?

  but now I have, I can get more if I want. I just think that, that sort of. Pay to get more as opposed to pay to stop me from taking things away. I think that's just sort of a really critical component. And just sort of think about when you want, you have to launch this new category. It's not, you're not replacing the cellular phone. You're asking people to add something to their life that wasn't there before. I suspect, and we'll see how this works out. But the way you do that is not by trying to do everything and most of it's crappy and worse than the phone.

• 32:41Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Ben Thompson?

  You get a couple little things that are really useful. And, and so the key is gonna, now again, I haven't used it. But I can imagine, at least in theory, deliver a couple things that it's not gonna be, for most people, it's not gonna be worth it. It's just gonna be a cool demo. But for some people, it's like, yeah, this is so useful and I use it all the time. And then you have this foundation of a killer use case that is not just additive, but aspirational, like I want to go do this. And then you can start layering on, on top of that, more and more things. Maybe in the long run, you end up in a state where you do replace the phone, but you get there by having a beachhead that people aspire to.

• 33:28Ben Thompson?

  Not a collection of crap and people trying to dig through and find the jewels.

• 33:33Andrew Sharp?

  Just throwing stuff against the wall. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I, I would say, I mean, you've been making fun of me, calling me a hater throughout this conversation. I'm actually kind of torn when I look at this product because on one hand, I'm a podcast host who's consuming news about technology every week and talking to you about it every week. And on that basis, I salute the ambition that we're seeing from Meta. I think it's really cool. And I totally agree with the idea of them just shipping and letting actual customers figure out how they want to use it and discovering the killer use cases that way. I think that makes a ton of sense. Um, if I were to play the role of analyst, I would hearken back to exactly what you're talking about there where,

• 34:17Andrew Sharp?

  and, and also we discussed a little bit last week, you wrote about it with the browser company, like changing user. Habits, you have to be so much better to justify changing user habits and justify me, someone who doesn't wear glasses, putting glasses on my face all day or six hours a day, I think is the battery life with a 30 hour battery life for the case like you have to be much better in terms of what you're introducing for people and nothing that I saw from Meta at the keynote makes me think they're that close to clearing that bar like none of those features really move the needle for me. I don't need captions from people in my daily life. I don't need live translations. The live translation thing is really, really cool, but I just can't

• 35:00Andrew Sharp?

  imagine that many scenarios where I would need live translations. And then if I'm playing the role of human, not podcast host or tech analyst.

• 35:11Ben Thompson?

  Okay, we'll get to the human in a second.

• 35:13Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 35:14Ben Thompson?

  Meta is fine or should be fine with you being dismissive. You don't, you don't even bother trying AirPods. Like, like the idea is-

• 35:23Andrew Sharp?

  Don't want to charge my headphones. Don't need to lose the AirPods. Yeah, absolutely.

• 35:27Ben Thompson?

  So, so I like, and I think the, the modesty of the launch and tied to the name even is why that's the right approach. Like, like what they need to do is they, they, I think their goal is 100,000 units or something like that. They can do that easily without any Andrew Sharps. And your, and your role in the ecosystem and I appreciate you-

• 35:49Andrew Sharp?

  I sincerely wish them luck.

• 35:50Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, I know. Your role is to be the hater and to be the skeptic and that's fine after everyone else has them and John Gruber and Dithering in 2035 can say that the Meta-

• 36:02Andrew Sharp?

  Gruber got my attention, man.

• 36:04Ben Thompson?

  Is the greatest technological product in history, then you can finally go by version 13. That's fine. The rest of us will have enjoyed the journey along the way.

• 36:12Andrew Sharp?

  Fair enough. Um, my only other addition would be that as a human, I think these glasses are a little bit dystopian. If they were adopted by the mainstream and everybody's just going around and potentially recording conversations and whatnot, uh, I, I shudder to think about that reality, but I do acknowledge it's a possibility. Some point.

• 36:34Ben Thompson?

  I completely agree. Like, like, and that's the reality of these. It's with all those AI pendants that like, listen to everything, even AirPods. There's an aspect of magnifying. You know what? Like, like, to go back to the glasses, even the regular glasses, not the display ones, have this functionality where they could elevate the volume of whoever you're talking with. So in a noisy circumstance, which you can see totally useful. Uh, you could also see totally inappropriate when you're, yeah, exactly. Right? Uh, there's no, all this stuff I think is under discussed, underappreciated. Uh, it's probably inevitable and inescapable, and I hate it. Uh, like the, I.

• 37:11Andrew Sharp?

  I could, honestly, I'm sitting there watching the keynote, like they screwed up a couple of times at the keynote. And I love that they were doing it live. I love that there were mistakes as I was watching. And I salute how bold and aggressive they're being despite people like me, who have been calling them morons for the last five years with all these investments. Like, I really do respect the ambition, but then I'm like, oh my God, if the ambition actually pays off and everybody's walking around with these surveillance devices, like that's probably a suboptimal outcome. But, um,

• 37:41Ben Thompson?

  I mean, I do appreciate that you've managed to carve a route for you where you can just be a hater, whether they succeed or lose. It's perfect. So.

• 37:49Andrew Sharp?

  Exactly. Uh, excited about the future. Um, but Facebook or no, not Facebook. Meta was not the only news of the week because we also had news on Thursday, Ben. And we got an email from Ed who says, give me the rundown on this intel news. More bullshit or is this something that could actually give them life? All right. And that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharp tech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week. Plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle.

• 38:31Andrew Sharp?

  Check it out. And if you've got feedback, please email us at email at sharp tech.fm.